First In His Class (13 page)

From his letters that summer it was clear that Clinton was struggling with the competing impulses of humility and ambition. He was looking wistfully at his past, seeing it only in its innocence. And of his future, he wrote: “
Just searching
, I guess, for a road ahead. Maybe I am beginning to realize that I am almost grown, and will soon have to choose that one final motive in life which I hope will put a little asterisk by my name in the billion pages of the book of life.”

Denise Hyland
sensed what that little asterisk might denote. When she
reached Nice after studying in Dijon, she met a group of college students from France and America, including some Texans. “
This one
tall proud Texas boy was talking on and on about his political future,” Hyland later recalled. “And I turned to him and I said, ‘Remember this name—Bill Clintonbec—ause someday he will be president.'”

CHAPTER FOUR
 
HE WAS ON FIRE

F
OR THE START
of his sophomore year at Georgetown, Clinton made the return trip east by car, the first time that he had covered the distance on the ground. Kit Ashby, his classmate from Dallas, came up to Hot Springs and joined him
for the
1,200-mile drive. Their plan was to go nonstop, four hours on, four hours off for each driver; but in those days before the completion of the East-West interstate system, the journey was an arduous succession of narrow twists and turns. Ashby was shocked and awed by “how many miles, how many hours, how much land” there was between where they grew up and where they went to school. He was at the wheel as they drove through the hills of Tennessee, and he saw, for the first time in his life, the makeshift memorials to accident victims that were becoming commonplace along American highways: seven white wooden crosses lined the embankment as he negotiated the sharpest bends in the road. Clinton understood all too well the real-life consequences of those symbolic markers: a highway in southern Missouri had taken away the father he never knew. In the middle of the night, overtaken by drowsiness, they pulled over at a rest stop in Virginia and slept for a few hours. They drove across the Potomac and up to Georgetown the next day, two college boys on top of the world, big men on campus, Clinton possessing everything he might want at nineteen: the white Buick convertible with its red interior, the affection of Denise Hyland, and the presidency of the sophomore class.

As the student officer responsible for making the incoming freshmen feel welcome, Clinton had the opportunity to make new friends and build his constituency at the same time. He seemed to be everywhere at once: at the Main Gate shaking hands with anxious parents and students as they pulled up; at Loyola Hall, hauling luggage up the stairs. No one knew how to navigate the campus more skillfully. As polished as Clinton had become at Georgetown politics, appealing to students by calling for lower cafeteria prices and to Jesuit administrators by stressing student moderation and civility, he was even more adept in the classroom, where it seemed that he studied the teachers with as much diligence as he applied to the subject matter. His coziness with professors was a source of constant razzing from his friends. Tom Campbell, once again his roommate, this time in Harbin Hall, would tease Clinton by placing his hand on his nose in an obscene gesture and saying, “Bill, you'
ve got
your nose up their ass all the time.” Clinton would deny it, claiming that he was “trying to clear up an inconsis-tency.” But Campbell knew better. He marveled at how Clinton could figure out what was important to a professor and pick his brain, raising points of special interest to the teacher. Clinton was doing what came naturally to him, Campbell concluded. He was working the room.

Although Campbell, Moore, and Ashby chided Clinton about his solicitous approach to teachers, they also had enough sense to try to get into classes with him and pick his brain in study groups. Clinton's ability to anticipate test questions by studying the professors was what set him apart from the rest of them, Ashby believed.
A medical
student had once told Ashby that the great doctors were not those most interested in helping people but those who were most fascinated by the human body and how it works. “Bill had that same intense fascination with people and how they work. That was the thrust of his intellectual curiosity.”

That curiosity was put to full use in
the most
exacting course in the sophomore curriculum, U.S. Constitution and Law, taught by Walter I. Giles. The course was modeled after a law school seminar. Undergraduates formed study groups to survive, parceling out the heavy reading load. Clinton was in a study group with Moore and Ashby. When they gathered to go over law cases, the others were struck by Clinton's clarity and sense of humor about coursework that could otherwise seem intimidating. He would tell stories to relax the others, and “better than anyone I had seen,” Moore observed, “he could absorb a lot of information and come right to the point.” He was a meticulous notetaker. John Spotila, a freshman friend, missed classes one week and borrowed Clinton's notes. Clinton had not only outlined with Roman numerals and subheadings, but cross-referenced the material. From then on, Spotila copied Clinton's notebook every day.

The Giles course, much like Quigley's, was one of the shared experiences of School of Foreign Service students. Some agreed with Phil Verveer's description of Walter Giles as a “somewhat imperious character.” He was definitely a man of traditions. All classroom exchanges were conducted formally as “Mister” and “Sir,” and students stood when answering questions. It was highly embarrassing to be called upon and not have an answer; the only way to avert that humiliation was to come to Giles before class started and plead
nolo contendere
. What Giles imparted to his disciples
was respect for the founding documents of American law and their application in the twentieth century. He had a liberal outlook toward human rights, an expansive interpretation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and what Tommy Caplan regarded as “a great sense of the genius of our founding fathers and of the majesty of their document.”

The Warren Court was in its heyday then, interpreting civil liberties and civil rights in ways that Giles generally favored. Landmark cases emerging from the Warren Court would quickly become part of Giles's course, providing new material for his rigorous exams. Two weeks before each test, he would distribute a syllabus of cases and readings that his students should be familiar with in order to handle the essay questions. Everything that was going to be on the exam would be somewhere in that stapled syllabus, but there was so much that it was virtually impossible to read it all. Clinton, knowing how to read the professor, knew how to read the syllabus, and the study group the week before an exam would focus intently on what Clinton picked out as the essential material. Although his exams were difficult, Giles stressed that they were the least important part of his class. It was the learning process that he loved. On the first page of every syllabus, Giles would present his philosophy of learning, a quotation from Justice Benjamin Cardozo: “In the end the great truth will have been learned, that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer than the prize, or rather that the effort is the prize, the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.”

Giles lived near campus in a carriage house with a felicitous history: it was originally part of the estate of the Marbury who lent his name to the landmark 1803 U.S. Supreme Court decision,
Marbury
v.
Madison
, which established the judicial branch's right to review the constitutionality of legislation. It seemed to David Kammer that Giles “was wedded to the institution” of teaching, much in the manner of an Oxford don. He socialized with students outside the classroom, especially during football season. Football Sundays were a Giles ritual. He held four tickets for Washington Redskins home games and would invite students to accompany him. Clinton was among those invited, though he was of no help downing the cooler full of martinis that the professor and his brood toted into D.C. Stadium. For away games, Giles invited a group of six or eight who gathered at his carriage house and watched the game on television while downing Heinekens, martinis, and Bloody Marys, and sharing his Triscuits topped with Cheddar cheese and bacon. It was partly a performance, and those who performed well would find a second invitation in their mailbox.

Those who stood out in class and at the carriage house were tapped for a peculiar and colorful drama. It was called the James Madison Martini Lecture. Giles would walk into class that day and open a portable bar—
Tanqueray gin, Martini & Rossi, olives—and launch into a discourse on the role of olives in American constitutional history. As he spoke, he would mix a pitcher of martinis. As the lecture concluded, he would call a group of students up to the front, hand each a martini glass, and propose a toast. “Gentlemen, to the republic!” They would toss down their martinis and the glasses would be filled again, followed by a second Giles toast: “Gentle-men, may confusion reign among enemies of the republic!” Confusion certainly reigned in the heads of the classroom leaders as they stumbled out in a two-martini daze.

Clinton thrived in this environment without being a drinker or much of a Redskins fan.
He was,
in the football realm as most everything else, still an Arkansas chauvinist. His high school friend Phil Jamison, who had transferred from Texas A&M to the Naval Academy that year, came to Washington on October 16 to attend Navy's contest against Pitt, and after the game he and two fellow plebes from Arkansas made their way up to the Georgetown campus to spend the afternoon and evening. Clinton took them over to the lounge in Denise Hyland's dorm where they watched Arkansas beat Texas in a Southwest Conference showdown, 27-24. The women of Georgetown had never witnessed anything quite like that late afternoon when Clinton and his buddies filled the dorm lobby with ear-splitting howls of “Whooo-pig-sooey!” That night, Clinton and Denise got Jamison and his friends dates for the dance at McDonough Gym featuring the Four Tops.

That was Bill Clinton at Georgetown, a curious mix, calling the hogs in support of an all-white college football team one hour, singing the lyrics to the soulful Motown tunes of the Four Tops the next. He was of both worlds. The progressive Clinton would make the case for the Johnson civil rights initiatives. The traditional Clinton revered his southern roots and the people back home so much that he tried to shy away from confrontations on issues of race.
When his
grandmother mailed him a pouch of postcards from Hope with an overtly racist image, a Sambo-styled black boy polishing enormous watermelons, Clinton mailed one back to her with the message: “Dear Mammaw, Thought I would send you one of your cards just to prove I'm using them.”

Denise Hyland enjoyed watching her boyfriend portray himself as “a simple southern guy coming to the brave new world of the East Coast.” She knew that part of it was true: he was enough of a hokey razorback to walk around campus wearing a bright red V-neck vest hand-knitted for him by a relative. But it was also partly a ruse, a way for him to lure people into underestimating him. He would play that just-a-humble-southern-boy game, teasingly, even with Denise's mother. He sent her a note that year after a visit thanking her for letting Denise drive him to the airport in New
York—“
A small
price to pay,” he wrote with mock self-ridicule, “to get rid of the southern plague.” Later, when he learned that Denise would be working as an intern at an export-import firm in the financial district the next summer, he wrote Mrs. Hyland another self-effacing, pun-filled note: “Take care of Miss Financial District. Make sure she doesn't become an ‘export' to someone of ‘import.' I wouldn't have a prayer—oh yes, even Baptists have those.”

T
HE
times were changing rapidly on college campuses by the spring of 1966, but still not at Georgetown, which remained decidedly mainstream, all beer and no drugs. War protests on campus amounted to fifteen or twenty peaceful souls holding vigils near the statue of Georgetown founder John Carroll. The editorialists in
The Courier
maintained their prowar position, arguing: “American withdrawal at the present time is absurd. We are a world power engaged in a world struggle and the liberal neo-isola-tionists among us should realize the need for effective use of this power if our position and their liberties are to be maintained.” Some students were starting to worry about the military draft, however, as the troop numbers in Vietnam increased. “
All males
harbor fears over the Armed Forces Qualification Test,” one
Hoya
columnist wrote. “Fear not, we have the solutions: Poke out right ear drum; kiss your Army recruiter; shave your legs during the physical; burn your best friend's draft card; become one of George Hamilton's buddies; get religious convictions, or for that matter criminal ones will do; finally, if all else fails, enlist. Patriots never pass physicals.”