First In His Class (85 page)

“I tell you what,” Wagner responded. “When you reach the top of the steps, walk into your daughter's bedroom, look at her, and understand that if you do this, your relationship with her will never be the same. I'm not sure if it will be worse or better, but it will never be the same.”

After Clinton disappeared up the steps, Wagner went to the phone and called Steve Cohen, who planned to be at the announcement. “Jesus Christ,” Cohen remembered Wagner telling him, “
this guy
doesn't know
whether he wants to run!” Cohen called Sandy Berger, who also had airplane reservations for Little Rock. There was a chance Clinton might not run, Cohen said. They decided to go anyway.

By early afternoon the next day, a dozen Clinton friends from around the country had congregated at the Governor's Mansion for an announcement-eve luncheon. Most waited in the living room as Clinton sat on the porch steps leading out to the back lawn, engaged in a final conversation with Wagner and Mickey Kantor, the California lawyer and Democratic activist who had been part of Clinton's network since the Carter era. If Clinton had privately made up his mind after the encounter with Betsey Wright, if he had reached a decision after the discussion with Wagner in the kitchen the night before, he still felt a need to weigh the options to the last possible moment.
Kantor took
the lead as they talked about the level of commitment that a national campaign required. As they talked, Chelsea, then seven years old, approached her father and asked him about a family vacation planned for later that summer. As Kantor remembered the scene, Clinton told his daughter that he might not be able to go because he might be running for president. “Well,” Kantor recalled Chelsea responding, “then Mom and I will go without you.”

Chelsea always had a powerful effect on Clinton. He carried pictures of her around in his wallet and showed them to friends whenever he was on the road. He could get misty-eyed talking about her. They held hands whenever they were together. When he was in town, he tried to drive her to school every morning. Earlier that year,
on a
Sunday morning at the start of the legislative session, his aide and former high school teacher, Paul Root, and Root's wife Mary, who was also a teacher, accompanied Clinton and Chelsea to a prayer breakfast at the First Baptist Church in Benton. When father and daughter came out of the mansion and got into the car, Root recalled, Clinton said that he might not talk to them much on the ride down to Benton because he did not get that much time with Chelsea and their favorite thing to do together was read books. Chelsea opened her church book and found her favorite story. Father and daughter read it aloud together. They did the same thing on the way home from Benton. As they neared the mansion, Clinton turned to Mary Root and asked, “Is that okay? The way I was reading to her?”

The subtext of Clinton's relationship with his daughter was his own unfortunate history with fathers. He did not want to be considered a neglectful father himself, yet his political obsession gave him little time with Chelsea. He would try to soften the guilt by joking about it, often telling the story of how, when Chelsea was asked to describe what her father did, she said, “He gives speeches, drinks coffee, and talks on the telephone.”
It was
as true as it was amusing. Now, when Kantor saw the look on Clinton's
face after Chelsea matter-of factly scratched her father from the family vacation plans, he was sure that Clinton would not run for president that year. “It was the turning point of the conversation,” he said later.

Clinton faced
the gathering of friends in the dining room and apologized for luring them all down to Little Rock for no reason. No problem, they said, one after another, some fighting to keep their composure. The struggle between family and ambition was something all of them had dealt with in various ways. John Holum helped Clinton draft a statement. Clinton did not want the news to slip out haphazardly. He had friends around the country who were expecting him to run, and he wanted them to learn about his decision at the same time. Betsey Wright and Gloria Cabe and several other aides and friends worked the telephones, setting up the calls for him and alerting the national press that there was no need to make the trip to Arkansas. Wait for another day, he said to many of those he called, “because it's coming.” One of those who heard from Clinton was Billie Carr in Houston. It was a sentimental conversation during which Clinton talked about the importance of “putting his house in order.” Carr said she understood. “All of us in politics feel bad about neglecting our families,” she said later. “We feel bad about it—but not too bad.”

Clinton's statement was issued late in the day. “
I need
some family time: I need some personal time,” he said. “Politicians are people too. I think sometimes we forget it, but they really are. The only thing I or any other candidate has to offer in running for president is what's inside. That's what sets people on fire and gets their confidence and their votes, whether they live in Wisconsin or Montana or New York. That part of my life needs renewal. The other, even more important reason for my decision is the certain impact that this campaign would have had on our daughter. The only way I could have won, getting in this late, after others had been working up to two years, would be to go on the road full time from now until the end, and to have Hillary do the same thing…. I've seen a lot of kids grow up under these pressures and a long, long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was.”

That night, a group of Clinton's high school friends gathered at Carolyn Staley's house near the mansion in Little Rock. Clinton, his staff had said, would be too busy to attend, but he came over anyway. The friends had suspected that he would find his way there: Bill usually sought them out when he needed to ease the pressure and emotion of his public life. Just looking at David Leopoulos could make him feel better. “So,” Leopoulos said at one point that night, “
this reminds
me of the Fuhgawe Indians.” Clinton was the only one in the room who knew what Leopoulos was talking about. They both started laughing. It was their oldest, corniest joke,
one they used to tell as they sat atop the mountain above Hot Springs. It was about the Indians who had no name until they got lost in the mountains and one of them asked, “Where the fuhgawe?”

O
N
a Sunday morning in early February of 1988, Clinton was asked to talk to a class of single adults at Immanuel Baptist Church. Most members of the group were professionals in their twenties and thirties. The theme he chose was “
the conflict
between the idea of progress and the certainty of death.” Sometimes, he said, it is hard “to keep going when you know that the sand's running out of the hourglass. Yet you still have a moral obligation to try to make tomorrow better than today.” A few days later, in a speech at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Clinton recalled his Sunday School sermon and said that in his own life he had two hourglasses going at once, one his mortality as a person and the other his mortality as a politician. Knowing about the first made him feel more urgency about the second and all that he still hoped to accomplish. “I think about it,” he said, “as the time ebbs away.”

A
TLANTA
, Georgia: July 20, 1988. This was the third consecutive convention at which
Clinton had
made the coveted list of speakers. In 1980, he had been selected to present the issues affecting the nation's governors. In 1984, his assignment was to deliver a tribute to Harry Truman. This 1988 Democratic National Convention might have been the time he talked about himself. But another governor, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, had top billing, and another governor, Ann Richards of Texas, became a star as the keynote speaker. Jesse Jackson had already stirred the convention hall with an emotional speech. Clinton would give the nominating speech for Dukakis. By tradition, several speakers nominated a presidential candidate. Clinton would do it alone, in prime time, before all the audiences he wanted to reach. It could be the first speech of his future campaign.

Clinton had stayed up all night revising his speech, going through nine full drafts. Ordinarily he spoke extemporaneously, working off notes, but this speech had to be a finished document, to be read and approved by Dukakis and his aides. Hillary had never seen him work so hard on a speech, she told friends. He would tackle a section, go over it with his advisers, and then scrap it and redo it, again and again, adding more themes, inserting paragraphs. His secretary got so worn out typing and retyping drafts overnight that she ended up needing medical treatment for exhaustion. By midmorning, when the manuscript was essentially finished, Clinton was concerned that it was too long, yet Dukakis aides called three
more times with suggested additions. Clinton had been allotted twenty minutes, including pauses for applause and demonstrations, and it was timed with no interruptions at sixteen minutes. His advisers had other concerns. Betsey Wright, Gloria Cabe, and Bruce Lindsey, the Little Rock lawyer who was becoming Clinton's most trusted traveling aide, had all listened to him give countless rousing speeches that brought his audiences to standing ovations. They knew that it would be hard to turn an introduction into a scintillating oration. But this text, Cabe thought, had been redone so many times by Clinton and had so many inserts from the Dukakis camp that it had become plain vanilla. After reading it with Lindsey and Wright, she turned to them and said, “All the Bill Clinton's been taken out of it.”

After the dress rehearsal at the convention hall in late afternoon, Clinton and Hillary paid a visit to the Dukakises at their hotel room. The speech. Dukakis said, was exactly what he wanted. He loved it. “
No matter
what happens,” Clinton later recalled Dukakis telling him, “give the speech.”

Clinton went to the microphone confidently that night, to the theme of
Chariots of Fire
playing on the sound system. “I'm honored to be here tonight to nominate my friend Michael Dukakis for President of the United States,” he began. That was the rhetorical high point. It went downhill from there. Clinton and his aides had hoped that the house lights would be dimmed and the crowd silenced for a thoughtful presentation. But the lights stayed on, and Dukakis delegates, who had remained relatively subdued for two days while Jackson delegates dominated the scene, were now being whipped up by cheerleaders on the convention floor. Inside the convention hall, Clinton s words were an inaudible drone. It was no better on television.

Betsey Wright
stood at the back of the podium, overtaken by a “completely helpless feeling.” She tried to have the lights lowered. No one would do it. Hillary was posted nearby, furious about the lights and the sight of Dukakis floor whips instructing delegates to cheer every time Clinton mentioned his name. Gloria Cabe was seated with the Arkansas delegation, “pissed off” that she could not hear the speech above the orchestrated commotion. Harry Truman Moore was also on the floor, with his camera out, recording the scene for the
Paragould Daily Press
. Caught between two clumps of Dukakis and Jackson delegates engaged in a shouting match, turning his lens first up at his longtime friend who seemed to be dying on stage, then back at the painful faces of his colleagues in the Arkansas delegation, Moore felt he was witnessing “one of the most miserable political experiences” he had ever been through. As the speech dragged on, past sixteen minutes, past twenty minutes, it got even worse.
ABC cut away at the twenty-one-minute mark and began showing a film. On NBC, Tom Brokaw uttered forlornly, “We have to be here, too,” and then gave up on the speech. CBS showed a red light flashing on the podium, a signal for Clinton to shut up, then found a delegate in the audience giving Clinton the cut sign with the hand slash across the throat. People could be heard shouting: “Get the hook! Get the hook!”

A few minutes into his speech, Clinton had seen that he had lost the audience. He considered abandoning the text and firing up the crowd with a few campaign-style exhortations and getting off the stage. But as he later explained, or rationalized, he kept his word to Dukakis to read the entire speech. After thirty-two excruciating minutes, when he uttered “In closing”—one of the few adlibbed phrases in his speech—the hall erupted in mocking applause. Clinton and his entourage knew it was a lost opportunity, but they did not realize how disastrous until Bruce Lindsey called Cabe's husband in Little Rock and asked what it had looked like on television. “God, Lindsey, Bill was awful!” Robert Cabe said. Clinton, Hillary, and Betsey Wright decided on a swift counterattack. They would spread the word on the problems in the hall as Clinton was giving his speech, without saying anything negative about Dukakis. Clinton, meanwhile, worked the hospitality suites and parties around town, talking to activists and journalists and anyone who would hear him out. The strategy recalled the days after his loss to Frank White in 1980, when he talked obsessively about what had happened to him and what he had done wrong, confronting friends and strangers in supermarkets and bookstores and anywhere he could find them.

The morning after was unforgiving. Deborah Norville on NBC's
Today
asked Tom Pettit how Clinton could have been described as “someone to watch” on the national scene. “Now we know better,” deadpanned Pettit. Frank Greer, a media consultant who admired Clinton and wanted to work for him on a political campaign, was quoted repeating a line he said he had heard after the speech: “‘It was either the longest nominating speech or the shortest presidential campaign speech in history.'” Television columnist Tom Shales of
The Washington Post
described it under the headline “The Numb and the Restless.” While Jesse Jackson had electrified the crowd the night before, Shales wrote, Clinton had calcified it. Johnny Carson's writers delighted in the material Clinton had provided them for
The Tonight Show
. Carson would begin his next monologue by saying, “In closing…” Then he would note that the Surgeon General had just approved Governor Bill Clinton as an over-the-counter sleep aid, and that Clinton's speech went over “about as big as the Velcro condom,” and that when it came to drama, Clinton was “right up there with PBS pledge breaks.”