First In His Class (19 page)

His housemates on Potomac Avenue noticed another way in which Clinton had adapted to the Capitol Hill environment. He started being chronically late. Time in the world of Congress was a free-form concept: hearings started late, congressmen came and left and schmoozed as they pleased, only occasionally disciplined by the buzzer attached to their office clocks alerting them that a vote was imminent. The atmosphere was built around the notion that the rest of the world could wait. And so it became with Clinton.
His friends
would plan a dinner or dance and wait for Clinton to show up, and after an hour or two had gone by, he would arrive and say, “Oh, sorry, I was talking to somebody.” Usually, Tom Campbell would discover, Clinton had been talking to “some nincompoop about nothing.”
Campbell, who had lived with Clinton for four years and knew his idiosyn-crasies, finally stopped expecting Clinton anywhere on time. “We would just say, ‘Here's where we're going, come when you get there.' You could see him change during his time on the Hill where he met all those diverse people. He was always gone, always talking to people, always late.”

Even as Clinton's comings and goings grew tardy and unpredictable, his mind sought order in other ways. Rudiger Lowe, a German studying at Wesleyan University in Connecticut under a Fulbright scholarship, was taken aback by the preciseness of a letter he received from Clinton assigning him a topic at a Georgetown-sponsored student conference on the Atlantic Community.
Clinton not
only informed Lowe what his topic was and the specific length of his paper, but went on to suggest how it might be organized. Lowe's topic was the US. role in unification efforts with Eastern Europe. Clinton outlined it with Roman numerals and a's and b's.
It was
the way Clinton took notes in class, and prefigured his style as a politician later, when he would respond to questions by breaking answers into points one, two, and three, or a, b, and c.

On the eve of the conference, the Georgetown sponsors held a party for the European students in attendance. Clinton, who had studied German to fulfill his language requirement in the School of Foreign Service, ap-proached Lowe and inquired in German, “Are you the student from Germany?” They spent the rest of the party chatting in German. The next day Clinton asked Lowe whether he would like to meet Senator Fulbright. Lowe knew that “Fulbright was this great senator challenging LBJ,” and thought there would be little chance of getting to meet him. “But Clinton went out and made a phone call and came back and said, ‘We're having breakfast with him tomorrow morning.'” Who is this fellow Clinton? Lowe began thinking to himself. Later in his tour of America, Lowe met Robert F. Kennedy and Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley (“How do you stay in power so long?” Lowe asked the big-city boss, to which Daley offered a chuckle), but for all the famous people he met in America that fall, he was most struck by the young organizer of the conference at Georgetown. He left the United States with an old German adage flashing in his mind about Bill Clinton: From this wood great politicians are carved.

E
VERY
morning that November
, Virginia Clinton asked the same question of her gravely ill husband: “Don't you think we ought to call Bill?” The treatments had not worked. It was not radiation sickness but cancer that was ravaging his body. The fight that had finally won him the respect of his stepson was surely lost. Roger Clinton was dying fast. “Not yet,” he kept saying to his wife, until finally the morning came when he emerged from
the bathroom and said, “It's time”—and Virginia called her son Bill at Georgetown and had him fly home to Hot Springs.

They had known each other for seventeen years now, Roger and Bill, since the boy was a four-year-old named Billy Blythe, then and always the prize of his mother's life in a way that no other man could be. What Roger gave him other than a new last name and years of fear and anguish he was only now able to comprehend. He had seen the old man drink too much and beat his mother, and he had once wanted him gone; but now that the leavetaking would be forever, he started to understand why his mother had ignored his advice six years earlier when he had pleaded with her not to take Roger back. He came to realize that “
somewhere deep
down in-side,” Roger “could never understand what was good about himself,” and that when he drank too much, “all of his darkest fears would come out.” But Roger had always adored Bill. It had been apparent several times when Bill visited him at the hospital at Duke. Next to Bill, Roger felt inadequate. He was just an auto parts clerk with a drinking problem and cancer eating away at his face. He could not see any good in himself. But in his wife's first son, who bore his name, he saw the promise of the world.

The house at 213 Scully Street seemed like a hospital wing when Bill got home.
Roger looked
pitiful, his weight forty pounds below normal, his mouth constantly drooling. He was attended to day and night by volunteer nurses, Virginia's friends and colleagues pulling eight-hour shifts. Doctors who had worked with Virginia shuttled in and out, reading charts, prescribing drugs, advising the family on how little time was left. Virginia would not enter the sick room to see her husband at the end. She did not want to because “it was not a pretty sight to see.”

Mary Jo Nelson, Bill's friend from high school, was with him when Roger died. She had gone to the house to deliver pain-killing drugs from the pharmacy where she worked. She watched Bill follow the stretcher out to the driveway and stand there, wordless, as the ambulance conveying his stepfather's body rolled down the street, the wagon's red taillights brightening in the distance as it braked at the corner, turned left, and disap-peared. Bill stood there, shoulders slumped, staring through the November mist. Two fathers dead—and in a sense he knew neither of them. He put his big left arm around Mary Jo and walked back into the house.

T
HE
notion that Bill Clinton
might be selected as a Rhodes Scholar was the subject of a running joke among his housemates, who assumed that Rhodes winners had to be not only A students and campus leaders (categories where Clinton fit the bill) but also athletes of some sort. These good friends knew Clinton's athletic prowess, or lack thereof, all too well. He
had started running the previous summer but was still somewhat out of shape. He had never played a varsity sport in high school or college. Even his mother called him “gawky and not quite coordinated enough.” As a touch football player, his best talent was winning arguments about whether someone had been touched. As a basketball player, he was lumbering, his feet seemingly glued to the gym floor. In golf, he was a mid-handicap hacker. He was a decent bowler, but bowling shirts seemed a bit unstylish for the Rhodes scene.

But Clinton always had a plan. This time he decided that he could best demonstrate his sporting manner by employing his greatest skill: politics. He maneuvered his way into a slot as chairman of the Student Athletic Commission in time for the Rhodes interviews. The Rhodes selection process had two levels, state and regional. Clinton survived the Arkansas competition in Little Rock and reached the regional finals in New Orleans. By then, he and his counterparts in the regionale across the country came to realize that they had harbored a misconception about the athletic skill requirement. Although the Rhodes questionnaire asked applicants to list activities that demonstrated their “fondness for and success in sports,” track stars and quarterbacks fell away while debaters and Shakespeare scholars advanced.
George Butte
in the Southwest region said playing the concert piano was his sport. Robert Reich in the New England region was a self-described “anti-athlete who vigorously avoided athletic events.” Compared to these fellows, Clinton seemed less the clumsy ham loaf and more like Jim Thorpe.

The interview
process for Rhodes candidates ranks among the most peculiar enterprises in academia, equal parts dissertation defense, locker-room sizing up, television quiz show, cocktail party bull session, debating society, and drawing of straws. Some of the young men were the proverbial big fish from smaller ponds, who felt intimidated the moment they walked into the traditional interview eve cocktail parties where candidates and their judges—the Rhodes secretaries from the states in their region-sipped sherry and chatted. Darryl Gless out of tiny Schuyler, Nebraska, felt so nauseated after the cocktail party that he went back to his room, called his sponsoring professor at the University of Nebraska, and said he wanted to go home. The whole scene, he said, made him angry. “A lot of the guys were using the occasion to show off and members of the selection committee were provoking confrontations. They'd pick up a point from one person and turn to me and say, ‘Do you agree with that?'”

Some candidates, especially those recruited by the Rhodes networks at Harvard and Yale, which in those years supplied as many as one-third of the thirty-two scholars, seemed to be sure things and sprinted through the process with nary a worry. Nelson Strobridge Talbott III was one such sure
bet—a squash-playing scholar of Russian and chairman of the
Yale Daily News
, who had spent the previous summer in London as a
Time
magazine intern and was hand-picked for a go at the Rhodes by his Yale mentors. During Talbott's final interview, one lawyer on the selection committee decided that the young man was having it too easy, and so started asking him a series of arcane questions about the oil depletion allowance about which, Talbott later confessed, “I didn't know shit from shinola.” But just as Talbott was struggling with an answer, the chairman of the committee interrupted. “I have a question, too,” said the chairman. “How in the Mid-west did you learn how to play classical guitar?” The lawyer now stewed in his seat. It was as if he had broken an unwritten rule: the chosen recognize the chosen.

Everyone got an odd question or nasty challenge from someone on his selection committee. Mike Shea, a psychology major from the University of Iowa, encountered a professor from Luther College who badgered him mercilessly for not having read a certain psychohistory of Martin Luther. Keith Marshall was asked, “As an Episcopalian, how do you feel about that issue?” To which Marshall responded, “I am not an Episcopalian.” Certainly the strangest scene that year unfolded at the interviews in New York, where Daniel Singer and one other candidate competed for the last of four regional slots. Singer waited in the hallway as the selection committee grilled the other student. The fellow finally emerged, ashen-faced. “They asked me the craziest stuff,” he muttered. Singer was called forward and took his seat. “We've about run out of ways to settle this, you're such good candidates,” the chairman said. “So we want you to debate this point: Why should the cow jump over the moon?”

So often in his adult career as a medical researcher, Singer recalled decades later, he had hoped that some sort of divine inspiration would strike him and he would say “aha” and have a mystery of life solved or a question answered—so often he had hoped for that and so often it had not happened. But it did happen once, back then in that stuffy room in Manhattan with the somber selection committee members staring at him and his Rhodes on the line and a nursery rhyme clanging around in his head. All of a sudden he was loose. He found an answer out of nowhere.

“It's pretty obvious that the cow should jump over the moon,” he said, “because the purpose of having cows is to produce more milk and you need heat on the udders for effective milk production so at night instead of wasting time if you could get the cows to jump over the moon they'll get warm from the refracted light and keep the udders heated and the milk flowing.”

Daniel Singer made Rhodes Scholar.

Good fortune
came to Bill Clinton in other ways. The first was that he was competing for a scholarship from Arkansas and the South, which many
then considered the least competitive of the eight Rhodes regions—not th
at the
scholars selected from the South were any less outstanding, but that there were fewer of them. Tom Ward, a Rhodes Scholar in the class of 1967 from Meridian, Mississippi, considered the South, “candidly, the easiest region to get in.” From his area, Clinton was competing against a relative handful of equally talented candidates, according to Kit Ashby, “whereas if he were trying for a Rhodes from New York he would have faced hundreds.”

Here was another situation in which Clinton's provincial roots worked to his advantage. East Coast contemporaries often seemed puzzled by his rise. How could someone come out of Hope, out of Hot Springs, out of Arkansas, and move up so surely and quickly? The answer may rest in the presumption of the question Hope and Hot Springs nourished Clinton as few larger communities could have done. And Arkansas, unpretentious, slow moving, relatively uneducated, inordinately proud and possessive of its favorite sons, was the land of opportunity for a young man on the rise.

At the South regional in New Orleans, Clinton told Arkansas stories with gusto and made it known that he intended to return to his home state after his academic training and embark on a career in government service. Keith Marshall, a candidate from Louisiana and Yale, who was an artist, stood on the balcony of the Royal Orleans Hotel in the French Quarter with Clinton that Friday night in December. They waved down at the jubilant crowds moving along the narrow street below. People waved back. Clinton turned to Marshall with a smile and said, “This is just like being president of the United States.” During his appearance before the selection committee the next day, Clinton was asked several questions concerning politics and a few related to medicine. One interviewer asked him about heart transplants—something he had known nothing about until the day before, when on the flight to New Orleans he had read a magazine article on the subject.

Clinton survived the cut, along with Marshall, Paul Parish, a diminutive English major from the University of Mississippi, and Walter Pratt, another student from Mississippi who attended Vanderbilt. The four selected scholars were separated from the eight who had been rejected and led to a small room, where they were interviewed one by one by a local newspaper reporter. Clinton was the first to be interviewed. Parish listened intently to the young man from Arkansas and at first was angered by what he heard. Clinton was talking about “how proud his mother would be, how excited she would be, how she was looking forward to this so much and all her faith in him was going to be worth it.” Listening to Clinton, Parish thought about his own mother, and how he would not dare say how much he wanted to please her, even though he did. When it was Parish's turn to be interviewed, he said he did not want to be a human interest story.