Simmons, Ronald, 450
Singer, Daniel, 102, 126, 129, 136, 145, 151, 168, 243
Sirabella, Vincent, 231-32
Slater, Rodney, 403
Smermova, Marie, 214, 215
Smith, Leslie, 76
Smith, Preston, 272
Smith, Ray, Jr., 118-19, 364, 399
Smith, Steve, 288, 290, 294, 330, 337, 351, 352, 355, 364, 366, 367, 396
Smith, William J., 75
Smith, W. Maurice, 403, 413, 424, 431
Snow, Edgar, 216
Sorensen, Ted, 54
Soviet Union, 138-39, 145-46, 176, 330, 331
Clinton in, 206, 209-13
Sparkman, John D., 83
Spence, Roy, 275, 276, 277, 282, 283, 284, 459-60
Sperling, Godfrey, Jr., 460
Spotila, John, 70, 168, 231
Spurlin, Virgil, 44, 45, 48, 200, 299, 424
Staley, Carolyn Yeldell, 41, 42, 43, 45-47, 55, 67, 94, 323, 342, 359, 375, 382, 399, 422, 426, 427, 443, 463, 464
Clinton’s friendship with, 108-9, 116-117, 147
Staley, Jerry, 426
Starr, John Robert, 408, 429
Stearns, Rick, 128, 132, 140, 142, 153, 158-61, 170, 178, 179, 183, 185, 189, 192, 194-96, 200, 202, 220-22, 243, 260, 266, 268, 289, 346, 388
Steel, Ronald, 159
Steenburgen, Mary, 450
Stephens, Jackson, 350
Stephens, W. R. “Witt,” 75-76
Stevenson, Adlai, 274
Stevenson, Wilf, 134, 140-41, 142-43, 145
Stitt, Clive, 134
Stolberg, Irv, 229
Stone, Alan, 318
Stone, Ira, 148, 163
Stratton, Richard, 17, 18, 19
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 257
Supreme Court, U.S., 71, 235, 263, 293
Sutton, Eddie, 342, 351, 362
Talbott, Nelson Strobridge, III, “Strobe,” 101-2, 127-28, 129, 145-46, 150, 168, 175-76, 210, 224, 243, 244, 259, 260, 261, 300, 346, 436, 448, 463
at Oxford, 132, 145-46, 153, 159, 161, 164, 196, 197, 216, 217, 220, 223
Talmadge, Eugene, 29
Taunton, Larry, 15, 17, 18
Taylor, Donna, 32
Tell, David, 205
Texas, McGovern’s campaign in, 265-86
Thomas, Dylan, 194, 195
Thomas, Herman, 181
Thomas, Mike, 148, 181-82, 198
Thomason, Harry, 447
Thomason, Linda Bloodworth, 447
Thomasson, Patsy, 423
Thrift, Jill, 220-22
Time, 102, 125, 216, 242, 346, 436
Trabulsi, Judy, 275, 276, 283, 447
Trimble, Jim, 87, 291, 301, 302
Trotter, Scott, 410
Truman, Harry S, 417, 444
Tucker, Jim Guy, 351, 354, 400-401, 402
Turnbull, Lucy, 164
Tutwiler, Guy, 324-25
Tyson, Don, 305, 331, 342-43, 350, 359
Tyson, Randal, 331-32
Tyson Foods, 369, 370, 454
Unruh, Paula, 456
Vaught, Carl, 451
Vaught, Mary Frances, 433
Vaught, Worley Oscar, 424, 433-34, 435, 451
Vereker, Katherine, 153, 374
Verveer, Phil, 61, 63, 70, 88, 313
Vietnam Moratorium Committee, 186
Vietnam War, 54, 64, 147, 148, 163, 165, 181-82, 217, 236, 255, 265, 272, 324
Clinton’s opposition to, 67, 85-86, 94, 95, 97, 105, 107, 157, 162, 164, 174, 178-79, 186-87, 188-99, 200-205, 239, 453
political and public opposition to, 73, 85-86, 96, 97, 105-6, 110-11, 114, 127-28, 135-36, 151-52, 157-59, 162, 171, 177, 178-79, 183, 187-89, 224, 226-27, 267-68
Wagner, Carl, 381, 441, 442, 463
Walker, Martin, 135, 136, 154
Wallace, Doug, 298, 320, 326, 333, 334, 335, 336, 340, 348, 396
Wallace, George C., 16, 75, 114
Walls, Frances, 364
Wal-Mart, 369, 454, 459
Walsh, James, 57
Walters, Mrs. (nanny), 35
Ward, Tom, 103, 177-78
Washington Post, 19, 191-92, 194, 317, 388, 446
Wasserman, Gary, 64
Watergate scandal, 277, 285-86, 291-92, 296, 297, 307-15, 329, 369
Watts, Duke, 95, 148, 163
Waugh, Jim, 155, 156, 157
Weddington, Sarah, 343
Weicker, Lowell P., Jr., 227-28, 230, 232
Wellesley College, 246, 248, 255-59
Wexler, Anne, 227-28, 230, 231, 232, 233, 266
Weyerhaeuser timber company, 365-67
Whillock, Carl, 291, 295-96, 299, 301, 302, 303-4, 344
White, Frank, 376, 377, 378, 384, 385, 391, 393, 395, 397, 398, 402, 403, 406, 412, 429, 438, 446
White, John C., 274-75, 276, 278, 300, 380
White, Randy. 333-34, 361-62, 363, 364, 373, 379, 389, 391, 394-95, 448, 455
Whitewater investments, 302, 355-56, 373-74, 430, 431
Williams, Edward Bennett, 128
Williams, Lee, 81-82, 83, 84, 86, 114, 115, 170-71, 173
Williams, Nancy, 275, 276
Williams, Sir Edgar, 129, 132, 153, 164-65, 206, 223, 261
Williamson, Tom, 120, 124, 132, 133, 143, 187, 211, 243, 391
Willis, Carol, 294, 403, 414
Wilson, Rodney, 324
Witcover, Jules, 397
Woodward, C. Vann, 365
Wooldridge, Letha Ann, 48
Wright, Betsey, 275-76, 277, 283-84, 342, 349, 358, 391, 394, 397, 402, 404, 406, 408, 412-13, 420, 421, 422, 427, 431, 434, 435, 439, 440-41, 442, 443, 445, 446, 447, 450-51, 452-53, 454-455, 463-64
Wright, Georgie, 32
Wright, Lindsey and Jennings, 392
Yale Law Journal, 226, 239, 246-47, 249
Yale Law School, 168, 198, 204, 208, 223, 231, 291, 297, 307, 308, 369
Clinton’s first year at, 225-26, 233-45, 246-48, 259, 263-64
Clinton’s third year at, 284, 285
faculty of, 235-37
pass-fail system at, 226, 288
Yale Review of Law and Social Action, 249
Yale University, 127, 145
Yeldell, Carolyn, see Staley, Carolyn Yeldell
Yeldell, Linda, 94
Yeldell, Walter, 47
Young, Tommy, 148
Young Republicans, 62, 116, 255
Zaguskin, Yasha, 197, 216
William Jefferson Blythe III. Hope, Arkansas, 1950.
Virginia Kelley and William Jefferson Blythe.
Roger Clinton and Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton, with his mother and half-brother, Roger.
In a cosmopolitan resort town with big hands featured in all the top hotels and nightclubs, it was no embarrassment to play tenor sax for the award-winning high school dance band; or to lead the Pep Band during basketball season; or to form a jazz band and play riffs in the auditorium during lunch hour.
The young men of Boys Nation were invited to lunch with the senators from their state in the Senate Dining Room. Bill Clinton sat between Senator John McClelan(left) and Senator J. William Fulbright. Clinton had already studied Fulbright’s life and career and considered the intellectual Arkansan his first political role model.
The highlight of Boys Nation was a visit to the Rose Garden. After a brief speech, President Kennedy greeted the boys, and Clinton made sure he was the first to shake his hand. Later, at graduation, when friends and teachers gave him their yearbooks, Clinton often turned to the page with this picture on it and signed below the photograph, which has subsequently become famous.
Georgetown, 1965. As the student officer responsible for making the incoming freshmen feel welcome, Clinton had the opportunity to make new friends and build his consituency at the same time. No one knew how to navigate the campus more skillfully.
The five seniors who shared a house on Potomat Avenue were “boringly respectable.” Within the wider spectrum of sixties behavior, Clinton and his housemates were trim and tame. Despite
the war in Vietnam and the rioting following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Jr., Tom Campbell (right) thought of it as “a sort of never-never-land up there.”
Clinton with Denise Hyland (center couple), his steady girlfriend at Georgetown, at a black tie ball with friends—Kit Ashby (far left), Jim Moore (fourth from left), and Tom Campbell (fourth from right).
For his first full-time campaign adventure. Clinton worked on Judge Frank Holt’s run for the Democratic nomination for governor of Arkansas. Holt lost the election but helped Clinton land a job on Senator Fulbright’s staff.
The young recruits, a coterie of college student leaders who became known as “the Holt Generation,” often worked sixteen-hour days. Clinton eventually became a chauffeur for the judge’s wife and two daughters, who barnstormed the state. When the route took them to Hope, Clinton asked if he could give the speech, since his grandmother would be in the audience.
For the Rhodes Scholars in the class of 1968, being in England may have removed them from the chaos and excesses of student activism back home, but it could not rid them of their anxieties and concerns about the draft.
No one had expected Clinton back for his second year at Oxford—his draft status had seemed so hopeless. So Clinton freeloaded for a while with friends before being invited to share a flat at 46 Leckford Road with Strobe Talbott (left), the Russia scholar, and Frank Aller (right), the China scholar and draft resister. Aller’s suicide in 1971 marked an end to the sixties for their Rhodes group. Clinton maintained a strong relationship with Talbott, and chose him to be ambassador at large for Russia and the other former Soviet republics and later appointed him deputy secretary of state.
In 1986, eighteen years after the Rhodes Scholars of the class of 1968 sailed across the Atlantic, Robert Reich, who was teaching politics and economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in the American Oxonian: “Rumor has it that Bill will be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. I just made up that minor, but by the time you read this, the rumor will have spread to the ends of the nation.” Reich’s work on industrial policy and world trade became a cornerstone of Clinton’s economic thinking, and Reich was appointed secretary of labor.
Clinton was never more in his element than on the campaign trail. Every hand he shook, even corner store he stopped in, every pie supper he attended, helped him transform his image from the long-haired Rhodes Scholar and law professor into a young man of the people.
After working on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry against President Nixon, Hillary Rodham joined Clinton in Arkansas and took a teaching position at the law school. While Clinton was a diffuse and easygoing professor, Rodham was precise and demanding.
Clinton and his chief campaign aide, Paul Fray (left), standing by the tally board on election night in 1974. Clinton lost his race for Congress. The following morning. Clinton was back in downtown Fayetteville shaking hands. He was warming up. The next race had already begun.
With his own election for Arkansas attorney general locked up, Clinton signed on to work on the presidential campaign of fellow southerner Jimmy Carter. Three years later. President 7arter sent Governor-elect Clinton a congratulatory note: “You and I will succeed in meeting the goals for our country by working closely together to serve those whom we represent.”
In January 1979, buti Clinton was sworn in as the youngest governor in the United States in four decades. For the friends of Clinton and Rodham, this first inaugural had the aura of a generational rite of passage. For Virginia Kelley, it was a moment she had been waiting for—and guiding her son toward—his whole life.
Governor Clinton meeting with Brigadier General James (Bulldog) Drummond (right) at Fort Chaffee after the Cuban refugee riot. Clinton was given high marks for his performance under pressure, hut his close friendship with President Carter became increasingly strained and was then held against him by Arkansas voters.
The governor at the Hope Watermelon Festival. Since his college days, Clinton had been at ease sticking out his oversize right hand and working conversations back to his humble roots—and the giant watermelons of Hope.
With Clinton in the governor’s office, Hillary Rodham seemed to have little difficulty embracing the acquisitive and competitive corporate life she had once repudiated. Her decision to join the Rose Law Firm, which represented, among others, the holy trinity of Arkansas business and industry—Stephens Inc., Tyson Foods, and Wal-Mart—later provoked questions of conflict of interest.
Vincent Foster, Jr. (below), and Webster Hubbell (right) were Hillary’s partners at the Rose Law Firm and business associates. They would both join President Clinton’s administration in high positions.
The 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta was the third consecutive convention at which Clinton had made the coveted list of speakers. After the first sentence, the speech went downhill. After a few minutes, Clinton could see that he had lost the audience. At the twenty-one-minute mark, ABC cut away and people could he heard shouting, “Get the hook!”
By the time Clinton began his campaign for a fifth term, he was such a large, familiar figure in the state that he faced the ultimate political paradox. His self-image had always been one of action and change, yet now he had come to represent permanence and the status quo.
Clinton and Al Gore at the national meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council in May 1991. The buzz among journalists and political opinion makers was that Clinton’s keynote speech established him as a serious national figure who seemed to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do as president.
On October 3, 1991, with his wife, Hillary, and their daughter, Chelsea, at his side, and with many of the key figures in his life—including his mother, Virginia Kelley, and friends Carolyn Staley, David Leopoulos, Tommy Caplan, and Bob Reich—in attendance, Clinton announced his candidacy for president.
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