My life- Bill Clinton

SEVEN
High school was a great ride. I liked the schoolwork, my friends, the band, DeMolay, and my other activities, but it bothered me that Hot Springs?T schools still weren?Tt integrated. The black kids still went to Langston High School, which claimed as its most famous alumnus the legendary Washington Redskins back Bobby Mitchell. I followed the civil rights movement on the evening news and in our daily paper, the Sentinel- Record, along with Cold War events like the Bay of Pigs and the U-2 incident with Francis Gary Powers. I can still see Castro riding into Havana at the head of his ragtag but victorious army. But as with most kids, politics took a backseat to daily life. And apart from Daddy?Ts occasional relapses, I liked my life a lot.
It was in high school that I really fell in love with music. Classical, jazz, and band music joined rock and roll, swing, and gospel as my idea of pure joy. For some reason I didn?Tt get into country and western until I was in my twenties, when Hank Williams and Patsy Cline reached down to me from heaven.
In ad***ion to the marching and concert bands, I joined our dance band, the Stardusters. I spent a year dueling for first chair on tenor sax with Larry McDougal, who looked as if he should have played backup for Buddy Holly, the rocker who died tragically in a badweather plane crash in 1959 along with two other big stars, the Big Bopper and seventeen-year-old Richie Valens. When I was President I gave a speech to college students in Mason City, Iowa, near where Holly and his pals had played their last gig. Afterward I drove to the site, the Surf Ballroom, in neighboring Clear Lake, Iowa. It?Ts still standing and ought to be turned into a shrine for those of us who grew up on those guys.
Anyway, McDougal looked and played as if he belonged with them. He had a ducktail hairdo, crew cut on top, long hair greased back on the sides. When he stood for a solo, he gyrated and played with a blaring tone, more like hard-core rock and roll than jazz or swing. I wasn?Tt as good as he was in 1961, but I was determined to get better. That year we entered a competition with other jazz bands in Camden in south Arkansas. I had a small solo on a slow, pretty piece. At the end of the performance, to my astonishment, I won the prize for ?obest sweet soloist.? By the next year, I had improved enough to be first chair in the All-State Band, a position I won again as a senior, when Joe Newman won on drums.
In my last two years I played in a jazz trio, the 3 Kings, with Randy Goodrum, a
pianist a year younger and light-years better than I was or ever could be. Our first drummer was Mike Hardgraves. Mike was raised by a single mom, who often had me and a couple of Mikê?Ts other friends over for card games. In my senior year Joe Newman became our drummer. We made a little money playing for dances, and we performed at school events, including the annual Band Variety Show. Our signature piece was the theme from El Cid. I still have a tape of it, and it holds up pretty well after all these years, except for a squeak I made in my closing riff. I always had problems with the lower notes.
My band director, Virgil Spurlin, was a tall, heavyset man with dark wavy hair and a gentle, winning demeanor. He was a pretty good band director and a world-class human being. Mr. Spurlin also organized the State Band Festival, which was held over several days every year in Hot Springs. He had to schedule all the band performances and hundreds of solo and ensemble presentations in classrooms in the junior and senior high school buildings. He scheduled the days, times, and venues for all the events on large poster boards every year. Those of us who were willing stayed after school and worked nights for several days to help him get the job done. It was the first large organizational effort in which I was ever involved, and I learned a lot that I put to good use later on.
At the state festivals, I won several medals for solos and ensembles, and a couple for student conducting, of which I was especially proud. I loved to read the scores and try to get the band to play pieces exactly as I thought they should sound. In my second term as President, Leonard Slatkin, conductor of the Washington National Symphony, asked me if I would direct the orchestra in Sousâ?Ts ?oStars and Stripes Forever? at the Kennedy Center. He told me all I had to do was wave the baton more or less in time and the musicians would do the rest. He even offered to bring me a baton and show me how to hold it. When I told him that I?Td be delighted to do it but that I wanted him to send me the score of the march so I could review it, he almost dropped the phone. But he brought the score and the baton. When I stood before the orchestra I was nervous, but we got into it, and away we went. I hope Mr. Sousa would have been pleased.
My only other artistic endeavor in high school was the junior class play, Arsenic and Old Lace, a hilarious farce about two old maids who poison people and stash them in the house they share with their unsuspecting nephew. I got the role of the nephew, which Cary Grant played in the movie. My girlfriend was played by a tall, attractive girl, Cindy Arnold. The play was a big success, largely because of two developments that weren?Tt part of the script. In one scene, I was supposed to lift up a window seat, find one of my aunts?T victims, and feign horror. I practiced hard and had it down. But on play night, when I opened the seat, my friend Ronnie Cecil was crammed into it, looked up at me, and said, ?oGood evening,? in his best vampire voice. I lost it. Luckily, so did everyone else. Something even funnier happened offstage. When I kissed Cindy during our only love scene, her boyfriend?"a senior football player named Allen Broyles, who was sitting in the front row?"let out a loud comic groan that brought the house down. I still enjoyed the kiss.
My high school offered calculus and trigonometry, chemistry and physics, Spanish, French, and four years of Latin, a range of courses many smaller schools in Arkansas lacked. We were blessed with a lot of smart, effective teachers and a remarkable school leader, Johnnie Mae Mackey, a tall, imposing woman with thick black hair and a ready smile or a stern scowl as the occasion demanded. Johnnie Mae ran a tight ship and still managed to be the spark plug of our school spirit, which was a job in itself, because we had the losingest football team in Arkansas, back when football was a religion, with every coach expected to be Knute Rockne. Every student from back then can still remember Johnnie Mae closing our pep rallies leading the Trojan yell, fist in the air, dignity discarded, voice roaring, ?oHullabloo, Ke-neck, Ke-neck, Hullabloo, Ke-neck, Keneck, Wo-Hee, Wo-Hi, We win or die! Ching Chang, Chow Chow! Bing Bang, Bow Wow! Trojans! Trojans! Fight, Fight, Fight!? Fortunately, it was just a cheer. With a 6?"29?"1 record in my three years, if the yell had been accurate, our mortality rate would have been serious.
I took four years of Latin from Mrs. Elizabeth Buck, a delightful, sophisticated woman from Philadelphia who had us memorize lots of lines from Caesar?Ts Gallic Wars. After the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik, President Eisenhower and then President Kennedy decided Americans needed to know more about science and math, so I took all the courses I could. I was not very good in Dick Duncan?Ts chemistry class, but did better in biology, though I remember only one remarkable class, in which the teacher, Nathan McCauley, told us we die sooner than we should because our bodies?T capacity to turn food into energy and process the waste wears out. In 2002, a major medical study concluded that older people could increase their life span dramatically by sharply decreasing food intake. Coach McCauley knew that forty years ago. Now that I am one of those older people, I am trying to take his advice.
My world history teacher, Paul Root, was a short, stocky man from rural Arkansas who combined a fine mind with a homespun manner and an offbeat, wicked sense of humor. When I became governor, he left his teaching position at Ouachita University to work for me. One day in 1987, I came upon Paul in the state Capitol talking to three state legislators. They were discussing Gary Hart?Ts recent downfall after the story broke about Donna Rice and the Monkey Business. The legislators were all giving Gary hell in their most sanctimonious voices. Paul, a devout Baptist, director of his church choir, and certified straight arrow, listened patiently while the legislators droned on. When they stopped for breath, he deadpanned, ?oYou?Tre absolutely right. What he did was awful. But you know what else? It?Ts amazing what being short, fat, and ugly has done for my moral character.? The legislators shut up, and Paul walked off with me. I love that guy.
I enjoyed all my English courses. John Wilson made Shakespearê?Ts ****** Caesar come alive to Arkansas fifteen-year-olds by having us put the meaning of the play in ordinary words and asking us repeatedly whether Shakespearê?Ts view of human nature and behavior seemed right to us. Mr. Wilson thought old Will had it about right: life is comedy and tragedy.
In junior English honors class, we had to write an autobiographical essay. Mine was full of self-doubt I didn?Tt understand and hadn?Tt admitted to myself before. Here are some excerpts:
I am a person motivated and influenced by so many diverse forces I sometimesquestion the sanity of my existence. I am a living paradox?"deeply religious, yet not as convinced of my exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility yet shirking it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity.. .. I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day.. .. I view those, some of whom are very dear to me, who have never learned how to live. I desire and struggle to be different from them, but often am almost an exact likeness.. .. What a boring little word?"I! I, me, my, mine. .. the only things that enable worthwhile uses of these words are the universal good qualities which we are not too often able to place with them?"faith, trust, love, responsibility, regret, knowledge. But the acronyms to these symbols of what enable life to be worth the trouble cannot be escaped. I, in my attempts to be honest, will not be the hypocrite I hate, and will own up to their ominous presence in this boy, endeavoring in such earnest to be a man... .
My teacher, Lonnie Warneke, gave me a grade of 100, saying the paper was a beautiful and honest attempt to go ?oway down insidê? to fulfill the classic demand to ?oknow thyself.? I was gratified but still unsure of what to make of what I?Td found. I didn?Tt do bad things; I didn?Tt drink, smoke, or go beyond petting with girls, though I kissed a fair number. Most of the time I was happy, but I could never be sure I was as good as I wanted to be.
Miss Warneke took our small class on a field trip to Newton County, my first trip into the heart of the Ozarks in north Arkansas, our Appalachia. Back then it was a place of breathtaking beauty, hardscrabble poverty, and rough, all-consuming politics. The county had about six thousand people spread over more than a couple of hundred square miles in hills and hollows. Jasper, the county seat, had a little more than three hundred people, a WPA-built courthouse, two cafés, a general store, and one tiny movie theater, where our class went one night to watch an old Audie Murphy western. When I got into politics I came to know every township in Newton County, but I fell in love with it at sixteen, as we navigated the mountain roads, learning about the history, geology, flora, and fauna of the Ozarks. One day we visited the cabin of a mountain man who had a collection of rifles and pistols dating back to the Civil War, then explored a **** the Confederates had used for munitions storage. The guns still fired, and remnants of the arsenal were still in the ****, visible manifestation of how real a century-old conflict was in places where time passed slowly, grudges died hard, and handed-down memories hung on and on. In the mid-seventies, when I was attorney general, I was invited to give the commencement address at Jasper High School. I urged the students to keep going in the face of adversity, citing Abraham Lincoln and all the hardships and setbacks hê?Td overcome. Afterward, the leading Democrats took me out into a bright starlit Ozark night and said, ?oBill, that was a fine speech. You can give it down in Little Rock anytime. But don?Tt you ever come up here and brag on that Republican President again. If hê?Td been that good, we wouldn?Tt have had the Civil War!? I didn?Tt know what to say.

In Ruth Sweeney?Ts senior English class, we read Macbeth and were encouraged to memorize and recite portions of it. I made it through a hundred lines or so, including the famous soliloquy that begins, ?oTomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded timê? and ends, ?oLifê?Ts but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.? Almost thirty years later, when I was governor, I happened to visit a class in Vilonia, Arkansas, on a day the students were studying Macbeth, and I recited the lines for them, the words still full of power for me, a dreadful message I was always determined would not be the measure of my life.
The summer after my junior year, I attended the annual weeklong American Legion Boys State program at Camp Robinson, an old army camp with enough primitive wooden barracks to house a thousand sixteen-year-old boys. We were organized by cities and counties, divided equally into two political parties, and introduced as candidates and voters to local, county, and state politics. We also developed platforms and voted on issues. We heard addresses from important figures, from the governor on down, and got to spend one day at the state Capitol, during which the Boys State governor, the other elected officials and their ?ostaffs,? and the legislators actually got to occupy the state offices and legislative chambers.
At the end of the week, both parties nominated two candidates for the Boys Nation program, to be held toward the end of July at the University of Maryland in College Park, near the nation?Ts capital. An election was held, and the top two vote-getters got to go as Arkansas?T senators. I was one of them.
I went to Camp Robinson wanting to run for Boys Nation senator. Though the most prestigious post was governor, I had no interest in it then, or in the real job itself, for years thereafter. I thought Washington was where the action was on civil rights, poverty, education, and foreign policy. Besides, I couldn?Tt have won the governor?Ts election anyway, since it was, in the Arkansas vernacular, ?osaucered and blowed??"over before it started. My longtime friend from Hope, Mack McLarty, had it in the bag. As his school?Ts student-council president, a star quarterback, and a straight-A student, he had begun lining up support all across the state several weeks earlier. Our party nominated Larry Taunton, a radio announcer with a wonderful silken voice full of sincerity and confidence, but McLarty had the votes and won going away. We were all sure he would be the first person our age to be elected governor, an impression reinforced four years later when he was elected student body president at the University of Arkansas, and again just a year after that when, at twenty-two, he became the youngest member of the state legislature. Not long after that, Mack, who was in the Ford business with his father, devised a then-novel leasing scheme for Ford trucks, which eventually made him and Ford Motor Company a fortune. He gave up politics for a business career that led him to the presidency of Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Company, our largest natural gas utility. But he stayed active in politics, lending leadership and fund-raising skills to many Arkansas Democrats, especially David Pryor and me. He stayed with me all the way to the White House, first as chief of staff, then as special envoy to the Americas. Now he is Henry Kissinger?Ts partner in a consulting business and owns, among other things, twelve car dealerships in São Paulo, Brazil.
Though he lost the governor?Ts race, Larry Taunton got a big consolation prize: as the only boy besides McLarty with 100 percent name recognition, he was a lock cinch for one of the two Boys Nation slots; he had only to file. But there was a problem. Larry was one of two ?ostars? in his hometown delegation. The other was Bill Rainer, a bright, handsome multi-sport athlete. They had come to Boys State agreeing that Taunton would run for governor, Rainer for Boys Nation. Now, though both were free to run for Boys Nation, there was no way two boys from the same town were going to be elected. Besides, they were both in my party and I had been campaigning hard for a week. A letter I wrote to Mother at the time recounts that I had already won elections for tax collector, party secretary, and municipal judge, and that I was running for county judge, an important position in real Arkansas politics.
At the last minute, not long before the party met to hear our campaign speeches, Taunton filed. Bill Rainer was so stunned he could hardly get through his speech. I still have a copy of my own speech, which is unremarkable, except for a reference to the Little Rock Central High turmoil: ?oWe have grown up in a state ridden with the shame of a crisis it did not ask for.? I did not approve of what Faubus had done, and I wanted people from other states to think better of Arkansas. When the votes were counted, Larry Taunton finished first by a good margin. I was second with a pretty good cushion. Rainer finished well back. I had come to really like Bill, and I never forgot the dignity with which he bore his loss.
In 1992, when Bill was living in Connecticut, he contacted my campaign and offered to help. Our friendship, forged in the pain of youthful disappointment, enjoyed a happy renewal.
Larry Taunton and I defeated our opponents from the other party after another day of campaigning and I arrived in College Park on July 19, 1963, and eager to meet the other delegates, vote on important issues, hear from cabinet members and other government officials, and visit the White House, where we hoped to see the President.
The week passed quickly, the days packed with events and legislative sessions. I remember being particularly impressed by Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz and completely caught up in our debates over civil rights. Many of the boys were Republicans and supporters of Barry Goldwater, who they hoped would defeat President Kennedy in 1964, but there were enough progressives on civil rights, including four of us from the South, for our legislative proposals to carry the day.
Because of my friendship with Bill Rainer and my more liberal views on civil rights, I had a tense relationship with Larry Taunton the whole week of Boys Nation. I?Tm glad that, after I became President, I got to meet the grown-up Larry Taunton and his children. He seemed to be a good man whô?Td built a good life.
On Monday, July 22, we visited the Capitol, took pictures on the steps, and met our statê?Ts senators. Larry and I had lunch with J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and John McClellan, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. The seniority system was alive and well, and no state had more power from it than Arkansas. In ad***ion, all four of our congressmen held important positions: Wilbur Mills was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; Oren Harris, chairman of the Commerce Committee; ?oTook? Gathings, ranking member of the Agriculture Committee; and Jim Trimble, who had been in Congress ?oonly? since 1945, a member of the powerful Rules Committee, which controls the flow of legislation to the House floor. Little did I know that within three years I would be working for Fulbright on the Foreign Relations Committee staff. A few days after the lunch, Mother got a letter from Senator Fulbright saying that he had enjoyed our lunch and that she must be proud of me. I still have that letter, my first encounter with good staff work.
On Wednesday, July 24, we went to the White House to meet the President in the Rose Garden. President Kennedy walked out of the Oval Office into the bright sunshine and made some brief remarks, complimenting our work, especially our support for civil rights, and giving us higher marks than the governors, who had not been so forwardleaning in their annual summer meeting. After accepting a Boys Nation T-shirt, Kennedy walked down the steps and began shaking hands. I was in the front, and being bigger and a bigger supporter of the President?Ts than most of the others, I made sure I?Td get to shake his hand even if he shook only two or three. It was an amazing moment for me, meeting the President whom I had supported in my ninth-grade class debates, and about whom I felt even more strongly after his two and a half years in office. A friend took a photo for me, and later we found film footage of the handshake in the Kennedy Library.
Much has been made of that brief encounter and its impact on my life. My mother said she knew when I came home that I was determined to go into politics, and after I became the Democratic nominee in 1992, the film was widely pointed to as the beginning of my presidential aspirations. I?Tm not sure about that. I have a copy of the speech I gave to the American Legion in Hot Springs after I came home, and in it I didn?Tt make too much of the handshake. I thought at the time I wanted to become a senator, but deep down I probably felt as Abraham Lincoln did when he wrote as a young man, ?oI will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come.?
I had some success in high school politics, getting elected president of the junior class, and I wanted to run for president of the student council, but the accre***ing group that oversaw our high school decided that Hot Springs students were not allowed to be involved in too many activities and ordered restrictions. Under the new rules, since I was the band major, I was ineligible to run for student council or class president. So was Phil Jamison, the captain of the football team and the odds-on favorite to win.
Not running for high school student-council president didn?Tt hurt me or Phil Jamison too much. Phil went on to the Naval Academy, and after his naval career he did important work in the Pentagon on arms control issues. When I was President, he was involved in all our important work with Russia, and our friendship gave me a close account of our efforts from an operational level, which I would not have received had I not known him.
In one of the dumber political moves of my life, I allowed my name to be put up for senior class secretary by a friend who was angry about the new activity restrictions. My next-door neighbor Carolyn Yeldell defeated me handily, as she should have. It was a foolish, selfish thing for me to do, and proof positive of one of my rules of politics: Never run for an office you don?Tt really want and don?Tt have a good reason to hold.
Notwithstanding the setbacks, sometime in my sixteenth year I decided I wanted to be in public life as an elected official. I loved music and thought I could be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would never be Michael DeBakey. But 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 and other issues. Of course it was improbable, but isn?Tt that what America is all about?

EIGHT
One other memorable event happened to me in the summer of 1963. On August 28, nine days after I turned seventeen, I sat alone in a big white reclining chair in our den and watched the greatest speech of my lifetime, as Martin Luther King Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and spoke of his dream for America. In rhythmic cadences reminiscent of old Negro spirituals, his voice at once booming and shaking, he told a vast throng before him, and millions like me transfixed before television sets, of his dream that ?oone day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,? and that ?omy four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.?
It is difficult to convey more than forty years later the emotion and hope with which King?Ts speech filled me; or what it meant to a nation with no Civil Rights Act, no Voting Rights Act, no open housing law, no Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court; or what it meant in the American South, where schools were still mostly segregated, the poll tax was used to keep blacks from voting or to round them up to vote as a bloc for the status quo crowd, and the word ?onigger? was still used openly by people who knew better.
I started crying during the speech and wept for a good while after Dr. King finished. He had said everything I believed, far better than I ever could. More than anything I ever experienced, except perhaps the power of my grandfather?Ts example, that speech steeled my determination to do whatever I could for the rest of my life to make Martin Luther King Jr.?Ts dream come true.
A couple of weeks later, I started my senior year in high school, still on a high from Boys Nation, and determined to enjoy my last shot at childhood.
The most challenging course I took in high school was calculus. There were seven of us in the class; it had never been offered before. I recall two events with clarity. One day the teacher, Mr. Coe, handed back an exam on which I had all the right answers but a grade reflecting that I?Td missed one. When I asked about it, Mr. Coe said I hadn?Tt worked the problem properly and therefore must have gotten the correct answer by accident, so he couldn?Tt give me cre*** for it; in the textbook, the problem required several more steps than I had used. Our class had one true genius, Jim McDougal (no, not the Whitewater one), who asked if he could see my paper. He then told Mr. Coe he should give me cre***
because my solution was as valid as the one in the textbook, indeed better, because it was shorter. He then volunteered to demonstrate the vali***y of his opinion. Mr. Coe was just as much in awe of Jim?Ts brain as the rest of us, so he told him to go ahead. Jim then proceeded to fill two full blackboards with symbolic mathematical formulas analyzing the problem and demonstrating how I had improved on the textbook solution. You could have fooled me. I had always liked solving puzzles, still do, but I was just clawing my way through a maze. I didn?Tt have a clue about what Jim was saying, and I?Tm not sure Mr. Coe did either, but at the end of his bravura performance I got my grade changed. That incident taught me two things: that in problem-solving, sometimes good instincts can overcome intellectual inadequacy; and that I had no business pursuing advanced mathematics any further.
Our class met at fourth period, just after lunch. On November 22, Mr. Coe was called out of class to the office. When he returned, he was white as a sheet and could hardly speak. He told us President Kennedy had been shot and probably killed in Dallas. I was devastated. Just four months before, I had seen him in the Rose Garden, so full of life and strength. So much of what he did and said?"the inaugural address; the Alliance for Progress in Latin America; the cool handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Peace Corps; the stunning line from the ?oIch bin ein Berliner? speech: ?oFreedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in??"all these embodied my hopes for my country and my belief in politics.
After class, all the students in the annex where our class met walked back to the main building. We were all so sad, all of us but one. I overheard an attractive girl who was in the band with me say that maybe it was a good thing for the country that he was gone. I knew her family was more conservative than I was, but I was stunned and very angry that someone I considered a friend would say such a thing. It was my first exposure, beyond raw racism, to the kind of hatred I would see a lot of in my political career, and that was forged into a powerful political movement in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I am thankful that my friend outgrew it. When I was campaigning in Las Vegas in 1992, she came to one of my events. She had become a social worker and a Democrat. I treasured our reunion and the chance it gave me to heal an old wound.
After I watched President Kennedy?Ts funeral and was reassured by Lyndon Johnson?Ts sober assumption of the presidency with the moving words ?oAll that I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today,? I slowly returned to normal life. The rest of senior year passed quickly with DeMolay and band activities, including a senior band trip to Pensacola, Florida, and another trip to All-State Band; and lots of good times with my friends, including lunches at the Club Café, with the best Dutch apple pie I?Tve ever had, movies, dances at the Y, ice cream at Cook?Ts Dairy, and barbeque at McClard?Ts, a seventy-five-year-old family place with arguably the best barbeque and unquestionably the best barbeque beans in the whole country.
For several months that year, I dated Susan Smithers, a girl from Benton, Arkansas, thirty miles east of Hot Springs on the highway to Little Rock. Often on Sundays, I would go to Benton to church and lunch with her family. At the end of the meal Susan?Ts mother, Mary, would put a pile of peach or apple fried pies on the table, and her father, Reese, and I would eat them until I practically had to be carried away. One Sunday after lunch, Susan and I went for a drive to Bauxite, a town near Benton named for the ore used to make aluminum, which was dug out of open pit mines there. When we got to town we decided to drive out to see the mines, going off the road onto what I thought was hard clay soil, right up to the edge of a huge open pit. After walking around the site, we got back in the car to go home, and our mood took a sharp downward turn. My car?Ts wheels had sunk deep into the soft, wet ground. The wheels turned over and over, but we didn?Tt move an inch. I found some old boards, dug down behind the wheels, and put them in the space for traction. Still no luck. After two hours, I had burned all the tread off the tires, it was getting dark, and we were still stuck. Finally I gave up, walked to town, asked for help, and called Susan?Ts parents. Eventually help came and we were towed out of the huge ruts, my tires as smooth as a baby?Ts behind. It was way past dark when I got Susan home. I think her folks believed our story, but her dad sneaked a look at my tires just to be sure. In that more innocent time, I was mortified.
As my senior year drew to a close, I became increasingly anxious about college. For some reason, I never even considered applying to any Ivy League school. I knew just where I wanted to go, and I applied only there: the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. I didn?Tt want to go into the foreign service and I had never even seen the Georgetown campus when I was at Boys Nation, but I wanted to go back to Washington; Georgetown had the best academic reputation in the city; the intellectual rigor of the Jesuits was legendary and fascinating to me; and I felt that I needed to know all I could about international affairs, and that somehow I would absorb all I could learn about domestic issues just by being in Washington in the mid-sixties. I thought I would get in, because I was fourth in my class of 327, my College Board scores were pretty good, and Georgetown tried to have at least one student from every state (an early affirmative action program!). Still, I was worried.
I had decided that if I got turned down at Georgetown, I?Td go to the University of
Arkansas, which had an open admissions policy for Arkansas high school graduates, and where the smart money said aspiring politicians should go anyway. In the second week of April, my acceptance notice from Georgetown arrived. I was happy, but by then I?Td begun to question the wisdom of going. I didn?Tt get a scholarship and it was so expensive: $1,200 for tuition and $700 for room and fees, plus books, food, and other expenses. Although we were a comfortable middle-class family by Arkansas standards, I was worried that my folks couldn?Tt afford it. And I was worried about being so far away and leaving Mother and Roger alone with Daddy, though age was slowing him down. My guidance counselor, E***h Irons, was adamant that I should go, that it was an investment in my future that my parents should make. Mother and Daddy agreed. Also, Mother was convinced that once I got there and proved myself I?Td get some financial help. So I decided to give it a shot.
I graduated from high school on the evening of May 29, 1964, in a ceremony at Rix Field, where we played our football games. As fourth-ranked student, I got to give the benediction. Subsequent court decisions on religion in public schools, had they been law then, might have taken us prayer leaders off the program. I agree that tax money should not be used to advance purely religious causes, but I was honored to get in the last word at the end of my high school years.
My benediction reflected my deep religious convictions as well as a little politics as I prayed that God would ?oleave within us the youthful idealism and moralism which have made our people strong. Sicken us at the sight of apathy, ignorance, and rejection so that our generation will remove complacency, poverty, and prejudice from the hearts of free men.. .. Make us care so that we will never know the misery and muddle of life without purpose, and so that when we die, others will still have the opportunity to live in a free land.?
I know that some nonreligious people may find all this offensive or naïve but I?Tm glad I was so idealistic back then, and I still believe every word I prayed.
After graduation, I went with Mauria Jackson to our senior party at the old Belvedere Club, not far from our Park Avenue house. Since Mauria and I were both unattached at the time and had been in grade school together at St. John?Ts, it seemed like a good idea, and it was.
The next morning, I headed into my last summer as a boy. It was a typical, good, hot Arkansas summer, and it passed quickly, with a sixth and final trip to the university band camp, and a return to Boys State as a counselor. That summer I helped Daddy for a couple of weeks with the annual inventory at Clinton Buick, something I had done a few times before. It?Ts hard to remember today, when records are computerized and parts can be ordered from efficient distribution centers, that in those days we kept parts in stock for cars more than ten years old, and counted them all by hand every year. The small parts were in little cubbyholes in very tall shelves set close together, making the back of the parts department very dark, in stark contrast to the bright showroom in front, which was only large enough to accommodate one of the new Buicks.
The work was tedious, but I liked doing it, mostly because it was the only thing I did with Daddy. I also enjoyed being at the Buick place, visiting with Uncle Raymond, with the salesmen on the car lot full of new and used cars, and with the mechanics in the back. There were three men back there I especially liked. Two were black. Early Arnold looked like Ray Charles and had one of the greatest laughs I ever heard. He was always wonderful to me. James White was more laid-back. He had to be: he was trying to raise eight kids on what Uncle Raymond was paying him and what his wife, Earlene, earned by working at our house for Mother after Mrs. Walters left. I lapped up James?Ts armchair philosophy. Once, when I remarked on how quickly my high school years had flown by, he said, ?oYeah, time?Ts goin?T by so fast, I can?Tt hardly keep up with my age.? Then I thought it was a joke. Now it?Ts not so funny.
The white guy, Ed Foshee, was a genius with cars and later opened his own shop. When I went away to school, we sold him the Henry J I drove, one of six badly burned cars Daddy had repaired at the Buick dealership in Hope. I hated to part with that car, leaking hydraulic brakes and all, and I?Td give anything to get it back now. It gave my friends and me a lot of good times, and one not-so-good one. One night, I was driving out of Hot Springs on Highway 7 on slick pavement, just behind a black car. As we were passing Jessie Howe?Ts Drive-In, the car in front stopped dead in its tracks, apparently to see what was showing on the big screen. One of its brake lights was out, and I didn?Tt see it stop until it was too late. The combination of inattention, slow reflexes, and iffy brakes plowed me right into the back of the black car, driving my jaw into the steering wheel, which promptly broke in half. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt, and I had insurance to cover the other car?Ts damage. The guys at Clinton Buick fixed the Henry J as good as new, and I was grateful that the steering wheel had broken instead of my jaw. It didn?Tt hurt any worse than when Henry Hill had slugged me a few years earlier, and not nearly as badly as when the ram had almost butted me to death. By then I was more philosophical about such things, with an attitude rather like the wise man who said, ?oIt does a dog good to have a few fleas now and then. It keeps him from worrying so much about being a dog.?

NINE
The summer ended too quickly, as all childhood summers do, and on September 12 Mother and I flew to Washington, where we would spend a week sightseeing before I started freshman orientation. I didn?Tt know exactly what I was getting into, but I was full of anticipation.
The trip was harder on Mother than on me. We were always close, and I knew that when she looked at me, she often saw both me and my father. She had to be worried about how she was going to raise little Roger and deal with big Roger without me to help out on both fronts. And we were going to miss each other. We were enough alike and enough different that we enjoyed being together. My friends loved her, too, and she loved having them at our house. That would still happen, but usually only when I was home at Christmas or in the summer.
I couldn?Tt have known then as I know now how much she worried about me. Recently, I came across a letter she wrote in December 1963 as part of my successful application for the Elks Leadership Award, which was given to one or two high school seniors each year in towns with Elks Clubs. She wrote that her letter ?orelieves in a small way a guilt complex I have about Bill. Anesthesia is my profession and it has always taken time that I felt rightfully belonged to him. And, because of this, the cre*** for what he is and what he has done with his life actually belongs to him. Thus, when I look at him I see a ?~selfmadê?T man.? Was she ever wrong about that! It was she who taught me to get up every day and keep going; to look for the best in people even when they saw the worst in me; to be grateful for every day and greet it with a smile; to believe I could do or be anything I put my mind to if I were willing to make the requisite effort; to believe that, in the end, love and kindness would prevail over cruelty and selfishness. Mother was not conventionally religious then, though she grew to be as she aged. She saw so many people die that she had a hard time believing in life after death. But if God is love, she was a godly woman. How I wish I?Td told her more often that I was the furthest thing in the world from a self-made man.
Despite all the apprehension about the big changes in our lives, Mother and I were both giddy with excitement by the time we got to Georgetown. Just a couple of blocks away from the main campus was the so-called East Campus, which included the School of Foreign Service and other schools that had women and were religiously and racially more diverse. The college was founded in 1789, George Washington?Ts first year as President, by Archbishop John Carroll. A statue of him anchors the grand circle at the entrance to the main campus. In 1815, President James Madison signed a bill granting Georgetown a charter to confer degrees. Although our university has from the beginning been open to people of all faiths, and one of the greatest Georgetown presidents, Father Patrick Healy, was from 1874 to 1882 the first African-American president of a predominantly white university, the Yard was all male, almost all Catholic, and all white. The School of Foreign Service was founded in 1919 by Father Edmund A. Walsh, a staunch anti- Communist, and when I got there the faculty was still full of professors who had fled from or suffered from Communist regimes in Europe and China and who were sympathetic to any anti-Communist activity by the U.S. government, including in Vietnam.
The politics weren?Tt all that was conservative at the Foreign Service School. So was the curriculum, the rigor of which reflected the Jesuit educational philosophy, the Ratio Studiorum, developed in the late sixteenth century. For the first two years, six courses a semester were required, totaling eighteen or nineteen hours of class time, and there were no electives until the second semester of the junior year. Then there was the dress code. In my freshman year, men were still required to wear dress shirt, jacket, and tie to class. Synthetic-fabric ?odrip-dry? shirts were available, but they felt awful, so I went to Georgetown determined to fit the five-dollar-a-week dry-cleaning bill for five shirts into my twenty-five-dollar-a-week allowance for food and other expenses. And there were the dorm rules: ?oFreshmen are required to be in their rooms and studying weeknights, and must have their lights out by midnight. On Friday and Saturday evenings, freshmen must return to their rooms for the night by 12:30 a.m.. .. Absolutely no guests of the opposite ***, alcoholic beverages, pets, or firearms are allowed in University dormitories.? I know things have changed a bit since then, but when Hillary and I took Chelsea to Stanford in 1997, it was still somewhat unsettling to see the young women and men living in the same dorm. Apparently the NRA hasn?Tt yet succeeded in lifting the firearms restriction.
One of the first people I met when Mother and I went through the front gate was the priest in charge of freshman orientation, Father Dinneen, who greeted me by saying Georgetown couldn?Tt figure out why a Southern Baptist with no foreign language except Latin would want to go to the Foreign Service School. His tone indicated that they also couldn?Tt quite figure out why they had let me in. I just laughed and said maybe wê?Td figure it out together in a year or two. I could tell Mother was concerned, so after Father Dinneen went on to other students, I told her that in a little while they?Td all know why. I suspect I was bluffing, but it sounded good.
After the preliminaries, we went off to find my dorm room and meet my roommate. Loyola Hall is at the corner of 35th and N streets just behind the Walsh Building, which houses the Foreign Service School and is connected to it. I was assigned Room 225, which was right over the front entrance on 35th and overlooked the house and beautiful garden of Rhode Island?Ts distinguished senator Claiborne Pell, who was still in the Senate when I became President. He and his wife, Nuala, became friends of Hillary?Ts and mine, and thirty years after staring at the exterior of their grand old house, I finally saw the inside of it.
When Mother and I got to the door of my dorm room, I was taken aback. The 1964 presidential campaign was in full swing, and there, plastered on my door, was a Goldwater sticker. I thought I?Td left them all behind in Arkansas! It belonged to my roommate, Tom Campbell, an Irish Catholic from Huntington, Long Island. He came from a staunch conservative Republican family, and had been a football player at Xavier Jesuit High School in New York City. His father was a lawyer who won a local judgeship running on the Conservative Party line. Tom was probably more surprised than I was by his assigned roommate. I was the first Southern Baptist from Arkansas hê?Td ever met, and to make matters worse, I was a hard-core Democrat for LBJ.
Mother wasn?Tt about to let a little thing like politics stand in the way of good living arrangements. She started talking to Tom as if shê?Td known him forever, just as she always did with everyone, and before long she won him over. I liked him too and figured we could make a go of it. And we have, through four years of living together at Georgetown and almost forty years of friendship.
Soon enough, Mother left me with a cheerful, stiff-upper-lip parting, and I began to explore my immediate surroundings, beginning with my dorm floor. I heard music coming from down the hall?"?oTarâ?Ts Themê? from Gone with the Wind?" and followed it, expecting to find another southerner, if not another Democrat. When I came to the room where the music was playing, I found instead a character who defied categories, Tommy Caplan. He was sitting in a rocking chair, the only one on our floor. I learned that he was an only child from Baltimore, that his father was in the jewelry business, and that he had known President Kennedy. He spoke with an unusual clipped accent that sounded aristocratic to me, told me he wanted to be a writer, and regaled me with Kennedy tales.
Though I knew I liked him, I couldn?Tt have known then that I had just met another person who would prove to be one of the best friends I?Td ever have. In the next four years Tommy would introduce me to Baltimore; to his home on Maryland?Ts Eastern Shore; to the Episcopal church and its liturgy; in New York to the Pierre Hotel and its great Indian curry, to the Carlyle Hotel and my first experience with expensive room service, and to the ?o21? Club, where several of us celebrated his twenty-first birthday; and to Massachusetts and Cape Cod, where I nearly drowned after failing to hold on to a barnacle-covered rock in an effort that shredded my hands, arms, chest, and legs. Trying desperately to get back to shore, I was saved by a fortuitous long, narrow sandbar and a helping hand from Tommy?Ts old school friend, Fife Symington, later Republi-can governor of Arizona. (If he could have foreseen the future, he might have had second thoughts!) In return, I introduced Tommy to Arkan-sas, southern folkways, and grassroots politics. I think I made a good trade.
Over the next several days, I met other students and started classes. I also figured out how to live on twenty-five dollars a week. Five dollars came off the top for the required five dress shirts, and I decided to eat on a dollar a day Monday through Friday, and allocate another dollar to weekend meals, so that I?Td have fourteen dollars left to go out on Saturday night. In 1964, I could actually take a date to dinner for fourteen dollars, sometimes a movie too, though I had to let the girl order first to make sure our combined order plus a tip didn?Tt go over my budget. Back then there were a lot of good restaurants in Georgetown where fourteen dollars would go that far. Besides, in the first few months I didn?Tt have a date every Saturday, so I was often a little ahead on my budget. It wasn?Tt too hard to get by on a dollar a day the rest of the timê?"I always felt I had plenty of money, even enough to cover the extra cost of a school dance or some other special event. At Wisemiller?Ts Deli, just across Thirty-sixth Street from the Walsh Building, where most of my classes were, I got coffee and two donuts for twenty cents every morning, the first time in my life I ever drank coffee, a habit I still try to lick now and then, with limited success. At lunch, I splurged to thirty cents. Half of it bought a Hostess fried pie, apple or cherry; the other half went for a sixteen-ounce Royal Crown Cola. I loved those RCs and was really sad when they quit producing them. Dinner was more expensive, fifty cents. I usually ate at the Hoya Carry Out, a couple of blocks from our dorm, which despite its name had a counter where you could enjoy your meal. Eating
there was half the fun. For fifteen cents, I got another big soft drink, and for thirty-five cents, a great tuna fish sandwich on rye, so big you could barely get your mouth around it. For eighty-five cents you could get a roast beef sandwich just as big. Once in a while, when I hadn?Tt blown the whole fourteen dollars the previous Saturday night, I would get one of those.
But the real attractions of the Hoya Carry Out were the proprietors, Don and Rose. Don was a husky character with a tattoo on one of his bulging biceps, back when tattoos were a rarity rather than a common sight on the bodies of rock stars, athletes, and hip young people. Rose had a big beehive hairdo, a nice face, and a great figure, which she showed off to good effect in tight sweaters, tighter pants, and spiked heels. She was a big draw for boys with small budgets and large imaginations, and Don?Ts good-natured but vigilant presence guaranteed that all we did was eat. When Rose was at work, we ate slowly enough to ensure good digestion.
In my first two years, I rarely ventured beyond the confines of the university and its immediate surroundings, a small area bordered by M Street and the Potomac River to the south, Q Street to the north, Wisconsin Avenue to the east, and the university to the west. My favorite haunts in Georgetown were the Tombs, a beer hall in a cellar below the 1789 Restaurant, where most of the students went for beer and burgers; Billy Martin?Ts restaurant, with good food and atmosphere within my budget; and the Cellar Door, just down the hill from my dorm on M Street. It had great live music. I heard Glenn Yarborough, a popular sixties folksinger; the great jazz organist Jimmy Smith; and a now forgotten group called the Mugwumps, who broke up shortly after I came to Georgetown. Two of the men formed a new, more famous band, the Lovin?T Spoonful, and the lead singer, Cass Elliot, became Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas. Sometimes the Cellar Door opened on Sunday afternoon, when you could nurse a Coke and listen to the Mugwumps for hours for just a dollar.
Though occasionally I felt cooped up in Georgetown, most days I was happy as a clam, absorbed in my classes and friends. However, I was also grateful for my few trips out of the cocoon. Several weeks into my first semester, I went to the Lisner Au***orium to hear Judy Collins sing. I can still see her, standing alone on the stage with her long blond hair, floor-length cotton dress, and guitar. From that day on, I was a huge Judy Collins fan. In December 1978, Hillary and I were on a brief vacation to London after the first time I was elected governor. One day as we window-shopped down King?Ts Road in Chelsea, the loudspeaker of a store blared out Judy?Ts version of Joni Mitchell?Ts ?oChelsea Morning.? We agreed on the spot that if we ever had a daughter wê?Td call her Chelsea.
Though I didn?Tt leave the Georgetown environs often, I did manage two trips to New York my first semester. I went home with Tom Campbell to Long Island for
Thanksgiving. LBJ had won the election by then, and I enjoyed arguing politics with Tom?Ts father. I goaded him one night by asking if the nice neighborhood they lived in had been organized under a ?oprotectivê? covenant, under which homeowners committed not to sell to members of proscribed groups, usually blacks. They were common until the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Mr. Campbell said yes, the area they lived in had been established under a covenant, but it ran not against blacks but Jews. I lived in a southern town with two synagogues and a fair number of anti-Semites who referred to Jews as ?oChrist killers,? but I was surprised to find anti-Semitism alive and well in New York. I guess I should have been reassured to know the South didn?Tt have a corner on racism or anti-Semitism, but I wasn?Tt.
A few weeks before the Thanksgiving trip, I got my first bite at the Big Apple when I traveled to New York City with the Georgetown band, pretty much a ragtag outfit. We practiced only once or twice a week, but we were good enough to be invited to play a concert at a small Catholic school, St. Joseph?Ts College for Women in Brooklyn. The concert went fine, and at the mixer afterward I met a student who invited me to walk her home and have a Coke with her and her mother. It was my first foray into one of the endless apartment buildings that house the vast majority of New Yorkers, poor to rich. There was no elevator, so we had to walk up several flights to reach her place. It seemed so small to me then, accustomed as I was to Arkansas?T one-story houses with yards, even for people of modest means. All I remember about the encounter is that the girl and her mother seemed incredibly nice, and I was amazed that you could develop such outgoing personalities living in such confined spaces.
After I said good night, I was on my own in the big city. I hailed a cab and asked to go to Times Square. I had never seen so many bright neon lights. The place was loud, fast, and throbbing with life, some of it on the seamy side. I saw my first streetwalker, hitting on a hapless archetype: a pathetic-looking guy wearing a dark suit, crew cut, and thick black horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a briefcase. He was both tempted and terrified. Terror won out. He walked on; she smiled, shrugged, and went back to work. I checked out the theaters and storefronts, and one bright sign caught my eyê?"Tad?Ts Steaks?"advertising big steaks for $1.59.
It seemed too good to pass up, so I went in, got my steak, and found a table. Sitting near me were an angry boy and his heartbroken mother. He was giving her a verbal beating with the words, ?oIt?Ts cheap, Mama. It?Ts cheap.? She kept saying the salesman had told her it was nice. Over the next few minutes I pieced the story together. She had saved up enough money to buy her son a record player that he wanted badly. The problem was that it was a standard high-fidelity system, called ?ohi-fi,? but he wanted one of the new stereo systems that had much better sound, and apparently more status among fashionconscious kids. With all her scrimping, his mother couldn?Tt afford it. Instead of being grateful, the kid was screaming at her in public, ?oEverything we have is cheap! I wanted a nice one!? It made me sick. I wanted to slug him, to scream back at him that he was lucky to have a mother who loved him so much, who put food on his plate and clothes on his back with what was almost certainly a deadly dull job that paid too little. I got up and walked out in disgust, without finishing my bargain steak. That incident had a big impact on me, I guess because of what my own mother had done and endured. It made me more sensitive to the daily struggles of women and men who do things we want someone else to do but don?Tt want to pay much for. It made me hate ingratitude more and resolve to be more grateful myself. And it made me even more determined to enjoy lifê?Ts lucky breaks without taking them too seriously, knowing that one turn of fatê?Ts screw could put me back to square one or worse.

Not long after I got back from New York, I left the band to concentrate on my studies and student government. I won the election for freshman class president in one of my better campaigns, waged to an electorate dominated by Irish and Italian Catholics from the East. I don?Tt remember how I decided to go for it, but I had a lot of help and it was exciting. There were really no issues and not much patronage, so the race boiled down to grassroots politics and one speech. One of my campaign workers wrote me a note showing the depth of our canvassing: ?oBill: problems in New Men?Ts; Hanover picking up lots of votes. There are possibilities on 3rd (Pallen?Ts) floor Loyolâ?"down at the end towards the pay phone. Thanks to Dick Hayes. See you tomorrow. Sleep well Gentlemen. King.? King was John King, a five-foot-five dynamo who became the coxswain of the Georgetown crew team and study partner of our classmate Luci Johnson, the President?Ts daughter, who once invited him to dinner at the White House, earning our admiration and envy.
On the Tuesday before the election, the class gathered to hear our campaign speeches. I was nominated by Bob Billingsley, a gregarious New Yorker whose Uncle Sherman had owned the Stork Club and who told me great stories of all the stars who had come there from the twenties on. Bob said I had a record of leadership and was ?oa person who will get things done, and done well.? Then came my turn. I raised no issue and promised only to serve ?oin whatever capacity is needed at any time,? whether I won or lost, and to give the election ?oa spirit which will make our class a little bit stronger and a little bit prouder when the race is over.? It was a modest effort, as it should have been; as the saying goes, I had much to be modest about.
The stronger of my two opponents tried to inject some gravity into an inherently
weightless moment when he told us he was running because he didn?Tt want our class to fall ?ointo the bottomless abyss of per***ion.? I didn?Tt know much about that?"it sounded like a place you?Td go for collaborating with Communists. This bottomless remark was over the top, and was my first big break. We worked like crazy and I was elected. After the votes were counted, my friends collected a lot of nickels, dimes, and quarters so that I could call home on the nearest pay phone and tell my family I had won. It was a happy conversation. I could tell there was no trouble on the other end of the line, and Mother could tell I was getting over my homesickness.
Though I enjoyed student government, the trips to New York, and just being in the Georgetown area, my classes were the main event of my freshman year. For the first time I had to work to learn. I had one big advantage: all six of my courses were taught by interesting, able people. We all had to study a foreign language. I chose German because I was interested in the country and impressed by the clarity and precision of the language. Dr. von Ihering, the German professor, was a kindly man who had hidden from the Nazis in the loft of a farmhouse after they began burning books, including the children?Ts books he wrote. Arthur Cozzens, the geography professor, had a white goatee and a quaint professional manner. I was bored in his class until he told us that, geologically, Arkansas was one of the most interesting places on earth, because of its diamond, quartz crystal, bauxite, and other mineral deposits and formations.
I took logic from Otto Hentz, a Jesuit who had not yet been ordained as a priest. He was bright, energetic, and concerned about the students. One day he asked me if I?Td like to have a hamburger with him for dinner. I was flattered and agreed, and we drove up Wisconsin Avenue to a Howard Johnson?Ts. After a little small talk, Otto turned serious. He asked me if I had ever considered becoming a Jesuit. I laughed and replied, ?oDon?Tt I have to become a Catholic first?? When I told him I was a Baptist and said, only half in jest, that I didn?Tt think I could keep the vow of celibacy even if I were Catholic, he shook his head and said, ?oI can?Tt believe it. I?Tve read your papers and exams. You write like a Catholic. You think like a Catholic.? I used to tell this story to Catholic groups on the campaign trail in Arkansas, assuring them I was the closest thing they could get to a Catholic governor.
Another Jesuit professor, Joseph Sebes, was one of the most remarkable men I?Tve ever known. Lean and stoop-shouldered, he was a gifted linguist whose primary interest was Asia. He had been working in China when the Communists prevailed, and spent some time in captivity, much of it in a small hole in the ground. The abuse damaged his stomach, cost him a kidney, and kept him in poor health for much of the rest of his life. He taught a course called Comparative Cultures. It should have been entitled Religions of the World: we studied Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and other faiths. I loved Sebes and learned a lot from him about how people the world over defined God, truth, and the good life. Knowing how many of the students came from foreign countries, he offered everyone the chance to take the final exam orally?"in nine languages. In the second semester I got an A, one of only four that were given, and one of my proudest academic achievements.
My other two teachers were real characters. Robert Irving taught English to freshmen who were unprepared for his rapid-fire, acid commentary on the propensity of freshmen to be verbose and imprecise. He wrote withering comments in the margins of essays, calling one of his students ?oa capricious little bilge pump,? responding to another?Ts expression of chagrin with ?oturned into a cabbage, did you?? My papers received more pedestrian rebukes: in the margins or at the end, Dr. Irving wrote ?oawk? for awkward, ?ough,? ?orather dull, pathetic.? On one paper I saved, he finally wrote ?oclever and thoughtful,? only to follow it by asking me to ?onext time be a sport? and write my essay on ?obetter paper?! One day Dr. Irving read aloud an essay one of his former students had written on Marvell to illustrate the importance of using language with care. The student noted that Marvell loved his wife even after she died, then added the unfortunate sentence, ?oOf course physical love, for the most part, ends after death.? Irving roared, ?oFor the most part! For the most part! I suppose to some people, therê?Ts nothing better on a warm day than a nice cold corpse!? That was a little rich for a bunch of eighteen-yearold Catholic school kids and one Southern Baptist. Wherever he is today, I dread the thought of Dr. Irving reading this book, and can only imagine the scorching comments hê?Ts scribbling in the margins.
The most legendary class at Georgetown was Professor Carroll Quigley?Ts Development of Civilizations, a requirement for all freshmen, with more than two hundred people in each class. Though difficult, the class was wildly popular because of Quigley?Ts intellect, opinions, and antics. The antics included his discourse on the reality of paranormal phenomena, including his claim to have seen a table rise off the floor and a woman take flight at a séance, and his lecture condemning Platô?Ts elevation of absolute rationality over observed experience, which he delivered every year at the end of the course. He always closed the lecture by ripping apart a paperback copy of Platô?Ts Republic, then throwing it across the room, shouting, ?oPlato is a fascist!?
The exams were filled with mind-bending questions like ?oWrite a brief but wellorganized history of the Balkan Peninsula from the start of the Würm Glacier to the time of Homer? and ?oWhat is the relationship between the process of cosmic evolution and the dimension of abstraction??
Two of Quigley?Ts insights had a particularly lasting impact. First, he said that societies have to develop organized instruments to achieve their military, political, economic, social, religious, and intellectual objectives. The problem, according to Quigley, is that all instruments eventually become ?oinstitutionalized??"that is, vested interests more committed to preserving their own prerogatives than to meeting the needs for which they were created. Once this happens, change can come only through reform or circumvention of the institutions. If these fail, reaction and decline set in.
His second lasting insight concerned the key to the greatness of Western civilization, and its continuing capacity for reform and renewal. He said our civilization?Ts success is rooted in unique religious and philosophical convictions: that man is basically good; that there is truth, but no finite mortal has it; that we can get closer to the truth only by working together; and that through faith and good works, we can have a better life in this world and a reward in the next. According to Quigley, these ideas gave our civilization its optimistic, pragmatic character and an unwavering belief in the possibility of positive change. He summed up our ideology with the term ?ofuture preference,? the belief that ?othe future can be better than the past, and each individual has a personal, moral obligation to make it so.? From the 1992 campaign through my two terms in office, I quoted Professor Quigley?Ts line often, hoping it would spur my fellow Americans, and me, to practice what he preached.
By the end of my first year, I had been dating my first long-term girlfriend for a few months. Denise Hyland was a tall, freckle-faced Irish girl with kind, beautiful eyes and an infectious smile. She was from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, the second of six children of a doctor who was studying to be a priest before he met her mother. Denise and I broke up at the end of our junior year, but our friendship has endured.
I was glad to be going home, where at least I?Td have old friends and my beloved hot summer. I had a job waiting for me at Camp Yorktown Bay, a Navy League camp for poor kids mostly from Texas and Arkansas, on Lake Ouachita, the largest of Hot Springs?T three lakes and one of the cleanest in America. You could see the bottom clearly at a depth of more than thirty feet. The man-made lake was in the Ouachita National Forest, so development around it, with the attendant pollution runoff, was limited.
For several weeks, I got up early every morning and drove out to the camp, twenty miles or so away, where I supervised swimming, basketball, and other camp activities. A lot of the kids needed a week away from their lives. One came from a family of six kids and a single mother and didn?Tt have a penny to his name when he arrived. His mother was moving and he didn?Tt know where hê?Td be living when he got back. I talked with one boy who tried unsuccessfully to swim and was in bad shape when he was pulled out of the lake. He said it was nothing: in his short life, hê?Td already swallowed his tongue, been poisoned, survived a bad car wreck, and lost his father three months earlier.
The summer passed quickly, full of good times with my friends and interesting letters from Denise, who was in France. There was one last terrible incident with Daddy. One day he came home early from work, drunk and mad. I was over at the Yeldells?T, but luckily, Roger was home. Daddy went after Mother with a pair of scissors and pushed her into the laundry room off the kitchen. Roger ran out the front door and over to the Yeldells?T screaming, ?oBubba, help! Daddy?Ts killing Dado!? (When Roger was a baby he could say ?oDaddy? before he could say ?oMother,? so he created the term ?oDadô? for her, and he used it for a long time afterward.) I ran back to the house, pulled Daddy off Mother, and grabbed the scissors from him. I took Mother and Roger to the living room, then went back and reamed Daddy out. When I looked into his eyes I saw more fear than rage. Not long before, he had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth and throat. The doctors recommended radical, and disfiguring, surgery, but he refused, so they treated him as best they could. This incident took place early in the two-year period leading to his death, and I think it was his shame at the way hê?Td lived and his fear of dying that drove him to what would be his last bad outburst. After that, he still drank, but he became more withdrawn and passive.
This incident had a particularly devastating effect on my brother. Almost forty years later, he told me how humiliated hê?Td felt running for assistance, how helpless he felt that he couldn?Tt stop his father, how irrevocable his hatred was after that. I realized then how foolish I?Td been, in the immediate aftermath of the episode, to revert to our family policy of just pretending nothing had happened and going back to ?onormal.? Instead, I should have told Roger that I was very proud of him; that it was his alertness, love, and courage that had saved Mother; that what he did was harder than what I had done; that he needed to let go of his hatred, because his father was sick, and hating his father would only spread the sickness to him. Oh, I often wrote to Roger and called him a lot when I was away; I encouraged him in his studies and activities and told him I loved him. But I missed the deep scarring and the trouble it would inevitably bring. It took Roger a long time and a lot of self-inflicted wounds to finally get to the source of the hurt in his heart.
Though I still had some concerns about Mother?Ts and Roger?Ts safety, I believed Daddy when he promised he was through with violence, and besides, he was losing the capacity to generate it, so I was ready when the time came to go back to Georgetown for my second year. In June, I had been awarded a $500 scholarship, and the requirement to wear tie and shirt to class had been scrapped, so I was looking forward to a more affluent existence on my twenty-five dollars a week. I also had been reelected president of my class, this time with a real program concentrating on campus issues, including nondenominational religious services and a community-service initiative we took over from the outgoing senior class: GUCAP, the Georgetown University Community Action Program, which sent student volunteers into poor neighborhoods to help kids with their studies. We also tutored adults working for high school diplomas through an extension program, and did whatever else we could to help families struggling to get by. I went a few times, although not as often as I should have. Along with what I knew from growing up in Arkansas, I saw enough of inner-city Washington to convince me that volunteer charity alone would never be enough to overcome the grinding combination of poverty, discrimination, and lack of opportunity that held so many of my fellow citizens back. It made my support for President Johnson?Ts civil rights, voting rights, and anti-poverty initiatives even stronger.
My second year, like the first, was primarily focused on class work, really for the last time. From then on, through my final two years at Georgetown, the stay in Oxford, and law school, my formal studies increasingly fought a losing battle with politics, personal experiences, and private explorations.
For now, there was more than enough to hold my attention in the classroom, starting with second-year German, Mary Bond?Ts absorbing course on major British writers, and Ulrich Allers?Ts History of Political Thought. Allers was a gruff German who noted these few words on a paper I wrote on the ancient Athenian legal system: ?oPlodding but very decent.? At the time, I felt damned with faint praise. After I had been President a few years, I would have killed to be called that.
I made a C in Joe Whitê?Ts microeconomics class first semester. Professor White also taught macroeconomics second semester, and I got an A in that class. I suppose both grades were harbingers, since as President I did a good job with the nation?Ts economy and a poor job with my personal economic situation, at least until I left the White House.
I studied European history with Luis Aguilar, a Cuban expatriate who had been a leader of the democratic opposition to Batista before he was overthrown by Castro. Once, Aguilar asked me what I intended to do with my life. I told him that I wanted to go home and get into politics but that I was becoming interested in a lot of other things too. He replied wistfully, ?oChoosing a career is like choosing a wife from ten girlfriends. Even if you pick the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the kindest woman, there is still the pain of losing the other nine.? Though he loved teaching and was good at it, I had the feeling that for Professor Aguilar, Cuba was those other nine women rolled into one.
My most memorable class sophomore year was Professor Walter Giles?Ts U.S. Constitution and Government, a course he taught largely through Supreme Court cases. Giles was a redheaded, crew-cut confirmed bachelor whose life was filled by his students, his love for the Constitution and social justice, and his passion for the Washington Redskins, win or lose. He invited students to his house for dinners, and a lucky few even got to go with him to see the Redskins play. Giles was a liberal Democrat from Oklahoma, not common then and rare enough today to place him under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.
I think he took an interest in me partly because I was from a state that bordered his own, though he liked to kid me about it. By the time I got to his class I had embraced my lifelong affinity for sleep deprivation and had developed the sometimes embarrassing habit of falling asleep for five or ten minutes in class, after which I?Td be fine. I sat in the front row of Giles?Ts big lecture class, a perfect foil for his biting wit. One day as I was napping, he noted loudly that a certain Supreme Court ruling was so crystal clear anyone could understand it, ?ounless, of course, you?Tre from some hick town in Arkansas.? I awoke with a start to peals of laughter from my classmates and never fell asleep on him again.

TEN
After my sophomore year I went home without a job but with a clear idea of what I wanted to do. It was the end of an era in Arkansas?"after six terms, Orval Faubus wasn?Tt running for reelection as governor. Finally our state would have a chance to move beyond the scars of Little Rock and the stains of cronyism that also tainted his later years. I wanted to work in the governor?Ts race, both to learn about politics and to do what little I could to put Arkansas on a more progressive course.
The pent-up ambitions from the Faubus years propelled several candidates into the race, seven Democrats and one very big Repub-lican, Winthrop Rockefeller, the fifth of the six children of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who left his father?Ts empire to oversee the charitable efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation; left his father?Ts conservative, anti-labor politics under the influence of his more liberal wife, Abby, and the great Canadian liberal politician Mackenzie King; and, finally, left his father?Ts conservative religious views to found the interdenominational Riverside Church in New York City with Harry Emerson
Fosdick.
Winthrop had seemed destined to be the black sheep of the family. He was expelled from Yale and went to work in the Texas oil fields. After distinguished service in World War II, he married a New York socialite and reacquired his reputation as a hard-partying dilettante. In 1953, he moved to Arkansas, partly because he had a wartime buddy from there who interested him in the possibilities of setting up a ranching operation, and partly because the state had a thirty-day divorce law and he was eager to end his brief first marriage. Rockefeller was a huge man, about six feet four, weighing about 250 pounds. He really took to Arkansas, where everybody called him Win, not a bad name for a politician. He always wore cowboy boots and a white Stetson hat, which became his trademark. He bought a huge chunk of Petit Jean Mountain, about fifty miles west of Little Rock, became a successful breeder of Santa Gertrudis cattle, and married his second wife, Jeannette.
As he settled into his adopted state, Rockefeller worked hard to shed the playboy image that had dogged him in New York. He built up the small Arkansas Republican Party and worked to bring industry to our poor state. Governor Faubus appointed him chairman of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, and he brought in a lot of new jobs. In 1964, impatient with Arkansas?T backward image, he challenged Faubus for governor. Everybody appreciated what he had done, but Faubus had an organization in every county; most people, especially in rural Arkansas, still supported his segregationist position over Rockefeller?Ts prô?"civil rights stance; and Arkansas was still a Democratic state.
Also, the painfully shy Rockefeller was a poor speaker, a problem aggravated by his legendary drinking habits, which also made him so late so often that he made me look punctual. Once, he arrived inebriated and more than an hour late to address the chamber of commerce banquet in Wynne, county seat of Cross County, in eastern Arkansas. When he got up to speak, he said, ?oI?Tm glad to be here in?"? When he realized he didn?Tt know where he was, he whispered to the master of ceremonies, ?oWhere am I?? The man whispered back, ?oWynne.? He asked again and got the same answer. Then he boomed out, ?oDamn it, I know my name! Where am I?? That story crossed the state like wildfire, but was usually told good-naturedly, because everybody knew Rockefeller was an Arkansan by choice and had the statê?Ts best interests at heart. In 1966, Rockefeller was running again, but even with Faubus gone, I didn?Tt think he could make it.
Besides, I wanted to back a progressive Democrat. My sentimental favorite was Brooks Hays, who had lost his seat in Congress in 1958 for supporting the integration of Little Rock Central High. He was defeated by a segregationist optometrist, Dr. Dale Alford, in a write-in campaign, which succeeded partly because of the use of stickers with his name on them that could be plastered on ballots by voters who couldn?Tt write but were ?osmart? enough to know that blacks and whites shouldn?Tt go to school together. Hays was a devout Christian who had served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention before the majority of my fellow Baptists decided that only conservatives could lead them, or the country. He was a marvelous man, bright, humble, funny as all get-out, and kind to a fault, even to his opponent?Ts young campaign workers.
Ironically, Dr. Alford was in the race for govenor, too, and he couldn?Tt win either, because the racists had a far more fervent champion in Justice Jim Johnson, who had risen from humble roots in Crossett, in southeast Arkansas, to the state supreme court on rhetoric that won the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan in the governor?Ts race. He thought Faubus was too soft on civil rights; after all, he had appointed a few blacks to state boards and commissions. With Faubus, who had genuine populist impulses, racism was a political imperative. He preferred improving schools and nursing homes, building roads, and reforming the state mental hospital to race-baiting. It was just the price of staying in office. With Johnson, racism was theology. He thrived on hate. He had sharp features and bright, wild eyes, giving him a ?olean and hungry? look that would have made Shakespearê?Ts Cassius green with envy. And he was a savvy politician who knew where his voters were. Instead of going to the endless campaign rallies where the other candidates spoke, he traveled all over the state on his own, with a country-and-western band, which he used to pull in a crowd. Then he would whip them into a frenzy with tirades against blacks and their traitorous white sympathizers.
I didn?Tt see it at the time, but he was building strength among people the other candidates couldn?Tt reach: people upset with federal activism in civil rights, scared by the Watts riots and other racial disturbances, convinced the War on Poverty was socialist welfare for blacks, and frustrated with their own economic con***ions. Psychologically, wê?Tre all a complex mixture of hopes and fears. Each day we wake up with the scales tipping a bit one way or the other. If they go too far toward hopefulness, we can become naïve and unrealistic. If the scales tilt too far the other way, we can get consumed by paranoia and hatred. In the South, the dark side of the scales has always been the bigger problem. In 1966, Jim Johnson was just the man to tip them in that direction.
The best candidate with a good shot at winning was another supreme court justice and a former attorney general, Frank Holt. He had the support of most of the courthouse crowd and the big financial interests, but he was more progressive on race than Faubus, and completely honest and decent. Frank Holt was admired by just about everybody who knew him (except those who thought he was too easygoing to make any real change), had wanted to be governor all his life, and also wanted to redeem his family?Ts legacy: his brother, Jack, who was more of an old-fashioned southern populist, had lost a hot Senate race to our conservative senior senator, John McClellan, a few years before.
My uncle Raymond Clinton was a big supporter of Holt?Ts and told me he thought he could get me on the campaign. Holt already had secured the support of a number of student leaders from Arkansas colleges, who called themselves the ?oHolt Generation.? Before long I got hired at fifty dollars a week. I think Uncle Raymond paid my way. Since I had been living on twenty-five dollars a week at Georgetown, I felt rich. The other students were a little older and a lot better connected than I was. Mac Glover had been president of the University of Arkansas student body; Dick King was president of the student body at Arkansas State Teachers College; Paul Fray was president of the Young Democrats at Ouachita Baptist; Bill Allen was a former Arkansas Boys State governor and student leader at Memphis State, just across the Mississippi River from Arkansas; Leslie Smith was a beautiful, smart girl from a powerful political family who had been Arkansas Junior Miss.
At the start of the campaign, I was definitely a second stringer in the Holt Generation. My assignments included nailing ?oHolt for Governor? signs on trees, trying to get people to put his bumper stickers on their cars; and handing out his brochures at rallies around the state. One of the most important rallies, then and later when I became a candidate, was the Mount Nebo Chicken Fry. Mount Nebo is a beautiful spot overlooking the Arkansas River in Yell County, in western Arkansas, where the Clintons originally settled. People would show up for the food, the music, and a long stream of speeches by candidates, beginning with those running for local office and ending with those running for governor.
Not long after I got there and began working the crowd, our opponents started to arrive. Judge Holt was running late. When his opponents began speaking, he still wasn?Tt there. I was getting worried. This was not an event to miss. I went to a pay phone and somehow tracked him down, which was a lot harder before cell phones. He said that he just couldn?Tt get there before the speeches were over, and that I should speak for him. I was surprised and asked if he was sure. He said I knew what he stood for and I should just tell the people that. When I told the event organizers Judge Holt couldn?Tt make it and asked if I could speak in his place, I was scared to death; it was much worse than speaking for myself. After I finished, the people gave me a polite reception. I don?Tt remember what I said, but it must have been okay, because after that, along with my sign and bumper-sticker duties, I was asked to stand in for Judge Holt at a few smaller rallies he couldn?Tt attend. There were so many, no candidate could make them all. Arkansas has seventy-five counties, and several counties held more than one rally.
After a few weeks, the campaign decided that the judgê?Ts wife, Mary, and his daughters, Lyda and Melissa, should go on the road to cover places he couldn?Tt. Mary Holt was a tall, intelligent, independent woman who owned a fashionable dress shop in Little Rock; Lyda was a student at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, where Woodrow Wilson was born; Melissa was in high school. They were all attractive and articulate, and they all adored Judge Holt and were really committed to the campaign. All they needed was a driver. Somehow I was chosen.
We crisscrossed the state. We were gone a week at a time, coming back to Little Rock to wash our clothes and recharge for another lap. It was great fun. I really got to know the state and learned a lot from hours of conversation with Mary and her daughters. One night we went to Hope for a rally on the courthouse steps. Because my grandmother was in the crowd, Mary graciously invited me to speak to the hometown folks, though Lyda was supposed to do it. I think they both knew I wanted the chance to show that I?Td grown up. The crowd gave me a good listen and I even got a nice write-up in the local paper, the Hope Star, which tickled Daddy because when he had the Buick dealership in Hope, the e***or disliked him so much he got an ugly mongrel dog, named him Roger, and
frequently let the dog loose near the Buick place so that he could go down the street after him shouting, ?oCome here, Roger! Here, Roger!?
That night I took Lyda to see the house where I had spent my first four years and the wooden railroad overpass where I?Td played. The next day we went out to the cemetery to visit the graves of Mary Holt?Ts family, and I showed them my father?Ts and grandfather?Ts graves.
I treasure the memories of those road trips. I was used to being bossed around by women, so we got along well, and I think I was useful to them. I changed flat tires, helped a family get out of a burning house, and got eaten alive by mosquitoes so big you could feel them puncture your skin. We passed the hours of driving by talking about politics, people, and books. And I think we got some votes.
Not long before the Hope rally, the campaign decided to put on a fifteen-minute TV program featuring the students who were working for Judge Holt; they thought it would position him as the candidate of Arkansas?T future. Several of us spoke for a couple of minutes about why we were supporting him. I don?Tt know if it did any good, but I enjoyed my first TV appearance, though I didn?Tt get to watch it. I had to speak at yet another rally in Alread, a remote community in Van Buren County, in the mountains of north-central Arkansas. The candidates who made it way up there usually got the votes, and I was beginning to realize that we needed all we could get.
As the hot summer weeks passed, I saw more and more evidence that the Old South hadn?Tt given up the ghost, and the New South wasn?Tt yet powerful enough to chase it away. Most of our schools were still segregated, and resistance remained strong. One county courthouse in the Mississippi Delta still had ?owhitê? and ?ocolored? designations on the doors of the public restrooms. When I asked one elderly black lady in another town to vote for Judge Holt, she said she couldn?Tt because she hadn?Tt paid her poll tax. I told her that Congress had eliminated the poll tax two years earlier and all she had to do was register. I don?Tt know if she did.
Still, there were signs of a new day. While campaigning in Arkadelphia, thirty-five miles south of Hot Springs, I met the leading candidate for the south Arkansas congressional seat, a young man named David Pryor. He was clearly a progressive who thought if he could just meet enough people he could persuade most of them to vote for him. He did it in 1966, did it again in the governor?Ts race in 1974, and again in the Senate race in 1978. By the time he retired, much to my dismay, from the Senate in 1996, David Pryor was the most popular politician in Arkansas, with a fine progressive legacy. Everybody thought of him as their friend, including me.
The kind of retail politics Pryor mastered was important in a rural state like Arkansas, where more than half the people lived in towns with fewer than five thousand people, and tens of thousands just lived ?oout in the country.? We were still in the days before television ads, especially negative ones, assumed the large role in elections they have now. Candidates mostly bought television time to look into the camera and talk to voters. They also were expected to visit the courthouses and main businesses in every county seat, go into the kitchen of every café, and campaign in sale barns, where livestock are auctioned. The county fairs and pie suppers were fertile territory. And, of course, every weekly newspaper and radio station expected a visit and an ad or two. That?Ts how I learned politics. I think it works better than TV air wars. You could talk, but you had to listen, too. You had to answer voters?T tough questions face-to-face. Of course, you could still be demonized, but at least your adversaries had to work harder to do it. And when you took a shot at your opponent, you had to take it, not hide behind some bogus committee that expected to make a killing from your time in office if its attacks destroyed the other candidate.
Though the campaigns were more personal, they were far from just personality contests. When there were big issues at stake, they had to be addressed. And if a strong tide of public opinion was rolling in, and you couldn?Tt go with the flow in good conscience, you had to be tough, disciplined, and quick to avoid being washed away.
In 1966, Jim Johnson?"or ?oJustice Jim,? as he liked to be called?"was riding the tide and making big, ugly waves. He attacked Frank Holt as a ?opleasant vegetable,? and implied that Rockefeller had had homo***ual relations with black men, a laughable charge considering his earlier well-earned reputation as a ladies?T man. Justice Jim?Ts message was simply the latest version of an old southern song sung to white voters in times of economic and social uncertainty: You?Tre good, decent, God-fearing people; ?othey?Trê? threatening your way of life; you don?Tt have to change, it?Ts all their fault; elect me and I?Tll stand up for you just as you are and kick the hell out of them. The perennial political divide, Us versus Them. It was mean, ugly, and ultimately self-defeating for the people who bought it, but as we still see, when people feel discontented and insecure it
often works. Because Johnson was so extreme in his rhetoric, and largely invisible on the tra***ional campaign trail, most political observers thought it wouldn?Tt work this time. As election day neared, Frank Holt refused to answer his attacks, or the attacks from other candidates, who assumed he was way ahead and also began to hit him for being the ?ooldguard machinê? candidate. We didn?Tt have many polls back then and most people didn?Tt put much stock in the few that floated around.

Holt?Ts strategy sounded good to the idealistic young people around him, like me. He simply replied to all charges with a statement that he was completely independent, that he wouldn?Tt respond to unsubstantiated attacks or attack his opponents in return, and that he wanted to win on his own merits ?oor not at all.? I finally learned that phrases like ?oor not at all? are often used by candidates who forget that politics is a contact sport. The strategy can work when the public mood is secure and hopeful and when the candidate has a platform of serious, specific policy proposals, but in the summer of 1966 the mood was mixed at best, and the Holt platform was too general to inspire much intense feeling. Besides, those who most wanted a candidate who simply embodied opposition to segregation could vote for Brooks Hays.
Despite the attacks on him, most people thought Frank Holt would lead the ticket, but without a majority, and then would win the runoff two weeks later. On July 26, the people spoke, more than 420,000 of them. The results surprised the pun***s. Johnson led with 25 percent of the vote, Holt was second with 23 percent, Hays was third with 15 percent, Alford got 13 percent, and the other three split the rest.
We were shocked but not without hope. Judge Holt and Brooks Hays had gotten slightly more votes between them than the segregationist combo of Johnson and Alford. Also, in one of the more interesting legislative races, a long-serving old-guard House member, Paul Van Dalsem, was defeated by a young, progressive, Yale-educated lawyer, Herb Rule. A couple of years earlier Van Dalsem had infuriated supporters of the rising women?Ts movement by saying women should be kept at home, ?obarefoot and pregnant.? That got Herb, later Hillary?Ts partner at the Rose Law Firm, an army of female volunteers, who dubbed themselves ?oBarefoot Women for Rule.?
The outcome of the runoff election was very much up in the air, because runoffs are about voter turnout, about which candidate will do a better job of getting his own voters back to the polls, and a better job of persuading those who voted for candidates who were eliminated or people who didn?Tt vote the first time *****pport him. Judge Holt tried hard to make the runoff a choice between the Old South and the New South. Johnson didn?Tt exactly undermine that framing of the race when he went on TV to tell the voters that he stood ?owith Daniel in the lion?Ts den? and ?owith John the Baptist in Herod?Ts court? in opposing godless integration. I think somewhere in that talk Justice Jim even got on Paul Reverê?Ts horse.
Though the Holt strategy was smart and Johnson was willing to fight it out as Old versus New, there were two problems with Holt?Ts approach. First, the Old South voters were highly motivated to vote and they were sure Johnson was their champion, while the New South voters weren?Tt so sure about Holt. His refusal to really take the gloves off until late in the race reinforced their doubts and reduced their incentive to vote. Second, an undetermined number of Rockefeller supporters wanted to vote for Johnson because they thought hê?Td be easier than Holt for their man to beat, and anyone, Republican or Democrat, could vote in the Democratic runoff as long as he or she hadn?Tt voted in the Republican primary. Only 19,646 people had done that, since Rockefeller was unopposed. On runoff election day, only 5,000 fewer people voted than in the first primary. Each candidate got twice as many votes as the first time, and Johnson won by 15,000 votes, 52 to 48 percent.
I was sick about the outcome. I had come to care deeply about Judge Holt and his family, to believe he would have been a better governor than he was a andidate, and to dislike what Justice Jim stood for even more. The only bright spot was Rockefeller, who actually had a chance to win. He was a better organized candidate the second time around. He spent money as if it was going out of style, even buying hundreds of bicycles for poor black kids. In the fall he won with 54.5 percent of the vote. I was very proud of my state. I had gone back to Georgetown by then and didn?Tt watch the campaign unfold firsthand, but a lot of people commented that Johnson seemed less animated in the general election. Perhaps it was because his financial support was limited, but there was also a rumor that he might have gotten some ?oencouragement? from Rockefeller to cool it. I have no idea if that was true or not.
Except for a brief interregnum in the Carter years, when I was President Carter?Ts point man in Arkansas, and when he wanted a federal appointment for his son, Jim Johnson remained way out there on the right, where he grew more and more hostile toward me. In the 1980s, like so many southern conservatives he became a Republican. He ran again for the supreme court and lost. After that, he made his mischief in the background. When I ran for President, he planted ingenious stories, directly and indirectly, with anyone gullible enough to believe them, and got some surprising takers among the so-called eastern liberal media he loved to revile, especially for Whitewater tales. Hê?Ts a canny old rascal. He must have had a great time conning them, and if the Republicans in Washington had succeeded in running me out of town, hê?Td have had a good claim to the last laugh.
After the campaign I got to wind down by taking my first trip to the West Coast. A regular customer of Uncle Raymond?Ts wanted a new Buick he didn?Tt have in stock. Uncle Raymond found one at a dealership in Los Angeles, where it was being used as a ?odemonstrator,? a car prospective customers could test-drive to see how they liked it. Dealers often swapped these cars or sold them to one another at a discount. My uncle asked me to fly out to L.A. and drive the car back, along with Pat Brady, whose mother was his secretary, and who had been in my high school class and the band. If we both went, we could drive straight through. We were eager to go, and back then student fares were so cheap Raymond could fly us out for nearly nothing and still make a profit on the car.
We flew into LAX, got the car, and headed home, but not in a straight line. Instead, we took a minor detour to Las Vegas, a place we thought wê?Td never have another chance to see. I still remember driving across the flat desert at night with the windows down, feeling the warm, dry air and seeing the bright lights of Vegas beckoning in the distance.
Las Vegas was different then. There were no big theme hotels like the Paris or the Venetian, just the Strip, with its gambling and entertainment. Pat and I didn?Tt have much money, but we wanted to play the slot machines, so we picked a place, got a roll of nickels each, and went to work. Within fifteen minutes I had hit one jackpot and Pat had pulled two. This did not go unnoticed by the regular hostages to the one-armed ban***s. They were convinced we were good luck, so every time we left a machine without hitting, people rushed to it, jostling for the right to pull up the jackpot we had left waiting for them. We couldn?Tt understand it. We were convinced that wê?Td completely used up years of luck in those few minutes, and we didn?Tt want to squander it. We got back on the road with most of our winnings still bulging in our pockets. I don?Tt think anyone carries that many nickels anymore.
After we turned the car in to Uncle Raymond, who didn?Tt seem to mind the side trip, I had to get ready to go back to Georgetown. At the end of the campaign, I had spoken to Jack Holt about my interest in going to work for Senator Fulbright, but I didn?Tt know if anything would come of it. I had written Fulbright for a job the previous spring and had received a letter back saying there were no vacancies but they?Td keep my letter on file. I doubted things had changed, but a few days after getting back to Hot Springs, I got a call early in the morning from Lee Williams, Fulbright?Ts administrative assistant. Lee said Jack Holt had recommended me and there was a job opening as an assistant clerk on the Foreign Relations Committee. He said, ?oYou can have a part-time job for $3,500 or a full-time job for $5,000.? Even though I was sleepy, I couldn?Tt miss that one. I said, ?oHow about two part-time jobs?? He laughed and said I was just the kind of person he was looking for and I should report for work Monday morning. I was so excited I could have popped. The Foreign Relations Committee under Fulbright had become the center of national debate over foreign policy, especially the escalating war in Vietnam. Now I would witness the drama unfold firsthand, albeit as a flunky. And I would be able to pay for college without any help from Mother and Daddy, taking the financial burden off them and the guilt burden off me. I had worried about how in the world they could afford Daddy?Ts medical treatments on top of the costs of Georgetown. Though I never told anyone at the time, I was afraid I?Td have to leave Georgetown and come home, where college was so much less expensive. Now, out of the blue, I had the chance to stay on at Georgetown and work for the Foreign Relations Committee. I owe so much of the rest of my life to Jack Holt for recommending me for that job, and to Lee Williams for giving it to me.

ELEVEN
A couple of days after Lee Williams called I was packed and ready to drive back to Washington in a gift. Since my new job required me to get to Capitol Hill every day, Mother and Daddy gave me their ?oold car,? a three-year-old white convertible Buick LeSabre with a white and red leather interior. Daddy got a new car every three years or so and turned the old one in to be sold on the used-car lot. This time I replaced the used-car lot and I was ecstatic. It was a beautiful car. Though it got only seven or eight miles to the gallon, gas was cheap, dropping under thirty cents per gallon when there was a ?ogas war? on.
On my first Monday back in Washington, as instructed, I presented myself in Senator Fulbright?Ts office, the first office on the left in what was then called the New Senate Office Building, now the Dirksen Building. Like the Old Senate Office Building across the street, it is a grand marble edifice, but much brighter. I had a good talk with Lee, then was taken upstairs to the fourth floor, where the Foreign Relations Committee had its offices and hearing room. The committee also had a much grander space in the Capitol building, where the chief of staff, Carl Marcy, and a few of the senior staff worked. There was also a beautiful conference room where the committee could meet privately.
When I arrived at the committee office, I met Buddy Kendrick, the documents clerk, who would be my supervisor, fellow storyteller, and provider of homespun advice over the next two years; Buddy?Ts full-time assistant, Bertie Bowman, a kind, bighearted African-American who moonlighted as a cabdriver and also drove Senator Fulbright on occasion; and my two student counterparts, Phil Dozier from Arkansas and Charlie Parks, a law student from Anniston, Alabama.
I was told I would be taking memos and other materials back and forth between the Capitol and Senator Fulbright?Ts office, including confidential material for which I would have to receive proper government clearance. Beyond that, I would do whatever was required, from reading newspapers and clipping important articles for the staff and interested senators to answering requests for speeches and other materials, to adding names to the committeê?Ts mailing list. Keep in mind that this was before computers and e-mail, even before modern copying machines, though while I was there we did graduate from copies made on carbon paper while typing or writing to rudimentary ?oXerox? copies. Most of the newspaper articles I clipped were never copied; they were simply put into a big folder every day with a routing sheet that had the names of the committee staff from the chairman on down. Each person would receive and review them, check off his or her name on the sheet, and pass them along. The main mailing lists were kept in the basement. Each name and address was typed onto a small metal plate, then the plates were stored in alphabetical order in file cabinets. When we sent a mailing out, the plates were put into a machine that inked them and stamped the imprints on envelopes as they passed through.
I enjoyed going to the basement to type new names and addresses on plates and put them in file drawers. Since I was always exhausted, I often took a nap down there, sometimes just leaning against the file cabinets. And I really loved reading the newspapers and clipping articles for the staff to read. For nearly two years, every day, I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the now defunct Washington Star, the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the last because it was thought the committee should see at least one good ?oheartland? newspaper. When McGeorge Bundy was President Kennedy?Ts national security advisor, he remarked that any citizen who read six good newspapers a day would know as much as he did. I don?Tt know about that, but after I did what he recommended for sixteen months, I did know enough *****rvive my Rhodes scholarship interview. And if Trivial Pursuit had been around back then, I might have been national champion.
We also handled requests for documents. The committee produced a lot of them: reports on foreign trips, expert testimony in hearings, and full hearing transcripts. The deeper we got into Vietnam, the more Senator Fulbright and his allies tried to use the hearing process to educate Americans about the complexities of life and politics in North and South Vietnam, the rest of Southeast Asia, and China.
The document room was our regular workplace. In the first year I worked my half day in the afternoon from one to five. Because the committee hearings and other business often ran beyond that, I often stayed after five ô?Tclock and never begrudged it. I liked the people I worked with, and I liked what Senator Fulbright was doing with the committee.
It was easy to fit the job into my daily schedule, partly because in junior year only five courses were required instead of six, partly because some classes started as early as 7 a.m. Three of my requirements?"U.S. History and Diplomacy, Modern Foreign Governments, and Theory and Practice of Communism?"complemented my new work. Scheduling was also easier because I didn?Tt run again for president of the class.
Every day, I looked forward to the end of classes and the drive to Capitol Hill. It was easier to find parking then. And it was a fascinating time to be there. The vast majority that had carried Lyndon Johnson to his landslide victory in 1964 was beginning to unravel. In a few months the Democrats would see their majorities in the House and Senate diminish in the 1966 midterm elections, as the country moved to the right in reaction to riots, social unrest, and the rise of inflation, and President Johnson escalated both domestic spending and our involvement in Vietnam. He claimed our country could afford both ?oguns and butter,? but the people were beginning to doubt it. In his first two and a half years as President, Johnson had enjoyed the most stunning legislative successes since FDR: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, sweeping anti-poverty legislation, and Medicare and Medicaid, which at last guaranteed medical care for the poor and elderly.
Now, more and more, the attention of the President, the Congress, and the country was turning to Vietnam. As the death toll mounted with no victory in sight, rising opposition to the war took many forms, from protests on campuses to sermons from pulpits, from arguments in coffee shops to speeches on the floor of Congress. When I went to work for the Foreign Relations Committee, I didn?Tt know enough about Vietnam to have a strong opinion, but I was so supportive of President Johnson that I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Still, it was clear that events were conspiring to undermine the magic moment of progress ushered in by his landslide election.
The country was dividing over more than Vietnam. The Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965 and the rise of militant black activists pushed their sympathizers to the left and their opponents to the right. The Voting Rights Act, of which LBJ was particularly and justifiably proud, had a similar effect, especially as it began to be enforced. Johnson was an uncommonly shrewd politician. He said when he signed the voting rights legislation that he had just killed the Democratic Party in the South for a generation. In fact, the socalled Solid South of the Democrats had been far from solid for a long time. The conservative Democrats had been falling away since 1948, when they recoiled at Hubert Humphrey?Ts barn-burning civil rights speech at the Democratic convention and Strom Thurmond bolted the party to run for President as a Dixiecrat. In 1960, Johnson helped Kennedy hold enough southern states to win, but Kennedy?Ts commitment to enforcing court-ordered integration of southern public schools and universities drove more conservative whites into the Republican fold. In 1964, while losing in a landslide,
Goldwater carried five southern states.
However, in 1966 a lot of the white segregationists were still southern Democrats, people like Orval Faubus and Jim Johnson and Governor George Wallace of Alabama. And the Senate was full of them, grand characters like Richard Russell of Georgia and John Stennis of Mississippi and some others who had no grandeur at all, just power. But President Johnson was right about the impact of the Voting Rights Act and the other civil rights efforts. By 1968, Richard Nixon and George Wallace, running for President as an independent, would both outpoll Humphrey in the South, and since then, the only Democrats to win the White House were two southerners, Jimmy Carter and I. We won enough southern states to get in, with huge black support and a few more white voters than a non-southerner could have gotten. The Reagan years solidified the hold of the Republican Party on white conservative southerners, and the Republicans made them feel welcome.
President Reagan even went so far as to make a campaign speech defending states?T rights and, by implication, resistance to federal meddling in civil rights, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, two whites and one black, were martyred to the cause in 1964. I always liked President Reagan personally and wished he hadn?Tt done that. In the 2002 midterm elections, even with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and other minorities holding prominent positions in the Bush administration, Republicans were still winning elections on race, with white backlashes in Georgia and South Carolina over Democratic governors removing the Confederate flag from the Georgia State flag and from the South Carolina Capitol building. Just two years earlier, George W. Bush had campaigned at the notoriously right-wing Bob Jones University in South Carolina, where he declined to take a stand on the flag issue, saying it was a matter for the state to decide. When a Texas school insisted on hoisting the Confederate flag every morning, Governor Bush said it was not a state but a local issue. And they called me slick! President Johnson foresaw all this in 1965, but he did the right thing anyway, and I?Tm grateful he did.
In the summer of 1966, and even more after the elections that fall, all the foreign and domestic conflicts were apparent in the deliberations of the U.S. Senate. When I went to work there, the Senate was full of big personalities and high drama. I tried to absorb it all. The president pro tempore, Carl Hayden of Arizona, had been in Congress since his state entered the Union in 1912 and in the Senate for forty years. He was bald, gaunt, almost skeletal. Senator Fulbright?Ts brilliant speechwriter Seth Tillman once cracked that Carl Hayden was ?othe only ninety-year-old man in the world who looks twice his age.? The Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, had enlisted to fight in World War I at fifteen, then had become a college professor with a specialty in Asian affairs. He held the post of majority leader for sixteen years, until 1977, when President Carter appointed him ambassador to Japan. Mansfield was a fitness fanatic who walked five miles a day well into his nineties. He was also a genuine liberal and, behind his taciturn façade, something of a wit. He had been born in 1903, two years before Senator Fulbright, and lived to be ninety-eight. Shortly after I became President, Mansfield had lunch with Fulbright. When he asked Fulbright his age and Fulbright said he was eighty-seven, Mansfield replied, ?oOh, to be eighty-seven again.?
The Republican leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, had been essential to passing some of the President?Ts legislation, providing enough liberal Republican votes to overcome the opposition of segregationist southern Democrats. Dirksen had an amazing face, with a large mouth and lots of wrinkles, and an even more amazing voice. Deep and full, it boomed out one pithy phrase after another. Once he hit Democratic spending habits with this ***ty: ?oA billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you?Tre talking about real money.? When Dirksen talked it was like hearing the voice of God or a pompous snake-oil salesman, depending on your perspective.
The Senate looked a lot different then from how it looks today. In January 1967, after the Democrats had lost four seats in the midterm elections, they still had a margin of sixty-four to thirty-six?"a far more lopsided group than what we usually find today. But the differences then were deep, too, and the lines were not only drawn on party affiliation. A few things have not changed: Robert Byrd of West Virginia still serves in the Senate. In 1966, he was already the authoritative voice on the rules and history of the body.
Eight states of the Old South still had two Democratic senators each, down from ten before the 1966 elections, but most of them were conservative segregationists. Today, only Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana are represented by two Democrats. Oklahoma had two Democrats, California two Republicans. Today it?Ts the reverse. In the inter-mountain West, now solidly Republican, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming each had one progressive Democratic senator. Indiana, a conservative state, had two liberal Democratic senators, one of whom, Birch Bayh, is the father of current Senator Evan Bayh, a gifted leader who might be President someday, but whô?Ts not as liberal as his dad was. Minnesota was represented by the brilliant but diffident intellectual Gene McCarthy and future vice president Walter Mondale, who succeeded Hubert Humphrey when he became President Johnson?Ts vice president. Johnson picked Humphrey over Connecticut senator Tom Dodd, one of the chief prosecutors of Nazis at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Dodd?Ts son, Chris, now represents Connecticut in the Senate. Al Gorê?Ts father was in his last term and was a hero to young southerners like me because he and his Tennessee colleague, Estes Kefauver, were the only two southern senators who refused to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto in 1956, which called for resistance to court-ordered school integration. The fiery populist Ralph Yarborough represented Texas, though the rightward future of the state was emerging with the election in 1961 of a Republican senator, John Tower, and a young Republican congressman from Houston, George Herbert Walker Bush. One of the most interesting senators was Oregon?Ts Wayne Morse, who started out as a Republican, then became an independent, and was by 1966 a Democrat. Morse, who was long-winded but smart and tough, and Democrat Ernest Gruening of Alaska were the only two senators to oppose the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1964, which LBJ claimed gave him authority to wage the war in Vietnam. The only woman in the Senate was a Republican who smoked a pipe, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. By 2004, there were fourteen women senators, nine Democrats and five Republicans. Back then there were also a number of influential liberal Republicans, alas, a virtually extinct group today, including Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the Senatê?Ts only African-American; Mark Hatfield of Oregon; Jacob Javits of New York; and George Aiken of Vermont, a crusty old New Englander who thought our Vietnam policy was nuts and tersely suggested we should simply ?odeclare victory and get out.?
By far the most famous first-term senator was Robert Kennedy of New York, who joined his brother Ted in 1965, after defeating Senator Kenneth Keating for the seat Hillary now holds. Bobby Kennedy was fascinating. He radiated raw energy. Hê?Ts the only man I ever saw who could walk stoop-shouldered, with his head down, and still look like a coiled spring about to release into the air. He wasn?Tt a great speaker by conventional standards, but he spoke with such intensity and passion it could be mesmerizing. And if he didn?Tt get everyonê?Ts attention with his name, countenance, and speech, he had Brumus, a large, shaggy Newfoundland, the biggest dog I ever saw. Brumus often came to work with Senator Kennedy. When Bobby walked from his office in the New Senate Building to the Capitol to vote, Brumus would walk by his side, bounding up the Capitol steps to the revolving door on the rotunda level, then sitting patiently outside until his master returned for the walk back. Anyone who could command the respect of that dog had mine too.
John McClellan, Arkansas?T senior senator, was not merely an ardent conservative. He was also tough as nails, vindictive when crossed, a prodigious worker, and adept at obtaining power and using it, whether to bring federal money home to Arkansas or to pursue people he saw as evildoers. McClellan led a life of ambition and anguish, the difficulties of which bred in him an iron will and deep resentments. The son of a lawyer and farmer, at age seventeen he became the youngest person ever to practice law in Arkansas, when he passed an oral examination with honors after reading law books he had checked out of the traveling library of the Cumberland Law School. After he served in World War I, he returned home to find that his wife had become involved with another man and he divorced her, a rare occurrence in Arkansas that long ago. His second wife died of spinal meningitis in 1935, when he was in the House of Representatives. Two years later, he married his third wife, Norma, who was with him for forty years until he died. But his sorrows were far from over. Between 1943 and 1958 he lost all three of his sons: the first to spinal meningitis, the next in a car accident, the last in a small-plane crash.
McClellan lived an eventful but difficult life, the sorrows of which he drowned in enough whiskey to float the Capitol down the Potomac River. After a few years, he decided drunkenness was inconsistent with both his values and his self-image and he gave up liquor completely, sealing the only crack in his armor with his iron will.
By the time I got to Washington, he was chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, a position he used to get our state a great deal of money for things like the Arkansas River Navigation System. He served another twelve years, a total of six terms, dying in 1977 after announcing he would not seek a seventh. When I worked on the Hill, McClellan seemed a remote, almost forbidding figure, which is how he wanted to be perceived by most people. After I became attorney general in 1977, I spent quite a bit of time with him. I was touched by his kindness and his interest in my career, and wished he had been able to show the side of him I saw to more people and to reflect it more in his public work.
Được tieu co nuong sửa chữa / chuyển vào 22:58 ngày 05/08/2004

Fulbright was as different from McClellan as daylight from dark. His childhood had been more carefree and secure, his education more extensive, his mind less dogmatic. He was born in 1905 in Fayetteville, a beautiful Ozark Mountain town in north Arkansas where the University of Arkansas is located. His mother, Roberta, was the outspoken progressive e***or of the local paper, the Northwest Arkansas Times. Fulbright went to the hometown university, where he was a star student and quarterback of the Arkansas Razorbacks. When he was twenty, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. When he returned two years later, he was a committed internationalist. After law school and a brief stint in Washington as a government lawyer, he came home to teach at the university with his wife, Betty, a delightful, elegant woman who turned out to be a better retail politician than he was and who kept his morose side in check through more than fifty years of marriage, until she died in 1985. I?Tll never forget one night in 1967 or ?T68. I was walking alone in Georgetown when I saw Senator and Mrs. Fulbright leaving one of the fashionable homes after a dinner party. When they reached the street, apparently with no one around to see, he took her in his arms and danced a few steps. Standing in the shadows, I saw what a light she was in his life. At thirty-four, Fulbright was named president of the University of Arkansas, the youngest president of a major university in America. He and Betty seemed headed for a long and happy life in the idyllic Ozarks. But after a couple of years, his apparently effortless rise to prominence was abruptly interrupted when the new governor, Homer Adkins, fired him because of his mother?Ts sharply critical e***orials.
In 1942, with nothing better to do, Fulbright filed for the open congressional seat in northwest Arkansas. He won, and in his only term in the House of Representatives, he sponsored the Fulbright Resolution, which presaged the United Nations in its call for American participation in an international organization to preserve peace after the end of World War II. In 1944, Fulbright ran for the U.S. Senate and for a chance to get even. His main opponent was his nemesis, Governor Adkins. Adkins had a flair for making enemies, a hazardous trait in politics. Besides getting Fulbright fired, he had made the mistake of opposing John McClellan just two years earlier, going so far as to have the tax returns of McClellan?Ts major supporters au***ed. As I said, McClellan never forgot or forgave a slight. He worked hard to help Fulbright defeat Adkins, and Fulbright did it. They both got even.
Despite the thirty years they served together in the Senate, Fulbright and McClellan were never particularly close. Neither was prone to personal relationships with other politicians. They did work together to advance Arkansas?T economic interests, and voted with the southern bloc against civil rights; beyond that, they didn?Tt have much in common.
McClellan was a pro-military, anti-Communist conservative who wanted to spend tax dollars only on defense, public works, and law enforcement. He was bright but not subtle. He saw things as black or white. He spoke in blunt terms, and if he ever had any doubts about anything, he never revealed them for fear of looking weak. He thought politics was about money and power.
Fulbright was more liberal than McClellan. He was a good Democrat who liked and supported President Johnson until they fell out over the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. He favored progressive taxation, social programs to reduce poverty and inequality, federal aid to education, and more generous American contributions to international institutions charged with alleviating poverty in poor countries. In 1946, he sponsored legislation creating the Fulbright program for international education exchange, which has funded the education of hundreds of thousands of Fulbright scholars from the United States and sixty other countries. He thought politics was about the power of ideas.
On civil rights, Fulbright never spent much time defending his voting record on the merits. He simply said he had to vote with the majority of his constituents on issues like civil rights, areas about which they knew as much as he did, which is just a euphemistic way of saying he didn?Tt want to get beat. He signed the Southern Manifesto after he watered it down a little, and didn?Tt vote for a civil rights bill until 1970, during the Nixon administration, when he also took a leading role in defeating President Nixon?Ts anti?"civil rights nominee to the Supreme Court, G. Harrold Carswell.
Despite his civil rights stance, Fulbright was far from gutless. He hated sanctimonious demagogues parading as patriots. When Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was terrorizing innocent people with his blanket accusations of Communist ties, he intimidated most politicians into silence, even those who loathed him. Fulbright cast the only vote in the Senate against giving McCarthy?Ts special investigative subcommittee more money. He also co-sponsored the resolution censuring McCarthy, which the Senate finally passed after Joseph Welch exposed him to the whole country for the fraud he was. McCarthy came along too soon?"he would have been right at home in the crowd that took over the Congress in 1995. But back in the early fifties, a period so vulnerable to anti-Communist hysteria, McCarthy was the nine hundred?"pound gorilla. Fulbright took him on before his other colleagues would.
Fulbright didn?Tt shy away from controversy in foreign affairs, either, an area in which, unlike civil rights, he knew more than his constituents did or could know. He decided just to do what he thought was right and hope he could sell it to the voters. He favored multilateral cooperation over unilateral action; dialogue with, not isolation from, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations; more generous foreign assistance and fewer military interventions; and the winning of converts to American values and interests by the force of our example and ideas, not the force of arms.
Another reason I liked Fulbright was that he was interested in things besides politics. He thought the purpose of politics was to enable people to develop all their faculties and enjoy their fleeting lives. The idea that power was an end in itself, rather than a means to provide the security and opportunity necessary for the pursuit of happiness, seemed to him stupid and self-defeating. Fulbright liked to spend time with his family and friends, took a couple of vacations a year to rest and recharge his batteries, and read widely. He liked to go duck hunting, and he loved golf, shooting his age when he was seventy-eight. He was an engaging conversationalist with an unusual, elegant accent. When he was relaxed, he was eloquent and persuasive. When he got impatient or angry, he exaggerated his speech patterns in a tone of voice that made him seem arrogant and dismissive.
Fulbright had supported the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964, giving President Johnson the authority to respond to apparent attacks on American vessels there, but by the summer of 1966, he had decided our policy in Vietnam was misguided, doomed to fail, and part of a larger pattern of errors that, if not changed, would bring disastrous consequences for America and the world. In 1966, he published his views on Vietnam and his general critique of American foreign policy in his most famous book, The Arrogance of Power. A few months after I joined the committee staff, he autographed a copy for me.
Fulbright?Ts essential argument was that great nations get into trouble and can go into long-term decline when they are ?oarrogant? in the use of their power, trying to do things they shouldn?Tt do in places they shouldn?Tt be. He was suspicious of any foreign policy rooted in missionary zeal, which he felt would cause us to drift into commitments ?owhich though generous and benevolent in content, are so far reaching as to exceed even Americâ?Ts great capacities.? He also thought that when we brought our power to bear in the service of an abstract concept, like anti-communism, without understanding local history, culture, and politics, we could do more harm than good. That?Ts what happened with our unilateral intervention in the Dominican Republic?Ts civil war in 1965, where, out of fear that leftist President Juan Bosch would install a Cuban-style Communist government, the United States supported those who had been allied with General Rafael Trujillô?Ts repressive, reactionary, often murderous thirty-year military dictatorship, which ended with Trujillô?Ts assassination in 1961.
Fulbright thought we were making the same mistake in Vietnam, on a much larger scale. The Johnson administration and its allies saw the Vietcong as instruments of Chinese expansionism in Southeast Asia, which had to be stopped before all the Asian ?odominoes? fell to communism. That led the United States *****pport the anti- Communist, but hardly democratic, South Vietnamese government. As South Vietnam proved unable to defeat the Vietcong alone, our support was expanded to include military advisors, and finally to a massive military presence to defend what Fulbright saw as ?oa weak, dictatorial government which does not command the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people.? Fulbright thought Ho Chi Minh, who had been an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt for his opposition to colonialism, was primarily interested in making Vietnam independent of all foreign powers. He believed that Ho, far from being a Chinese puppet, shared the historic Vietnamese antipathy for, and suspicion of, its larger neighbor to the north. Therefore, he did not believe we had a national interest sufficient to justify the giving and taking of so many lives. Still, he did not favor unilateral withdrawal. Instead, he supported an attempt to ?oneutralizê? Southeast Asia, with American withdrawal con***ioned on agreement by all parties to self-determination for South Vietnam and a referendum on reunification with North Vietnam. Unfortunately, by 1968, when peace talks opened in Paris, such a rational resolution was no longer possible.
As nearly as I could tell, everyone who worked on the committee staff felt the way Fulbright did about Vietnam. They also felt, increasingly, that the political and military leaders of the Johnson administration consistently overstated the progress of our military efforts. And they set out systematically to make the case for a change in policy to the administration, the Congress, and the country. As I write this, it seems reasonable and straightforward. But Fulbright, his committee colleagues, and the staff were in fact walking a high political tightrope across dangerous rocks. War hawks in both parties accused the committee, and Fulbright in particular, of giving ?oaid and comfort? to our enemies, dividing our country, and weakening our will to fight on to victory. Still, Fulbright persevered. Though he endured harsh criticism, the hearings helped to galvanize anti-war sentiment, especially among young people, more and more of whom were participating in anti-war rallies and ?oteach-ins.?
In the time I was there, the committee held hearings on such subjects as attitudes of Americans toward foreign policy, China-U.S. relations, possible conflicts between U.S. domestic goals and foreign policy, the impact of the dispute between China and the Soviet Union on the Vietnam conflict, and the psychological aspects of international relations. Distinguished critics of our policy appeared, people like Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times ; George Kennan, former ambassador to the USSR and author of the idea of ?ocontainment? of the Soviet Union; Edwin Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan; distinguished historian Henry Steele Commager; retired General James Gavin; and professor Crane Brinton, an expert on revolutionary movements. Of course, the administration sent up its witnesses, too. One of the most effective was Undersecretary of State Nick Katzenbach, who had a leg up with me at least, because of his civil rights work in President Kennedy?Ts Justice Department. Fulbright also met privately with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, usually for early-morning coffee in Fulbright?Ts office.
I found the dynamics between Rusk and Fulbright fascinating. Fulbright himself had been on Kennedy?Ts short list for secretary of state. Most people thought he was eliminated because of his anti?"civil rights record, especially his signing of the Southern Manifesto. Rusk was also a southerner, from Georgia, but he was sympathetic to civil rights and had not faced the political pressure Fulbright had, since he was not in Congress but a member of the foreign policy establishment. Rusk saw the Vietnam conflict in simple, stark terms: It was the battleground of freedom and communism in Asia. If we lost Vietnam, communism would sweep through Southeast Asia with devastating consequences.
I always thought the dramatically different ways Fulbright and Rusk viewed Vietnam were due in part to the very different times when they were young Rhodes scholars in England. When Fulbright went to Oxford in 1925, the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I was being implemented. It imposed harsh financial and political burdens on Germany, and redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The humiliation of Germany by the victorious European powers, and the postwar isolationism and protectionism of the United States, reflected in the Senatê?Ts rejection of the League of Nations and the passage of the Smoot- Hawley Tariff Act, led to an ultra-nationalist backlash in Germany, the rise of Hitler, and then World War II. Fulbright was loath to make that mistake again. He rarely saw conflicts in black and white, tried to avoid demonizing adversaries, and always looked for negotiated solutions first, preferably in a multilateral context.
By contrast, Rusk was at Oxford in the early thirties, when the Nazis came to power. Later, he followed the hopeless attempts of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain to negotiate with Hitler, an approach given one of history?Ts most stinging rebukes: appeasement. Rusk equated Communist totalitarianism with Nazi totalitarianism, and despised it as much. The movement of the Soviet Union to control and communize Central and Eastern Europe after World War II convinced him communism was a disease that infected nations with a hostility to personal freedom and an unquenchable aggressiveness. And he was determined not to be an appeaser. Thus, he and Fulbright came to Vietnam from different sides of an unbridgeable intellectual and emotional divide, formed decades before Vietnam appeared on Americâ?Ts radar screen.
The psychological divide was reinforced on the pro-war side by the natural tendency in wartime to demonize onê?Ts adversary and by the determination Johnson, Rusk, and others had not to ?olosê? Vietnam, thus doing lasting damage to Americâ?Ts prestige, and to their own. I saw the same compulsion at work in peacetime when I was President, in my ideological battles with the Republican Congress and their allies. When there is no understanding, respect, or trust, any compromise, much less an admission of error, is seen as weakness and disloyalty, a sure recipe for defeat.
To the Vietnam hawks of the late sixties, Fulbright was the poster boy of gullible naïveté. Naïveté is a problem all well-meaning people have to guard against. But hardheadedness has its own perils. In politics, when you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to quit digging; if you?Tre blind to the possibility of error or determined not to admit it, you just look for a bigger shovel. The more difficulties we had in Vietnam, the more protests mounted at home, the more troops we sent in. We topped out at more than 540,000 in 1969, before reality finally forced us to change course.
I watched all this unfold with amazement and fascination. I read everything I could, including the material stamped ?oconfidential? and ?osecret? that I had to deliver from time to time, which showed clearly that our country was being misled about our progress, or lack of it, in the war. And I saw the body count mount, one at a time. Every day Fulbright got a list of the boys from Arkansas who had been killed in Vietnam. I got in the habit of dropping by his office to check the list, and one day I saw the name of my friend and classmate Tommy Young. Just a few days before he was to return home, his jeep ran over a mine. I was so sad. Tommy Young was a big, smart, ungainly, sensitive guy who I thought would grow up to have a good life. Seeing his name on the list, along with others I was sure had more to give and get in life, triggered the first pangs of guilt I felt about being a student and only touching the deaths in Vietnam from a distance. I briefly flirted with the idea of dropping out of school and enlisting in the military?"after all, I was a democrat in philosophy as well as party; I didn?Tt feel entitled to escape even a war I had come to oppose. I talked to Lee Williams about it. He said that I?Td be crazy to quit school, that I should keep doing my part to end the war, that I wouldn?Tt prove anything by being one more soldier, perhaps one more casualty. Rationally, I could understand that and I went on about my business, but I never felt quite right about it. After all, I was the child of a World War II veteran. I respected the military, even if I thought many of those in charge were clueless, with more guts than brains. So began my personal bout with guilt, one that was fought by many thousands of us who loved our country but hated the war.
Those long-distant days are not easy to re-create for those who didn?Tt live through them. For those who did, little needs to be said. The war took its toll at home, too, even on its most self-confident opponents. Fulbright liked and admired President Johnson. He enjoyed being part of a team he thought was moving America forward, even on civil rights, where he couldn?Tt help. He always wore his game face to work, but he hated being a reviled, isolated outsider. Once, coming to work early in the morning, I saw him walking alone down the corridor toward his office, lost in sadness and frustration, actually bumping into the wall a time or two as he trudged to his damnable duty.
Although the Foreign Relations Committee had to concern itself with other things, Vietnam overshadowed everything else for the committee members and for me. In my first two years at Georgetown, I saved virtually all my class notes, papers, and exams. From my third year, about all I have are two not at all impressive Money and Banking papers. In the second semester I even withdrew from the only course I ever dropped at Georgetown, Theory and Practice of Communism. I had a good reason, though it had nothing to do with Vietnam.
In the spring of 1967, Daddy?Ts cancer had returned, and he went to the Duke Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, for several weeks of treatment. Every weekend I would drive the 266 miles from Georgetown to see him, leaving Friday afternoon, returning late Sunday night. I couldn?Tt do it and make the communism course, so I bagged it. It was one of the most exhausting but important times of my young life. I would get into Durham late Friday night, then go get Daddy and spend Saturday with him. Wê?Td spend Sunday morning and early afternoon together, then I?Td head back to school and work.
(be continued)

On Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, we went to church in the Duke Chapel, a grand Gothic church. Daddy had never been much of a churchgoer, but he really seemed to enjoy this service. Maybe he found some peace in the message that Jesus had died for his sins, too. Maybe he finally believed it when we sang the words to that wonderful old hymn ?oSing with All the Sons of Glory?: ?oSing with all the sons of glory, sing the resurrection song! Death and sorrow, Earth?Ts dark story, to the former days belong. All around the clouds are breaking, soon the storms of time shall cease; In God?Ts likeness man, awaking, knows the everlasting peace.? After church, we drove over to Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina. The place was in full bloom, awash in the dogwoods and redbuds. Most southern springtimes are beautiful; this one was spectacular and remains my most vivid Easter memory.
On those weekends, Daddy talked to me in a way he never had before. Mostly it was small talk, about my life and his, Mother and Roger, family and friends. Some of it was deeper, as he reflected on the life he knew he would be leaving soon enough. But even with the small stuff, he spoke with an openness, a depth, a lack of defensiveness I?Td never heard before. On those long, languid weekends, we came to terms with each other, and he accepted the fact that I loved and forgave him. If he could only have faced life with the same courage and sense of honor with which he faced death, he would have been quite a guy.
TWELVE
A long toward the end of my junior year, it was election time again. I had decided a year or so earlier that I would run for president of the student council. Though I had been away from campus a lot, I?Td kept up with my friends and activities, and given my earlier successes, I thought I could win. But I was more out of touch than I knew. My opponent, Terry Modglin, was vice president of our class. He had been preparing for the race all year, lining up support and devising a strategy. I presented a specific but conventional platform. Modglin tapped into the growing sense of discontent on college campuses across America, and the specific opposition many students were expressing to the rigi***y of Georgetown?Ts academic requirements and campus rules. He called his campaign the ?oModg Rebellion,? a takeoff on ?oThe Dodge Rebellion,? the slogan of the automobile company. He and his supporters portrayed themselves in white hats fighting against the Jesuit administration and me. Because of my good relations with the school administrators, my job and car, my orthodox campaign, and my glad-handing manner, I became the establishment candidate. I worked hard, and so did my friends, but I could tell we were in trouble from the intensity of Modglin and his workers. For example, our signs were disappearing at an alarming rate. In retaliation, one night close to the election, some of my guys tore down Modglin?Ts signs, put them in the back of a car, then drove off and dumped them. They would be caught and reprimanded.
That sealed it. Modglin beat the hell out of me, 717?"570. He deserved to win. He had outthought, outorganized, and outworked me. He also wanted it more. Looking back, I see I probably shouldn?Tt have run in the first place. I disagreed with the majority of my classmates about the need for relaxing the required curriculum; I liked it the way it was. I had lost the singular focus on campus life that had provided the energy for my victories in the earlier races for class president. And my daily absence from campus made it easier to portray me as an establishment backslapper gliding his way through the turmoil of the time. I got over the loss soon enough and by the end of the year was looking forward to staying in Washington for the summer, working for the committee and taking some courses. I couldn?Tt know that the summer of ?T67 was the calm before the storm, for me and for America.
Things slow down in the summer in Washington, and the Congress is usually in recess all of August. It?Ts a good time to be there if you?Tre young, interested in politics, and don?Tt mind the heat. Kit Ashby and another of my classmates, Jim Moore, had rented an old house at 4513 Potomac Avenue, just off MacArthur Boulevard, a mile or so behind the Georgetown campus. They invited me to live with them and to stay on for senior year, when we would be joined by Tom Campbell and Tommy Caplan. The house overlooked the Potomac River. It had five bedrooms, a small living room, and a decent kitchen. It also had two decks off the second-floor bedrooms, where we could catch some sun in the daytime and, on occasion, sleep at night in the soft summer air. The house had belonged to a man who wrote the national plumbing code back in the early 1950s. There was still a set of those fascinating volumes on the living-room bookshelves, incongruously kept upright by a bookend of Beethoven at his piano. It was the only interesting artifact in the whole house. My roommates bequeathed it to me, and I still have it.
Kit Ashby was a doctor?Ts son from Dallas. When I worked for Senator Fulbright, he worked for Senator Henry ?oScoop? Jackson of Washington State, who, like LBJ, was a domestic liberal and a Vietnam hawk. Kit shared his views and we had a lot of good arguments. Jim Moore was an army brat who had grown up all over. He was a serious historian and genuine intellectual whose views on Vietnam fell somewhere between Kit?Ts and mine. In that summer and the senior year that followed, I formed a lasting friendship with both of them. After Georgetown, Kit went into the Marine Corps, then became an international banker. When I was President, I appointed him ambassador to Uruguay. Jim Moore followed his father into the army, then had a very successful career managing state pension investments. When a lot of states got in trouble with them in the 1980s, I got some good free advice from him on what we should do in Arkansas.
We all had a great time that summer. On June 24, I went to Constitution Hall to hear Ray Charles sing. My date was Carlene Jann, a striking girl I had met at one of the numerous mixers the area girls?T schools held for Georgetown boys. She was nearly as tall as I was and had long blond hair. We sat near the back of the balcony and were among the tiny minority of white people there. I had loved Ray Charles since I heard his great line from ?oWhat?Td I Say?: ?oTell your mama, tell your pa, I?Tm gonna send you back to Arkansas.? By the end of the concert Ray had the audience dancing in the aisles. When I got back to Potomac Avenue that night, I was so excited I couldn?Tt sleep. At 5 a.m., I gave up and went for a three-mile run. I carried the ticket stub from that concert in my wallet for a decade.
Constitution Hall had come a long way since the 1930s, when the Daughters of the American Revolution had denied the great Marian Anderson permission to sing there because she was black. But a lot of younger blacks had moved way beyond wanting access to concert halls. Rising discontent over poverty, continuing discrimination, violence against civil rights activists, and the disproportionate number of blacks fighting and dying in Vietnam had sparked a new militancy, especially in Americâ?Ts cities, where Martin Luther King Jr. was competing for the hearts and minds of black America against the much more militant idea of ?oBlack Power.?
In the mid-sixties, race riots of varying size and intensity swept through non-southern ghettos. Before 1964, Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, had rejected integration in favor of black-only efforts to fight poverty and other urban problems, and predicted ?omore racial violence than white Americans have ever experienced.?
In the summer of 1967, while I was enjoying Washington, there were serious riots in Newark and Detroit. By the end of the summer there had been more than 160 riots in American cities. President Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, which found that the riots were the result of police racism and brutality, and the absence of economic and educational opportunities for blacks. Its ominous conclusion was summed up in a sentence that became famous: ?oOur nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one whitê?"separate and unequal.?
Washington was still fairly quiet in that troubled summer, but we got a small taste of the Black Power movement when, every night for several weeks, black activists took over Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, at the intersection of Connecticut and Massachusetts avenues. A friend of mine got to know a few of them and took me down one night to hear what they had to say. They were ****y, angry, and sometimes incoherent, but they weren?Tt stupid, and though I disagreed with their solutions, the problems at the root of their grievances were real.
Increasingly, the lines between the militancy of the civil rights movement and that of the anti-war movement were beginning to blur. Though the anti-war movement began as a protest of middle-class and affluent white college students and their older supporters among intellectuals, artists, and religious leaders, many of its early leaders also had been involved in the civil rights movement. By the spring of 1966, the anti-war movement had outgrown its organizers, with large demonstrations and rallies all across America, fueled in part by popular reaction to the Fulbright hearings. In the spring of 1967, 300,000 people demonstrated against the war in New York City?Ts Central Park.
My first exposure to serious anti-war activists came that summer when the liberal National Student Association (NSA) held its convention at the University of Maryland campus, where I had attended Boys Nation just four years earlier. The NSA was less radical than the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) but firmly anti-war. Its credibility had been damaged the previous spring when it was revealed that for years the organization had been taking money from the CIA to finance its international operations. Despite this, it still commanded the support of a lot of students all over America.
One night I went out to College Park to the convention to see what was going on. I ran into Bruce Lindsey, from Little Rock, whom I had met in the 1966 governor?Ts campaign when he was working for Brooks Hays. He had come to the meeting with Southwestern?Ts NSA delegate, Debbie Sale, also an Arkansan. Bruce became my close friend, advisor, and confidant as governor and President?"the kind of friend every person needs and no President can do without. Later, Debbie helped me get a foothold in New York. But at the NSA convention in 1967, we were just three conventional-looking and conventionalacting young Arkansans who were against the war and looking for company.
The NSA was full of people like me, who were uncomfortable with the more militant SDS but still wanted to be counted in the ranks of those working to end the war. The most notable speech of the convention was given by Allard Lowenstein, who urged the students to form a national organization to defeat President Johnson in 1968. Most people at the time thought it was a fool?Ts errand, but things were changing quickly enough to make Al Lowenstein a prophet. Within three months, the anti-war movement would produce 100,000 protesters at the Lincoln Memorial. Three hundred of them turned in their draft cards, which were presented to the Justice Department by two older antiwarriors,
William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain of Yale University, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor.
Interestingly, the NSA also had a history of opposing strict totalitarianism, so there were representatives of the Baltic ?ocaptive nations? there, too. I had a conversation with the woman representing Latvia. She was a few years older than I, and I had the feeling that going to these kinds of meetings was her career. She spoke with conviction about her belief that one day Soviet Communism would fail and Latvia would again be free. At the time I thought she was three bricks shy of a full load. Instead, she turned out to be as prophetic as Al Lowenstein.
Besides my work for the committee and my occasional excursions, I took three courses in summer school?"in philosophy, ethics, and U.S. Diplomacy in the Far East. For the first time I read Kant and Kierkegaard, Hegel and Nietzsche. In the ethics class I took good notes, and one day in August another student, who was smart as a whip but seldom attended class, asked me if I?Td take a few hours and go over my notes with him before the final exam. On August 19, my twenty-first birthday, I spent about four hours doing that, and the guy got a B on the test. Twenty-five years later, when I became President, my old study partner Turki al-Faisal, son of the late Saudi king, was head of Saudi Arabiâ?Ts intelligence service, a position he held for twenty-four years. I doubt his philosophy grade had much to do with his success in life, but we enjoyed joking about it.
The professor for U.S. Diplomacy, Jules Davids, was a distinguished academic who later helped Averell Harriman write his memoirs. My paper was on Congress and the Southeast Asia resolution. The resolution, more commonly known as the Tonkin Gulf resolution, was passed on August 7, 1964, at the request of President Johnson, after two U.S. destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS C. Turner Joy, allegedly were attacked by North Vietnamese vessels on August 2 and 4, 1964, and the United States retaliated with attacks on North Vietnamese naval bases and an oil storage depot. It authorized the President to ?otake all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression,? and ?oto take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force,? to assist any nation covered by the SEATO Treaty ?oin defense of its freedom.?
The main point of my paper was that, except for Senator Wayne Morse, no one had seriously examined or even questioned the constitutionality, or even the wisdom, of the resolution. The country and the Congress were hopping mad and wanted to show we wouldn?Tt be pushed around or run out of Southeast Asia. Dr. Davids liked my paper and said it was worthy of publication. I wasn?Tt so sure; there were too many unanswered questions. Beyond the constitutional ones, some distinguished journalists had questioned whether the attacks had even occurred, and at the time I finished the paper, Fulbright was asking the Pentagon for more information on the incidents. The committeê?Ts review of Tonkin Gulf ran into 1968, and the investigations seemed to confirm that at least on the second date, August 4, the U.S. destroyers were not fired upon. Seldom in history has a non-event led *****ch huge consequences.
Within a few months, those consequences would come crashing down on Lyndon Johnson. The swift and nearly unanimous passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution became a painful example of the old proverb that lifê?Ts greatest curse is the answered prayer.
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