Bill Clinton

Building a Bridge to the New Millennium

David H. Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415894685
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136174667
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1993, William J. Clinton began his eight year stint as forty-second president of the United States. A key figure of change in the Democratic Party, Clinton's political and personal actions ensured his lasting status as an important if controversial leader at a critical moment in recent American history. In Bill Clinton: Building a Bridge to the New Millennium, David H. Bennett traces Clinton's life and career from childhood through his two terms in the White House. From childhood to college, state government to the executive branch, Bennett provides a concise and readable biography that places Clinton's achievements, problems, and legacy in historical context.

Situating the former president in the trajectory of 20th century liberalism, Bennett draws on Clinton's life to illuminate the political landscape of America in the 1990s and the role of the U.S. in the global context of the post-Cold War world. Combining keen scholarship with accessible prose, this will be an essential resource for students and all those interested in understanding the recent history of the U.S.

Part I
Bill Clinton

Chapter 1
The Boy from Hope Becomes The Man from Hope

Once Bill Clinton had secured enough delegates to ensure the nomination, his team discussed ways to reintroduce the candidate at the Democratic National Convention. He had been a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of a top-tier college and a famous Ivy League law school. It was easy for foes to characterize him as just another member of the elite. But while the nominee often would make reference to the iconic figures in his party—Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy—all of them born to wealth and privilege, Clinton himself had a very different life story. So his friends Harry and Linda Bloodworth Thomason, Hollywood producers (and Arkansas natives), were asked to create a seventeen-minute film to be shown to the nation before the nominating acceptance speech. It would describe Bill Clinton’s remarkable road toward the pinnacle of power. And it took its theme of hope and change from the name of the candidate’s hometown. It was called The Man from Hope.

Bill Clinton was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, a town of about six thousand near the southwestern corner of the state, just over thirty miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. His mother named him William Jefferson Blythe III after his father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor Texas farmer. But Bill Clinton never knew his birth father. Bill Blythe had married his young wife, Virginia, only two months after they met in 1943 and then left for wartime service in Italy. He had returned after the war and gotten back his old job as an equipment salesman in Chicago. He had purchased a small house and was en route to Hope to pick up his pregnant wife and bring her back to Chicago when, at 28, he was killed in a car accident in May. He was driving fast and a tire had blown out on a wet road in Missouri.

Bill Clinton never knew much about Bill Blythe, described by his family as a handsome, charming, fun-loving man. It was only after Clinton was in the White House, in 1993, that he would learn from investigative newspaper reports that his father—a mysterious figure, one biographer noted, who constantly reinvented himself—had been married three times before he met his mother, who was unaware of these marriages, and had at least two other children. (The President later reached out to try to meet these half-siblings.)¹

And so Bill Clinton’s early years would be in Hope. At first, he would live with his mother in the home of his maternal grandparents, Edith and Eldridge Cassidy, whom he would call Mammaw and Papaw. It was a comfortable, two-and-a-half-story white wood-frame house that had been in the family since 1938, although it occasionally shook from trains coming by on the nearby tracks. Edith, 45, a strong, volatile personality and a respected private nurse in the community, was the dominant figure in the household. Her worst trait was her temper, her daughter would recall. “She had hell-fire in her, but she was a good woman,” one friend said. Her good-natured husband, a former iceman but now a grocery store proprietor, often was the object of her angry outbursts. But both of them were devoted to their grandson, and Edith was teaching little Bill—who was extraordinarily precocious from the start—to read while he was still in a high chair. (He was reading numerous books by age 3.) They would be the primary caregivers when his mother left for New Orleans for a year, to be trained in a hospital as a nurse anesthetist.²

When Virginia Blythe returned to Hope, she soon announced she would marry Roger Clinton, a car dealer with the Buick franchise in town. Clinton had a reputation as a drinker, a womanizer, and a party-lover. Edith Cassidy disliked him, even threatened to seek custody of Virginia’s son, and refused to attend the marriage ceremony. But Bill Blythe, age 4, moved into his new home, a one-story wooden cottage in a postwar Boomer neighborhood of large families and children, with the newlyweds. He soon began to call his stepfather Daddy and not long afterward began calling himself Bill Clinton. He would later make the name change official.

When young Bill was finished with first grade, he would leave Hope, Arkansas. Roger had decided to return to his hometown, neighboring Hot Springs. He sold the dealership and moved the family to a farm near town. (Bill Clinton later found it politically useful to recall his days living on a farm with an outhouse.) But after a year, Roger Clinton disposed of the farm and took a job in the city, working for his affluent brother Raymond, the prosperous regional Buick dealer.

The family soon moved into a large, two-story frame house on a hill— rented from Uncle Raymond—in a community so much different than little Hope. Hot Springs, an aging but prosperous resort town of 35,000, was a tourist center located adjacent to a national park, with large hotels and numerous bath houses. It had a colorful history as a haven for illegal gambling and prostitution; in the Twenties and Thirties, Al Capone and other mobsters had visited often. Now, it housed a multiracial, multiethnic population. Bill was sent to a Catholic grade school at first, but then went on to public schools, where, not for the last time, he would be a star student.³

Virginia Clinton’s relationship with her second husband (whose youthful nickname was “Dude”) was stormy from the start. He was not only a serial adulterer, but an alcoholic and violently abusive when drunk. He beat his wife. During one angry, drunken outburst, when Bill was 5, he pulled a gun and fired in her direction; the police took him to jail. Later, when Bill was 14 and he was in the house with his 4 year old half-brother Roger (named after his dad), Roger Clinton again began screaming and hitting his wife. Now grown larger than his stepfather, Bill Clinton grabbed a golf club and threatened to beat the man he called “Daddy” if he did not stop; the drunken man collapsed.

This story of Bill Clinton’s intervention to protect his mother was featured in the film at the convention, The Man from Hope. When it was shown, several of his friends told reporters that they never knew about the troubled household in which the candidate was raised, never knew of the violence and alcoholic rampages. Clinton would later write that these were family secrets; they were a normal part of his life. He never talked about them with anyone: a friend, a neighbor, a teacher, a pastor, a counselor. And then he noted that while we all have them, some secrets “can be an awful burden to bear, especially if some sense of shame is attached to them … or the allure of our secrets can be too strong, strong enough to make us feel we can’t live without them, that we wouldn’t be who we are without them.”⁴

The year after the golf club confrontation, when Roger was drinking again, Virginia Clinton moved her sons into a new house and soon filed for divorce. Bill was 16 when the divorce was granted. But a desperate and remorseful Roger Clinton begged to be taken back, and his former wife finally agreed. It was then that Bill Clinton went to the courthouse and officially changed his last name. He never rejected his stepfather: “a combustible mix of fears, insecurities and psychological vulnerabilities … but a fundamentally good person.” The renewed relationship between the Clintons would hardly go smoothly and there would be ugly episodes to come. But soon Bill Clinton would be out of that household and off to college.⁵

Still, during his school years, in Hope and Hot Springs, the boy living in a home with such an explosive marriage, the child of an alcoholic, seemed to flourish. His mother adored him and was deeply supportive—as were his grandparents—and he was an exceptionally bright and gregarious youngster. He made close friends and nurtured these relationships across the years. In Hope, two of these boyhood pals—Vince Foster, neighbor from next door, and Mack McLarty, a fellow kindergartener—would later have notable careers; they would be asked to accompany the new President to the White House, one as Counselor, the other as Chief of Staff. They were, perhaps, the charter members of the FOB, the “Friends of Bill,” Clinton’s extraordinarily large and devoted circle of friends.

Clinton described himself in junior high as “fat, uncool, and hardly popular with the girls.” But he was smart, articulate, and always interested in politics and public life. Back when he was a child, at age 10, he watched— entranced—the national Democratic political convention on the family’s first television set. He had friends across the color line and, even as a boy, rejected the racist policies of Governor Orville Faubus and some other home-state politicians. As a teenager, he cried, sitting alone, watching Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

While big for his age and rather clumsy, certainly not a gifted athlete, he did make his mark right through high school as a musician. He loved music: classical, jazz, Elvis Presley. His instrument was saxophone and he was in the high school concert and marching bands as well as a jazz trio. For seven summers, he attended band camp at the University of Arkansas.

Bill Clinton, always gregarious, became immensely popular. Later, he would call high school a “great ride.” He was elected president of the junior class, winner of so many awards that he was kept from running for student council or senior class president only by a school rule restricting students from too many activities. But in the summer of his junior year he did become a representative at the annual American Legion Boys State program, where kids from all across the state engaged in model government exercises. He excelled in the debates and in the political maneuvering. He won election as one of the two coveted Arkansas “senators,” which meant he would go to Boys Nation, at the University of Maryland, adjacent to the capital. In Washington, he would be introduced to the powerful members of the Arkansas congressional delegation, including Senator J. William Fulbright. Of course, he would be first in line to shake the hand of John F. Kennedy, when the President greeted the Boys Nation delegates in the White House Rose Garden. Clinton had been a passionate supporter of JFK; the picture of the handshake would become famous.

Bill Clinton was entranced by Washington. He wrote later that “I knew I could be great in public service. I was fascinated by people, politics, and policy, and I thought I could make it without family wealth, or connections or establishment southern positions on race.” So against the advice of school counselors, family, and friends, he applied to only one college: Georgetown. He thought he could get in; he had been fourth in a class of 327 students, had been a National Merit semifinalist, and his board scores were good. Coming from Arkansas was an advantage (as it would be in the Rhodes Scholar competition) because a national university wanted representation from across the nation. It was pricey, even in the mid-Sixties, but his parents encouraged him to try and he knew he could work while at school and maybe get scholarship aid. And so in the fall of 1964, at the height of a critical presidential election between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, he arrived—escorted by his mother—at his freshman dorm on the Georgetown campus.⁶

Clinton was enrolled in the School of Foreign Service. In 1964, Georgetown’s college of arts and sciences—blocks away in “the Yard”—was 100 percent male and 95 percent Catholic, but the foreign service school was much more eclectic; there were Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists (although few Southern Baptists like Clinton), and there were women. Bill Clinton lost no time making friends and contacts across campus. He ran and won the election as president of the freshman class that fall; he later called it “one of my better campaigns, waged to an electorate dominated by Irish and Italian Catholics from the East.” He would be reelected as sophomore class president. He had a remarkable capacity to meet, make, and keep new friends and to enlist some of them to work for him in his campaigns.

He had enormous energy and seemed to operate on less sleep than almost anyone else. And he excelled in class. Later, he would recall almost all the courses he took, particularly in the first two years, and the teaching styles of the instructors. He even saved notes taken in these classes and he certainly made a point of getting to know the faculty, which probably irritated some fellow class members. Students who were in study groups with him were struck by his easy mastery of the material.

Clinton was especially influenced by the required freshman course “Development of Civilizations,” taught by a legendary teacher, Professor Carroll Quigley. He recalled Quigley’s view that “the future can be better than the past, and each individual has a personal, moral obligation to make it so.” He wrote later that “from the 1992 campaign through my two terms in office, I quoted Professor Quigley’s line often, hoping it would spur my fellow Americans and me to practice what he preached.” One fellow Georgetown undergraduate said when he first heard the song “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” at the 1992 Democratic Convention, the song which would serve as the Clinton campaign anthem, “that was pure Quigley.” (And it was Quigley who once remarked to a class that great men and women who make a mark on their times operate on less sleep.)⁷

In the summer between his second and third years, Bill’s uncle Raymond helped him get a job working on the campaign of Judge Frank Holt, a candidate for the Arkansas Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He helped to hand out brochures and organize rallies, but when the judge had to miss one speaking engagement, Clinton was asked to speak in this place; he did well enough to become a stand-in at some subsequent smaller rallies. This was his earliest lesson in “retail politics,” reaching directly out to voters at fairs and pie suppers, answering their questions, touching their hands. “That’s how I learned politics,” he would recall. “It works better than TV wars. You had to talk but you had to listen, too.” You could take a shot at your opponent but could not “hide behind some bogus committee that hoped to make a killing from your time in office if its (televised advertising) attacks destroyed the other candidate.”⁸

Frank Holt narrowly lost the primary to “Justice Jim” Johnson. A right-wing racist politician who would become an enemy of Clinton’s in succeeding years, Johnson was defeated by Winthrop Rockefeller in the general election. Later, he was a source for some of the “Clinton scandal” stories written by major national newspaper reporters in the Nineties.

But Bill Clinton’s experience that summer proved critical to his future. Judge Holt’s brother, another experienced Arkansas political figure, wrote to J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recommending him for a job. Clinton had written Fulbright earlier but had been told there were no openings. Now he would be offered a part-time position as assistant clerk on the Foreign Relations Committee. It paid enough to cover tuition and expenses without any help from his family. Because Roger Clinton was now struggling with terminal cancer, and the medical bills were mounting, Clinton feared he would soon have to leave Georgetown and come home, where college was much less expensive. The call from Fulbright’s office changed his life.

Working for the committee between 1966 and 1968 was a rare opportunity. It was at the height of the Vietnam War, in the midst of intense debate over the wisdom of America’s involvement and the shaping of a powerful antiwar movement spreading across the campuses of the nation. Chairman Fulbright, the author of The Arrogance of Power, had been one of President Lyndon Johnson’s senatorial supporters, but now he had turned against the war. Not only did this committee assignment give Bill Clinton new insights into the workings of Congress and the character of key players on Capitol Hill, but it helped inform his own views about the Vietnam War.

Clinton opposed the war. But in the context of those days, he was a moderate activist, like the delegates at the National Students Association (NSA) convention he attended in summer 1967. He was not a firebrand and not a member of Students for a Democratic Society—an antiwar liberal but certainly not a radical. “Though I was sympathetic to the zeitgeist, I didn’t embrace the lifestyle or the radical rhetoric. My hair was short, I didn’t even drink and some of the music was too loud and harsh for my taste.” In a time when some protesters in front of the White House (and not far from his Georgetown campus) were shouting bitter and lurid slogans like “Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you now when we really need you,” Clinton said, “I didn’t hate LBJ; I just wanted to end the war, and I was afraid the culture clashes would undermine, not advance, the cause.”⁹

When the charismatic Allard Lowenstein addressed that NSA meeting, he called for an effort to defeat Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination in 1968. But when he persuaded Senator Eugene McCarthy to run for his Coalition for a Democratic Alternative in the primaries, Clinton was not committed to this new “McCarthy movement.” Yet, after McCarthy did well in the New Hampshire primary and Robert F. Kennedy, who initially had rejected Lowenstein’s appeal to run, decided to enter the race—creating two antiwar candidates—Clinton did become an RFK supporter. He was persuaded that Bobby Kennedy would be a much better President. It w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue Inauguration 1993
• PART I Bill Clinton
• PART II Documents
• Selected Bibliography
• Index