TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/92elect/92elect.025

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                                                                                July 20, 1992

COVER STORIES

Beginning Of the Road


To discover the real Bill Clinton, look not at Yale or Oxford,
but at the thick forests and fertile plains of his native
Arkansas

By GARRY WILLS


    "He's beyond Arkansas now. He's more Yale and Oxford than
Arkansas." That was the snap judgment, later modified, of
columnist John Brummett, the best of the journalistic Clinton
watchers in Little Rock. When several people told me that Bill
Clinton brought them into the state and took them on tours of
its beauties, Brummett said, "I wonder what they could be. Maybe
he should take me on one of those tours." When Hillary Rodham
first came to Arkansas, it took Clinton nine hours to drive the
one-hour's distance from Little Rock's airport to his mother's
home in Hot Springs. He showed off everything from mountain
lookouts (Dardanelle and Mount Nebo) to obscure purveyors of
fried pies -- a local delicacy Clinton has loved not wisely but
too well, as he has continued to love his often unlovable state.

    In 1931, when H.L. Mencken collaborated with a
statistician on three articles trying to establish the worst
state in America, Mississippi won that upside-down contest, but
with Arkansas and Alahotly contesting the bad eminence.
Arkansas, near the bottom in most categories, was at the bottom
for insolvency. V.O. Key Jr., in his famous study Southern
Politics in State and Nation, gave the prize for fraudulent
elections to Tennessee -- but Arkansas was a close second. Diane
Blair, a political scientist who has written the best study of
the state's constitutional structure, calls Arkansas nearly
ungovernable. Yet Clinton has governed it -- fairly well -- for
12 years. He seems to find in it things that elude the rest of
us. As Brummett talked, he moved from his first judgment.
"Clinton in Arkansas is like Bush in the nation -- he has
hometowns everywhere and a network of friends in each place."
Clinton can best be understood in terms of his four hometowns:
Hope, Hot Springs, Fayetteville and Little Rock.

    HOPE

    Clinton was born at the bottom of the state, in its black
belt, which has a bleak history. Twenty-five miles to the west,
the state's most famous demagogue (Jeff Davis, named for the
Confederate leader) was born, in a county (Little River) where
more than a hundred freed blacks were murdered after the Civil
War. About 25 miles south, a cemetery from early in the century
was dug up, revealing African-American bones ravaged by the
worst malnutrition recorded in this country. Hope is placed on
stingy soil that raises, paradoxically, only large things: thick
piney woods and 200-lb. watermelons.

    Actually, Hope was in the midst of a minor boom when
Clinton was born there in 1946. The Federal Government
established an artillery proving ground outside the town, which
brought in skilled workers during the war and created new jobs.
Clinton's admired Uncle Buddy, Oren Grisham, worked in the fire
department on the proving grounds, which are now an industrial
park.

    The town itself was and is small and slow. Because
Clinton's father drowned in a freak accident before his birth,
Bill's mother left him with her parents while she went off to
New Orleans to become certified as a nurse anesthetist.
Clinton's grandparents, Hardey and Mattie Hawkins, ran a grocery
store outside town near the Rose Hill Cemetery. Clinton, who was
often in the store as a child, remembers its clientele as half
black, but his cousin Falva Lively says, "Oh, it was more than
that. It was in what used to be called Niggertown." Clinton
praises his grandfather for extending credit to poor black
customers, but that was the only way to do business with people
seasonally employed. Clinton also says he learned tolerance from
his grandfather -- but it is a lesson the man did not pass on
to his own daughter, Clinton's mother, who admits her prejudice
toward blacks was not dispelled until late in her life. Clinton
never played with black children, and the one black friend he
remembers from Hope was his grandparents' maid Odessa. "I
visited with Odessa years later. I remember rocking with her on
her porch." Asked, he cannot remember Odessa's last name.

    He lived among blacks, but not with them. He would have to
grow, along with his region, in the stormy civil-rights days
ahead. But he is at ease among blacks -- as Jimmy Carter was --
and they make up his most solid base of support in the state.
He carries the black belt easily, with more than 90% of the
African-American vote, in every election. Considered a moderate
outside the state, he is opposed at home as "too liberal," too
supportive of minorities.

    Though he lost both parents -- his father permanently and
his mother temporarily during the crucial years of his
childhood -- Clinton's memories of Hope are fond. Uncles and
aunts and cousins rallied round the bright little orphan left
with his grandparents. He remembers being taken to various
relatives' places of work, showered with compensatory
kindnesses. His grandfather did a spell as a night watchman at
one of the pine-tree sawmills. He would take Billy with him, let
him play in the mill until the boy was tired, then put him in
the backseat of his Buick to sleep. "I remember climbing the
mountain of sawdust, how it smelled on those spring and summer
nights -- such a vivid memory."

    The supportive network of relatives and friends was
typical of Arkansas clannishness. The state's white population
is homogeneous and inbred. The base of its stable demographics
was an influx of native-born Protestants from nearby states in
the 19th century. It still has few foreign-born citizens -- or
Jews (0.1% of the population) or Roman Catholics (3.1%, about
a ninth of the national average). It is a Bible-reading and
conservative state that passed one of the last creationism laws
to teach an alternative to evolution.

    Like many homogeneous societies, Arkansas delights in its
eccentrics (think of England). Two of these were Clinton's
mother and his Uncle Buddy. Virginia Kelley (nee Cassidy) is a
free spirit who has outlived three husbands and goes to the
racetrack with her fourth. In her home, not far from the large
open Bible, hangs a sampler that says RACE TRACKS ARE THE ONLY
PLACE WHERE WINDOWS CLEAN PEOPLE. She has maintained a career
in nursing throughout her adult life.

    Uncle Buddy, a lively (and off-color) raconteur, regaled
the young Clinton with tales of hunting dogs, life's ironies
and the maxims people should live by. Asked about his own
family tragedies, he told his nephew, "Yes, life's tough, but
I signed on for the whole trip." To this day Clinton calls his
Uncle Buddy "the wisest man I ever met." (Clinton talks Southern
hyperbole, which raises a language barrier for some
Northerners.) He describes his uncle and his mother in the same
terms: they have weathered many trials with unfailing
equilibrium and good humor. There is a streak in the Arkansas
character that militates against expecting too much from life
(and militates, as well, against political reform). I am not as
surprised as I was when Clinton first told me that one of his
favorite books is the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

    Clinton left Hope when he was seven, moving north to Hot
Springs, but he and his mother were frequently back for
relatives' graduations and funerals, for the Watermelon
Festival, for long talks with Uncle Buddy. Clinton calls his
grandfather and his uncle "the main male influences in my
childhood." He kept up with all the interconnected family gossip
and vicissitudes that make life in a small Arkansas town seem
like an open-air soap opera. A thousand times over, Clinton
heard and told the tale of how Uncle Buddy decided one day to
"stop making a damn fool of myself" by heavy drinking -- and did
it. Little moral sagas, losses taken with resignation,
unexpected gains, made up the texture of Hope life. The marks
of a small town are still on him, the intimate questions asked
even of strangers, the touching and hugging at every entry to
a house, the relaxed slouching walk Clinton shares with his
mother. He may have done some bustling around the world of Yale
and Oxford, but his preferred rhythms are the slow ones of his
birthplace.

    HOT SPRINGS

    When Virginia Blythe (as she then was) retrieved her son
from the relatives and married her second husband, Roger
Clinton, this should have been a return to stability for the boy
who had been handed around the small town. Instead, he
experienced his first disorientation in this restored life with
two parents. Roger Clinton's anger was explosive when he drank.
In one of his rages, he fired a gun into the wall and was taken
off to jail -- a searing memory for Clinton, and grist for the
busy rumor mills of Hope.

    The couple tried for a new start in Hot Springs. Roger
Clinton, who had been selling Buicks in a town with little
demand for new or expensive cars, joined his brother in a more
prosperous dealership in the state's most affluent resort town.
Virginia, meanwhile, got steadier work, better remunerated, as
a nurse anesthetist. At first the Clintons lived in the country,
in a house without indoor plumbing. Much has been made of
Clinton's encounters with snakes in the outhouse, but he says,
"We were not poor. A lot of rural Arkansas had no sewers back
then." Billy was taken into town to attend a Catholic school,
rather than the inferior county school nearer home. It was his
first experience of Arkansas' dreary educational establishment.

    It was a sign of Hot Springs' comparative cosmopolitanism
that Catholics, rare elsewhere in the state, had a large parish
and school in the city. The city's affluence came largely from
the Federal Government, which had established a hospital and
reservation around the mineral waters in the 1800s. The natives
let a double jurisdiction grow up, and visitors to the spas were
received with illegal (but openly practiced) gambling and
prostitution. The local tales of Hope were traded for the
legends of Al Capone carousing in the acrid steam of the
bathhouses or at champagny circles around the roulette wheel.

    After the Clintons moved into town, Billy tried out the
slot machines (confiscated in various political campaigns and
held by a compliant police force until the zealots had moved
on). A natural stinginess soon made him give up on machines
that gobbled his money and gave so little back. Like the other
boys, he called up Maxine, the best-known madam, to tie up the
line she used for customers. "We did it mainly to hear her cuss
-- we never heard a woman use language like that."

    Carolyn Staley, who lived next door to the Clintons when
she and Bill were in high school, says that as a preacher's
kid, she never even knew about the town's reputation as sin
city. Did the Clintons know? I ask her. "Oh, yes, they were more
sophisticated, more worldly-wise." Clinton's mother liked the
gambling, and his stepfather, who was still drinking, flew into
rages when he was not sure where she had been. In a deposition
for divorce proceedings, the mother feared for her son's safety:
"He has continually tried to do bodily harm to myself and my son
Billy."

    Eventually Billy got too big to beat, and threatened his
stepfather, telling him never to lay a hand on his mother again.
When the rages continued, the family broke up.

    Hot Springs, unlike Hope, was a place where such problems
could be kept secret. Billy's friends, teachers, counselors and
pastors never knew what violence he faced when he went home.
Staley lived next door when the Clintons' brief (three-month)
divorce was still in effect, and did not realize that her friend
was fatherless during that period. Eventually, Roger convinced
Virginia that he could reform. Her son, 15 at the time, argued
that he would never change and tried to persuade his mother not
to remarry him. Why, I ask, did she? "She was old-fashioned and
thought she must be to blame in some way; and she felt that
Roger ((Clinton's half brother, born of this marriage)) needed
a father." He does not mention what seems the obvious and (in
this case) the real reason -- that Virginia still loved Roger.

    Clinton has always been very close to his mother, despite
the fact that he and his brother were largely brought up by a
maid who cared and cooked for them while the mother was at her
nursing jobs. It was a tradition in Hope for families of even
modest means to have a black maid -- Virginia had one when she
was growing up, and Billy had Odessa while he was at his
grandfather's house. In Hot Springs the maid was white, and very
religious -- she hoped Billy would grow up to be a preacher.

    It was not an expectation that would have surprised anyone
at the time. Facing chaos at home, Billy became
super-responsible in school and church. "I was the most
religious member of my family," he remembers now. "Mother got
more religious later, as a result of the suffering she
underwent." (She lost two more husbands to death.) Billy raised
funds, organized for charities, became the band director's right
hand for statewide planning. The band director acted as another
surrogate father.

    While others fancied him as a preacher, Billy was
determined to be a musician. He attended band camp every summer
in the Ozarks, won first place in the state band's saxophone
section, and played in jazz combos. Musicians were always coming
and going at the Hot Springs clubs, and the first blacks
Clinton respected were jazz artists he heard and tried to
emulate. Despite the joshing he takes now over his sporadic
bouts with the saxophone, his band director, Virgil Spurlin,
says he was very talented and dogged in his practice: "He could
sight-read with the best, and he kept me busy finding scores for
him to read." Music seemed a way to test the wider horizons
offered in Hot Springs; despite excellent grades, he would be
offered more musical scholarships than academic ones when he
graduated from high school.

    The Clintons acquired a television set just before the
1956 presidential campaign, and young Bill watched with
fascination both parties' conventions. In 1958 Governor Orval
Faubus closed the high school in Little Rock to prevent
integration, and some families brought their children the 50
miles to Hot Springs to enroll them in Clinton's school. When
Clinton and Carolyn Staley, class leaders as well as good
friends, were elected to Boys Nation and Girls Nation, they went
to Washington and shook John Kennedy's hand in the White House.

    That glimpse of Washington, where the powerful Senator
William Fulbright redeemed the clownish Arkansas Governor,
helped banish ideas of playing jazz in smoky nightclubs. Clinton
asked his high school counselor, Edith Irons, what college
offered a good program in foreign service. The only one she
knew, offhand, was Georgetown, but she would look up others.

    The fact that Georgetown was in Washington settled the
matter for him. He paid no attention when Irons brought him
other names, and she was upset when he did not even apply to
other colleges. As the acceptance period went by, and summer was
half gone, he still had not heard from his school of choice, and
Irons says she had visions of her prize pupil not entering
college that year. Clinton says he was not worried because the
University of Arkansas took any student with decent grades; he
had long assumed he would be going there, where Fulbright had
been the college president before going to Washington. Clinton
had become familiar with Fayetteville, the Ozark campus town,
during his summers at band camps, and he wrote his junior paper
on the university. He had acquired a circle of friends in that
corner of the state -- and even another surrogate father, Eli
Leflar, who had been on a Masonic panel that gave Clinton one
of his many prizes. Clinton began visiting Leflar and dating his
daughter. Only Georgetown -- or, more precisely, only Washington
-- was more attractive to him than the school in Fayetteville,
where he would later apply to teach law.

    When I repeat to Stephen Smith, a key aide in Clinton's
first term as Governor, John Brummett's claim that Clinton is
more Yale and Oxford than Arkansas, Smith says, "He is more
Georgetown than Yale." I ask Clinton if he agrees with Smith.
"Yes. At Yale I had to work at a number of jobs. At Georgetown
I had only one outside job. It was my first time away from home,
and I had a whole range of things to learn." Also, Arkansas
kept intruding. His one job was in Fulbright's Senate office.
Clinton took roommates from Georgetown to visit Arkansas, and
friends from there came to see him. Staley was visiting him
when, in the wake of Dr. King's assassination, Clinton drove
food to churches in the riot area. Like Fulbright himself,
Clinton won a Rhodes scholarship when he finished college.

    In this period, too, Clinton discovered a dangerous
talent, part of his gregarious and ingratiating way with all his
friends: a puppylike eagerness and drive to please. A man who
was at Oxford with him tells me, "Bill was one of the two people
I have known who were just amazingly successful with women. You
would hear him and say to yourself, `No one is going to believe
that line,' but they all did."

    FAYETTEVILLE

    Clinton, famously, applied to the University of Arkansas
Law School ROTC as part of his casting about to avoid the
Vietnam War. He had intended to go to Fayetteville because the
local law school is a great place for forming political
connections -- and everyone, by the time he was at Oxford, knew
Clinton was permanently running for office. "We would kid him
about it, but no one found it offensive," says Peter Hayes, now
a historian at Northwestern University.

    At Yale, Clinton did no interviewing for the major law
firms. "All I wanted to do was go home. I thought I would hang
out my shingle in Hot Springs and see if I could run for
office." But a teacher at Yale said the University of Arkansas
needed new faculty, and Clinton called the dean from the
interstate highway as he was driving to Hot Springs. The dean
said Clinton was too young, and he answered, "Well, I'm that,
but I'll teach anything you need for now, and I'm not interested
in tenure, so I'll be no problem. It's a one-year deal." On such
terms he finally reached Fayetteville, where he had expected to
go to college and law school.

    Up in the northern corner of the state, mountainous
Fayetteville is as far as it can be from Hope's flat piney
woods. There were never many blacks in the clefts and dells
where independent farmers tended little plots. This area had
little sympathy for the owners of antebellum cotton plantations
in the black belt, and many in this Republican stronghold fought
for the Union. No wonder the Reconstruction government started
the state college in this receptive, if isolated, place.

    Fayetteville is now turning up on lists of the most
desirable communities in America, but only for those who want
to get away from urban problems -- and amen ities. Richard
Atkinson, a professor at the law school, says his faculty has
trouble convincing potential members that a move to Fayetteville
will not drop them off the edge of the world. What do you tell
them? I ask. "Well, we boast that we get National Public Radio
here."

    Clinton did fill in the areas no others taught (admiralty
law, for example), and found the academic life rewarding enough
to turn down other offers (for instance, to be on the House
staff for impeaching Nixon). He meant to run for office, but not
locally -- this was the Republican corner of Arkansas, after
all. But as the 1974 race approached, the popular Congressman
from that area, John Paul Hammerschmidt, strongly vouched for
Nixon, who was under fire for the Watergate offenses. Clinton
knew, from his close friend Hillary Rodham, how vulnerable Nixon
was to impeachment -- she had accepted the offer to work on the
staff that he refused. The two were visiting each other, back
and forth between Washington and Fayetteville, and spending
long hours on the telephone. He was kept informed of her work,
of her virtual certitude that Nixon would be convicted in the
Senate after the House impeached him.

    Clinton became convinced that Nixon would take
Hammerschmidt down with him, and he began to canvass his new
friends in and around the university for a candidate to run
against Hammerschmidt -- he wanted a Democrat who planned to
live permanently in the district. But when no one else would do
it, he announced his own candidacy. As a young law professor
with '60s-style hair, a Yale and Oxford background and liberal
cohorts from the university on his team, he should have been an
easy loser in this enclave of the state's few Republicans. But
he ran surprisingly well, thanks to Watergate, giving
Hammerschmidt the one scare in his long, safe tenure of the
office.

    Hillary Rodham came to Arkansas to help with the campaign,
and -- when the House staff disbanded after Nixon's resignation
-- she took up an offer the dean had made her, to come teach and
run a legal clinic at Fayetteville. From the time they met at
Yale, the two had circled each other warily -- Clinton
confessing that he thought, "Oh-oh, this woman is trouble -- the
one I could love." She had joined him in Texas during the
McGovern campaign of 1972, where he was a paid member of Gary
Hart's staff, and she was a vote registrar for the Democratic
National Committee.

    Atkinson says the two of them were living together at the
time, but maintaining separate apartments, in deference to
conservative local ideas of professorial ethics. When they
decided to marry, Clinton bought a house, which his army of
friends descended on to paint, inside and out, against the
deadline of their marriage day. Atkinson, who was there, says
it was a marriage all the friends saw as a merging of high
talents. "I know brighter people singly, but I do not know any
married couple with their combined strengths." It was
fascinating to his friends that Bill, with his reputation as a
ladies' man, chose for his wife the brainy and (at that time)
frumpy-looking Hillary. Her indifference to matters of
appearance was evident on the night before the marriage when,
amid the bustle of painters, her mother asked to see her wedding
dress -- and discovered that she had not bought one. Mother and
daughter went up to the quaint town square of Fayetteville and
found one store open, where Hillary bought the first dress she
took from the rack.

    His unexpected showing against Hammerschmidt gave Clinton
the statewide attention he turned into electoral victories for
attorney general (1976) and then for Governor (1978), offices
that took him to the very center of the state, where the
Arkansas River divides uplands from lowlands, Ozarks from
Mississippi rice. He had, in effect, been circling this place
for years, aiming at the power center of the state.

    LITTLE ROCK

    Precisely because it is the center of power in Arkansas,
the city has long been resented. Jeff Davis, an enormously
successful demagogue of the early century, always ran against
Little Rock and kept declaring his independence of the place
even when he had to live there as Governor. He tethered a goat
on the Governor's lawn to show that his heart was still with the
hill folks. He won his first term in office crusading against
the construction of a capitol building in the city -- a new home
for the despised politicians. The antipolitics of our own time
is just rediscovering the ploys of Davis, who treated Little
Rock as the Beltway of his time: "The judges have lived too long
at Little Rock, which is why they ruled against the people."

    Those scratching a living in the hills wanted to be left
alone, and certain growers in the black belt did not want others
to see how they ruled their plantations. This prickly isolation
took on a rabid note after the Civil War, when federal
interference created the "Carpetbagger Constitution" with strong
powers. As soon as the "Redeemers" drove out the carpetbaggers,
a deliberately weak government was created by the constitution
of 1874, which is still in force.

    To this day, the legislature meets only biennially, for
two months, to keep the representatives of the people out of
evil Little Rock. The power to tax is severely restricted --
the legislature must raise all state taxes by a three-quarters
vote. The Governor, with only a two-year term, has a weak veto.
Attempts to write a new constitution have been crushed twice in
recent years by a populace afraid of giving any more power to
the government. Even the New Deal, which brought blessings to
all the South, met the most grudging reception in Arkansas,
which refused to raise local funds to qualify for federal
largesse, treating rural electrification as a plot against old
local autonomy. When Winthrop Rockefeller gave $1.5 million to
set up a model integrated school, on condition that local taxes
take up the burden after five years, the school was allowed to
close when its free run ended. Jeff Davis, after all, had tried
to outlaw the education of Negroes, on the grounds that it
ruined good field hands without creating intelligent citizens.

    Faubus, the son of a socialist, tried to open up Arkansas
to outside investment, making Rockefeller the head of a newly
created investment council. Opposition on this front helps
explain his unexpected defiance of federal integration orders
in 1957. It was surprising that Arkansas, of all places, should
be the first Southern state to take this stand. It had fewer
blacks than most of its neighbors; and those were concentrated
in one segment of the state, and they had been rapidly draining
away since the collapse of cotton growing. (Black population
shrank from 27% in 1920 to 16% in 1980.) But Faubus wanted to
be seen standing up against outsiders. What bothered his state
was not simply having to integrate schools but being told that
it had to by the distant Federal Government.

    People now adult in Arkansas were taught in school that
theirs is the only state in America that, surrounded by a wall,
could survive on nothing but its own products. The old boast was
never true, but it was important to believe it, to find some
blessing in the state's isolation. The most persistent vein of
folklore in the state tells how a traveler so befuddled as to
end up in Arkansas can be gulled with impunity by natives who
are amused at this man from Mars.

    Faubus was converted to government baiting by the popular
reaction to his 1957 demagoguery. It helped that he was being
vilified elsewhere. Arkansans rally to their own under assault.
John Brummett says Clinton was never more popular at home than
when the nation mocked his endless speech at the 1988
Democratic Convention or when he came under assault in New
Hampshire and New York earlier this year. Even some inveterate
foes of Clinton's came to his rescue during these moments of
attacks by outsiders.

    Faubus finally went a bit too far in his government
bashing. Partly to compensate, the citizens in 1966 elected the
first Republican Governor since Reconstruction, Winthrop
Rockefeller, in 1966. Rockefeller, who served four years,
instituted a number of reforms, largely with the help of a
Federal Government still solvent at the time and intent on
building a Great Society.

    When Clinton became Governor in 1978, he tried to pick up
where Rockefeller had left off. He lacked not only Rockefeller's
private fortune but also the business ties Rockefeller had
established in his long tenure as Faubus' investment counselor.
Besides, the Federal Government was turning away from the Great
Society. Clinton hoped for help from his fellow Southerner in
the White House, Jimmy Carter, but that plan backfired when
Carter used Arkansas to dump Cuban refugees at Fort Chaffee,
where they rioted, broke loose and alienated the locals.

    Desperate for funds, unable to get income or corporate
taxes through the labyrinth of the constitution, Clinton tried
to build badly needed roads with new-car registration and
license fees. The costs of this angered small farmers in the key
swing counties, who have a heavy turnover in junky cars and
trucks, each change now entailing a higher registration fee.

    Clinton launched ambitious plans for the environment and
schools, relying on some experts brought down from the
university or from out of state. Three of these visible aides
wore beards -- an even greater offense than Hillary's retention
of her original last name. Clinton was rejected after his first
term for the second Republican of the century, Frank White, who
was very far from Rockefeller Republicanism.

    Like Michael Dukakis, who was defeated by an ex-footballer
after his first term as Governor of Massachusetts, Clinton set
about recasting his political persona. But where Dukakis was
given a light cosmetic coating, Clinton returned to his most
authentic self -- the gregarious schmoozer and good ole boy.
Arkansas had the least-developed single-party system of all
those states studied by V.O. Key Jr. It lacked even factions
within the one party. Personality alone formed shifting clots
of political alliance.

    No one is better than Clinton at this kind of
shoulder-patting, chat-about-the-family, how-is-so-and-so-back-
in-such-and-such-a-town politics. In his second and subsequent
terms as Governor, he sought out legislators in the halls of
the capitol, acting as his own best lobbyist. Brummett wrote
that it would be more dignified for the Governor to summon
people to his office; but the informality of Clinton's new
approach seemed to work. He realized that his long-range plans
depended on building popular support, and he sent his wife out
to talk about concern for education in every county of the
state. The remade Hillary -- higher-class in her clothes,
lower-class in her rhetoric, and now called by her married name
-- was accepted as no longer an outsider, and Clinton's education
reforms (testing of teachers, standard curriculums, aid to
marginal students, vocational training) are the principal success
of his 12 years in office.

    To accomplish this, Clinton had to rely on regressive
sales taxes rather than expend further energy trying to work an
income tax through the constitutional baffles. He had to cut
corners and improvise in ways that less hamstrung governments
avoid. "Clinton is criticized for using corporate jets to get
around the state, but every politician does that here," says
Diane Blair. "Otherwise you don't go anywhere. I have seen
Hillary fly through black storms to get to a high school
graduation where they are waiting for her. She would never make
it if some firm in the town did not fly her."

    Clinton has instilled a new sense of pride in many
citizens of his state. Ms. Rodham was shocked when she arrived
at the University of Arkansas Law School and had a student
complain of her demands: "What do you expect of me? I'm only
from Arkansas." She did not realize that he might have been
guying this traveler into Arkansas, in the defensive old form
of mockery; but even this hangdog defiance of the outer world
masked an uneasiness about the state's reputation. Journalists
covering Clinton in Little Rock are constantly asked by a
suspicious citizenry, "What have you heard about us up there?"
The state took a long time to recover after it sent its prized
leader Jeff Davis to the U.S. Senate in 1907, only to have him
laughed into fecklessness by a more sophisticated audience. The
state has tried to send more presentable leaders to Washington
ever since -- men like Fulbright, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor.

    The constitution was finally amended to give Clinton a
four-year term in 1986 (just when shorter term limits were
gaining support elsewhere). At a time of pinched resources,
Clinton has had experience of working within a financial
straitjacket, setting priorities, concentrating on the essential
tasks. The whole nation is in the grips of an antigovernment
mood that he has dealt with in what was, until recently, the
capital of opposition to government.

    On the other hand, Clinton is a quintessential politician
when the very name has become a swear word. He is a man who
builds compromises and is accused of being slick. He tries to
please, omnidirectionally, and is accused of pandering. I ask
if he ever considered being anything but a politician. Yes, he
answers, a doctor, because he saw his mother and her fellow
nurses deferring to them. Then a musician. At Oxford, when he
thought his opposition to the Vietnam War would preclude a
political career in the patriotic South, he seriously considered
becoming a journalist. "I would at least comment on the great
events of my time." Why had he rejected those careers? "I would
not have been great at them. I would have been a very good
musician, but not a great one." Does that mean he thinks he's
a great politician? He answers, matter-of-factly, "Yes." Why?
"I like people, and like to help them. I can get them together,
organize them, help them reach their goals." It is, I suppose,
one definition of politics.