Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060892/06089932.000

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                                                                                THE CAMPAIGN, Page 62

Clinton's Forgotten Childhood


Quick to recall the tiniest detail on dozens of issues, the
Democratic candidate for years suppressed memories of a violent
stepfather. To understand his upbringing is to understand the
man he is today.

By GARRY WILLS


    "I remember the police coming and taking him away. That
was a pretty spooky deal." Bill Clinton was less than six when
his drunken stepfather was arrested for firing a gun during a
marital quarrel. But, he says, "I remember it like it was
yesterday." That was in the little town of Hope, where Clinton
was born. "The neighbors knew about it." Shortly afterward the
family moved to Hot Springs, where, Clinton says, "we never had
a public incident."

    But they did. As a 15-year-old, Clinton gave a sworn
deposition against his stepfather: "I was present on March 27,
1959, and it was I who called my mother's attorney, who in turn
had to get the police to come to the house to arrest the
defendant. The last occasion in which I went to my mother's aid,
when he was abusing my mother, he threatened to mash my face in
if I took her part." Clinton not only forgot that event; he
also forgot that he ever gave the deposition, now on file in
the Garland Chancery Court.

    When I reminded his mother about this, she said, "Bill and
I have always been able to do that. I know you people are
amazed at this, but we would always put away anything
unpleasant." In fact, his mother does not remember her own
deposition given in the same divorce proceedings. The name of
her lawyer is a stranger's name now. She doesn't even remember
the timing or circumstances of her remarriage to Roger Clinton
-- a remarkable suppression of the past. In fact, when a cousin
suggested she did not pursue the divorce to its conclusion, she
could not deny that with certainty -- and neither could her son.
Only the court records restore the sequence. Her divorce did
become final in May 1962 -- and three months later she remarried
the man she had divorced.

    Even during the short time when the family was separated,
Bill, then the only son, hid from others the disgrace of his
father's drunken behavior. The mother and son moved into a new
house then, and Bill remembers having to get a neighbor, Jim
Clark, to show him how to use a posthole digger for putting up
the mailbox. But the girl next door, a minister's daughter who
became his close friend in school, never knew about the furies
raging inside the Clinton home. No one knew -- not Clinton's
high school counselor, not his pastor, not his closest friends.

    Going back into his childhood is a form of emotional
spelunking that Clinton has always avoided. He did not break his
silence until Joe Klein of New York magazine, working from hints
he had picked up from Clinton's mother, asked the candidate
direct questions about his step father's drinking and violence.
Clinton told more about his past as court records came to light
and as his younger brother described their home to reporters.
"One of the frustrating things about this whole deal, this
nationwide attempt to make me look slick -- to which I may have
contributed -- is that people expect me to remember things I
don't remember all of, or to share things I thought I was never
supposed to share. I mean, it's a strange sort of deal."

    Clinton now says he learned a lot about himself in the
therapy sessions he and other members of the family attended
after his brother was caught peddling cocaine in 1984. Says
Clinton: "We [the brothers] were sort of the two prototypical
kids of an alcoholic family . . . Like most families of
alcoholics, you do things by not confronting problems early, you
wind up making things worse. I think that the house in which we
grew up, because there was violence and trouble, and because my
mother just put the best face on it she could -- in later years
a lot of the stuff was dealt with by silence."

    During his childhood, Clinton was torn by contending
emotions toward his stepfather. He had urged his mother not to
reunite with him. "I didn't think he would straighten up, even
though I loved him." Both mother and son remember one traumatic
confrontation when a 14-year-old Clinton broke in the door to
threaten his father. Both, until their memories were recently
jogged, thought this ended the physical threats. Now they admit
that could not have been the case. Why does Clinton remember the
break-in episode and not later ones, which he described in his
deposition? "That [break-in] was a dramatic thing. It made me
know I could do it if I had to. But it made me more
conflict-averse. It's a really painful thing, you know, to
threaten to beat up your stepfather."

    Some think it is odd that Clinton changed his name (from
Blythe) during this period, taking his stepfather's name. But
that would be typical of the emotions that go with growing up
in an alcoholic's home: the reconciliations, relapses, pretenses
of reform and the urgent maintenance of a facade for the outside
world. His mother remembers him, even in the confrontation when
he threatened his stepfather, as beginning, "Daddy, if you're
not able to stand up, I'll help you. But I have something to
say."

    Clinton was dutiful to a fault in this period, becoming a
superachiever in school and a drudge at community service. He
not only played in the band but also helped its director
organize statewide musical events. He was a devoted Boy Scout.
His readiness to volunteer was so great that his high school
principal called a halt when she felt adults were exploiting him
-- as when the local heart fund wanted to make him an officer.
"Bill just couldn't say no to these requests," she told
Clinton's mother.

    Clinton was a reconciler in the home and outside it, the
responsible one whom other adults treated like their own son.
The bandleader Vergil Spurlin became especially important to
Clinton, whose major interest at the time was music. Looking
back now, Clinton says, "He was a real good man, real religious,
spent a lot of time with his kids, cared a lot about them." He
was everything Clinton's stepfather was not, and once Clinton
startled Spurlin by saying he really did not have a daddy of his
own. The inscriptions "Billy" put in Spurlin's yearbooks are
eloquent. In his sophomore year he wrote, "In the years to come,
I shall try with all I have to be deserving of your friendship."
In his junior year: "Some things can't be written down . . . I
truly hope I don't let you down next year." In his last year:
"I honestly tried to do a good job for you."

    People from damaged homes can be quick to empathize with
others' suffering and try to do something about it. Clinton's
friend Carolyn Staley has often told how, when she visited him
at Georgetown, he delivered food to a church in the Washington
riot area after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. A less
well-known incident from the same time comes from a fellow
student, Neil Grimaldi, who had begun a service to help feed and
house alcoholics. Clinton went to the shelters and impressed
Grimaldi with his sympathy for the alcoholics. He even played
his saxophone to break the ice with them. In 1969, when there
was racial tension in Hot Springs, during Clinton's visit at his
home he organized an integrated jazz group to play in the K Mart
parking lot -- though, as he admits now, "we caused more trouble
than we cured."

    Some of Clinton's high school contemporaries recall him as
disgustingly responsible, always trying to impress his elders.
The draft letter he wrote from Oxford after his enlistment
problems were over looks like a bid for the ROTC man's respect.
Sometimes Bill could be more adult than adults: when his mother,
a free spirit who still loves the racetrack, a kind of Arkie
Auntie Mame, took him to nightclubs to listen to jazz, he was
offended by the smoke and the drinking.

    Whether a damaged childhood cripples or strengthens one in
later life depends on many factors. Some find the continuing
mark of his violent upbringing in Clinton's desire to please
everybody, in his attempt to put the best face on things, in his
maintenance of a sunny facade with darker things behind it.
Others find its legacy in his sympathy for others and his urge
for reconciliation. Much of his past is permanently blanked out,
though Clinton acknowledges that those experiences play
themselves out in patterns of behavior. "If you live in that
kind of constant environment where conflict is never resolved,
you tend to repeat that pattern when you grow up," he says.
"That was an early problem with me, so that I would let things
fester too long and then try to deal with them in an emergency
situation. Now I think I do a much better job of just dealing
with life as it comes along."