First In His Class (12 page)

But he knew how to rile Clinton. “We would fight all the time as student officers, and I knew how to get him to lose his temper,” Maloy later recalled. “Everyone thought he was unflappable, but I figured out how to do it. I'd accuse him of being insincere. I'd say, ‘You goddamn southern phony!' His face would get red and he'd lose it a bit. He was a bit of a choirboy, but flim-flamming you.”

It was a contentious year for the East Campus Council. They drew up a student bill of rights which gave students an expanded role at the university, placing undergraduate members on the discipline committee and athletic board. They took a stand in support of an outspoken teacher, Francis Kearns, who claimed he was denied tenure because of his radical beliefs. In mid-March 1965 they debated an issue that extended beyond the boundaries of Georgetown: whether to provide funding for students who
wanted to participate in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. The demonstrators in Selma had already been tear-gassed and beaten as they attempted to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and a young clergyman from Boston had been murdered by angry whites. Father Richard McSorley, Georgetown's leading activist priest, organized a delegation to make the trip south as a show of support. He had a dozen or so student followers, including Phil Verveer, the junior class president, and Walter Draude, president of the senior class, who went before the council seeking a statement of support and financial backing. The council was split: some thought the southern civil rights crusade was beyond the purview of Georgetown students. Verveer and Draude called upon their fellow students to awaken to the world around them.

Their side eventually won, supported by Clinton, who first tried to take the middle ground. He agreed with the civil rights marchers in principle and endorsed their mission, though he said he also appreciated the conservatives' argument that it should not be underwritten with student funds. Verveer accepted the fact that Clinton was more moderate than him. “He was still learning. He was trying to get the lay of the land. He was staying pretty close to the center.”

The center was precisely where Georgetown as a whole seemed situated in the spring of 1965. The sociocultural phenomenon that would come to be known as the sixties lapped at the edges of the hilltop. There were few drugs on campus. The social scene was closer to the boola-boola era, with enormous crowds lining up outside The Tombs on Wednesday nights to drink beer and listen to the old-fashioned a cappella college songs sung by the Chimes. Although Peter, Paul and Mary drew an appreciative audience at McDonough Gym, the new music was still competing with the old: Clinton would join Tommy Caplan in Caplan's room to listen to the soundtrack from
Gone With the Wind
.

The student council's Selma debate was played out in a one-dimensional context. The handful of black students at Georgetown were Africans.
A letter
to the editor of
The Hoya
asked plaintively: “Why are there not any Negro basketball players at Georgetown?” The best known black on campus was the gym custodian, Pebbles, who was patronizingly accepted by the Georgetown Gentlemen. The only other blacks made the beds and served the meals. Women were slightly more visible, but they were not immune to old-school perceptions and traditions. Since the nursing school was also in the East Campus area, most males assumed that a female student was a nurse unless she proved otherwise.
The Courier
offered a regular photographic display of monthly nominees for Miss Foreign Service, a tame version of
Playboy's
playmate of the month. One edition in Clinton's freshman year featured a special layout on “The Girls of Portugal.” Georgetown
women also had to overcome a widespread impression that they were less fun to date than their competitors from Immaculata, Mount Vernon, Marymount, Dunbarton, Marjorie Webster, and Trinity, the local women's colleges that virtually cleared out on weekends as their students headed over to the action on the hilltop. In Loyola Hall, the word was that Web girls, from Marjorie Webster, were the hottest.

The debate on Vietnam had only just begun at Georgetown, sparked by word that the first alumnus had been killed in the war. Prowar and antiwar voices seemed about evenly matched in the student journals. Columnist Gary Wasserman supported the war, quoting JFK's inaugural vow to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But freshman Jim Regan countered with an article entitled “Vietnam: Let's Get Out!” that said of the war: “It is unprincipled. It is unjustified. And it is hopelessly futile.” Claiborne Pell, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island who lived in a Georgetown townhouse visible from Clinton's second-floor dorm window, drew a ripple of interest when he spoke on the East Campus and raised questions about U.S. bombing in North Vietnam. Clinton, who had spent a weekend that year at the Campbell house on Long Island defending Lyndon Johnson against his roommate's father's attacks from the right, was
still supportive
of the president.

D
ENISE
Hyland left her British Literature class one day in February of that freshman year and encountered Bill Clinton waiting in the hallway. He wondered whether he could walk her to the next class. As they stepped outside, he asked her out on a date. They went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. As they were walking back along Reservoir Road toward Hyland's dorm, St. Mary's Hall, he asked her out again—this time for an occasion that was months away, the Diplomats Ball. “He flabbergasted me, I didn't know what to say,” Hyland remembered. “He said he hoped I didn't think he was too forward, and that I didn't have to answer him right away.” He gave her a peck on the cheek, and strolled through the night back to Loyola. Taken by his earnestness, charmed by his southernness, she said yes the next day, and the first serious romance of Bill Clinton's life began.

Hyland was one of six children in an easygoing, upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family from Upper Montclair, a leafy suburb in northern New Jersey. Her father was an orthopedic surgeon and her mother was a dieti-tian. She was only seventeen when she arrived at Georgetown to study French at the language institute, tall and poised, as reserved as Clinton was outgoing. As a schoolgirl she had studied maps, history books, and
National Geographic
magazines. Their mutual friends noticed that she had a
grace about her that brought out the better side of Clinton's nature. She was innocent, though not naive, and her unthreatening manner allowed Clinton to express his self-doubt and vulnerability. They went everywhere together. On warm spring nights they would often end up at the Capitol. They would sit on the west steps and look out at the Mall, out into the quiet darkness to the beacons of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, and talk about the nation and its problems. When he ran for sophomore class president near the end of the freshman year, Hyland helped pass out leaflets and type his platform. She organized the women in her dorm into a potent campaign operation that helped Clinton win again.

At the end of the semester she took him home to New Jersey to meet her family. He charmed the Hyland brood, wrestling in the living room with Denise's two little brothers, teaching her little sister how to make peanut butter and banana sandwiches, chatting late into the night with her mother in the kitchen as she washed the dishes and he dried. It was as though he wanted to lose himself in this functional and secure family. Then Denise went to France for the summer and Clinton to Hot Springs. Every day he drove to Mount Pine to work as a counselor at Camp Yorktown Bay. At night he read books and wrote letters to his girlfriend in France, letters that revealed a sentimental young man.

“
I meet some awfully cute kids
at camp,” he wrote in his first letter to Hyland.

Some really make you realize how lucky you are. One flunked seventh grade last year and has always been in trouble…. One had his way paid by the Houston Boys Club and his mother, the mother of six more, didn't give him a cent to take with him…. When they get back to Houston he has to call an aunt to find out where he lives. They were giving swimming tests tonight and one little scrapper tried even though he couldn't swim a lick. When one of the counselors pulled him out he was so pale and shivering. Later I was walking with him to the gym and he told me he was really a lucky boy—his experience in the lake was nothing—he swallowed his tongue, he'd been poisoned, and been in a bad wreck. His father died three months ago. The little guy was so cute telling me how he was going to take care of his mother and sister—kinda hard though—cause they are all bigger than he. Camp is really good for these boys—good for this one too I guess.

Soon after Clinton arrived in Arkansas, his grandfather Alien W. Clinton took deathly ill. “
My grandfather
is dying tonight, Denise,” he wrote Hyland
on June 10. “Mother and Daddy just left and all the family is beginning to congregate. He is a fine old gentleman of 85 and until two years ago he produced some of the best vegetables you ever saw in his acre garden. Worked at the garage until the very end. He was never much of a church-goer, but I have a hunch he is going to have a good trip.” Clinton had always admired people like this grandfather, uneducated Arkansans whose lives seemed simple and honest. They appealed to him almost as characters out of the Old Testament.
After the
funeral, Clinton wrote about him again: “He was really amazing to have lived so long—but I guess more amazing is he lived so well. He was really quite a man, especially for one who lived so simply, and the greatest in the world might have been a carpenter.”

In his letters, Clinton rarely mentioned the man he called “Daddy”—his stepfather Roger Clinton—but went on about his mother's gardening and her carbohydrate diets and gave constant progress reports on his eight-year-old brother Roger. His care for Roger seemed almost maternal. Hyland would open the letters to discover what the boy looked like, how his shoulders were broadening, how “he weighs 90 pounds now.” Clinton's preoccupation with his own weight was transferred to his little brother. They were eating too many sweets, he lamented: “Sometimes I think the whole house will sink into a heap of sugar.”

Time was another constant in his letters: he was always taking note of it and trying to find more of it. “It's 1:30 a.m. and I have to get up at six.” When he could not sleep at night, he said, he would turn on the light and read. One night he woke up at three-thirty and read until five. “I wish I could wake up and read in the middle of every night.”

His reading interests ranged from the dense and furious southern prose of William Faulkner to the corny poetry of Edgar Guest, which he described to Hyland as “very simple, kinda southern, kinda negro, very beautiful poetry.” Guest was neither southern nor black. He was a London-born journalist whose homespun verse for the
Detroit Free Press
was syndicated to an adoring national audience. But when Clinton read Guest's work he thought it was written expressly for his idealized vision of his childhood in Hope and Hot Springs, not the private torment that alcohol visited upon his family but the sheltering of his mammaw and pappaw in Hope and the free and easy days roaming the streets of Hot Springs with his adolescent friends. “David Leopoulos and I agreed today—no one ever enjoyed being kids more than we did—it would be pretty hard to crowd more living in,” he wrote.

Nothing pleased Clinton more than to show off his homeland to friends from other places. His first visitor was Tom Campbell, who came down from Long Island for a week that summer. Campbell arrived in Little Rock late at night and was struck first by its smallness. “
I remember
the black-ness,” he recalled. “On the East Coast, it was all lights. Out there it was
blackness, lights, blackness again. The whole feeling was something I'd never experienced before. It was exotic: the heavy southern air, the warmth, the darkness. I felt like I was in another country on the drive from Little Rock to Hot Springs.” They goofed around with Leopoulos, shot baskets in the driveway, went water-skiing out at Uncle Raymond's place on Lake Hamilton, and had a little party on Scully Street.

Carolyn Yeldell
was home that summer from Ouachita Baptist University. She had read Emily Post, and “learned the whole business of entertain-ing,” preparing for a future where she might be the wife of a politician. She and Clinton went to the grocery store and bought crackers, cheese spreads, vegetables, and sodas. When she got home with the party food, her mother was upset that she had used her hard-earned money, money that was supposed to go toward a tonsils operation, for a party next door. “Who do you think you are,” she snapped at Carolyn, “Mrs. Astor?” Carolyn “cried and cried,” she later remembered. “I was making my mark as an entertainer or practice bride. I wanted to be the perfect hostess. That I would spend my money on it horrified my parents. I don't remember Bill chipping any money in. But I remember Roger Clinton, Sr., was impressed. He said, ‘You are going to make some man so lucky.'”

When his roommate went back to Long Island, Clinton began concentrating on the year ahead. He had already been elected sophomore class president, and he drafted plans for an orientation committee that would greet every freshman at the Main Gate and help them move into their dorms. He also began plotting his future beyond that. “
What feedback
are you getting from the French regarding Vietnam?” he asked Hyland in an August letter. Then he added: “I've been meaning to ask you, does the Institute of Language and Linguistics offer a course in Vietnamese? I really want to know. If I go to summer school next summer, I can take it in my junior year. Someone has to be there after—and during—the war to speak and help the people—probably not over one or two people in our embassy can converse fluently. Let's hope there'll come a time when guns won't have to win our battles for us and we can begin to win battles in the cold war again.” Hyland wrote back that she was uncertain about the language question but could tell him that there was “a real negative feeling about America” since the Johnson administration had escalated the war.