First In His Class (81 page)

For Clinton,
a period
of intense introspection began soon after his brother's arrest, when Roger entered therapy for his drug addiction. The counselor, Karen Ballard, requested that Bill and Virginia join the sessions. For the first time, the mother and two sons talked openly about alcoholism and the effects it had had on their family. It came out that Virginia had developed a tendency to avoid unpleasant truths and block out difficult parts of her life. Just as she had once been reluctant to acknowledge that her angry and skeptical mother might have been right about the failings of Roger the husband, it was hard for her to accept now that Roger the son had a chemical addiction of his own. Virginia had faced so many obstacles in her life that she had taught herself to create her own version of reality and function within it, allowing her to maintain her optimism and to persevere. Bill discovered that he had the same characteristics, including the denial mechanism, he told friends. It had always been easier for him to discuss the premature death of his biological father, and how that pushed him to achieve at an early age, than to consider how he was shaped by his stepfather's alcoholism, which he had never mentioned to most of his closest friends. In the sessions with his brother and mother, Clinton said later, “We learned a lot about how you do a lot of damage to yourself if you're living with an alcoholic and you just sort of deny that behavior and deflect it all. You pay a big price for that.”

For several weeks, Clinton delved into the literature of alcoholism and co-dependence, the emerging fashionable theory, which placed addiction in the realm of family relationships. According to Betsey Wright, Clinton often came back to the office talking about the latest book he had read and relating it to his own experience. It was the first time she had heard him talk about alcoholism in his home, and how it had made him so averse to conflict. “
He did
a lot of introspection that I had never seen him do like that before,” Wright recalled. “He got a much better understanding of why he did things the way he did. It was in the context of learning about how that comes out of an alcoholic home. Most notable was why he was always trying to please people. He was fascinated by it, and it rang so true that it was kind of like he was being introduced to something that he wished he had known a long time ago.” This did not mean that Clinton changed his behavior, Wright thought, but simply that he could “see what he was doing far better.”

In a discussion with Carolyn Yeldell Staley, Clinton indicated that he was struggling with his self-awareness. “
I think
we're all addicted to something,” Clinton told her, according to Staley's recollections. “Some people are addicted to drugs. Some to power. Some to food. Some to sex. We're all addicted to something.” It seemed to Staley that Clinton was “coming to grips with the fact that he had places of real weakness. He was trying to sort all of that out in his life.”

Clinton, Virginia, and Hillary Clinton all sat in the federal courtroom on the day in January 1985 when Roger was sentenced to a two-year prison term at the federal correctional institution in Fort Worth, Texas. As part of his plea,
Roger agreed
to testify, with immunity, for the government in several other cocaine cases. One resulted in the conviction of his childhood friend, Sam Anderson, Jr., a limousine-riding Hot Springs attorney. Another led to a six-month prison term for investment banker Dan R. Lasater, a flashy young financier, racehorse owner, and recreational cocaine user who set out lines of the white powder at his lavish parties.

The connections
between Lasater and the Clintons throughout the decade raised questions about the propriety of the relationship. Roger, who had been one of Lasater's cocaine suppliers, had worked briefly for him at one of his horse farms and as his driver, and had borrowed $8,000 from him to pay off a drug debt. At the same time, Lasater was a major contributor to Clinton's permanent campaign, donating money to his gubernatorial races and holding fundraisers. His brokerage house, meanwhile, received $1.6 million in fees for its role in handling tax-exempt bonds for the state. Clinton personally lobbied the legislature in 1985 to give Lasater's firm a contract to sell bonds for a state police radio system. The governor and his wife occasionally flew on Lasater's corporate jet. When Lasater was
promoting a special vacation package at Angel Fire, his 22,000-acre ski resort in New Mexico, he used Governor Clinton's name in his mailings, although Clinton did not make the trip. Patsy Thomasson, the executive vice president of Lasater Inc., was a Democratic party activist who had been appointed to the state highway commission by Clinton, her long-time friend. After serving time in prison, Lasater was later pardoned by Clinton.

The prosecution of Roger Clinton did have some positive side effects. Asa Hutchinson, then the Republican federal prosecutor in Little Rock, believed that Roger's conviction and his later testimony in other cases helped stem an emerging cocaine party scene in central Arkansas. “
Here the
brother of the governor was saying, ‘Hey, nobody touches me, look who I am!' And people had come to think it was all right,” Hutchinson recalled. “The case was important in showing people they couldn't do that.” It was also important, Bill Clinton came to believe, in saving his brother's life.

“W
E'RE
closer than any brothers you've ever known,” Roger Clinton was heard saying about his relationship with his brother the governor during one of the secretly tape-recorded conversations with Rodney Myers. “See, I didn't have a father growing up and he was like a father to me growing up, all my life, so that's why we've always been so close. There isn't anything in the world he wouldn't do for me.”

Minutes before
he described that brotherly bond, twenty-eight-year-old Roger had inhaled cocaine through his nose. He and Myers were in the middle of a rambling discussion during which they rated the quality of their cocaine (
Myers
: “Boy, this is some good coke!”
Clinton
: “It's decent. It's decent”) … and discussed the high-rolling lives of wealthy lawyer friends who rode in white limousines and partied in hot tubs … and told tall tales about busting heads in a Fayetteville brawl … and fantasized about how they were going to make so much money in condominium deals that they could have generous clothing allowances and new cars (
Clinton
: “What I've been saving up for is a Porsche.” Myers: “What kind?”
Clinton
: “Just any kind. Just any kind.”
Myers
: “Right. You want a Porsche?”
Clinton
: “I want a Porsche so bad I can spit” ) … and agreed that Roger's name would help them put the deals together (
Myers
: “If I had you on my side, I could make a hell of a lot of money, you know, with your last name.”
Clinton
: “Oh, listen, I realize exactly what you're saying.” Myers: “You got good bullshit. You got your bullshit but your last name would also make, you know, you could make a hell of a lot.” Clinton: “Good at bullshitting and public relations. I can sell a product.”).

Roger Clinton would call Bill “Big Brother” when talking about him to other people. Not “my big brother,” just “Big Brother,” with the double meaning explicit. They were of different generations, though separated only by ten years, each with soft blue eyes and big hands, raised by the same woman with the same unconditional love. When her boy Bill had left for good from Scully Street,
Virginia had
taken down his plaques and awards and rearranged the house to make it more accommodating as a rehearsal space for Roger's first rock band, The Hundred Millimeter Banana, which he formed at age ten. She wanted him to become the next Elvis as much as she wanted Bill to become the next JFK. When he started to get club dates with another band, Dealer's Choice, she went to see him perform, even at a topless lounge named the Black Orchid, and listened to him sing with the same pride with which she listened to her son the politician talk. She got a list of Roger's club dates and studied it with the same pleasure that she perused Bill's weekly schedule, sent to her by the governor's office. She loved her sons with equal intensity, she told her friends. But one son had the will and one son did not.

How could two brothers be so different: the governor and the coke dealer, the Rhodes Scholar and the college dropout, one who tried to read three hundred books in three months and another who at his most addicted snorted cocaine sixteen times a day, one who could spend hours explaining economic theories and another whose economic interests centered on getting a new Porsche? In the case of the Clinton brothers, the contrasts become more understandable when considered within the context of their family history and environment. They grew up in a town of contrast and hypocrisy, in a family of duality and conflict. Bill and Roger were not so much opposites as two sides of the same coin. Each essentially grew up without a father. Bill was constantly searching for older male role models: his pappaw Eldridge Cassidy, Virgil Spurlin at school, his grandmother's brother Buddy Grisham, his friend Jim Blair, his adviser Maurice Smith, his minister W. O. Vaught. Bill was the closest thing to a role model Roger could find.

By their chosen careers, Bill the politician and Roger the rock musician revealed a common desire to perform and to gain approval from large audiences. Virginia often said that her boys resembled her in that respect. Like her son Roger, she loved to jump on stage and sing along with the band; and like her son Bill, she would walk into a room and try to win over every person there. Another common denominator for the politician and the rock musician is sex. Performers in both realms are often surrounded by groupies, their sexual charisma enhanced by power and unrestrained ego. The desire to perform, the need for approval, and the supply of idolaters can be a habit-forming triangle.

There was little history of sexual restraint in Bill and Roger's family culture, no puritanical sense that sexual propriety was the barometer of goodness and morality. Suspicion, gossip, and mystery were always part of the sexual mix.
Edith Cassidy
constantly accused her husband Eldridge Cassidy of cheating on her, while at the same time
she developed
a reputation for engaging in affairs with certain doctors in Hope. William Jefferson Blythe may have had five or more wives in his short life, wooing and discarding women with dispatch. Virginia married Roger Clinton even though she knew he was a philanderer.
During the
ir tumultuous marriage, Roger was often overcome by jealousy after catching Virginia flirting at nightclubs or hearing the gossip that she had been seen around town with other men. Bill Clinton came out of that environment, and took from it the competing impulses of a youth who had walked to church alone in a city of earthly pleasures. He was, at once, the good boy, the Family Hero, and the inveterate flatterer and flirt, constantly searching for more girls—and later, women—who would be charmed by him and feed his ego.

His marriage to Hillary Rodham in 1975 seemed to have little inhibiting effect on him. During the 1978 gubernatorial race, campaign manager Rudy Moore had to fire a travel aide who boasted publicly about the nightclubs he had visited with the candidate. Provocative women seemed to find their way to the governor's office, “hangers-on who could get you in trouble,” as Moore described them. Clinton's judgment at times was not as good as it should have been, Moore thought, though he believed that “appearances were more than what was going on.” Clinton's travel aide during his first term, Randy White, said that the governor enjoyed nothing more than to go on the road, especially to Fayetteville, where he would frequent a club in the bottom of the old post office, and dance and hang out “until they threw us out.” Wherever they went, White said, Clinton'
s table
attracted a crowd of pretty women drawn to the powerful young governor, who enjoyed the attention. “He loved the road,” White said. “He loved it.”

In more than two years at Clinton's side, White said later, he saw no evidence that the governor was having extramarital affairs and was not asked by Clinton to conceal his activities. In contrast, several state troopers who worked on the governor's personal security staff after his return to power in 1983 claimed that Clinton was promiscuous and that he frequently used them to solicit sexual partners.
Trooper L.
D. Brown, who was on the security staff from 1983 to 1985, alleged that he was asked to try to solicit more than one hundred women for Clinton during those two years. On the matter of how many, if any, of those women acceded to Clinton's desires, Brown was unclear. He called himself “the go-between, the buffer” for a politician with a voracious sexual appetite.

•  •  •

H
ILLARY
Rodham Clinton and Carolyn Yeldell Staley were on the back lawn of the Governor's Mansion one summer day, sticking croquet hoops into the grass and talking about their husbands. Carolyn had married a soft-spoken photographer and art teacher named Jerry Staley, who remained in the background, content in his role as the dependable husband and father of two daughters and a son, willing to let his wife be the star of the family as the aspiring singer and longtime friend of the governor of Arkansas.
Hillary said
she could never marry someone as quiet as Jerry. She liked to spar, she said. She liked to “get into it.” She had to have an equal. Then, pondering the ups and downs of her life with Bill Clinton, she said, “
I wonder
how history is going to note our marriage.”

The long haul, the view toward the future and history, was evident in the Clinton and Rodham partnership from its formation. For Clinton, perpetually infatuated with a shining new idea or a fresh face, Hillary was the rare constant, her intellect, resilience, and ambition always there, equal to his. When he had thought about marrying her, it was not so much the sight of the young woman that overwhelmed him as an image of an older version: Hillary, he told friends, was the one woman with whom he could imagine growing old and not getting bored. Her feelings about him seemed more immediate and passionate; she adored him, one friend said, with “a romantic, fifteen-year-old, poetic, teenage love.” By the mid-1980s, those early dynamics were still apparent, although there had been several adjustments in the partnership, most of them made by Hillary. Year by year, in their joint political enterprise, she had taken on more tasks—some that her husband had asked her to do, some that she felt obliged to perform because it was clear to her that he did not want to do them or was not good at them. After ten years of marriage, those tasks were starting to define her.