Bill Clinton

New Gilded Age President

Patrick J. Maney

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700632909, 9780700621941
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621996
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Of the original Gilded Age, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: “There is no other period in the nation’s history when politics seems so completely dwarfed by economic changes, none in which the life of the country rests so completely in the hands of the industrial entrepreneur.” The era of William Jefferson Clinton’s ascent to the presidency was strikingly similar—nothing less, Clinton himself said, than “a paradigm shift . . . from the industrial age to an information-technology age, from the Cold War to a global society.” How Bill Clinton met the challenges of this new Gilded Age is the subject of Patrick J. Maney’s book: an in-depth perspective on the 42nd president of the United States and the transformative era over which he presided.

Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President goes beyond personality and politics to examine the critical issues of the day: economic and fiscal policy, business and financial deregulation, healthcare and welfare reform, and foreign affairs in a post–Cold War world. But at its heart is Bill Clinton in all his guises: the first baby boomer to reach the White House; the “natural”—the most gifted politician of his generation, but one with an inexplicably careless and self-destructive streak; the “Comeback Kid,” repeatedly overcoming long odds; the survivor, frequently down but never out; and, with Hillary Rodham Clinton, part of the most controversial First Couple since Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Maney’s book is, in sum, the most succinct and up-to-date study of the Clinton presidency, invaluable not merely for understanding a transformative era in American history, but presidential, national, and global politics today.

1

Making of a President, 1946–1992

The American South where Bill Clinton was born and raised provided a fertile training ground for an aspiring young politician with national ambitions. It was also a treacherous training ground that claimed more than its share of casualties. To succeed during those years when the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was being dismantled, one had to adapt—often at a moment’s notice—to the fast-changing realities of southern politics. Clinton’s training, especially as a five-term governor of Arkansas, equipped him with the political survival skills and coalition-building techniques that served him well in the 1990s, by which time national politics had taken on many of the characteristics of southern politics.

Clinton’s childhood and adolescence equipped him with survival skills of another sort, skills that enabled him to survive a multitude of personal crises that would imperil his ascent to the presidency and his presidency itself. Christened William Jefferson Blythe III, after a father he would never know, he was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, a town of 7,500 in southwest Arkansas. Three months earlier, the elder Blythe was driving back to Arkansas from Chicago, where he had a job selling heavy equipment and planned to move his wife. Outside of Sikeston, Missouri, his Buick blew a tire, flipped over, and apparently pitched Blythe headfirst into a drainage ditch filled with water. He was twenty-eight years old. Growing up, Clinton knew almost nothing about his father except that he had married his mother after a whirlwind courtship, had almost immediately gone off to war, had earned his living as a salesman, and had a winning personality. Not until Clinton became president and reporters began to dig into his past, did he (or his mother) learn that Blythe had probably been married three times before meeting his mother and that he had at least two other children.¹

Clinton’s mother, Virginia, twenty-four years old when he was born, became the center of his life, and he of hers. A larger-than-life figure with painted-on eyebrows and black hair with a dramatic white streak in the front, she was smart, lively, fun-loving, optimistic, and resilient. She loved to dance and play the horses. She smoked two packs of Pall Malls a day and enjoyed Scotch and water. “I’m friendly, I’m outgoing, and I like men,” she wrote in her memoir. “Always have, always will.” She added: “Ever since I was a girl, when I showed up someplace, I’ve wanted people to know I’m there.” She need not have worried. At the nightclubs she frequented, she would invite herself onstage to sing with featured performers like Frankie Laine and Teresa Brewer.² But there was another side to her as well. She was an accomplished nurse who specialized in administering anesthesia during surgery. She worked a grueling schedule and was often on call twenty-four hours a day. Her struggle to forge a career within a profession dominated by men and medical doctors was a story in itself—one that rivaled in drama and intrigue some chapters of her son’s political career.

Virginia trained as a nurse anesthetist at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. While there, she left Bill, who was two, in the care of her parents in Hope. Although his grandparents lavished him with attention and kindness, living in the household could not have been altogether pleasant. His grandfather, who ran a small grocery store, was a kindly man of generous sympathies. He served black and white customers alike, hardly a common practice in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the rigid barriers of segregation were only beginning to be breached. He frequently forgave the debts owed him by poor customers, black and white. Clinton credited his grandfather’s example with his own liberal views on race. “I could see that black people looked different,” Clinton recalled, but because his grandfather “treated them like he did everybody else, asking after their children and about their work, I thought they were just like me.”³ But Clinton’s grandmother, despite sharing her husband’s racial tolerance, may have been mentally unstable. She had a violent temper. In fits of rage she would scream and throw things at her husband and even at Clinton’s mother during her visits home from New Orleans. One time she threatened to go to court to gain custody of Bill. But life with his grandparents was only a prelude to the domestic turbulence that was to come. Soon after completing her training in New Orleans, Virginia returned to Hope and married car dealer Roger Clinton (whose name Bill eventually took). Roger moved his new family to Hot Springs, a rowdy gambling and resort mecca of 50,000 in northwest Arkansas, where he ran the parts department in his brother’s Buick dealership. At first everything seemed fine. The Clintons lived in a comfortable five-bedroom, four-bathroom house in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood. Even after stepbrother Roger Jr. was born, Bill had his own room, and later a Buick convertible. It soon became clear, however, that the elder Clinton was an alcoholic whose idea of a good time, as Bill Clinton later put it, “was to gamble, get drunk, and do crazy, reckless things in cars or airplanes or on motorcycles.”⁴ During drunken sprees, he would sometimes beat his wife and threaten the boys. When Bill was five, Roger fired a handgun inside the house, barely missing Virginia. The police hauled him off to jail in handcuffs. Another time he held a pair of scissors to Virginia’s neck. By his early teens, Bill, now six feet tall, had been thrust into the role of family defender. He “was father, brother, and son in the family,” his mother said. During one altercation, Bill broke into his parents’ bedroom and forced a drunken Roger to stand. “Hear me,” he said. “Never . . . ever . . . touch my mother again.”⁵ The Clintons divorced but remarried six months later after Roger pleaded for a second chance. Roger soon picked up where he had left off. Roger Jr., who was ten years younger than Bill, recalled how bad it was: “I’d pray he wouldn’t get drunk—he’d go get drunk. I’d pray he wouldn’t hit us—he’d come home and hit us. I’d pray we would have a happy household—we wouldn’t.” Then, when the elder Clinton was dying of cancer, Roger Jr. remembered praying “for him to die, and he wouldn’t die. That’s when I got tired of praying.”⁶ But he did die, when Roger Jr. was eleven and Bill was away at college. Virginia married two more times.

The most striking thing about Bill Clinton’s turbulent homelife is that almost no one outside the family knew about it. “I came to accept the secrets of our house as a normal part of my life,” he wrote in his memoir. “I never talked to anyone about them—not to a friend, a neighbor, a teacher, a pastor.” Noted one of his biographers: “He decided to pretend it didn’t exist. To pretend that everything was all right. To go to church . . . with his bible under his arm and be sunny and energetic, and positive, and simply not to accept it.”⁷

Still, it would be a mistake to view Clinton’s early life as Southern Gothic, a tale out of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. Even during the worst of times, he was the adored son, the adored stepson, and the adored stepbrother. Clinton’s mother devoted an entire wall in their home, dubbed “the shrine” by Clinton’s friends, to his photographs, medals, and ribbons.

He was also the center of attention at Hot Springs High School, where he excelled in academic and extracurricular activities. “He just took over the school,” a classmate recalled. “He didn’t mean to, but he just took the place over.” Recalled another: “Bill was the kind of person who would come up to everyone new in high school and say: ‘Hi. How are you? My name’s Bill Clinton, and I’m running for something,’ whatever it was.” He was president of the Key Club and the Beta Club. He played tenor saxophone in the band and helped form a jazz group named The Three Blind Mice. On Sundays, he sang in the choir of the Baptist Church. A member of the National Honor Society and a National Merit Scholarship semi-finalist, he graduated fourth in his class, out of 363.⁸

The high point of high school came the summer between his junior and senior years when he represented Arkansas at the national convention of Boys Nation in Washington, DC. There, in the Rose Garden at the White House, he got a chance to shake hands with his boyhood hero, President Kennedy, a moment fortuitously captured on film. Clinton greatly admired Kennedy. Not all white southerners did. By the summer of 1963, many considered Kennedy a traitor to his race for his support of civil rights. Six months later, when word came of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, applause erupted in some white classrooms in the South.

In the fall of 1964, Clinton was back in Washington, this time as a freshman at Georgetown University. Once again, he quickly made his presence felt. As students moved into their dorms, Clinton went from room to room, introducing himself to them and to their parents. To some, the six-foot-two, bushy-haired, garrulous, self-confident Clinton with a southern drawl must have seemed an oddity. And as one of the few southerners in his class, he was. But most liked him, and before long “the amiable farm boy,” as the student newspaper described him, was elected president of the freshman class.⁹

If classmates assumed the Arkansas farm boy was more amiable than bright, he quickly surprised them. In a famously demanding first-semester survey of Western Civilization, he was one of two students out of 230 to earn an A. He may have made it look easy, but he was also ambitious, competitive, and hardworking. After a lecture, he would be one of the students to go up front to ask the professor to clarify this point or that. He developed a knack for “reading” his professors, for anticipating from the professor’s interests what was likely to be on the test, even when it was not obvious to other students. A voracious reader, he always had two or three books unrelated to class going at any one time. When one of his history professors noted that great leaders required less sleep than ordinary mortals, Clinton began setting his alarm to awaken him after five hours of sleep. He would then refresh himself with an occasional catnap during the day.¹⁰

By his third year, Clinton was devoting as much or more time to outside activities as to the classroom. That’s because he was working part-time in the office of his home state senator, J. William Fulbright. Former president of the University of Arkansas, a Rhodes Scholar, and chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the urbane Fulbright was a role model for Clinton in part, perhaps, because he defied the “farm boy” image that Clinton probably had to combat. By the time Clinton went to work for Fulbright, the senator was a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Otherwise, Fulbright voted with his conservative southern colleagues on most other matters, including civil rights. Clinton, more liberal on domestic issues than Fulbright but less inclined to criticize the war, eventually came to oppose the war probably because of Fulbright’s influence. While he was at Georgetown, the first major demonstrations against the war occurred in Washington, including the legendary March on the Pentagon in 1967, chronicled by Norman Mailer in his Armies of the Night. But Clinton took no part in this or other demonstrations. At this stage, he remained more observer than participant in the antiwar movement.¹¹

Even with all of his outside activities and less-than-stellar attendance record, Clinton graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with a 3.7 grade point average. The biggest honor was yet to come. In 1968, he joined the elite company of thirty-two young men from across the country who were chosen to study at Oxford University as Rhodes Scholars. The two years Clinton spent at Oxford allowed him to shed the parochialism he shared with most of his countrymen. Before he returned to the United States he visited the British Isles, France, Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe, including brief visits to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Even among a high-powered cohort of fellow scholars, Clinton stood out. Recalled Strobe Talbott, who shared a house with Clinton for a year: “You just knew that Bill Clinton was going to be a politician and that he was going to probably be President.”¹²

The Oxford years counted most for Clinton’s political future, however, because of the decisions he made regarding the draft. Upon turning eighteen, Clinton, like all young men, became eligible for two years of military service, including service in Vietnam. At Georgetown, student deferments had kept him out of the draft. But those deferments ended upon graduation, so Clinton could be drafted at any time by his hometown draft board in Hot Springs. The details of Clinton’s encounter with the draft did not come to light until twenty years later, when he was running for president. Even then they were so complicated it was difficult to make sense of them. But three things about Clinton and the draft were clear. First, he pulled strings to avoid being called up, and he did so in ways that, although not illegal, raised questions about his honesty and ethical standards. Second, among members of his generation, he was hardly alone. Millions of young men contrived to avoid service, many of them successfully. But a third thing about the episode was also clear: Clinton agonized over his actions to an extent that later generations, coming of age after the draft ended in 1974, would have difficulty comprehending. He agonized over the possible impact of service—or nonservice—upon the political career he hoped to pursue. He also spent many late nights talking with friends about the morality of the draft and of the war itself and whether one was obligated to serve in a war considered immoral. And then there was the agonizing question whether it was fair for privileged individuals to avoid service while others could not.¹³

Clinton returned to the United States in 1970 to begin law school at Yale University. He applied to Yale because it was one of the two or three most prestigious law schools in the country, but also because it would give him the time to pursue his political ambitions. Operating on the assumption that if you were smart enough to get in, you were smart enough to graduate, Yale required neither regular class attendance nor formal grades beyond honors, pass, or fail. “This is a tough country club to get into,” one professor told his class. “But once you’re in, you’re in.”¹⁴ Clinton spent his first two months in New Haven canvassing Irish and Italian working-class neighborhoods on behalf of Joseph Duffey, a Democrat running unsuccessfully for the US Senate on a pro–civil rights, anti–Vietnam War platform. When the campaign ended, Clinton had to ask a classmate if he could borrow her class notes. “For what?” she asked. “For everything,” he answered. In another class, he showed up half an hour late for the final because it was open book, and he hadn’t yet gotten himself a copy.¹⁵

In 1972, while still a full-time student, Clinton greatly ad...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bill Clinton and the New Gilded Age
• 1 Making of a President, 1946–1992
• 2 Taking Office, 1993
• 3 “On the Edge,” 1993
• 4 Defeat, 1993–1994
• 5 In Search of Three Syllables: Foreign Policy, 1993–1996
• 6 Rebound, 1995–1996
• 7 Siege and Survival, 1997–1999
• 8 The “New” Economy, 1998–2000
• 9 Last Chance: Clinton and the World, 1998–2000
• Epilogue: The Third Term
• Notes
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover