First In His Class (84 page)

“
The latest
polls in Arkansas show that the governor has a seventy-two percent approval rating, which places him in the same category as McDonald's hamburgers and Dan Rather, ahead of Ronald Reagan and the new Coca-Cola,” Reich wrote. “Rumor has it that Bill will be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. I just made up that rumor, but by the time you read this, the rumor will have spread to the ends of the nation.”

The expectation was always there. It had started long before there was any sense to it, back when Clinton's mother boasted that a second-grade teacher had told her that her boy could be president. Or perhaps it went back generations further, back to his
poor southern
forebears who connected themselves, if only in name, to things presidential: back to Thomas Jefferson Blythe, a Confederate private from Tippah County, Mississippi, who once bet a saddle on the outcome of a sheriffs race; and to Andrew Jackson Blythe of Tennessee; and to George Washington Cassidy of Red Level, Alabama. Wherever it came from, it was always there, not a matter of predestination but of expectation and will, and it had built up year by year, decade by decade.

O
N
August 26, 1986,
one week
after he turned forty, Clinton ascended to the chairmanship of the National Governors Association (NGA) at the group's summer meeting in Hilton Head, South Carolina. In his acceptance speech that night, he satirized his passage into middle age, wondering whether this would be a “milestone or millstone” year for “the first of the over-the-hill baby boomers.” He also stirred the audience with a campaign-style oration in which he said his priority as chairman would be to help create more jobs. “Let me be clear,” he said. “We do not need further studies. We have a wealth of excellent material outlining the dimensions of the problem. What I want are action plans and programs.”

The chairmanship of the NGA was part of Clinton's own action plan. It allowed him to develop issues that he cared about, that he thought were essential to the revival of the Democratic party, especially jobs creation, education reform, and an overhaul of the welfare system, while at the same time providing him a forum to expand his reputation. He felt relaxed and at home with this collegial group of state executive peers. Here was a place where he could fit in and yet easily stand out. Harry Hughes, the governor of Maryland, recalled that his lasting image of Clinton at NGA conventions was of him “
always standing,
never sitting.” Hughes contrasted Clinton's style at the meetings with those of two other ambitious governors, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts arid Mario Cuomo of New York. Dukakis was usually seated, Hughes said, plugging his way through plenary sessions, talking earnestly, while Cuomo rarely bothered to show up at all, and when he did, tended to remain apart from the gang. Clinton was always in the middle of the action, working the room, leaning against a wall perhaps, surrounded by governors and staff members, telling a joke or leading an informal discussion about the latest book by urban historian Jane Jacobs or sociologist William J. Wilson or his friend Bob Reich.

Along with the camaraderie, the Governors Association gave Clinton opportunities to travel outside Arkansas and deliver speeches. He took on another post earlier that year that offered him additional national visibility, as chairman of the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based nonprofit commission that provided research on education issues to state
officials. Little Rock state representative Gloria Cabe, whose loyalty to Clinton went back to the bleak days after his 1980 defeat, served as his educational liaison to both national groups. “
Nobody ever
told me to behave in this manner, so it was largely my attitude, but through all the work I did for him in national organizations, it was with the notion that he was going to run for president,” Cabe recalled. There was no reason for Clinton to make his national ambitions too explicit at first, especially not until after his reelection that November in his noisy but not particularly close rematch with Frank White.
After the
election, as he began his fourth term as governor, it became increasingly obvious to his staff, as well as to Arkansas legislators and journalists, that his attention was elsewhere.

E
ARLY
on the evening
of March 20, 1987, the office of Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas issued a brief statement announcing that he would not be a candidate for president in 1988. The announcement came as a surprise to some in the political world. Since the beginning of the year, Bumpers had been traveling the country, meeting with prominent Democratic party financiers and operatives, seeming to prepare the groundwork for a presidential campaign. Only the week before, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who had already issued the first of many statements of noncandidacy for himself, predicted that Bumpers would make the race. But this was not the first time that Bumpers had edged toward the national spotlight and then receded from it. He had first been urged to run for president in 1976, shortly after he left the governor's office for the Senate. He had considered it again in 1984. Now, at sixty-one, he was taking himself out of consideration for the last time. Running for president, he said in his statement, “means a total disruption of the closeness my family has cherished. If victorious, much of that closeness is necessarily lost forever. So I'll turn to other challenges.”

The quiet announcement from the office of Senator Bumpers in Washington reverberated loudly in the office of Governor Clinton in Little Rock. Whatever Bumpers did or did not do was always of great interest to Clinton. Their relationship had gone through brief periods of hostility and longer periods of reconciliation and alliance, but it had always been marked by a certain amount of tension. They were separated by twenty years, yet often got in each other's way. Only a year earlier,
Clinton had
talked to friends about challenging Bumpers for the Senate seat, but was dissuaded by Hillary, who thought he would be unhappy in the Senate, and by polls that showed Bumpers would beat Clinton in a primary. Now, with Bumpers out of the presidential derby, Clinton seriously considered making the race. Alone in his office or in the kitchen of the mansion, he
worked the telephone day and night talking to friends about the pros and cons. Legislators noted that he seemed distracted, disinterested in state affairs. He was losing the major tax initiatives that year which he had hoped would pay for the final parts of his education reform effort.

Clinton and Betsey Wright dispatched scouts to Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Super Tuesday primary states to gauge how a Clinton candidacy might be received.
Gloria Cabe
ventured up to New Hampshire and spent three days in a Holiday Inn calling campaign activists from a list Clinton had compiled. She was preparing the way for Clinton's first campaign-style swing through the state, which went so well that he returned home “flying like a kite,” convinced that he could finish second there and then win the southern primaries. Fundraising letters were sent to the extensive network of out-of-state friends Clinton had accumulated over the years. Charlie Daniels, the old plumber from Virginia who had met Clinton in Moscow, mailed back the first contribution. He and his wife Ethel received a note from Clinton: “
Your willingness
to help us defray costs while we are testing the waters is a very special vote of confidence and I'm very grateful. You've been wonderful friends—Thanks for everything—Things are going well—Bill.” In Arkansas, Clinton began working on seed money commitments for the $1.5 to $2 million he had been told he would need to raise within his home state to make a creditable race. Betsey Wright thought about taking a leave from the governor's staff to concentrate on the presidential effort.

In the early morning of May 7, another Democrat was scratched from the field. This time it was Gary Hart who was forced to withdraw in the face of questions, allegations, and documented evidence regarding his extramarital sex life, which Hart had helped turn into an issue by denying that he was a philanderer and challenging reporters to tail him if they doubted his word. It was an unfortunate challenge which the
Miami Herald
took up, leading to an article in that newspaper and subsequent pictures in a tabloid detailing Hart's dalliance with a model named Donna Rice. Hart's sudden fall increased the pressure on Clinton from both ends. From one end came more longtime political pros from the McGovern era who had been allied with Hart but were now looking to Clinton as an alternative. And from the other end came the question: Did Bill Clinton have a Gary Hart problem?

As journalists and party activists in Washington asked the question among themselves, and in so doing advanced Clinton's reputation as a womanizer, Clinton and his friends and advisers struggled with how to deal with it. Bob Armstrong, the former Texas Land Commissioner who had developed an easygoing, big-brotherly friendship with Clinton since they worked together in the McGovern campaign, had several telephone
conversations with Clinton in the aftermath of the Hart implosion. One of the issues Clinton brought up, according to Armstrong, was whether there was “
a statute
of limitations on infidelity—whether you get any credit for getting it back together.” Armstrong told Clinton that he thought not. Clinton and Betsey Wright also had several private debates over the lessons of the Hart episode.
Clinton “wanted
to believe and advocated that it was irrelevant to whether the guy could be a good president,” Wright recalled. She argued that it had a significant bearing in Hart's case “because it raised questions about his stability.” Any previous affairs might have been irrelevant, she said, but “to have one while he was running was foolhardy.”

Clinton agreed. Hart, he said, was foolish to flaunt it.

Dick Morris, still a Clinton pollster and consultant though his other clients by then were almost exclusively Republicans, was also brought into the discussions. Clinton questioned Morris at length about how he thought the public would react to the infidelity issue and whether it would be held against him. They gingerly explored different ways to address the topic or sidestep it. Morris sensed that Clinton had “
a tremendous
terror of the race because of the personal scandals that were visited upon candidates who ran. His experience watching candidates be destroyed by those scandals or impaired by them chilled him, and led him to a feeling that this was a terribly inhospitable environment upon which to tread.” The sex issue, Morris said, “loomed large in his consideration. It loomed very large.”

But the momentum kept building for Clinton to run.
He traveled
to Washington for a foreign policy briefing set up by Steve Cohen, the friend of his and Hillary's from Yale Law who had attended the first gubernatorial inaugural in Little Rock eight years earlier, where he had told Clinton about how taken he was by the “pride and hope” he felt there. Sandy Berger and John Holum, two veterans of the McGovern and Hart campaigns, helped Cohen with the briefing. Back in Little Rock, Wright and her assistants prepared for a possible announcement.
Their first
choice was the House chamber inside the Capitol, but state law prohibited its use for political events of that sort, so they rented a ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel for July 15.

Rumors about Clinton's extramarital sex life began making the rounds in Little Rock.
A few
days before the announcement, Wright met with Clinton at her home on Hill Street. The time had come, she felt, for Clinton to get past what she considered his self-denial tendencies and face the issue squarely. For years, she told friends later, she had been covering up for him. She was convinced that some state troopers were soliciting women for him, and he for them, she said. Sometimes when Clinton was on the road, Wright would call his room in the middle of the night and no one would answer. She hated that part of him, but felt that the other sides of him overshadowed his personal weaknesses.

“Okay,” she said to him as they sat in her living room. Then she started listing the names of women he had allegedly had affairs with and the places where they were said to have occurred. “Now,” she concluded, “I want you to tell me the truth about every one.” She went over the list twice with Clinton, according to her later account, the second time trying to determine whether any of the women might tell their stories to the press. At the end of the process, she suggested that he should not get into the race. He owed it to Hillary and Chelsea not to.

The next day, Wright drove to the airport and picked up Carl Wagner, the first of a group of Clinton friends who had planned to gather in Little Rock for the presidential announcement.
Wagner was
a generational co-hort who had met Clinton during the Project Pursestrings antiwar effort in the summer of 1970. They had gone through the McGovern campaign together, Wagner running Michigan while Clinton ran Texas, and had kept in touch ever since. Wagner, like Clinton, loved to talk on the phone. Clinton had asked him to come down to Little Rock a day early to help “think this thing through.” On the way back from the airport, Wright did not tell Wagner about her encounter with Clinton the day before. She did offer her opinion that her boss seemed “too conflicted” and “might not be ready.”

Wagner met with Clinton and Hillary at the Governor's Mansion that night. They sat around the table in the kitchen and talked for several hours. It was, Wagner recalled, an intense, blunt conversation in which he and Hillary assessed the practicality of Clinton making the presidential race, element by element. Could Clinton raise $20 million? Did he have the time he needed? They analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the other candidates, especially the probable Republican nominee, Vice President George Bush. Wagner thought that the economy would be strong enough to make Bush difficult to beat. Clinton was surprised by that argument and launched into a long discussion of economic policy. Wagner noticed that Clinton was more comfortable talking about policy, depersonalizing the discussion. He wondered whether Clinton was prepared for the consequences if he became a candidate. At the end of the evening, as Clinton and Hillary moved toward the stairs leading from the kitchen up to their second-floor bedroom, Clinton turned to Wagner, who was still seated at the table, and asked, “
So what's
the bottom line?”