Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 21, 1995 TAG: 9502210038
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``The latest polls in Arkansas show that the governor has a 72 percent approval rating, which places him in the same category as McDonald's hamburgers and Dan Rather, ahead of Ronald Reagan and the new Coca-Cola,'' Reich wrote in the jocular style that characterized his yearly reports. ``Rumor has it that Bill will be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. I just made up that rumor, but by the time you read this, the rumor will have spread to the ends of the nation.''
The expectation was always there. It had started long before there was any sense to it, back when Clinton's mother had boasted that a second-grade teacher had told her that her boy could be president. Or perhaps it went back generations further, back to his poor Southern forebears who connected themselves, if only in name, to things presidential: back to Thomas Jefferson Blythe, a Confederate private from Tippah County, Miss., who once bet a saddle on the outcome of a sheriff's race; and to Andrew Jackson Blythe of Tennessee; and to George Washington Cassidy of Red Level, Ala. Wherever it came from, it was always there, not a matter of predestination but of expectation and will, and it had built up year by year, decade by decade.
Early on the evening of March 20, 1987, the office of Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas issued a brief statement announcing that Bumpers would not run for president in 1988. The announcement came as a surprise to some in the political world. Since the beginning of the year, Bumpers had been traveling the country, meeting with prominent Democratic party financiers and operatives, seeming to prepare the groundwork for a presidential campaign. But this was not the first time that Bumpers had edged toward the national spotlight and then backed away. He had first been urged to run for president in 1976, shortly after he left the governor's office for the Senate. He had considered it again in 1984. Now, at 61, he was taking himself out of consideration for the last time. Running for president, he said in his statement, ``means a total disruption of the closeness my family has cherished. If victorious, much of that closeness is necessarily lost forever.''
Whatever Bumpers did or did not do was always of great interest to Clinton. Their relationship had gone through brief periods of hostility and longer periods of reconciliation and alliance, but it had always been marked by a certain amount of tension. They were separated by 20 years in age, yet often got in each other's way. With Bumpers out of the presidential derby, Clinton now seriously considered making the race.
Clinton and Betsey Wright, his longtime aide, dispatched scouts to Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Super Tuesday primary states to gauge how a Clinton candidacy might be received. Little Rock state Rep. Gloria Cabe, whose loyalty to Clinton went back to the bleak days after his defeat in the 1980 governor's race, ventured up to New Hampshire and spent three days in a Holiday Inn calling campaign activists from a list Clinton had compiled. Clinton's first swing through the state went so well that he returned ``flying like a kite,'' convinced that he could finish second there and win the Southern primaries.
In the early morning of May 7, another Democrat was scratched from the field. It was Gary Hart, who was forced to withdraw in the face of allegations and documented evidence regarding his extramarital sex life, which Hart had helped turn into an issue by denying that he was a philanderer. Longtime political pros who had been allied with Hart now looked to Clinton as an alternative. But there was the lingering question: Did Bill Clinton have a Gary Hart problem?
As journalists and party activists in Washington asked the question among themselves, and in so doing advanced Clinton's reputation as a womanizer, Clinton and his advisers struggled with how to deal with it. Bob Armstrong, the former Texas land commissioner who had developed an easygoing, big-brotherly friendship with Clinton since they worked together in the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, had several telephone conservations with Clinton in the aftermath of the Hart implosion. One of the issues Clinton brought up, according to Armstrong, was whether there was ``a statute of limitations on infidelity - whether you get any credit for getting it back together.''
Clinton and Betsey Wright also had several private debates about the lessons of the Hart episode. Clinton ``wanted to believe and advocated that it was irrelevant to whether the guy could be a good president,'' Wright recalled. She argued that it had a significant bearing in Hart's case ``because it raised questions about his stability.'' Any previous affairs might have been irrelevant, she said, but ``to have one while he was running was foolhardy.''
Clinton agreed. Hart, he said, was foolish to flaunt it.
Dick Morris, a longtime Clinton pollster and consultant whose clients were now primarily Republicans, was brought into the discussions. Clinton questioned Morris about how he thought the public would react to the infidelity issue. They gingerly explored different ways to address the topic or sidestep it. Morris sensed that Clinton had ``a tremendous terror of the race because of the personal scandals that were visited upon candidates who ran. His experience watching candidates be destroyed by those scandals or impaired by them chilled him, and led him to a feeling that this was a terribly inhospitable environment upon which to tread.''
The issue, Morris said, ``loomed large in his consideration. It loomed very large.''
The momentum kept building for Clinton to run. Wright and her assistants rented a ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel for a possible announcement. But rumors about Clinton's extramarital sex life intensified in Little Rock. A few days before the scheduled announcement, Wright met with Clinton at her home on Hill Street. The time had come, she felt, for Clinton to get past what she considered his self-denial tendencies and face the issue squarely. For years, she told friends later, she had been covering up for him. She was convinced that some state troopers were soliciting women for him, and he for them. Sometimes when Clinton was on the road, Wright would call his room in the middle of the night and no one would answer. She hated that part of him, but felt that the other sides of him overshadowed his personal weaknesses.
``OK,'' she said as they sat in her living room. Then she started listing the names of women with whom he allegedly had had affairs. ``Now,'' she concluded, ``I want you to tell me the truth about every one.''
She went over the list twice with Clinton. At the end, she suggested that he should not get into the race. He owed it to his wife, Hillary, and daughter, Chelsea, not to. She did not know what he planned to do. The next day, she drove to the airport and picked up Carl Wagner, the first of a group of Clinton friends who were traveling to Little Rock for the announcement. Wagner and Clinton had gone through the McGovern campaign together - Wagner running the Michigan effort while Clinton ran Texas. They had kept in touch ever since. Clinton had asked Wagner to come down to Little Rock a day early to help ``think this thing through.'' On the way back from the airport, Wright did not tell Wagner about her encounter with Clinton. She did offer her opinion that her boss seemed ``too conflicted'' and ``might not be ready.''
Wagner met with Clinton and Hillary that night. They sat around the kitchen table and talked for several hours. It was, Wagner recalled, a blunt conversation in which he and Hillary assessed the practicality of Clinton making the presidential race. Could Clinton raise $20 million? Did he have the time he needed? They analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the other candidates, especially the probable Republican nominee, Vice President George Bush. Wagner thought that the economy would be strong enough to make Bush difficult to beat. Clinton was surprised by that argument and launched into a long discussion of economic policy. Wagner noticed that Clinton was more comfortable talking about policy, depersonalizing the discussion. He wondered whether Clinton was prepared for the consequences if he became a candidate. At the end of the evening, as Clinton and Hillary moved toward the stairs leading from the kitchen up to their second-floor bedroom, Clinton turned to Wagner, who was still seated at the table, and asked, ``So what's the bottom line?''
``I tell you what,'' Wagner responded. ``When you reach the top of the steps, walk into your daughter's bedroom, look at her and understand that if you do this, your relationship with her will never be the same. I'm not sure if it will be worse or better, but it will never be the same.''
After Clinton disappeared up the steps, Wagner went to the phone and called Steve Cohen, another old Clinton friend who planned to be at the announcement. ``Jesus Christ,'' Cohen remembered Wagner telling him, ``this guy doesn't know whether he wants to run!'' Cohen called another friend, Sandy Berger, who also had plane reservations for Little Rock. There was a chance Clinton might not run, Cohen told Berger. They decided to fly in anyway.
By early afternoon the next day, a dozen Clinton friends from around the country had congregated at the Governor's Mansion for an announcement-eve luncheon. Most waited in the living room as Clinton sat on the porch steps leading out to the back lawn, engaged in a final conversation with Wagner and Mickey Kantor, a California lawyer and Democratic activist who had been part of Clinton's network since the Carter era. If Clinton had made up his mind after the encounter with Betsey Wright, if he had reached a decision after the discussion with Wagner in the kitchen the night before, he still felt a need to weigh the options to the last possible moment.
As the three men talked, Chelsea, then 7 years old, approached her father and asked him about a family vacation planned for later that summer. As Kantor remembered the scene, Clinton told his daughter that he might not be able to go because be might be running for president. ``Well,'' Kantor recalled Chelsea responding, ``then Mom and I will go without you.''
Chelsea had always had a powerful effect on Clinton. The subtext of his relationship with his daughter was his own unfortunate history with fathers. He did not want to be considered a neglectful father himself, yet his political obsession gave him little time with Chelsea. He would try to soften the guilt by joking about it, often telling the story of how, when Chelsea was asked to describe what her father did, she had said, ``He gives speeches, drinks coffee and talks on the telephone.'' It was as true as it was amusing. Now, when Kantor saw the look on Clinton's face after Chelsea matter-of-factly scratched her father from the family vacation plans, he was sure that Clinton would not run for president that year. ``It was the turning point of the conversation,'' Kantor said later.
Clinton faced the gathering of friends in the dining room and apologized for luring them all to Little Rock for no reason. No problem, they said, one after another. The struggle between family and ambition was something all of them had dealt with in various ways.
Clinton's statement was issued late in the day. ``I need some family time: I need some personal time,'' he said. ``Politicians are people too. I think sometimes we forget it, but they really are. The only thing I or any other candidate has to offer in running for president is what's inside. ... That part of my life needs renewal. The other, even more important reason for my decision is the certain impact that this campaign would have had on our daughter. The only way I could have won, getting in this late, after others had been working up to two years, would be to go on the road full time from now until the end, and to have Hillary do the same thing. ... I've seen a lot of kids grow up under these pressures and a long, long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was.''
|n n| The year 1990 presented Clinton with one of the toughest political decisions of his career. He had been governor for 10 of the last 12 years. What more could he do? he asked his advisers. He seemed tired of the job and feared that the people of Arkansas had grown weary of him.
Clinton's state of mind further complicated the decision about whether to relinquish the governorship. He seemed to be ``dithering and depressed,'' in the view of Dick Morris, who had helped construct the permanent campaign that had carried Clinton through the 1980s. As Morris saw it, Clinton's dilemma was that he was temporarily without a crusade and that he was incapable of being a caretaker chief executive. He had to be engaged in ``some important, valiant fight for the good of the world to lend coherence and structure to his life, and when he didn't have those fights he would turn on himself, he would eat away at himself, he would become depressed, paranoid, surly and, one suspects, escapist.''
There were persuasive reasons to remain in the governor's office. If Clinton left and ran for president as a former governor, he would be depriving himself of status and a financial power base, especially if President Bush appeared unbeatable in 1992 and Clinton ended up postponing his national run until 1996. He was getting strong advice from former governors not to give up the job until he had to. They missed it, they said, and he would, too.
Hillary seemed as unclear as anyone else about her husband's plans, even after he had scheduled a press conference to announce his decision. On the day before the event, Hillary called Gloria Cabe and asked whether she had any inside information on what Clinton had decided. Betsey Wright, who was still on leave from her post as chief of staff, talked to him on the morning of the announcement and was convinced up to 30 minutes beforehand he intended to say he would not run again. Cabe was among those who thought he had decided not to run and changed his mind when he entered the room and began to speak. David Leopolous, one of Clinton's closest high school friends, later recalled that ``you could have knocked Hillary over with a feather when Clinton declared that he was seeking another term.''
``She did not expect it,'' Leopolous said. ``None of us did.''
The following summer, Clinton talked to scores of friends about whether he should run for president in 1992. He could present a convincing case either way, as he always could. One of his arguments on the negative side had echoes of 1987. He would say that he was not sure that Chelsea was ready. There was a new problem as well: his promise to the voters of Arkansas that he would serve out his term as governor.
In August, Hillary went up to Bentonville for a meeting of the Wal-Mart environmental board, which she chaired. Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro and Roy Spence, head of a Texas advertising agency, were also there. Mauro and Spence had known the Clintons since the McGovern campaign in Texas. Now Mauro was on the Wal-Mart environmental board with Hillary, and Spence had the company's advertising account. After the meeting, Hillary said, ``Let's drive around.''
Spence drove around aimlessly. Mauro sat in the back and Hillary in front. ``We're thinking about doing it,'' Hillary said. ``We're thinking about going forward with this great adventure. What do you all think?''
``This is what we've been waiting for, for a long time,'' Spence said.
Hillary said there were some problems and she needed their advice. ``Bill made a contract with the people of Arkansas to not run and he's really worried about it,'' she said.
Spence said it was important to ``lance that boil.''
How? asked Hillary.
``Your enemies will hold it against you, but your friends don't have to,'' Spence said. ``They'll want you to run. Get in the car and drive around Arkansas and seek the counsel of the family members.''
Spence circled back to the Wal-Mart parking lot and turned off the engine.
``You know, Roy, they'll say a lot of things about our marriage,'' Hillary said.
``Yeah.''
``What should we do about that?''
``Admit it. Early.''
That subject got a more thorough vetting at a meeting that the Clintons held with their closest political advisers. They convened in the office of Frank Greer, a media consultant working for Clinton. In dealing with reporters and political operatives all summer, Greer had come to realize that Clinton had ``an incredible reputation around town'' for philandering. The next morning, Clinton was scheduled to meet the elite of Washington's political press corps at a traditional function known as the Sperling Breakfast, founded by Godfrey Sperling Jr. of the Christian Science Monitor. What should he do, if anything, to assure this crowd that his personal life was under control, that he would not implode like Gary Hart?
The mention of the subject irked Clinton. The rules had changed since Hart, he said. Now there was so much hypocrisy involved. If you just go out and divorce your wife, you never have to deal with this. But if you work at your problem, if you make a commitment, then you do. So people are rewarded in politics if they divorce their wives. That was the genesis of the answer they decided Clinton should give at the Sperling Breakfast. He would say that he had had some problems, but that he and Hillary had worked things through and they were committed to their marriage.
The next morning, before the breakfast, Greer encouraged several reporters to ask about Clinton's sex life. No one seemed eager to do it. Finally, as the session was nearing an end, the question came up. Clinton replied that it was the sort of trivia that people obsessed about while Rome was in decline. With Hillary at his side, he added: ``Like nearly anybody who has been together for 20 years, our relationship has not been perfect or free from difficulties, but we feel good about where we are and we believe in our obligation to each other, and we intend to be together 30 or 40 years from now, whether I run for president or not.''
Excerpted from ``First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton,'' 1995 by David Maraniss. Published by Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission. Distributed by The Washington Post Writers Group
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