The Washington Post, by David Maraniss

If lives are molded by purpose and chance, the first defining moment for Bill Clinton was what might be called the ultimate accident. It occurred before he was born -- in darkness and rain on a desolate stretch of Highway 61 four miles west of Sikeston in southern Missouri. There, on May 18, 1946, at 11 p.m., a gregarious young traveling salesman named William Jefferson Blythe III lost control of his black Buick when a tire blew out as he was speeding home to visit his pregnant wife.

He was coming from Chicago. She was staying with her parents down in the southwest Arkansas town of Hope. The car skidded across the median strip and off the slick road, rolling over again and again before coming to a stop, upside down, its lights illuminating a nearby farm field. Rescuers searched four hours before finding Blythe, who had been thrown 100 feet into a rain-filled ditch in which he drowned.

Three months after Blythe's death, his son was born in Hope. The widow named him William Jefferson Blythe IV. Fifteen years later, that boy took the surname of a stepfather. The world now knows him as Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas and candidate for president. Since he first became aware that he entered the world a fatherless son, Clinton, nee Billy Blythe, has been shaped by that event, by the shadows of death. Thoughts of his father's early demise, he says, have alternately pushed him into periods of single-minded ambition or careless expediency or intense reflection.

"For a long time I thought I would have to live for both of us in some ways," Clinton said last week as he glided through the darkness in the back seat of a limousine carrying him from Annapolis to Washington. "I think that's one reason I was in such a hurry when I was younger. I used to be criticized by people who said, 'Well, he's too ambitious,' but to me, because I grew up sort of subconsciously on his timetable, I never knew how much time I would have. . . . It gave me an urgent sense to do everything I could in life as quickly as I could."

This self-analysis came during a week when Clinton's life reached another turning point, a time of enormous opportunity as well as peril. His week was bracketed by two magazine covers, one in Time that served to anoint him unofficially as the Democrat to beat in the 1992 presidential nomination race, and another in the sensationalist tabloid Star that shifted allegations of his sexual infidelity from the realm of widespread whispering to unsubstantiated shouting.

Both articles, and indeed everything that has been written and said about Clinton during his emergence in recent weeks, can be reduced to the same essential concern, a question asked in many ways: Is he for real? What does he really stand for? Can he be trusted?

The resume' definition of Clinton is impressive: Band major at Hot Springs High. Delegate to Boys Nation. Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduate. Rhodes scholar. Yale Law School graduate. Arkansas attorney general. Youngest U.S. governor since Harold Stassen. Youngest ex-governor in history. Longest-tenured governor in the country since his comeback victory. Leader of the National Governors Association and Democratic Leadership Conference. First baby boomer to emerge as a serious contender for president.

The ways in which his friends and foes define him is more complicated. A colleague calls him a brilliant synthesizer of new ideas. A former aide says he is the one politician in the United States capable of reconnecting the people with their government. An old friend says he has an inexhaustible joy of life. An old political opponent says he is an incredible charmer. A onetime ally complains that he is so prone to conciliation that he chooses congenial duplicity over honest confrontation. And a former ally, in an immortal metaphor, says Clinton "would pat you on the back while pissing down your leg."

In recent months, as Clinton has fleshed out his life for a posse of campaign biographers, he at times has seemed almost to put himself under psychoanalysis and has taken to describing his first 45 years as a journey. He sees his political evolution as representative of his generation, from anti-Establishment impulses during the era of civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate to the less convulsive but in some ways more lasting concerns of middle age and middle America such as education and community.

Whether that association is closer to truth or sophistry is open to debate. There is no such question about the representativeness of Clinton's personal evolution -- it is wholly, uniquely, his own.

William Jefferson Blythe III, the father Bill Clinton never knew, was in many ways the earlier image of his son -- a north Texas farm boy, tall and charming, eager to please and to laugh, full of life, at ease with people of all types, always patting friends on the back or talking to them with a hand grasping each shoulder. Never getting a chance to meet this man was the first of a series of defining events for Clinton. Each one affected him in a different way, yet revealed certain familiar, predictable patterns of behavior.Coping With Family Turmoil

The name Clinton came from Roger Clinton, a car dealer who married Bill's mother, Virginia, in 1950, when Bill was 4. The remarriage in a sense gave Bill and Virginia a nuclear family again -- they had been separated for long stretches during Bill's infancy as the mother finished her studies in nursing in New Orleans while her son lived with his maternal grandparents in Hope. But by the time Roger and Virginia and Bill moved from Hope up the highway to Hot Springs, this was no longer your average nuclear family.

Roger Clinton was a good man with a mean streak, tormented and tormenting. He was an alcoholic and his alcoholism provided Bill with his second momentous test. When Bill was 5, his mother one day tried to take him to pay a visit to her grandmother, who was on her deathbed in a hospital in Hope. Roger told her she could not go. When she decided to leave anyway, he took out his shotgun and fired a wild shot into the ceiling. Bill never forgot it.

Virginia Clinton was a hard-working nurse who dyed a white glamour streak down the middle of her black hair and painted eyebrows high on her forehead. She drove around town in new convertibles and loved to visit the Oaklawn racetrack where she became a regular with her $ 2 bets. For as many concerns as she had in her own life, she always seemed to be worrying about people who had things worse. "My constant memory is of her coming home after work, plopping her purse down, and saying about someone else's troubles, 'It just isn't fair,'" said David Leopoulos, Clinton's childhood friend.

Billy Clinton was a bright, charismatic child who sought order amid chaos. He was the very model of responsible achievement. While never lecturing his mother, whom he adored, he made it clear that parts of her lifestyle were not for him. She took him to the racetrack once, when he was a teenager, and he left after one race, saying to her, "That was the dumbest thing I ever did." Since Bill played the tenor saxophone, his mother invited him to the Vapors nightclub one night to hear Jack Teagarden, but as soon as the music stopped, Clinton turned and said, "Mother, can I go home now?" He attended Park Avenue Baptist Church regularly and was proud of the leather Bible inscribed: William J. Blythe IV.

He was at the top of everything at Hot Springs High: best musician in the band, leading Latin scholar, math whiz, winner of the Elks Club leadership award -- equally admired by teachers and his classmates. He had a proclivity for memorizing things ranging from all of Elvis's hits to the speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He identified himself as a Democrat and an integrationist, and considered the high point of his young life the day he went to the White House and shook President John F. Kennedy's hand in the Rose Garden. The political ambition was already there -- he had always admired the life of an uncle who served in the Arkansas Senate -- but the trip to Washington intensified it.

But all of that was outside the home. Inside was something else. Roger Clinton, a kind and decent man to others, was constantly getting drunk and beating his wife or threatening to beat her. Twice, young Bill called his mother's lawyer to summon police to the Clinton residence. By the time Bill was 15, his mother decided to seek a divorce.

In recent interviews, Clinton and his mother have recounted what they have described as a pivotal scene where Bill barged into his parents' bedroom, ordered his stepfather to stand up, and warned him never to touch Virginia in anger again. The beatings then stopped, they said. But the family scene comes across somewhat differently in the testimony Bill Clinton provided at the divorce proceedings in 1962.

When asked whether he knew why his parents had separated, the 15-year-old testified in part: "He has threatened my mother on a number of occasions and because of his nagging, arguing with my mother, I can tell that she is unhappy and it is impossible in my opinion for them to continue to live together as man and wife. The last occasion in which I went to my mother's aid, he threatened to mash my face in if I took her part."

Clinton said during a recent interview that he had "blocked out" his memories of testifying for his mother until reminded of it. In several profiles, he has been quoted as saying that he formally changed his name from Blythe to Clinton after his mother and stepfather had reconciled and remarried. When asked why he testified at the trial as William J. Clinton, he said he could not remember when he changed his name.

How did the internal dynamics of the family shape Bill Clinton?

"Bill and I talked a lot about how many hills we've climbed," said his mother, who divorced Roger but then remarried him out of pity before he died of cancer in 1968, the second of three husbands who would die before she married her current husband, Richard Kelley.

"It seems like every hill we climbed, he just got stronger," she added. "It seemed like everything that happened to us was a character-builder for Bill. He is a survivor. He felt tremendous responsibility to protect me when he was too young to have to."

Clinton said his experiences during those years had a rebounding effect on him. He acted "40 when I was 16," and, as he has said a few times recently, "16 when I was 40." It is a glib line but, because of the context of recent events, can be interpreted perhaps too loosely. Clinton is a fun-loving fellow, but no one has ever called him wild or outwardly reckless. If there is another side to him, if he has played out some impulses through sexual indiscretions, it does not seem to have had clear connections to other parts of his life.

Clinton has a younger stepbrother, Roger Clinton Jr., who provided Bill with another difficult lesson. Roger Jr. proved to be chemically dependent just like his father and was arrested and convicted on cocaine charges in the mid-1980s while Clinton was governor. After Roger Jr. had served a year in federal prison, he went through a dependency program with his mother and Bill, who said the process helped him learn more about himself.

"People say my number one weakness is that I'm conflict averse," Clinton said. "I think part of that is I'm always trying to work things out because that's the role I played for a long time. On the other hand, I think I did develop enormous skills in understanding human nature -- the darker and brighter sides of human nature -- because of all the things I've lived through, and that gives me skills at bringing people together."

On McGovern's Campaign

The political side of Clinton, as well as his sophistication, evolved during his years at Georgetown and Oxford and Yale. He took the inquisitiveness of his youth and applied it to anything he encountered. Hot Springs friend David Leopoulos visited Clinton in England and remembers that the first thing they did was visit an art museum where Clinton lectured him on each painting and what was going through the mind of the artist during the creative process.

It was at the end of those university days, in 1972, that Clinton reached the next defining moment in his life. He and Taylor Branch, a future Pulitzer Prize chronicler of the civil rights era, served as managers of George McGovern's presidential campaign in Texas. All the dimensions of modern American politics were revealed to Clinton and Branch during those few months.

Texas was a hopeless cause for McGovern -- he eventually lost by a 2-1 ratio -- but it was invaluable for Clinton as the place where he learned how to transfer to the political world the conciliation skills he had acquired in his home as a teenager.

Factions within the McGovern camp were constantly grousing about who could sit where at a fund-raiser or what group had better access to the candidate's ear. All of this dismayed Branch, who recently recalled that he could not reconcile "the gravity of the issues at stake with the silliness of the decisions we had to make on a daily basis." Clinton, on the other hand, "loved the game," said Branch. And he was exceptionally good at it.

An essential part of Clinton's persona during that period was his ability to immerse himself in the anti-Establishment milieu of his contemporaries while at the same time maintaining a deep respect for the traditional "yellow dog" conservative Democratic roots that he came to know in his Arkansas youth. Those who have observed Clinton closely over the years say it is not so much a need to straddle the fence, as skeptics presume, as a sincere empathy.

"He seemed fully at home in a roomful of county chairmen or a roomful of radicals," said Branch. That trait remains central to his presidential campaign and was in full evidence on the day last week when he came to Washington: Within a four-hour period he raised $ 75,000 at a fundraiser of the Potomac elite, played the saxophone for a crowd of young people at a downtown nightclub and chatted late into the night with Jesse L. Jackson.

During their days in Texas in 1972, Clinton and other organizers were driven by their desire to end the war in Vietnam. Clinton had opposed the war since his days at Georgetown, when he worked in the office of Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), an articulate war dissenter. But in Texas he searched for ways to expand McGovern's base. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was his Yale Law School classmate and who also worked in Texas that year, put it this way: "Bill was always saying, 'Look, we've got to expand our base to appeal to people who don't see the world the way we do.' "

The McGovern campaign, like all campaigns, was redolent with sexual politics. Betsey Wright, a McGovern worker who later became Clinton's closest aide in Arkansas, said it was in Texas that she first noticed Clinton being surrounded by female admirers. "I've watched the groupie women around Bill for 20 years, fawning all over him," she said recently, adding: "Did he enjoy it? Sure he did. It used to make me mad how much he enjoyed it. It's an ego thing with men. It's part of the equation of politics and power and sex. Bill Clinton withstood more of that than most men."

The issue of women and Clinton, Wright said, was something she constantly dealt with during the 1980s when she worked for him in the Arkansas governor's office. "Ninety-nine percent of it is not true," Wright said. "And there is 1 percent where I didn't know where he was. I think there was a lot of wishful thinking on the part of some women. Things that were not."

Wright is a close friend of both Clinton and his wife, Hillary, and has often said that she would have preferred that Hillary, a brilliant lawyer and speaker, had been the one to rise to political prominence. The Clintons, Wright said, had a unique relationship. "Everything about their relationship is passionate, whether it is political, recreational, personal, raising their child [their daughter Chelsea, now 11]. There is no milquetoast in that relationship. I can't imagine him without her."

The First Political Loss

In the fall of 1980, as Election Day approached, Bill Clinton, for one of the few times in his life, could not find a way to overcome a losing situation. He was the chief executive of Arkansas at age 34, the youngest governor in the nation, hailed as the boy wonder of the Democratic Party. And the wheels were coming off his bid to win reelection to a second term against his Republican challenger, a boisterous political neophyte named Frank White.

One friend remembers seeing Clinton arrive an hour late at a forum in Texarkana where he stood in the back of the room as White stirred the crowd with his rallying cry, "Car tags and Cubans." It was a reference to Clinton's decision to raise the car license fees for Arkansas drivers, a decidedly unpopular move, and to his inability to dissuade President Jimmy Carter from warehousing Cuban refugees at Fort Chaffee, Ark., where their discontent boiled over into protests and riots -- all captured in negative television ads.

"You could see Bill's political life passing before his eyes," the friend said of Clinton that night in Texarkana. "All of this planning, all of his national ambitions, were falling away. You could see it in his eyes."

Another decade had begun, and for Bill Clinton another defining moment was at hand. He lost the election. "After that loss," said Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro, who had known Clinton since the McGovern campaign, "Bill was one humble sonofabitch." One Little Rock statehouse reporter found Clinton more angry than humble, recalling that the lame duck governor called him the morning after the election and accused him of undermining the campaign. Humble or angry, Clinton pushed on. He drew on the optimism borne from his redemptive mother.

"My strongest memory is of the sadness of our friends and of Bill's immediate willingness to find out what he did wrong," said Hillary Clinton, who had married him in 1975. Her husband, she said, much like his mother, woke up each morning thinking the world was starting anew. "They share that persistent optimism, that sense that the glass is half full."

Within one week of his defeat, Clinton had persuaded Betsey Wright to leave her job in Washington and move to Little Rock to organize his political records in preparation for the next race. He and Hillary traveled the state and urged people to tell them what he had done wrong. That was easy -- they told Clinton that he had been arrogant and remote. They wanted to teach him a lesson.

"The people of Arkansas had this strong parental feeling about Bill," said Wright, who documented the sentiment in a 1981 poll. "He was their favorite son, and they had watched him grow and they had felt proud of him and when he went astray they disciplined him, but they could not totally reject him no more than they could a member of their family."

There are two competing and equally compelling lines of thought on how that defeat changed Clinton. While they agree on nothing else, holders of each view say that Clinton's transformation after that loss is the key to both the substance and the style of his 1992 campaign.

His detractors say it made him cautious and conservative, more inclined to follow the whims of public opinion, and reinforced the more negative aspects of his lifelong conciliatory nature so that he became obsessed with trying to make everyone happy. "He backed off anything controversial," said John Brummett, a liberal columnist for the Arkansas Times. "He gave every possible factor in his defeat equal and total weight and decided never to try any of that again."

His admirers say the defeat taught him two lessons. The first was to focus his attention on a few central issues rather than trying to solve every problem in life. When he returned to office in 1983, it was with a clearer aim that he has followed for a decade -- to do anything he could to improve the education and economic development of his impoverished state.

At times this meant accepting that the ends justified the means -- such as pushing an inequitable sales tax and refusing even to exempt food from the tax because he wanted all the money he could find to fund massive education reforms; an income tax hike seemed impossible to get through the legislature.

The second lesson was that he had to listen better. "He learned a lesson that few of us could ever survive," said Wright. "He spent an entire year asking, 'What did I do wrong?'"

Clinton emerged from that experience with an intense desire to listen to people. He began inviting editors and community groups to the mansion on a regular basis for informal chats. He decided that he would never initiate another major program without first explaining it to the voters with paid advertising. And he decided that he had to find ways to effect change without scaring people. The transformation carried him through four straight elections in Arkansas and propelled him into the presidential race.

"What I've learned is that people will accept change if it is based on common sense values, [and] if you don't force them to reject things that give form and meaning to their own lives," Clinton said.Rumors Pose Another Test

The form and meaning of Bill Clinton's life now faces another defining moment, one that has yet to be resolved. His campaign somehow evokes that black Buick speeding home in the night, the fastest car on the road, the one that won't run out of gas but might blow a tire and careen out of control.

There is an irony there for Clinton, for he had thought that he had finally reached a comfortable stretch in the road. He has already revealed the most intimate details of his childhood and -- in general terms -- the marital imperfections of his adulthood. "If the voters want to vote for someone who's perfect," he said, "they'll have to look for another candidate."

The limousine was nearing the Washington Beltway. Clinton neared the heart of the question.

"One of the reasons I didn't run four years ago is . . . Hillary and I both thought we weren't quite ready. When you run for president, it's not really important how much better you think you are than your opponents. What's really important is the integrity of your campaign. As long as you know you can give it your best, that you have fully grown and matured, that's what counts. I really think these last four years have been of pivotal importance to me . . . not only my work as a politician but my sort of personal journey through life."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Allies Describe Candidate's 'Constancy'

No one could sense the imminent confrontation. For nearly one hour at this private session with the editorial board of New York Newsday, Bill Clinton had seemed at ease, addressing policy matters with a mastery that greatly impressed the world-wise men and women in publisher Robert M. Johnson's office. Then came a series of questions and vehement responses that changed the mood, evoking a complex set of frustrations both for Clinton and for people such as the Newsday editors struggling to sort out the ambiguities of his run for the presidency.

It started with what was called the Billy Crystal Question: Crystal, host of the Academy Awards show, had lampooned the famous last words Clinton uttered during his belated confession that he had smoked marijuana while studying in England in the late 1960s. "Didn't inhale!" said Crystal, mocking Clinton's claim that while he puffed on one or two marijuana cigarettes he never drew smoke into his lungs.

The Newsday editors wanted to know why Clinton felt compelled to make that claim. But as described by participants, the line of questioning carried the broader context of unease about Clinton's truthfulness and integrity. "It got to what was seen as Clinton's tendency to want it both ways," said one editor. "The subtext was: Do you deliberately try to mislead people? Why not just give a straight answer?"

I-smoked-but-didn't-inhale was lumped with two other curious aspects of Clinton's marijuana-use response: his earlier, lawyerly, claim that he had never broken state or federal laws and his explanation that he had dodged the question during his many gubernatorial campaigns in Arkansas because he felt a different standard of scrutiny applied then than during a presidential race.

Also noted by the Newsday questioner was Clinton's seemingly ambiguous answer to a more substantive issue at a Lehman College debate, where he had said that, although he thought the concept misguided and unfair, as president he would allow New Jersey to proceed with an experimental welfare program that penalizes women who have more children while on public assistance.

The accusatory questions sent Clinton, normally cool under fire, into a red-faced rage. He raised his hoarse voice several decibels as he tried to turn the burden of responsibility around to the press. "I think a lot of this stuff is calculated media grandstanding and positioning," he fumed at one point, adding: "I've got to learn how to play all these word games better."

The confrontation left some members of the editorial board bewildered that a politician of Clinton's acumen and skill, who had thought so deeply about so many issues, was seemingly unable to acknowledge and address his image of evasiveness. "He just didn't get it," said one. Newsday ended up endorsing Clinton's phantom opponent, former Massachusetts senator Paul E. Tsongas, who had long since suspended his campaign.

'Presumption of Guilt'

Clinton brooded over the Newsday episode for much of the following day as he traveled through New York and Wisconsin. During an interview about the lessons he learned in his struggle with the character issue, Clinton returned frequently to the editorial board showdown, saying that everything he says now is unfairly used to gauge his integrity. He did not mind people disagreeing with him on the New Jersey welfare program, he said, but he was confounded by the notion that his answer was seen to underscore an inherent slickness.

"They said this was a character question: Give me a break!" Clinton said. "Once the so-called character issue became raised against me I totally underestimated the extent to which everything I said or didn't say and the way I said or didn't say it was being viewed by people solely in terms of whether it reinforced some preconceived notion of whether I was slick or evasive. This was amazing to me -- to be basically laboring under the presumption of guilt."

Such is the tenuousness of Clinton and his campaign. Exit polls show that public unease with his character has not diminished despite the string of primary victories that have made him the probable Democratic nominee. Voters express some reservations about Clinton's unholy trinity of baby boomer controversy -- sex, war and pot -- but even more about the stories he tells in response to these and other crises.

The questions persist: Is Clinton a political creature who keeps reinventing himself, or is he authentic? Is he the "Slick Willie" who evades unpleasant questions and tough issues, or an empathetic leader with a solid moral core? Could he be all of these things, the ultimate ambiguous figure?The Gap in Perception

To millions of voters getting their first glimpse of Clinton this year, the way he has answered questions about the draft, about marijuana and about lounge singer Gennifer Flowers's claim that she had a 12-year affair with him has served as a major factor in determining whether to trust him. But to scores of people who have known him longer, and better, the candidate who has been defined by such matters only faintly resembles the person they know. A private gathering two nights after the Newsday episode illustrates the perception gap.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, April 5, in the living room of a Manhattan hotel suite, five men gathered for their first full reunion since they were housemates in an old stone cottage on Potomac Avenue in Washington during their senior year at Georgetown University: Tom Campbell, an airline pilot in California; Thomas Caplan, a Baltimore novelist; Jim Moore and Kit Ashby, New York financiers, and Bill Clinton, the Arkansas governor.

Even as the five men gathered near the close of the raucous New York campaign, news dispatches from Little Rock revealed that Clinton's previous accounts of how he averted military service in the Vietnam War had failed to note a critical element -- that at one point he actually might have received an induction notice from the draft board in his Arkansas hometown, Hot Springs.

The reunion in Room 1730 of the Sheraton Manhattan hotel was interrupted now and again by Clinton's need to discuss the breaking draft story with his aides. But among the five men, it was discussed only for a few seconds.

This was not a gathering of draft dodgers. Caplan had been in ROTC all four years at Georgetown. Campbell entered the Marines after college and served as a pilot in Japan. Ashby, a Marine veteran, and Moore, an Army veteran, both fought in Vietnam. But they were all fiercely loyal to Clinton, who opposed the war and who sought to avoid fighting in Vietnam while at the same time maintaining what he called long-range political viability.

The focus of attention at the reunion was a videotape Campbell made from still photographs and scrapbook items of their shared past. There could not have been a greater contrast between what was on the screen, what was in the hearts of the five men lounging in the hotel suite, and the story that was exploding outside the room. One minute Clinton fumed about another potentially damaging incident he thought he had left behind, another minute he laughed uproariously with old friends he carried with him.

To Clinton's college roommates, there was no doubt about Clinton's authenticity. They saw it in him from the moment he arrived at Georgetown. He had a sense of place about him, they said, that other students lacked, a pride in being from Arkansas and an ambition for public service that was clear, but never seemed blind. They laughed when the video showed a brochure from Clinton's earlier race for president -- of the Georgetown freshman class.

"The image of Bill Clinton as lacking integrity is held by absolutely no one who knows him as a friend," said Caplan, the novelist.

"With us it is the opposite. What is the most attractive quality a human being can have? It is to look at another person and imagine that you could be that person. That's the great leap of kindness. It is Bill. There's no archetypal anecdote to reveal this, just a constancy about him. He took the time to understand anybody's problems. He always helped people in courses. He always knew when somebody's parent died or something happened in the family. He's the real thing. I can't think of any figure who's been more mischaracterized."

The loyalty and deep feelings of respect that Clinton has engendered in scores of friends cannot be overstated. Some of them wince at the syntax Clinton has employed in answering the personal questions of infidelity and drug use, either too careful or too sloppy, but they are virtually unanimous in their sense that fears about Clinton's disingenuousness are misplaced.

Carolyn Yeldell Staley, who was Clinton's next-door neighbor in Hot Springs and is still close to him, as are many of his high school friends, recalled the Christmas Eve two years ago when Clinton drove off in an ice storm to deliver a "Letter from Santa" gift to an elderly woman who lived in the back room on the second floor of a rooming house on the outskirts of Little Rock.

There were no cameras around, Staley said, no political points to be scored, nothing calculating in the gesture. "The old woman sat on the edge of her bed and Bill sat on a chair and she told him her life's story," Staley said. "When he got to our house for dinner that night he was ecstatic, fulfilled, awestruck. He is the most empathetic person I have ever known."

Weakness or Strength?

The essential question about Clinton's ambiguity is whether it reflects the weakness of someone unable to deal with the fundamental conflicts of life or the strength of someone who believes deeply in reconciliation and redemption.

To Paul Greenberg, the conservative intellectual who writes editorials for the Pine Bluff Commercial, the answer comes in the sobriquet he coined for Clinton back in the early 1980s. It was Greenberg who struck on the nickname "Slick Willie" as a means, he said, of communicating that with Clinton there was "a lack of any authentic basis for what he says or who he is."

Greenberg, who has observed Clinton in Arkansas for 15 years, now serves as as a captain of sorts in the Clinton character police, finding echoes of previous ambiguities in every utterance or deed of the presidential candidate.

When Clinton, who makes racial reconciliation a centerpiece of his campaign, was photographed last month playing golf at the all-white Little Rock Country Club, it reminded Greenberg of the January day in 1979, at Clinton's first inauguration, when the young governor who had campaigned as an agent for racial change was photographed embracing his special guest for the day, former Gov. Orval E. Faubus, the symbol of segregation in the state.

"When those pictures came over the wires, they represented something terribly discouraging," said Greenberg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on race relations. During his five terms as governor, Clinton has appointed more blacks to administrative positions than all previous Arkansas governors combined.

When Greenberg heard about the flare-ups Clinton was having with the New York press, it reminded him of his own confrontation with the governor in 1990 and how he left that meeting feeling, much as the Newsday editors did, that there was something a bit hollow in Clinton's rage. Clinton had blasted Greenberg for questioning the fairness of Clinton's decision to appoint the members of a judicial panel investigating his gubernatorial opponent.

"Even when he pitched the fit, it didn't seem real," Greenberg said. "There was no genuine anger of the sort that shows one holds values so dear as to be willing to fight for them and wants to come to a clear resolution with things one is angry about. If you don't have that, then central values that should not be negotiable are negotiable. That is Clinton."

Clinton, during a recent interview, traced the roots of his seeming ambiguity back to his childhood in Arkansas. He grew up in a home dominated by an alcoholic stepfather who was occasionally abusive and violent, leaving young Clinton with what he called "an aversion to conflict."

It was also a culture, Clinton said, where the personal issues of the type that have washed over him this year were closely held from the outside world.

"I'm starting to understand that I am genuinely at fault at times because I was not raised in a culture that promoted being personally revealing," he said.

"It was a culture where your personal life was your own business, you're not supposed to complain to anybody else, and you're not supposed to let down. The personal pain of my childhood and my reluctance to be revealing in that sense may account for some of what may seem misleading."

He is struggling, Clinton said, with the idea that people think his answers are always calculated or slick. He thinks he is just the opposite.

On the marijuana question, he said, "I just made up my mind grimly that I was going to answer it a certain way when I was governor, but when I was running for president, since others had answered it, I would give a point-blank answer. What I said later about never inhaling was just a totally impulsive remark . . . with no artifice about it at all. But what I should have thought was, now, I should have been very calculating about this, I guess. I should have thought: How can I set up an opportunity to answer this so I say yes and don't have any nervous afterthoughts?"

'Have You Ever' Questions

Clinton's closest aides have spent considerable time recently trying to analyze how their candidate became defined by doubts about his character, and how he might overcome them. John D. Holum, a Washington lawyer who also advised the ill-fated campaign of Gary Hart, said there are no regrets about Clinton's original strategy of trying to place certain topics -- sex and marijuana -- into the realm of privacy.

"It's legitimate to say, 'I'm not going to volunteer things on these subjects. If you want to write about them, ask the right questions,'" Holum said. "The question is whether he is obliged to volunteer things about ancient personal matters, the 'have you ever' questions. I think our campaign became totally and thoroughly skewed by those questions, but the approach at first seemed acceptable and realistic."

George Stephanopoulos, the deputy campaign manager, developed a theory comparing what happened to a disease. The Gennifer Flowers story, he said, was the first infection: It put a virus into the system. Then the draft story dealt another blow to the immune system. Then former California governor Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr. arrived talking about the scandal-a-week and people started using the Slick Willie nickname as though it were the disease itself.

"Once you name something," Stephanopoulos said, "it becomes real. Eventually everything became part of it."

It all goes back to the Flowers story, he said. "Without that first infection, there would be stories that say, sometimes he makes mistakes, sometimes he fudges, but it wouldn't all be, this is a bad guy. Flowers leads to a discussion of character and then it's just fill-in-the-blanks."

It was Stephanopoulos who during the early days of the New Hampshire primary, before the deluge of stories challenging Clinton's personal integrity, attempted to define the political season with the statement: "Specificity is the character issue of 1992."

"Oh, God," he said softly the other day, when reminded of that preseason assessment in contradistinction to the occasions where Clinton has been criticized for his evasive vagueness on character questions. "That's really going to come back to haunt me, isn't it?"

Levels of Myth and Reality

One afternoon during his tumultuous journey through New York, Clinton brought his motorcade to a halt so that he could browse at a Barnes and Noble bookstore. He emerged with a copy of Mario Vargas Llosa's narrative tale entitled "The Storyteller." Sometimes it seems that Clinton is not only running for president this year, he is starring in his own version of "The Storyteller."

In Vargas Llosa's book, a Peruvian Jewish scholar is transformed into the oral historian of a primitive Amazonian tribe. The narrator seeks to penetrate the tales and gossip, the many levels of myth and reality that his search leads him to, but only gets so far. "The rest of the story," he says, "confronts me only with darkness, and the harder I try to see through it, the more impenetrable it becomes."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

From the Start, Perseverance Has Been Arkansan's Trademark

The dreadful memories have faded, for Bill Clinton if not for the American public: memories of the night four years ago when he stood on a podium in Atlanta and stared into a teleprompter that seemed to be flashing his political obituary. Clinton was the nominator instead of the nominee that night, delivering the speech at the Democratic National Convention that introduced Michael S. Dukakis to the nation. He bombed interminably, provoking Johnny Carson to declare that Clinton should be approved by the surgeon general as an over-the-counter sleep aid.

It was a belly flop, Bill Clinton's Big Speech, the political equivalent of the time back in Hot Springs, Ark., when he first tried diving off the 3-meter board at Belvedere Country Club and landed -- whop! -- on his belly, knocked himself out and sank to the bottom of the pool, where he had to be rescued by a lifeguard.

But in the timeline of Clinton's political rise to the peak he will reach this week as the Democratic nominee for president, the Atlanta speech stands out not so much as a low point, but rather as a reminder of his endurance. Among the scores of people interviewed for this series of articles, which explores the political path Clinton followed from his Arkansas childhood to his terms as Arkansas governor and his final preparations for the 1992 campaign, there was one constant: Through better and worse, they said, Clinton just keeps going.

"He sets his way and that's the way he goes," said Edith Irons, his high school adviser. "I got that from my mother," Clinton said, attributing his political stamina to Virginia Kelley, who has persevered through the deaths of three husbands. "She really taught me a lesson that I've always applied to my political life, about sucking it up and working through the tough times."

Clinton kept going that night, even though it was obvious that things were wrong from the start. Sections of his speech were inserted by Dukakis aides, using words, rhythms, styles that were not his. As he was about to begin, Clinton recalled later, he realized that the house lights were still on. There was no signal to the delegates that they should shut up and listen. Minutes into the speech, he noticed that convention whips were working against him, encouraging the disconcerting buzz on the Omni arena floor rather than trying to quell it.

For a moment, Clinton told friends later, he debated his alternatives -- should he scrap the text and wing it, make it more emotional and shorter, or should he do what Dukakis expected of him? He did what he thought Dukakis expected of him, stubbornly ignoring signs from convention managers to cut it short, droning on and on for 33 minutes until he uttered the famous last words "and in conclusion" . . . and the hall erupted in mock cheers.

Most of Clinton's staff was back in Little Rock, watching the speech on television. It was supposed to be a celebration at the Oyster Bar restaurant. It turned into a wake for their boss. It was so depressing that Clinton's chief of staff, Betsey Wright, who had been in Atlanta and watched the disaster from a seat behind Clinton on the platform -- overwhelmed, she said, by "a completely helpless feeling" -- rushed back to Little Rock the next morning and held a staff meeting where she hoped to buck up the demoralized troops.

"I was going to give a controlled assessment of what happened," Wright recalled. But she had too many years and too much hope invested in Clinton. At the start of the 1988 political season, she had spent months preparing the groundwork for a Clinton for President campaign, the campaign that never happened, and now, at the end, he was the butt of jokes. So Wright was going to give the staff a calm appraisal of the unforeseen and unfortunate factors that made the speech bomb. "But," she said later, "I couldn't control the sobs."

That morning in July four years ago, Bill Clinton's long-held ambition of reaching the White House seemed destined to go unfulfilled. But within days, he turned the joke around by appearing on "The Tonight Show" and making fun of himself, saying the speech "had not been my finest hour, not even my finest hour and a half." And within the year he began constructing the networks and policies that fueled his 1992 campaign.

And he kept going -- even when he was declared politically dead (after the sex and draft stories broke in New Hampshire), or gravely wounded (after former California governor Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr. beat him in Connecticut), or largely irrelevant (for most of May and June while Ross Perot stole the headlines).

He worked through the campaign with the same single-minded determination to win converts and reconcile differences that admirers say is his greatest strength but that critics say at times has weakened his principles and dimmed his courage. "After all this time, there is no longer any difference between the inner Bill Clinton and the political Bill Clinton," said John Brummett, a Little Rock political analyst who has followed Clinton's rise to prominence. "His whole life is one long reelection campaign aimed at the presidency. Everything he does has been shaped by that."

His old friends argue that Clinton's lifelong sense of purpose is misconstrued as blind ambition. "I think it is all to the good that here you have a person who has known early on what sort of a commitment he wanted to make in life and proceeded undeterred," said Baltimore novelist Thomas Caplan, one of Clinton's college roommates. "It is axiomatic that when we hear that Steven Spielberg liked to make films as a boy, or that Brian Boitano wanted to be a figure skater, we always consider that a sign of inspiration, and it should be the same for someone whose whole life is training for politics and the presidency."

"Bill's ambition is so strong that it can be misconstrued," said Wright, the former chief of staff who has watched him develop for two decades. "He is an empathetic person whose first motivation was to help people, and then to set up systems where they could help themselves."

The idea that Bill Clinton would run for president someday did not exactly come out of nowhere. There is a touch of predestination in the family tree of Clinton's father, William Jefferson Blythe III, who was killed in a car accident three months before Bill was born. One of his ancestors from Virginia was named Andrew Jackson Blythe, and a few generations later the Blythes moved to northern Mississippi and among them was Thomas Jefferson Blythe. Jefferson and Jackson: the two historic pillars of the Democratic party. Here was a man born to attend Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners.

The first anecdote about Clinton and the presidency comes so early that it seems apocryphal, though his mother and one of his teachers insist that it happened. Clinton was in second grade and attending a Catholic elementary school, St. John's. He came home with a C in deportment from Sister Mary, the teacher. His mother, shocked, called the school to find out what was wrong.

"Oh, nothing much," said the nun. "But let me tell you, this boy knows the answer to every question and he just leaps to his feet before anyone else can. I know he'll not tolerate this C, but it will be good for him. And I promise you, if he wants to be, he will be president someday."

His mother married into a political family when she wed her second husband, Roger Clinton, in 1950. Roger himself was more interested in music and clothes -- "His nickname was 'Dude,' and that describes him," said his sister-in-law, Janet Clinton. But Janet Clinton's late husband, Roy Clinton, who was Roger's brother and Bill's uncle, was a member of the Arkansas legislature from 1950 to 1954, representing the Democratic reform ticket in Hot Springs.

Janet Clinton described Roy, who ran a feed store, as "a dyed-in-the-wool yellow-dog Democrat." Young Bill loved to hand out leaflets for his uncle and in later years often turned to him for down-home political advice.

During his high school years Clinton was in the firm grip of his principal, Johnnie Mae Mackey, a Hot Springs legend, big, gregarious, energetic and proud, a woman who quickly recognized Clinton's political talents and pushed him to run for class offices. Some classmates thought Mackey gave Clinton too much favor: They say she rigged the election system by making it harder for football players and cheerleaders to run but not harder for band leaders. Clinton was band major.

"We had a little bit of a sit-down strike in the auditorium over it," said Peggy Janske, a cheerleader, who noted that while Billy Clinton was respected in high school, many of his peers thought of him as a bit too good to be true. "We felt like Mrs. Mackey was catering to Billy."

Mackey, whose husband was killed in World War II, was a leader of the local American Legion auxiliary and a fiery patriot. She drilled her students to show proper respect for the American flag. They all heard the story of the day she attended a University of Arkansas football game, and how it was drizzling before the game when the color guard passed by her section of the stands, virtually unnoticed, until she rose and bellowed: "If there's a red-blooded American in this stadium, stand up!" and they all did.

The thread of old-fashioned, middle-American sentiments that Mackey sewed into Clinton was stretched thin during his antiwar college years at Georgetown University, Oxford and Yale Law School, but it never broke and is as much a part of his political composition today as the more obvious modern and socially liberal thread of his baby boom generation. It was Mackey who pushed Clinton into the American Legion-sponsored Boy's State and Boy's Nation leadership camps. He was one of two Arkansans chosen for Boy's Nation in 1963, the summer before his senior year.

Clinton visited the Rose Garden and shook hands with President John F. Kennedy -- a handshake, he said later, that was the highlight of his young life and that set the 16-year-old on a path that he hopes will take him back to the Rose Garden 30 years later.

The moment was preserved for posterity in the Hot Springs High yearbook, which shows Clinton crunching his face much as he does now when he is trying unsuccessfully to mask his self-contentment. "Guess we'll never forget this," he scribbled next to the Kennedy picture in the yearbook of classmate Carolyn Yeldell Staley, who went to Washington for Girl's Nation. "Me with my arthritis of the face. It was so wonderful, wasn't it?"

"See you in the White House," another classmate wrote in Clinton's yearbook.

Clinton returned to Washington a year later to begin his college career at Georgetown, where he immediately delved into the political life, introducing himself to his fellow students with the words, "Hello, I'm Bill Clinton. Will you help me run for president of the freshman class?" He won that race, but later lost a contest for student council president. His slogan then echoes through the years with its moderation: "A Realistic Approach to Student Government." He also took his political passion to Capitol Hill, where he worked in the Senate Foreign Relations office of his Arkansas idol, Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright.

His political vision at Georgetown was shaped by one professor above all others -- Carroll Quigley, who taught western civilization. Clinton has never forgotten Quigley's last lecture. Throughout his career he has evoked it in speeches as the rhetorical foundation for his political philosophy and for his push as governor of Arkansas for long-term education programs.

"His last lecture was on why western civilization and America in particular has been so successful," Clinton recalled. "He called it 'future preference.' He said that we had taken more people more quickly out of ignorance and want and depravity than any other nation because of the simple idea we had embraced: that the future can be better than the present and that every person has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so."

Clinton was not yet 21 when he was moved by Quigley's call. The ego of a candidate was still unformed in some ways. But the political and ideological impulses that would drive his career were already taking shape. He was a pro-civil rights and antiwar son of the South who believed that he could reconcile the forces of social change with the more conservative values of his small-town roots. His efforts to deal with those competing forces remained the defining characteristic of his political career.

Even at Georgetown a sense of momentum was building in his life. His friends had few doubts which direction it would take him. "Most of us had no idea who we were or where we were from or where we were going," said Caplan, one of his college roommates. "Bill just emanated this sense of sureness."

There was a moment during Easter break of 1966 when it struck Caplan that his friend was bound for political fame. He accompanied Clinton back to Arkansas on vacation. They flew from Washington to Little Rock and picked up a Buick convertible there -- a loaner that had to be returned to an uncle's car dealership -- for the drive down to Hot Springs. They cruised into the resort town on a balmy spring night, the top down, two college kids feeling free and easy, and when they pulled up to a stoplight a crowd on the sidewalk looked over at them and someone shouted: "Hey, Billy Clinton's home!"

"Wherever we went that week," said Caplan, "it was the same -- 'Hey, Billy Clinton's home!' "

Clinton spent the next eight years refining his political and policy skills before coming home to begin his electoral career. Staley, his friend from high school days, recalled that Clinton often told her that he felt an obligation to be as well-trained as any politician in America before he undertook his life's calling. He followed the classical route of Fulbright, a former Rhodes Scholar, and went to England for two years to study as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

No mentors at Oxford shaped Clinton's political career, but several American peers there grew close to him then and later helped formulate the policy framework he carried into the presidential campaign, ranging from Robert Reich, the Harvard economist, to Richard Stearns, a campaign aide to George McGovern who now serves as a Massachusetts judge. A few of Clinton's contemporaries in England, such as fellow Arkansan Cliff Jackson who was there on a Fulbright fellowship, thought Clinton's networking and glad-handing was, as Jackson later put it, "crass and self-serving and enough to make you sick."

But Jackson, now a Little Rock lawyer who has spent much of the last year trying to undercut Clinton's political rise, holds a minority opinion on Clinton's Oxford days. Many colleagues say his popularity was natural and deserved.

"I have memories of Bill holding court at the Long Hall where we'd all eat," said Douglas Eakeley, now a deputy attorney general in New Jersey. "The English students were in constant fascination with Bill and he with them. The English are so verbally facile. And it was a regular practice not just to eat and run but to eat and talk and to debate the issues of the day at length until we were thrown out of the dining hall. Bill was always in the thick of those talks and he was easily the most popular student there."

The discussions continued when Eakeley and Clinton moved on together to Yale Law School, where they shared a Milford, Conn., beach-front house with two other students: Bill Coleman, the son of former Nixon-era transportation secretary William T. Coleman Jr., and Don Pogue, a midwestern '60s-era radical. The house became the social and political hub of the law school, and Clinton, the big, bearded, gabby fellow from Arkansas, was in the middle of the action, talking long into the night with Coleman and other black students about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Huey Newton, arguing with Pogue about the merits of working within the system, persuading Eakeley to read the novels of William Faulkner.

Vietnam was the central issue of that era, and it was through his opposition to the war that Clinton experienced his first practical lessons in national politics. After assisting Joseph Duffey's unsuccessful Senate campaign in Connecticut, Clinton headed down to Texas in the fall of 1972 to direct McGovern's antiwar presidential campaign in the Lone Star state. His co-director in Texas was another young activist from outside the state, Taylor Branch.

They shared an apartment in Austin, with occasional visits from Clinton's law school girlfriend and future wife, Hillary Rodham, who was at least as political as Clinton then and was in San Antonio registering Hispanic voters for the Democratic party. Branch, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of the American civil rights movement, said he was struck by how much Clinton loved the process: dealing with contentious personalities, trivial internecine disputes, stroking people's egos.

"Bill was way ahead of me in seeing that a lot of politics had to do with how people got along and understanding how individuals worked: who was lazy, who you could depend on," Branch said. "He knew how to reach people, how to play to their strengths and weaknesses. Politics is love of the people and the process. Bill was naturally good at that. In that sense he was Johnsonian."

The electoral career of Bill Clinton began two years later, in 1974, after he had finished at Yale and was a junior law professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He decided to run for Congress against incumbent Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt in the most Republican quadrant of Arkansas, the northwest.

Dozens of his law students volunteered for that campaign, and a Democratic party organization, the National Committee for an Effective Congress, sent professional consultants. But former Arkansas legislator David Matthews, a law student then who served as Clinton's driver, remembers that Clinton's first race in one sense set the pattern for all that would follow.

"The principal strategist and tactician in that campaign was Bill Clinton," Matthews said. "I have an idea that the principal strategist and tactician in the 1992 campaign is still Bill Clinton. I haven't seen a candidate who is better at running his own show."

In that year of Watergate, Clinton's campaign rhetoric also had a ring that would become familiar to Clinton watchers. His speeches stressed the need for Arkansans to come together across the divide of race, region and ideology -- the reconciliation theme that remains central to his presidential campaign.

Clinton lost that first election, receiving 48.5 percent against the popular Hammerschmidt. Most people expected him to lose, almost everybody except Clinton himself, and Hillary Rodham, who was running the Legal Aid office in Fayetteville, and David Matthews. They thought Clinton could win until the last week, when the campaign ran out of money for last-minute advertising.

Matthews and Sandy Kaplan, a Louisiana-based consultant who helped Clinton with the race, both recall that there were ways they could have obtained the needed money in the last week. "I've never said this before, but the fact is we could have had the money. There were overtures to Bill about funding him that last week, but the implication was that there would be strings attached," said Matthews. "Bill just said, 'Let's go with what we've got' " -- and he finished the campaign $ 45,000 in debt.

It only enhanced Clinton's reputation in Arkansas that he narrowly lost that race. And in retrospect, Matthews pointed out, it might have been a saving grace -- it saved him from a career in Congress where his ambition and organizational skills might have taken him to the top of an institution held in low regard by American voters.

"Clinton did something during that campaign that I don't know how to explain," said Bill Simmons, the veteran Associated Press bureau chief in Little Rock. "He achieved an aura of inevitability. It became a foregone conclusion that he would hold a state office soon." Two years later, in 1976, Clinton was elected attorney general without Republican opposition. "The thing about Arkansas is that you don't have to spend too much time here in political apprenticeship," said Diane Blair, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas and longtime Clinton adviser. "If you have the energy, you can just plunge in and make things happen."

Clinton plunged in, and the aura of inevitability continued.

"It seemed like a fait accompli that he'd be governor from the day he was elected attorney general," said state political analyst John Brummett. "And from there maybe someday president."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

They gathered at the redbrick governor's mansion in Little Rock one morning in late October 1980: Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Rodham and several friends from Hot Springs and Fayetteville. It was not yet one year into the decade that was supposed to witness Clinton's political ascension, but already, shockingly, at age 34, it seemed to him that everything might be going down the tubes. His Democratic Party was going down. President Jimmy Carter was going down. And Clinton was going down.

Perhaps his election as governor of Arkansas with more than 60 percent of the vote two years earlier had come too easily. "It was more like Bill was being elected president of his senior class," said Diane Blair, a political science professor and close friend and adviser. "It was not tough at all."

But this was tough, and it was different from Clinton's first race for Congress back in 1974, which he narrowly lost to John Paul Hammerschmidt. That had been a moral victory against a respected incumbent in the most Republican section of the state, and it made Clinton's reputation. Now there was all this hype about him being the boy wonder of American politics, but polls showed him losing to a blustery, beefy savings and loan executive named Frank D. White.

It mattered not at all what White looked like or sounded like or what he stood for: This election had little to do with him and everything to do with young Bill Clinton. Paula Unruh, White's campaign manager, understood that. She and White were killing Clinton with negative advertising, pounding away at the way Clinton handled a rebellion by Cuban boatlift refugees housed at Fort Chaffee and the fact that he had financed a highway reconstruction program by raising tenfold the state car-tag fees.

A grainy film flickered on the governor's television screen showing Cubans running down an Arkansas main street and holding sit-down strikes inside the federal fort -- an image intended, Unruh said later, to subconsciously twin Clinton's response to the refugee situation to Carter's ineffectual handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. Clinton looked at the ad and then turned to his wife and friends in dismay, according to the recollections of several people who were there that day.

"Do people really believe this stuff?" Clinton asked.

"Sure they do," said a friend.

"See!" said Hillary, jumping up from her seat. "People believe what they see and hear, Bill. You can't just sit there and take it!"

It was one of many lessons Clinton would never forget after that campaign, lessons that helped shape his race for the presidency 12 years later. But at the time it was too late to help, and a future race for president seemed irrelevant. There was nothing Clinton could do to turn the momentum his way.

"I was so young and inexperienced," he later recalled. "I didn't understand how to break through my crisis and turn the situation around." Cubans and car tags were part of the "Five C's" working against him, the other three being Carter, coattails and Clinton.

Many Arkansas voters likened that election to a political spanking. Billy was their boy, but he had been a little too uppity. It was not just that he had raised their fees and attacked some of the state's powerful interests, the timber industry and the utilities, during that first two-year term, but he had performed with what was seen as arrogance unbecoming an Arkansan. His top three aides, bearded young activists, were compared to H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman by frustrated legislators and citizens who found it difficult to penetrate the barriers they had set up between Clinton and the outside world.

Trivial items took on symbolic weight against the young governor. The fact that his wife still used her maiden name. The fact that, at a time when the state was pushing a safe-driving campaign, Clinton was caught going 80 mph on a freeway as he barreled from a YMCA to a library dedication. Clinton tried to turn the hostility around with good humor. He joked that because people seemed so upset about his wife's name and the speeding incident, he and Hillary should name their first child Hot Rodham.

Clinton was not laughing when White beat him that November by 32,000 votes, giving him the dubious distinction of being the youngest ex-governor in U.S. history. His high school friend Carolyn Staley remembers visiting the mansion the morning after the defeat in tears and telling Clinton that maybe he should move to a state that appreciated him. Clinton was sore and demoralized -- he snubbed the state press corps for several days -- but leaving Arkansas or getting out of politics were the last things on his mind.

"There was absolutely no doubt that I would run again," Clinton said. "The very moment I was conceding defeat my mind was spinning with ideas about what I had to do to stay active and get back."

It was then, without articulating it, that Clinton in essence began his long run for the presidency. It started with a line of thinking that he later developed and refined into the theme of his efforts to resuscitate not only his political career in Arkansas but the national Democratic Party over the ensuing decade.

"In those months after my defeat I seriously began to ponder what it would take to re-create a new majority for change in America," Clinton said. "A lot of what I'm saying now grows directly out of what I began thinking then. I began thinking about the no-win situations we were creating by becoming the party of blame. I realized that when we got in trouble it was when the need for change conflicted with people's most deeply ingrained habits or most cherished values. If you want to be for change, you have to render that change in ways people can understand and relate to."

This was not the overnight metamorphosis of a liberal activist into a cautious moderate. In fact, Clinton had been developing his ideas on how Democrats could survive and succeed in what seemed to be a more conservative national environment even before his defeat. At the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York, he delivered a speech in which he foresaw increased voter alienation and challenged the Democrats to offer "more creative and realistic" solutions to the nation's problems -- solutions, he said, that were being developed more at the state level than in Washington.

"Jimmy Carter and this administration cannot win this election simply by putting together the old elements of the Democratic coalition and repudiating Ronald Reagan," Clinton said. "It is not enough."

Nothing was enough for many Democrats that year, including Clinton. Through 1981 and 1982, his years as a private citizen, he operated on two tracks simultaneously. He maintained a law office in Little Rock in the firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings, where he handled a few antitrust cases but spent most of his time preparing his comeback in Arkansas. He persuaded Betsey Wright, a friend from the George McGovern era who had been working on women's political issues in Washington, to move to Little Rock and reconstruct his campaign organization from a room near his at the law firm. In 1981 they commissioned a poll that showed what Clinton anticipated: The voters did not really want White to be their governor, they had just wanted to teach Clinton a lesson.

Clinton spent the last six months of 1981 traveling the state, sometimes with Hillary, sometimes with Wright, other times with his law partner, Bruce Lindsey, in what became a sort of roadshow apologia. "We'd go somewhere and there'd be these confessionals in the supermarket aisles," recalled Hillary Clinton, who decided after that defeat to adjust to Arkansas' cultural mores and go by her husband's surname. "People would come up to Bill and say they voted against him but they were sorry he lost, and he'd say he understood and he was sorry for not listening to them better."

Although he had always had an empathetic personality, it was during that period that Clinton learned what a powerful campaign weapon it could be when he spent hours and days searching people out to listen to their problems and complaints, looking them straight in the eye, his arm braced on their shoulder or clasping their hand. It was a winning style that would serve him well a decade later during his toughest days in New Hampshire, another time when he desperately needed to connect with skeptical voters.

During that comeback campaign against White, Clinton took the unusual step of running commercials in which he confessed his sins of arrogance and publicly apologized to the voters, saying: "I learned that you can't lead without listening." Most of his campaign advisers urged him not to run the ads. "I was horrified by the idea," said Blair. "I didn't think he'd been that bad a governor. Plus I always thought you should show strength, not weakness. But he understood that he had hurt people personally and had to respond personally. He was absolutely right about that."

The Clinton of the 1982 campaign was different in message as well as style. Much as he would do a decade later, he began tailoring his rhetoric to what he considered middle-class tastes. He emphasized the need to move people off welfare. His speeches had law-and-order touches to them, and he began to move his capital punishment position from ambivalence to support.

Clinton won back the governor's job in 1982, winning 54.7 percent of the vote, and no challenger in Arkansas has come that close to him since.

The decade of the 1980s was Clinton's again, his time to rise. But how would he get where he wanted to go? The conventional route to national prominence, the U.S. Senate, seemed closed to him. Arkansas had two popular Democratic senators, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, and Clinton told friends that he was never certain that he could beat either one of them, even if he wanted to. He could not afford another loss.

His choice was to build his base from within the framework of his state job. To reach the major league circuit, he first had to win in the minors: with the Arkansas legislature, which though predominantly Democratic was among the most conservative bodies in the nation. And he had to show some quantifiable measures of success in raising the living standards of a poor southern state that ranked near the bottom in virtually every economic and social category. "Thank God for Mississippi" would no longer suffice as the informal motto for a state whose governor had national ambitions.

To his critics in Arkansas, it seemed that Clinton's will to survive began to overtake his convictions.

Where during his first term he often challenged the state's major industries on environmental and tax-equity issues, he now began courting them more often. He dropped the energy conservation office he had instituted during his first term. He backed away from challenging the timber industry on clearcutting. In the interest of pulling the state out of a recession, he made a crusade of giving industries tax breaks for economic development while maintaining a regressive state sales tax on food and frequently raising sales taxes and user fees.

Some legislators who during his first term complained that he was too arrogant now said that he was so malleable and eager to please that they could not trust him. "He wanted everyone to love him, so he would leave the impression that he was agreeing with you on every issue," said Democratic state Sen. Nick Wilson. "People were supposed to forget the fact that they couldn't always trust what he told them. It was just his way of being nice to you."

It was during that period that Paul Greenberg, now editorial editor of the Arkansas Democrat, coined the disparaging monicker for Clinton: "Slick Willie." "He developed the politics of ultraconsensus, this desire to never offend a single voter," said Greenberg. "You can't argue with the success of it, looking at where he is now, but it also accounts for the residue of distrust that haunted him during the presidential campaign a decade later. It became a continuous thread in the Clinton story."

Public policy activists in the state, who had considered Clinton a progressive, became increasingly frustrated with him. "He had so much potential," said Brownie Ledbetter, the state's leading tax-equity gadfly. "But he became more and more reluctant to challenge the power elite."

"It was obvious to anybody here that Clinton was a political animal who had wanted to be president for a long time and felt he had to change course to get there," said Bruce McMath, a Little Rock environmental attorney and son of former Arkansas reform governor Sid McMath. "To succeed he needed to have money and a network, so he became more pragmatic in some areas, including the environment, sometimes exceedingly so."

Clinton said he felt misunderstood by liberal critics. He was not selling out, he said later, but rather trying to get beyond the ideological impasses that had stymied his party during the post-Vietnam era. His detractors were framing each of his decisions in their left-right framework, he said, "instead of seeing that we would no longer have a Democratic Party unless we figured out how to move beyond that."

During the mid-1980s, Clinton began using Arkansas as a testing ground for many of the ideas that he thought would be important to the transformation of his party on a national level. Whether this was "altogether serendipitous," as Wright says, or more calculated is open to debate. In either case, Clinton's Arkansas programs coincided with work that was being done at the National Governors Association (NGA) and helped his steady rise to prominence among governors -- who voted him their most effective colleague -- and other Democratic policy activists.

The programs that most interested Clinton were ones that he could place within a larger theme he was developing about the relationship between government and individuals. To frame this theme he used a rhetorical device that he carried into the 1992 presidential race -- opportunity and responsibility. In his education overhaul packages, regarded as national models and Clinton's landmark legislative success of the decade, the opportunity was for teachers to get higher pay and more flexibility, for students to get more course offerings and smaller class sizes, and the responsibility was for both students and teachers to document their skills and effort through standardized competence tests.

He used the same approach for welfare reforms and other measures that he pushed when he became chairman of the governors' group in 1986. "The heart of our welfare reform proposal," Clinton said of the NGA plan that he later helped mark up and steer through Congress, "is the contract that conditions the right to benefits on the assumption of personal responsibility to pursue a path to independence, through education, training and work."

Clinton the boy wonder turned 40 in the same week that he took over the governors' conference, and he mused during his opening address to his colleagues whether this would be a "milestone or millstone" year for the first of the "over the hill baby boomers."

His 40th birthday, Clinton said later, reminded him once more of his father's premature death in an auto accident three months before Clinton was born and of his own mortality. It was a confusing period for him, he said. He was on top of his game politically, but not personally. He was concerned about his family life, his relationship with Hillary and the time he could spend with his daughter, Chelsea. And he was riddled with guilt over the troubles of his younger half-brother, Roger Clinton Jr., a musician who had been convicted and imprisoned on cocaine charges.

He was still dealing with those conflicts less than a year later when the opportunity he had prepared for all his adult life virtually fell in his lap. The 1988 presidential campaign had just begun, and already candidates were bailing out left and right. First the front-runner, Gary Hart, was forced out of the race and then Bumpers, the presumed candidate Clinton had been deferring to, decided not to run. As soon as Bumpers made his announcement, pressure mounted on Clinton to enter the race. "Bill was surprised by that," said Wright. "He thought Bumpers would run and should run."

The encouragement was coming in calls and letters by the hundreds. From Washington, veterans of the McGovern and Hart campaigns such as lawyer John Holum began writing memos on how and why Clinton should run. From California, longtime friend and veteran political organizer Mickey Kantor began working the network for him. Kantor, Clinton's campaign director this year, had been under Clinton's spell since the day he first met him in 1979 in Washington: He flew back to California to tell his friends, "I've just met the best I've ever seen!"

It did not seem as though it would take much to get Clinton into the race that summer five years ago. He expanded his speaking schedule and tested his message at a business convention in Virginia and a state Democratic convention in Wisconsin. Wright made arrangements to leave the governor's staff and set up the campaign. They began raising seed money in Arkansas and meeting with key contacts in the Super Tuesday states. A date was set for his announcement, July 15, 1987, and friends flew in from around the country to be with him. They wanted a dignified setting, in the House chambers, but state law prohibited that so they rented the ballroom at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel.

But as expectations increased that Clinton might get in the race, word spread through the national political circuit of journalists and elected officials that the Arkansas governor might have what was then called "the Gary Hart Problem." The reports and intimations of reports about an extramarital relationship that took Hart out of the race, in the minds of some Clinton advisers, had created a political climate that might prove troublesome for Clinton as well.

Among the few Clinton loyalists urging Clinton not to run was David Matthews, his former law student who went on to serve as his chief ally in the Arkansas legislature. "I spent an hour with him in the governor's office one day doing the best I could to argue him out of running," Matthews said. "I didn't think it was the thing to do for himself or his family at that time. I worried for him. I knew what a premium he placed on having a good relationship with his daughter, and I didn't want him to get hurt. Running for president is such a battleground. You could anticipate then some of the things he ran into this year."

But Matthews thought he was unconvincing, and even Wright assumed that Clinton was going to run. "We really thought he was going to, right up until the date we set for it," she said. "But it's like having second thoughts about getting married. If you have second thoughts, don't do it."

Clinton had second thoughts. The prevailing view of national political observers at the time was that he shied away from the race because of the sex issue. People close to him said his reluctance had a larger framework than that.

He had dedicated his life to public service and to his dream of being president. He loved the sport of politics, the handshakes and the deals and the policy discussions and the compromises and the phone calls -- he loved it all, from the five-point plan to the backroom bull -- but he realized that this time he wasn't making the phone calls. He was telling himself that he was not ready. On July 15, friends from around the country congregated in Little Rock. They walked over to the ballroom of the Excelsior Hotel on the banks of the Arkansas River and watched Clinton say something he had never before said in his life: He didn't have it in him to run.

"I need some family time. I need some personal time. Politicians are people too," he said. "I think sometimes we forget it, but they really are. The only thing I or any other candidate has to offer in running for president is what's inside. That's what sets people on fire and gets their confidence and their votes, whether they live in Arkansas or Wisconsin or Montana or New York. That part of my life needs renewal."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Bill Clinton's yearlong journey to the presidential nomination that he will attain tonight at the Democratic National Convention in New York began with a wild goose chase at dawn one morning last August when he slipped into the back seat of his white Ford sedan and told his state police chauffeur to drive west up the Arkansas River valley. It was the start of a trip around his home state that was called "The Secret Tour."

The tour was not truly secret. There were people waiting for Clinton at every stop. But each day's events were kept off the governor's daily schedule, and the state press corps had to scramble to find out where Clinton was headed and when he might get there. He wanted to take the pulse of the people without a caravan of television crews lumbering behind him to record every encounter.

Ten years earlier Clinton had traveled through his state in much the same fashion to apologize for the arrogance he had displayed during his first term as governor and to ask for a second chance after he was not reelected. This time his request for forgiveness was unstated but obvious nonetheless. During his successful campaign for a fifth term as governor in 1990, Clinton had promised Arkansas voters that he would serve the full four years and not run for president midway through his term. Now he wanted to back away from that pledge.

More than 200 people were waiting for Clinton when he reached the town of Rogers in northwest Arkansas. He addressed them with what seemed like the dispassion of the law professor he once was, outlining the positives and negatives of running for president.

"He seemed equally convincing either way," recalled Mike Gauldin, his capitol press secretary. "When he listed the reasons why he shouldn't run -- that he should not break his pledge and that there was much work still to accomplish in Arkansas -- I remember thinking, 'Yeah, that makes sense.' Then when he said why he should run -- that Arkansas could only do so much without changes at the federal level -- I thought, 'Well, that's convincing too.' It was a pretty even debate with himself."

Clinton was not seeking a unanimous mandate releasing him from his 1990 promise. His aides said they knew that the state's largest paper, the Arkansas Democrat, would hound him on the issue. (It did, and when Clinton finally announced, a Democrat editor, Meredith Oakley, began her column with the now-famous lead: "His word is dirt.") The purpose of the trip, Clinton's team said, was to determine whether average voters felt strongly about it one way or another. The sense Clinton returned with was that most of them either did not care or wanted him to run.

That was a welcome interpretation for a politician who showed signs of warming up for his presidential candidacy even months before he made the gubernatorial-race vow of White House abstinence.

The first key decision in the chain of events concerned whether Clinton should seek reelection in 1990. It was common knowledge in Little Rock that his interest in the job had waned somewhat by late 1989. He had said so publicly on a few occasions. Betsey Wright, his chief of staff, and other close aides and friends suggested to him that it might be best for his national political considerations if he withdrew from the glare of the gubernatorial spotlight. In private discussions with several former colleagues in the National Governors Association, he broached the question of whether he could maintain national stature without being governor.

"At several key points the former governors told him he should run again," Wright recalled. "They had a profound and decisive impact on him. These were Democratic and Republican governors who had left office mostly because of term limits. They said they had not done anything as fulfilling since and that being out of office restricted their ability to work on the national level. We don't do a good job of dealing with displaced politicians in this country." Clinton in effect decided to seek reelection with one hand and construct a national base with the other. Early in 1990, while running in the gubernatorial primary, he took over the chairmanship of the Democratic Leadership Council, a moderate faction of elected officials who were seeking to reorient the national party and make it more appealing to middle-class voters.

Clinton had been one of the founding members of the DLC in 1985, and the education and welfare programs he had instituted in Arkansas neatly coincided with the council's prescriptions for new Democratic policies. The DLC convention in 1990, at which Clinton was installed as chairman, marked a turning point for him and for the organization, transforming and enlarging them both.

"My own view is that Clinton transformed the DLC from a party rump group into a cause that stood for something," said Bruce Reed, a former DLC aide who now serves as Clinton's policy assistant. "He lifted it out of the left-right spectrum and talked about our ideas in ways that could unite the party. He was able to articulate what we stood for not just through programs but through values and principles."

The DLC in return provided Clinton with a policy resource that he could tap into and identify himself with, as well as give him a means of spreading his name and message across the country. The DLC's policy arm, the Progressive Policy Institute, became the issues center for most of the policy advisers who helped Clinton shape his 1992 campaign. His and their ideas were transmitted around the country through the DLC's magazine, which Clinton, sensitive to the group's image as a bastion of party conservatives, renamed The New Democrat from the Mainstream Democrat.

"The DLC is in no way responsible for Bill Clinton's ideology, but what we helped do is frame it and develop it," said Al From, the council's executive director. "And the reason that worked is because his ideology is very close to ours. Our crusade and his was always to try to modernize liberalism so it could sell again."

The process began with Clinton's opening address as chairman at a March 1990 convention in New Orleans where the DLC issued a statement of principles known as the New Orleans Declaration, which Clinton helped write. "It was all very coordinated," said From. "He helped write the declaration, and we helped write his speech." The central theme of both was one that Clinton had been developing for five years on his own concerning government opportunities and citizen responsibilities.

New policies and ideas, Clinton said, should be the party's only concern. "That is what we ought to be working on and we should forget . . . about who is going to be our nominee in 1992. If we stand for something that makes sense, the party will do just fine." The DLC should not only be the ideas wing of the Democratic party, Clinton added, but "also ought to be the action wing."

The national action had to wait for a few months. "Billy Boy had this campaign back home and he had this scare in the primary," From recalled of the 1990 Democratic gubernatorial primary in Arkansas in which Clinton was tested by liberal challenger Tom McRae. "We said, 'Win your election and we'll worry about the DLC when you're done.' "

Clinton stayed in Arkansas most of that summer and fall trying to convince state voters that the governor's job was his top priority. The question arose at a televised debate: If elected for a fifth time would he promise to serve out the term and not run for president?

"You bet," Clinton responded with his typical quick, eager-to-please self-assurance. "I told you when I announced for governor . . . and that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna serve four years. I made that decision when I decided to run."

Clinton's advisers were taken aback by his words that night. "It's usually a mistake for a politician to give an unqualified pledge for anything," said Wright, who by then had left the governor's staff. "He did not ask for advice, it just sort of came out. I was horrified that it happened."

His general election that year against former Democrat Sheffield Nelson was far tougher than the eventual landslide victory -- 57 percent to 43 percent -- made it appear. It was a dirty, negative campaign from the start, underscored by constant rumors and innuendos about Clinton and marital infidelity. It was during that campaign that Larry Nichols, a fired state employee, filed his lawsuit alleging that Clinton had had affairs with five women including Gennifer Flowers, who later would accuse Clinton publicly of the affair. Nelson denies that he pushed the Nichols story, but several Republican sources have said his campaign took the high road publicly while spreading the Clinton rumors around the state.

The Arkansas press never wrote about the rumors because Nichols could provide no evidence. He said he had tapes, but he never produced them. In private sessions with key state journalists, Clinton acknowledged that he had had problems in his marriage but said the Nichols allegations were false. As soon as the election was behind him, Clinton returned to his national agenda. From December 1990 to May 1991, he and From traveled to 35 states, spreading the New Orleans Declaration, signing up 23 state chapters of the DLC, refining his opportunity-responsibility speech. "Those trips were very important to his evolution into a presidential candidate," said From.

The culmination of that effort came at the DLC's annual convention that May 6 in Cleveland. Two notable events occurred there. First, Jesse L. Jackson unloaded on the DLC for not inviting him to speak even though he had garnered 7 million votes as a Democratic candidate in the 1988 primaries. From took the brunt of Jackson's public wrath, but personally Jackson blamed the snub on Clinton, and the animosity he felt toward the Arkansas governor then carried over into the 1992 presidential campaign, first when Jackson went up to New York and all but posed as former California governor Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr.'s running mate, later when Clinton criticized Jackson at the Rainbow Coalition convention for embracing controversial black rap singer Sister Souljah.

But it all started in Cleveland, and it was from then on that Jackson, whenever the opportunity presented itself, privately told friends and journalists that he had questions about Clinton's character and his moral authenticity.

Clinton and other DLC officials insisted that they were not trying to make a political statement by not inviting Jackson to speak in Cleveland. The purpose of that year's convention, they said, was to articulate as clearly as possible the themes and policies of their group. Jackson could not help them with that. Clinton did help them. The second key event of the meeting came when Clinton delivered what was considered the clearest and most powerful speech of his career, one that put together all the themes and policy ideas he had been developing since his gubernatorial loss more than a decade earlier.

"I think the political world discovered him in Cleveland when he gave what was generally regarded as the best speech of the year," said Reed. "It became immediately evident that Clinton could run for president if he wanted to."

Clinton went home to Arkansas and began talking to advisers, friends and family about his dilemma. "The only thing he could see at first is that he would be breaking his word to the people of Arkansas," said his mother, Virginia Kelley. "He really agonized over it. I told him it's only a wise man who changes his mind. A fool never does."

Over the Fourth of July holiday last year, Clinton traveled up to the Lowell, Ark., home of his longtime friend David Matthews, who then accompanied Clinton down to Fayetteville. It had been 17 years since Clinton and Matthews first made that trip, Clinton as a young law professor seeking a seat in Congress, Matthews as his student and campaign driver. Matthews remembered thinking during that long ago drive that the man seated next to him might run for president someday. But last year Matthews still did not think Clinton should do it.

"I spent the whole trip to Fayetteville telling him why he shouldn't run, just like I had when he was thinking about it in 1987," Matthews said. "I said he'd get beat. George Bush would win. You can't read Bill Clinton's mind. His great strength is he listens so intently. If he agrees with a point, he says so -- 'I agree with that.' So you leave the conversation thinking he's going to do what you want. I knew he was torn, but I thought he agreed with me."

Later that summer, when Clinton returned to the Lowell area during his Secret Tour, Matthews rose at a public session and said: "Bill, I've changed my mind. It's clear to me that no one else in the national Democratic Party is going to say what you say. So I'm going to encourage you to run."

Over the next month, the opinions of people Clinton trusted came back unanimously. He and his wife, Hillary, spent several nights discussing the inevitable stories they would encounter about his alleged extramarital affairs. Hillary later said she told her husband that if they stood together the stories would fall away. "I told Bill that if the government was doing what it should, improving our schools, health care, eradicating poverty, then he didn't need to be president," she said. "But since the government wasn't doing those things, it was worth the negative stories he might face to run for president."

"It made a big difference to me that Hillary and I were close enough that we could talk about all that," Clinton said. "That made a huge difference. It would have been much more difficult if we didn't have the kind of relationship that we had."

There was still a hope, even a presumption among some of Clinton's advisers, that marital infidelity would not even be raised as an issue in 1992. To the extent that it was, they thought Bill and Hillary could defuse it together by stating that like many modern American couples they had had some troubled times in their marriage but they had worked through them.

That would be enough, they thought. If asked "Have you ever . . . " questions, Clinton would say that he did not have to answer. "It was a perfectly legitimate position, we thought," said John Holum, a Clinton adviser who had also assisted former Colorado senator Gary Hart in 1984. "The plan was to say, 'Look, I'm not going to answer that question.' That's what the plan was from the start."

The moment Clinton had been grooming himself for all his adult life finally came on Oct. 3, 1991. In front of the Old State House in Little Rock, he announced that he was running for president. The lessons of his life came out in that speech, as he hopes they will again tomorrow night in Madison Square Garden.

He recalled his earliest years in Arkansas and the sense of place he felt whenever he looked at a picture on his office wall of him holding his great-grandfather's hand. He evoked the call of his Georgetown University professor who taught him that America's greatness came because each generation felt a moral responsibility to make life better for the next. He reminded his audience what it meant to grow up in a region where blacks and whites had been kept down because they were divided.

That night at the governor's mansion, he held a dinner for the scores of out-of-town friends who came for the announcement speech. Carolyn Staley, his high school friend, entertained the crowd by playing the piano and singing gospel music.

After other guests left, Clinton and Staley and a few other old friends went back to the piano. They talked about the old days in Hot Springs, about going to Washington to shake hands with President John F. Kennedy, about their high school principal, Johnnie Mae Mackey, the woman who gave Clinton an early shove -- and it didn't have to be much of one -- toward a life of politics. Just the thought of Mackey would lift their spirits as they remembered how she would get all fired up at school pep rallies and swing her arms around windmill-style faster and faster as she bellowed: "Hullabaloo kinnick-kinnick. Hullabaloo kinnick-kinnick. Warhee. Warhi. We Win or Die. Ching chang chow wow. Ping pang pow wow. Trojans! Trojans! Go! Go! Go!"

This was the first night of Clinton's campaign, and he wanted to feel the full emotion of the moment. He asked Staley to play his favorite gospel song, and he stood beside her, in full tenor voice, and sang: ". . . If anybody asks you where I'm goin' . . . I'm goin' up yonder."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

To Understand the Candidate, Walk the Streets of Hot Springs

Hope gets you nowhere in the Bill Clinton story. As a small town in Arkansas and the birthplace of a potential president, the name carries with it an unavoidable poetry, but its importance beyond that falls into the realm of myth. No one named Bill Clinton was born in Hope. The boy brought into the world there on Aug. 19, 1946, was called Billy Blythe. He became Bill Clinton years later in Hot Springs, only an hour up the road but an altogether different place, a city of secrets and vapors and ancient corruption and yet somehow purely American idealism. Hot Springs gets you somewhere.

Hot Springs is a place where when you ask county historian Inez Cline if she has any information on someone, the spunky grandmother heads to her file cabinet and says, "Let's see, why don't we look under 'Gangsters'?"

Hot Springs is a place where Dick Hildreth, the leather-faced masseur at the Arlington Hotel bathhouse, describes his intention to vote for Clinton in the idiom of an old gambler who once gave rubdowns to Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and the Capone boys from Chicago. "Yeah," he says, "I think I'll make a play on Billy this year."

Hot Springs is a place where Mayor Melinda Baran, a contemporary of Clinton, says that "every family in town has a skeleton rattling around in the closet," and then goes on to describe how her grandfather was a member of the political machine that made the city safe for gamblers and mobsters in the 1930s and how he accumulated a wide swath of valuable hillside property despite his modest clerk's salary.

Hot Springs is a place that inspired a poetic memoir titled "The Bookmaker's Daughter" by Shirley Abbott, who was exactly that -- the daughter of a bookie who would leave for the office every morning saying with only the slightest hint of irony that he was off to make an honest buck.

Hot Springs is a place, Abbott writes, that "deconstructs and demolishes the American dream of virtue and hard work crowned by success, as well as all platitudes and cant about the democratic process and small-town American life. After an upbringing here, New York City politics, or Watergate, or even the savings and loan scandal, could hardly come as a surprise."

The governor of Arkansas and Democratic nominee for president had his upbringing here. He arrived in town at age 5 in 1952 with his mother, Virginia, and her new husband, Roger Clinton -- a little family with secrets of its own. He left at age 17 in the fall of 1964 to study at Georgetown University -- a bright and worldly young man on his way to a career that three decades later would prompt his proud hometown to hang "Boyhood Home of Bill Clinton" banners across Central Avenue.

Listening to Clinton on the trail this year, one might never know that Hot Springs was his boyhood home. At the Democratic convention in New York, he closed his acceptance speech with the words "I still believe in a place called Hope." Hot Springs went unmentioned. It sometimes seems to be the great black hole of his campaign's anecdotal history. The only time it comes up is in a context Clinton would just as soon forget: when questions are raised about whether he got special treatment from the Hot Springs draft board.

Even Clinton's mother, who still lives here, feels sensitive about the dominant role that benign and symbolically wholesome Hope has played in the Clinton story at Hot Springs' expense. She sighed with relief this summer when her son showed up at his '50s-theme 46th-birthday bash in Little Rock wearing his old navy blue Hot Springs High letter sweater. "Make sure you take note of that sweater," she said as Bill and wife Hillary promenaded through the party throng. "Hot Springs people are feeling kind of left out."

Waters & Gangsters

The valley with the world-famous mineral springs in the Ouachita Mountains has always been a separate place from the rest of Arkansas: part restorative mecca, part safe haven; diverse, cosmopolitan, open to all the competing impulses and contradictions of human beings. Two hundred years ago the territory was neutral ground for the Caddo, Osage, Quapaw and Natchez Indians, who first came here to be healed by sweat baths in the natural hot water, and that atmosphere of tolerance persisted.

By the time the first Clinton arrived from the small Arkansas town of Dardanelle in 1919, sin had been flourishing in Hot Springs for a half-century. Central Avenue was lined with ornate bathhouses on one side and betting parlors on the other. Gambling was illegal but open, as was prostitution, and in fact both enterprises funded the local government, such as it was.

On the 27th of each month, officers would round up the prostitutes and march them over to the courthouse, where, in the words of an old judge, "every young blade in town was there to look them over." The prostitutes would pay five bucks, their madams twenty, and then go back to business. The gambling entrepreneurs made their payoffs in quieter fashion. It was said they had to bribe a string of 13 judges, cops and public officials.

There were four Clinton brothers in town between the two world wars: Roger, who would later become Bill's stepfather; Robert, who moved to Texas; Roy, who became a feed storekeeper and antiques merchant; and Raymond, who rose to the highest prominence as a civic leader and Buick dealer.

Raymond Clinton was a sharp-eyed financier who at times challenged the status quo but knew how to accommodate it when that better suited his purposes. He had been well aware of the gangster presence in Hot Springs since the days when he worked as a downtown salesclerk as a young man.

"I was working in a drugstore back in the early '20s when Al Capone used to come down, walk down the street with his hat … turning his hat down … and he would have two men behind and two in front and two on each side," the now-deceased Clinton recalled during an interview for an oral history project in 1980. "You couldn't miss him … and I stood out lots of nights in front of the drugstore and watched him walking down the street because just four or five doors above me was the Southern Club, and that's where they hung out when gambling was going on."

Capone and all the other notorious mobsters of that generation made frequent visits to the spa in provincial Arkansas. They felt protected in the valley of hot waters. Federal agents and Chicago detectives would trail them down to Hot Springs, but for the most part there was an uneasy truce here. It was a common sight at the bathhouses for cops and criminals to be resting side by side on massage tables getting rubdowns, chatting amiably.

Raymond Clinton appreciated one aspect of the gangland presence after he got his Buick dealership. "I did a lot of business with them," he said. "They bought a lot of cars."

The city boss from 1926 to the end of World War II was a colorful little dictator named Leo P. McLaughlin, who would take daily tours of his town in a buggy pulled by his show horses, Scotch and Soda. His political machine was the envy of the big-city boys back east. His theory of politics, as described by his partner in power, Judge Verne Ledgerwood, was: You rub my back and I'll rub yours. His version of integrity was summarized in what he once said about his police chief: "He was honest. He did exactly what we told him to do."

Raymond Clinton got on the wrong side of Leo P., and vice versa, in the aftermath of a fire that leveled four downtown stores in the late 1930s. Clinton complained that the fire raged out of control only because all the fire trucks were unavailable: The firemen were cruising around town at the time with political banners promoting McLaughlin's candidate for governor. One of the mayor's cronies heard Clinton's complaint, and here is how the scene went from that point, according to Clinton's tape-recorded recollection:

"The next morning he called me and said, 'Raymond, this is Leo.' I said, 'All right.' He said, 'I heard what you said yesterday and I want you to know that I am in politics and you are in the automobile business and I'm going to break you and run you out of Hot Springs.' And I said, 'Well, you SOB, crack your whip.' And that was the beginning of what you might say was our political battle."

McLaughlin told the gamblers to stop buying Buicks and bullied Clinton in minor ways, but he never ran him out of town. In 1946, at about the same time that Billy Blythe was born down in Hope, Raymond Clinton and several of his buddies who had just returned from the war plotted McLaughlin's overthrow. They formed what was known as the GI Movement and ran veterans for all city and county offices on an anti-gambling reform ticket. The GIs won, and their first act was to strip McLaughlin's name off the new airport.

Shirley Abbott, the author whose father was a bookmaker, still remembers that year and Clinton's role in the reform movement. "I remember my dad would go around the house muttering about 'that damn Raymond Clinton,' " she says.

But the reformers turned out to be a mixed lot. They included prosecutor Sid McMath, who went on to become the governor of Arkansas, and Q. Byrum Hurst, who went on to become Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer. In the end, as with many reformers, it turned out they mainly were interested in power. As Raymond Clinton himself said of McLaughlin: "He could've been a great man and I still say they would've built a monument to him when the boys came back had he said, 'Boys, I've had enough of it, you all want it, I'll help you.' But he didn't do that. He was too greedy."

McLaughlin was indicted twice on corruption charges, but never convicted. And gambling soon returned to Hot Springs. This time the big man in town was an international mobster, Owney Madden, who moved to Arkansas as part of a probation deal with East Coast prosecutors. Raymond Clinton sold Madden his cars. The first was a black Buick convertible with a khaki top.

"Mr. Madden wanted to call me Ray, and he said, 'Ray, can I give you a check?' I said, 'Sure.' I knew he had to be worth that kind of money," Clinton recalled. "So he wrote the check out -- he had a hard time doing it -- and when he handed it to me I looked at it and I said -- uh, he told me to call him Owney -- I said, 'Owney, this check is no good.' He said, 'Jesus, Ray, I just put 20 Gs in, it had better be good.' So after a bit I showed him what was wrong. He didn't put the amount and didn't sign it."

Bottoming Out

People say Roger Clinton knew how to have a good time -- his friends called him "Dude" -- but he was never much with money. His brother Raymond looked after him in a sense, and kept him employed in his auto business. In 1933 Roger married the Widow Murphy, Ina Mae, who had two young sons, George and Roy. Roy Murphy remembers him as "a great stepfather" who would take the boys fishing and camping and who never showed signs of being the violent drunkard who later tormented his second wife and her son Billy.

When Raymond expanded his business in 1946 and opened a Buick dealership in the small town of Hope, he sent Roger down to run the shop. Roger did not want to move there, so he commuted, coming back to his wife and stepchildren on weekends. His marriage swiftly deteriorated, and in 1948 Ina Mae divorced him. The divorce papers at the Garland County Courthouse in Hot Springs indicate that heavy drinking played a role in the divorce. Roger at least once hit his wife in the head with a shoe, giving her a black eye and a bloody scalp.

Two years later, on June 19, 1950, Roger married Virginia Cassidy Blythe, a young nurse who had lost her first husband, William Jefferson Blythe III, in a car accident in 1946 three months before her son, Billy, was born.

The new Clinton family split time between Hope and Hot Springs until 1952, when they moved up to Hot Springs for good. Roger steered clear of his ex-wife and the Murphy boys. For much of the next decade his first wife fought with little success to get Roger to pay $ 135 a month in child support.

Roger Clinton did not adopt Billy, according to court papers, but in a sense Billy adopted him. He started calling himself Billy Clinton from the moment he began school in Hot Springs. They lived in a big house on Park Avenue that was owned by Raymond Clinton. Roger ran the parts department at the Buick agency. Virginia was a nurse anesthesiologist. Billy was her special kid -- big, talkative, inquisitive, earnest, responsible beyond his years. Even before he reached his teens, she later recalled, he seemed to be taking care of her.

For every shadow of darkness in Hot Springs, there was a corresponding ray of light, and Billy Clinton seemed to live in that light. The same springs that drew the gamblers to town also brought a rich mix of tourists and new residents from all over the country and from Europe, giving the city an international flair that excited young Clinton to the possibilities of the outside world.

"This is just a little thing, but for example I remember once I was playing a New Year's Eve dance at the Arlington Hotel, our little band, and there were all these Jewish kids there from New York who asked me to play 'Hava Nagila,' " Clinton, a saxophonist, recalled in an interview. "So I said, 'Hum a few bars for me.' And I played it by ear for them. I will never forget that."

The cosmopolitan nature of the town also attracted an excellent corps of teachers to Hot Springs High, the elite school in Garland County. While many schools in Arkansas were so backward they offered no foreign languages and gave students credit for parking cars at football games, Hot Springs High offered Latin -- which Clinton studied for four years -- all the higher mathematics courses, and sophisticated world-events classes where Clinton examined the early stages of the Vietnam War and President Kennedy's initiatives in Latin America.

"The whole culture surrounding the high school was of a very strong middle class. Education was extremely important," said Bob Haness, one of Clinton's classmates. "We were the Chosen Ones. We were the ones who were going to do better than our parents did. We never skipped school and never thought about skipping school. It was a small town but a very liberal town in a sense. We always felt different from the other people in Arkansas, who were hicky and redneck."

Shirley Abbott attended Hot Springs High a decade before Clinton, and remembers how open and intellectual the school seemed even then in comparison with the rest of Arkansas, and how its idealism stood in such sharp contrast with the cynicism of the gambling milieu. Although the state forbade the teaching of evolution at the time, Abbott recalled a biology teacher who ignored the ban and spent a semester on the subject, comparing the seven days of Genesis to seven geologic eras.

Billy Clinton became the vessel for all the knowledge and wisdom the teachers of Hot Springs could pour. "The teachers all loved Billy," said classmate Peggy Parker Janske. "That kind of gagged everybody, that he was the teachers' pet, but he was such a nice guy nobody could dislike him."

Virginia was an interesting combination of all the competing forces of her new town. She was devoted to learning and self-improvement, and from an early age pushed her son to excel, often boasting that he would be president someday. She had an exotic side to her as well, driving around town in Buick convertibles, dyeing a white streak in her hair, building a sunken bathtub in her house. She worked nights as a nurse and often went to the Oaklawn race track in the afternoons, placing $ 2 bets.

Roger Clinton's drinking grew worse year by year. On March 1, 1959, according to divorce papers at the Garland County Courthouse, he took Virginia to a dance and beat her. "My husband became quite drunk and kicked me and struck me," she said. Later that month he "threw me to the floor and began to stomp me, pulled my shoe off and hit me on the head several times."

She separated from him then and filed for divorce, but he promised to quit drinking and they reconciled. Two years later Virginia again was humiliated in public. "We went to a party given by Mrs. Perry for Christmas 1961," she said in a divorce deposition. "My husband became so intoxicated I was unable to get him home. I was finally able to get my oldest son, Billy, to help me with the car and we were finally able to get him home." Bill tried to protect his mother. On dates he would call home every hour to make sure she was okay.

On May 15, 1962, Virginia divorced Roger Clinton. Less than one month later, Bill went to the county courthouse and officially had his name changed from William Blythe to William Jefferson Clinton. The reason for the name change, the court document states, was: "No pleasant associations connected with the name of Blythe as he never did know his father and he has always been known by his friends and in school records as William Jefferson Clinton."

Less than two months later, Virginia remarried Roger, largely out of pity, she later said, and against her son's advice. They stayed married until his death while Bill was away at college.

The gambling culture was hotter than ever during Bill Clinton's high school years. It embarrassed him. He told his mother that he hated to see so many lives wasted by the false lure of quick money. And it was becoming a national embarrassment as well. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy cited the town as a haven of gangland corruption and sent an army of agents to Arkansas to try to clean up the place. It was not until 1967, when a reform Republican, Winthrop Rockefeller, took over the governor's office, that the last slot machines were hauled off to a dump and ground to dust by bulldozers.

In some ways the town has changed considerably over the past 25 years. It hit bottom and now is enjoying a renaissance. The bathhouses, which turned seedy and closed, are are reopening one by one. Grand old Hot Springs High was abandoned for a newer facility, but the academic talk of the town these days is a statewide math and science high school opening here next fall, a product of Gov. Clinton's education agenda.

The Southern Club, the main gambling parlor, is now a wax museum. Family entertainment centers have taken the place of nightclubs such as the Vapors, the place where Clinton's mother used to go to see Vegas-style acts. An old man described by townsfolk as a grouchy hermit resides in the Park Avenue house where the Clinton family lived for a decade. Clinton's mother now goes by the name Virginia Kelley: She lives out on Lake Hamilton with her fourth husband.

'Fascinating Contradictions'

Out of this town, this family, came someone who believed that the world could always be better, that people could start anew every day, that there were some things in the past just as well forgotten; someone with a full appreciation of the dark and light sides of human nature, with a divided soul: part earnest preacher, part fast-talking gambler, with an urge to reform, yet also to accommodate.

Shirley Abbott thinks she understands the forces that move Bill Clinton and how Hot Springs shaped them. She thinks she understands where Hot Springs took them.

"Anyone growing up in Hot Springs has to have a very deep sense of politics from an early age, a sense that money and power control everything," she said. "You couldn't grow up here and not understand that. Yet what it did for me, somehow, is make me more of an idealist. Somehow everything I saw here made me want to reform the world. I think Bill came out of Hot Springs with that same sensibility. It is a place of fascinating contradictions."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Bill Clinton revealed his essential nature on issues of race one afternoon last March. First he drove down to a black neighborhood on the south side of town and ate lunch at Sim's Bar-B-Que, an unpretentious eatery known for its pork ribs and Delta blues jukebox. Then he cruised up to the Heights for a round of golf at Little Rock Country Club, an elite hideaway with manicured fairways and no black members.

The two stops illustrate the competing impulses that seem to take the Arkansas governor and Democratic presidential nominee in different directions. The rib joint and the country club are geocultural icons for two separate worlds in Little Rock, one black and the other white. Clinton seemingly has moved between the two worlds with ease and regularity.

He is in many ways the quintessential son of the New South who denounced racism as a teenager in segregated Hot Springs and made racial equality a central theme of his career. "Race," Clinton said, "was the major moral issue of my childhood" -- one that he felt he had stood up to with a certain amount of courage. "I was out of step with most people. Most southern whites were still pretty segregationist in the '50s and '60s, but I believed in integration."

But as he evolved into a pragmatic politician seeking to reach the top in a society where whites control most of the votes and virtually all the money and power, Clinton grew adept at advancing civil rights without seeming to turn his back on the largest voting constituency in Arkansas and the one from which he came, the culturally conservative and rural white southern middle class.

Clinton is a bicultural explorer with redneck roots, a combination that provides him with stronger empathetic ties to both worlds than most politicians, but also leaves him open to apparent contradictions.

He can send his daughter to a majority-black public school and yet greet his segregationist predecessor, Orval Faubus, with a warm embrace at his first inauguration -- a gesture intended to be a sign of reconciliation but taken by many blacks as a reminder of a bitter past.

He can blame Republicans for trying to divide the nation along racial lines through the manipulation of stereotypes and totems, and yet select the symbolically charged issue of welfare overhaul as the subject of one of his first campaign commercials in the general election against President Bush.

He can encourage and promote a generation of black lawyers and politicians in Arkansas and yet, motivated in part by his concern not to alienate too many old-line white pols, vote to appeal a historic civil rights ruling that reapportioned the legislature to increase black representation.

It is part of Clinton's dichotomous nature that he can make blacks and whites who have nothing in common with each other feel that they have a special bond with him.

U.S. Judge Damon J. Keith of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, after recounting a scene in which Clinton and his wife Hillary spent a weekend at the predominantly black wedding party of a former Yale Law School classmate on Martha's Vineyard, said: "As black folks, we all know when white folks are shucking and jiving. And let me tell you, Bill Clinton is for real."

No one could be further apart from Keith than L. G. Stevens, a retired plant machinist in Lake Charles, La., who voted for white supremacist David Duke in last year's Louisiana gubernatorial election and believes most Democrats promote "uncivil rights against white people." He met Clinton at a rally in August and came away thinking, "This guy cares for people like me."

Over the years in Arkansas, Perlesta Hollingsworth, a prominent civil rights attorney, has felt buffeted by what he sees as the contradictory forces within Clinton on issues of race. Hollingsworth was appointed to the state Supreme Court in the mid-1980s as part of a sweeping effort by Clinton to bring proportional minority representation to the state's courts, commissions and regulatory bodies. Five years later, as lead counsel in the redistricting case, he was stunned and disappointed by Clinton's vote to appeal.

Hollingsworth calls Clinton "in some ways the best governor in America on race," but with a caveat. "Bill puts himself in a tough position trying to make everyone happy," he said. "He's always got to have the white male support to get anywhere. We understand that."

Clinton's rapport with blacks is uncontested even by Jesse L. Jackson, with whom he has had several muted confrontations this year, including Clinton's rebuff of rap performer Sister Souljah at a Rainbow Coalition conclave in Washington.

Jackson said one reason he was restrained -- by Jacksonian standards -- in his criticisms was because he appreciated that "Bill Clinton has a greater comfort level among blacks than most white politicians." But while Jackson said he felt Clinton was motivated by "the best moral intentions," he found his actions bordering on patronizing at times.

Jackson said Clinton was sending out dual signals on issues such as welfare overhaul where "the language says one thing and the message is something else. The language is good, everyone is for welfare reform, but the unspoken message is that blacks are the problem."

Jackson also read an inner meaning into a picture in Jet Magazine that showed Clinton surrounded by black advisers. No one in the picture is within Clinton's inner circle of power, and with the exception of Ernest Green, one of the students who integrated Little Rock Central High 35 years ago, Jackson said, none is widely known in the black community.

The implication was that "these blacks are being given power, not sharing it," Jackson said. "There was the old plantation in the picture. . . . One senses with Bill a tension between his desire to have warm relationships and the push for structural change."

Clinton, while not challenging Jackson directly on the issue, expressed dismay at the implication that he has slighted blacks or taken them for granted during this campaign.

The Arkansas Experience

Not long after Clinton arrived in Fayetteville in 1973 to teach at the University of Arkansas law school, the word went out on the black grapevine that "here was a different breed of cat, substantially different from the run-of-the-mill that we were used to," as Jesse Kearney, one of his black students, later put it. Clinton's reputation had preceded him -- that he used to sit at what was known as the "black" table at Yale Law School and that he shared a house in Connecticut with a black classmate.

With no black faculty members at the Arkansas law school, Clinton became a mentor of sorts for black students who were part of the first significant wave of blacks moving through the legal education system in the state.

When he was elected attorney general in 1976, he brought several of his former students into state government with him, advancing the integration of the attorney general's office beyond tokenism. "When you saw more than one black deputy, you knew he meant business," Hollingsworth said.

The racial transformation of Arkansas government became more profound when Clinton was elected governor -- an office he has held for 12 of the past 14 years. He appointed blacks to the state Supreme Court and major cabinet positions, including not only social service agencies where blacks are often slotted, but key financial positions as well, such as the Department of Finance and Administration. In all, he has appointed more blacks to state jobs and commissions than all previous Arkansas governors combined.

Clinton's appointments did not always sit well with old-line white legislators. Betsey Wright, his former chief of staff who now serves as a deputy in his presidential campaign, recalled that one powerful legislative leader "was constantly visiting the governor's office to complain that Bill was appointing too many blacks to boards and commissions." Clinton, Wright said, would politely disagree.

His approach to these legislators was to try to overwhelm them with empathy and information, mulling over with them the ramifications of their votes on different constituencies and how they could minimize the political damage. "The respect he had for even the most Neanderthalic legislators was equal to his very best friend," Wright said. "He dealt with every one of them the same. He would put himself in their shoes."

There was a coolly practical side to Clinton's actions, shaped by numbers. Blacks make up 14 percent of the population in Arkansas, far less than most southern states, meaning that Clinton, unlike some of his Deep South counterparts, could never win an election without majority white support. The percentage of blacks in the legislature was even smaller until recently.

Within that context, Clinton's dealings on issues of race in Arkansas have had uneven results. For his first decade as governor, he could not get the legislature to fund a human rights commission. Until 1990, the state Constitution retained an amendment -- long since unenforced but nonethless embarrassing -- that opposed desegregation of public schools. It took Clinton a decade to get blacks appointed to the state medical and pharmacy boards.

Although Arkansas was one of only two states without a civil rights law, the most serious effort to enact one came only last year, on the eve of Clinton's presidential bid. The measure Clinton and the black legislators supported was similar to the federal law that eventually passed Congress and was signed by President Bush. It contained no quota language. But lawyers for the state Chamber of Commerce drafted a countermeasure essentially gutting it by providing no mechanism to pay lawyers who took discrimination cases.

With the Senate backing the stronger version and the House passing the Chamber of Commerce variation, Clinton tried to find a compromise, but the best he could come up with was a task force that is supposed to present a new bill next session. Although Bush attacked Clinton recently for not producing a civil rights bill, most blacks in Arkansas hold him harmless on the issue.

"The General Assembly here is an anti-urban legislature, which generally means it is anti-black," civil rights lawyer Hollingsworth said. "It is mostly rural good-ole-boys who don't want to do anything that infringes on their right to do what they want to do."

But Hollingsworth said there were times when Clinton showed less courage than he had hoped in standing up to the conservative white power structure. His gravest disappointment came when Clinton, as one of three members of the state Board of Apportionment, voted in 1989 to appeal a federal court ruling that substantially increased the number of majority-black legislative districts.

"I'll never forget that day," said Hollingsworth, who served as lead counsel for the black plaintiffs in the historic case. "I wanted him to show some leadership on that. I didn't feel good about it then and I don't feel good about it now. The appeal was a direct slap in the face of black voters, black people in the state. I think he could have done better."

Clinton offered largely technical reasons for joining with the attorney general and secretary of state in the unanimous decision to appeal. He said the apportionment board needed guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court on its role in redistricting because the 1990 census was approaching. The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal.

The unstated reason Clinton voted to appeal, said black state Rep. Bill Walker, was that he was under pressure from powerful white legislators whose districts were threatened. Jesse Turner, a black leader in Pine Bluff who switched to the Republican Party in 1990 out of discontent with Clinton's redistricting position, said: "Our governor claims to be the champion of black people in Arkansas, but that appeal showed nothing but insensitivity."

"The symbolism of appealing was misread by a number of black leaders as a rejection of their plan, which Bill didn't think it was," said Wright, his former aide. "His vote didn't so much surprise me as disappoint me. I felt in the end symbolism was more important than any technical reasons to appeal."

Using the Wrong Club

As governor of Arkansas, Clinton was granted special golfing privileges at the most exclusive club in the capital city, Little Rock Country Club. Unlike the Republican who beat him in 1980, Frank White, Clinton was not a member of the club, but he took advantage of his privileges to play there five or 10 times a year during the past decade, said lifetime member and frequent partner Mark Grobmyer, Clinton's companion on that day last March.

Grobmyer said Clinton never expressed concern over the racial composition of the club, which does not have a whites-only clause yet has only white members. He also said that black acquaintances in Little Rock never raised the club's racial composition as an issue.

But Hollingsworth and other black leaders in Little Rock said Clinton should have known better. The country club was considered the symbol of old-style racial exclusivity and that blacks avoided the place and played at an integrated course on the edge of town.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Bargaining, Mediating Roles Reflected Hands-On Approach

One day in 1985, Gov. Bill Clinton telephoned the chairman of International Paper Co. at its corporate headquarters in New York and spent an hour hashing out details of a massive tax break designed to deter the firm from moving its operations out of Pine Bluff and Camden, mill towns in the timberland of south Arkansas.

As Clinton worked the long-distance deal from his second-floor office in the Arkansas Capitol, he was flanked by an economic development aide urging him to strike the bargain and a budget analyst pleading, "Don't give up the store."

The warning by International Paper had come at a bad time for Clinton, who was crafting an economic package aimed at pulling his rural state out of a recession that had resulted in a 10.1 percent unemployment rate in 1983.

It was not only double-digit unemployment that was a threat to his notion that Arkansans could "fashion a life here that will be the envy of our nation," as he once promised. An estimated 35 percent of the Arkansas workforce was functionally illiterate and more than half the residents had not graduated from high school. Smokestack industries that had scrambled South earlier in the century were moving to cheaper labor markets in the Third World, and the capacity to compete in high-technology was limited -- all the government agencies, universities and corporations in Arkansas combined would rank only 80th among the nation's research institutions based on finances.

How Clinton responded to that economic predicament offers several clues to how he might preside over the national economy if he reaches the White House. While presidents have greater powers at their disposal than governors, as well as a wider range of troublesome forces to contend with, the underlying nature of Clinton's economic convictions can be found in his work in Arkansas.

In his five terms as governor, Clinton has displayed a hands-on approach as bargainer and mediator and a belief in public-private industrial policy. He has often equivocated between pursuing long-term remedies or short-term benefits, shown a propensity to direct tax initiatives toward what he views as the economic stepping stones of education and transportation, and demonstrated a readiness to trade corporate tax breaks for job growth.

Many of those traits came into play during Clinton's deliberations over the International Paper crisis.

His key economic development adviser, Dave Harrington, had worked out a "failure model" that indicated the state economy would suffer a $ 450 million-a-year loss if International Paper closed the Camden plant and chose an out-of-state site for modernization. He recommended that Clinton offer the company a 5 percent sales tax exemption spread over several years if it expanded the Pine Bluff plant by $ 5 million or more.

Mahlon Martin, Clinton's budget director, worried about the impact on the state budget. Whatever deal was struck with International Paper, he noted, would have to be extended to other industries that met the same guidelines. The revenue system already was riddled with business tax breaks that prevented the state from collecting millions of dollars in potential taxes. And the highly regarded Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation had just issued a scathing report calling for a moratorium on further tax breaks, labeling them "runaway tax exemptions" that had little effect on industry investment decisions.

Clinton mulled the options and chose the tax break route. In his bargaining with the paper company, he eventually accepted a 7 percent manufacturer's investment sales tax credit -- 2 percent higher than Harrington had recommended -- but in return won a promise that the company would modernize the Pine Bluff plant and not close the Camden facility for at least two years. The paper company eventually spent $ 278 million upgrading the Pine Bluff facility; the plant in Camden is still operating.

Seven years later, Harrington, director of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, and Martin, who left state government to run the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, still disagree on the merits of the deal.

"The tax credit led to the modernization of industry in the state of Arkansas, which is one reason why we're in better shape than many other states today," said Harrington. "It's a tradeoff that I'd make any day of the week."

"We almost gave away the store to major industries," said Martin, noting that after the tax break was enacted by the legislature in 1985, the state had to cut spending for six consecutive quarters to balance the books. "You can look back in hindsight and point out where we were more gracious [to industry] than we ought to have been." Statistics later compiled by the Arkansas Fairness Council, a nonprofit progressive-tax research organization, indicated a potential state revenue loss of $ 166 million between 1985 and 1990 for tax credits issued during that period.

But Harrington and Martin, as well as some of Clinton's more persistent critics in Arkansas, agree on a larger point: President Bush and the national Republicans, they say, are making a specious argument when they claim Clinton has led his state down a decade of economic decline.

The State's Economic Picture

The record shows that job growth in Arkansas has increased far beyond the national rate in the three full years since Bush took office. Per capita income, while still only 77 percent of the national average, has risen steadily. The jobless rate has dipped below the national average. Hourly wages for industry workers, while still stuck near the bottom among the 50 states, have increased during the past year by more than the national average. The workforce has become better educated: The percentage of Arkansans graduating from high school has increased by half, from college by one-third. And the state tax burden, while still favoring the rich and large corporations, has remained stable.

During the decade of slow but steady recovery in Arkansas, Clinton pushed through five significant increases in sales and gasoline taxes to fund education and transportation programs and one increase in the corporate income tax to enhance vocational training. He also implemented two major, controversial business tax exemptions designed to spur job growth and developed a network of economic agencies aimed at bringing more private capital into his rural state.

"We're a lot better off than we were when Bill came into office," said Warren Stephens, president of Little Rock-based Stephens Inc., the largest investment banking firm outside Wall Street, and the son of Jackson Stephens, one of Bush's major financial backers four years ago.

"I'm not naturally going to say a bunch of bad things about what Clinton has done with the economy because he really has done a good job," said Arkansas Senate Minority Leader Travis A. Miles (R). Miles said that although the national Republicans were within bounds calling Clinton a "tax and spender," there are "a lot of people in Arkansas, including me in most instances, who thought he was doing the right thing" by pushing the tax increases to finance education and transportation.

State Rep. Ted Mullenix (R) said the legislature's Joint Interim Committee on Economic Development spent the past six months holding hearings around the state on economic issues. "We basically found that most manufacturers, small businesses and towns are fairly well pleased with what's happened in Arkansas," Mullenix said.

Clinton's most vitriolic critics in Arkansas have come from his left, in the progressive-tax wing, rather than the right. Many of them still question his resolve to take on big industry and correct the state's historic tax inequities, but they nonetheless give him above-average marks overall.

"If you look at the total economic picture, the guy's been a more than decent governor," said Tom McRae, a former Rockefeller Foundation director who became so upset with what he saw as Clinton's equivocating nature that he challenged him in the 1990 Democratic gubernatorial primary. "He's been what I would call moderately conservative on fiscal issues."

Working With Private Business

As a salesman for his state, Clinton seems to enjoy the recruiting, cheerleading, mediating and jawboning part of his job, both on the road -- he has made 13 business trips to Europe and the Far East and has set up Arkansas development offices in Brussels, Tokyo and Taipei, Taiwan -- and at home.

"Clinton's a natural salesman, a hell of a salesman," said Robert Nash, one of his longtime economic aides, sporting a smile that revealed the many meanings of that assessment.

In the spring of 1984, one year after he had returned to the governor's office after winning his rematch with Republican Frank White, Clinton held a luncheon at the governor's mansion that epitomized his tendency to involve government as a sort of bartering bazaar for private business. The honored guest was Sam Walton, billionaire baron of the discount merchandise world, who sat at the end of the table across from Clinton. Along the table on either side were 15 executives with firms that had plants in Arkansas.

One of them, a garment manufacturer, was facing bankruptcy, which gave Clinton the idea for the meeting. If Walton's Wal-Mart would buy the manufacturer's clothes instead of getting them from an overseas supplier, the garment maker could stay in business. With Clinton leading the discussion, the executives persuaded Wal-Mart to drop many of its overseas suppliers in favor of the local firms that could provide similar wares.

The luncheon was the Arkansas-rooted genesis of what became Wal-Mart's "Buy America" program and the beginning of a state-run "matchmaking" program that matches large corporations with local suppliers.

Building an Economic Package

That same spring, Clinton put together an economic policy team led by Harrington, Nash, science adviser John Ahlen and Boston-based consultant Belden Daniels that established the overall economic direction of his administration.

The economic team's proposals were seen as a natural progression from the education changes Clinton had implemented in 1983. "What Clinton said to us was, 'Look, I think I'm being successful now in creating good educational opportunities for Arkansans, but what I'm worried about is: Will there be jobs for them?' " Daniels recalled.

Unlike the education measures, financed by a one-cent sales tax increase, the economic package enacted in 1985 was relatively self-sufficient. It relaxed some state banking investment regulations and usury limits -- from what had been a lid of 10 percent up to 5 percent above the prime rate -- and revised the investment guidelines for state pension funds, adding a requirement that at least 5 percent be invested in Arkansas.

But the core of the package was the creation or expansion of a group of economic agencies involved in a state version of public-private industrial policy: the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority, the Arkansas Capital Corp. and the Arkansas Development Finance Authority. Similar agencies were springing up elsewhere, and their mission was to use state powers to divert private capital into places where it might not naturally go, such as somewhat risky scientific entrepreneurial ventures or rural projects.

The Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA) was the most controversial part of the package, and ran headlong into the opposition of Stephens Inc., which saw it as direct competition in the bond-issuing business. Transformed by Clinton from a housing authority to an economic development super agency, ADFA had the role of providing long-term fixed-rate financing for manufacturing plants and housing developers in Arkansas. Cities, counties, school boards and hospitals also could get financing from it. By bundling various proposals, ADFA sought more financing at lower rates.

Some of Clinton's advisers thought he might buckle under pressure from Stephens Inc. "The underlying question with Clinton has always been how much steel there is in him, how much guts does he have, is he such a pleaser that he will not follow through against tough pressure," said one of his advisers, who asked not to be named. "He had pushed through the education bill in 1983 against the opposition of teachers who didn't want to be tested, but that might have been with his wife Hillary's steel more than his own. I can say I saw steel this time. Clinton stood up to Jack Stephens and got ADFA passed."

Warren Stephens, speaking for his family, said that the firm's concern at the time was not just the state competition ADFA posed, but the danger that it would unduly politicize the bonding business.

State records show that firms doing business with ADFA have been heavy contributors to Clinton's political campaigns. But there have been no clear cases of quid pro quo favoritism. "We were worried about the possibility of it becoming too political, but I must say it hasn't happened," said Stephens, whose firm, now on friendlier terms with the governor, raised more than $100,000 for Clinton's presidential campaign.

Clinton's 1985 package is credited with helping stabilize and strengthen the Arkansas economy and transforming its base from agriculture to manufacturing. The percentage of state workers in manufacturing now is 25 percent, compared to a national average of 17 percent. Total employment in manufacturing, according to state figures, has increased 19 percent during the past decade, compared to 2 percent growth nationally.

Job Growth vs. Job Quality

But questions have been raised about the state's -- and Clinton's -- depth of commitment to long-term funding of science and research. Several nearby states, including Kansas and Oklahoma, have developed science and technology agencies that are being funded at 10 times the level of Arkansas'.

Robert Nash, who now runs ADFA, said that although his authority has financed 46 industrial development programs in the state that boosted job growth among small manufacturers, its mission was hampered by the 1986 federal tax act that prevented the state agency from financing warehouses, docks and distribution centers. "We have not done all that we hoped and expected seven years ago," Nash said. "It's not been as completely successful as we wanted it to be, but it's been well worth the effort."

Clinton's obsession with job growth in Arkansas, some critics say, at times has come at the expense of the environment and with little regard to the quality of the jobs. The manufacturing job growth during the past three years has come largely through the location in northeast Arkansas of major steel plants, whose environmental and worker-safety records have been questioned, and construction of a massive food-processing plant in Pine Bluff for Tyson Foods, the world's largest chicken-processing company.

"Clinton talks about high-growth, high-wage jobs. Well, this is the other end of the spectrum," state AFL-CIO President J. Bill Becker said of the chicken assembly-line jobs that pay about $8 an hour. "It's not high wage; it's dirty, repetitive work." The Clinton administration counters that in poor areas such as Pine Bluff, where nearly 40 percent of the workforce is functionally illiterate, it is elitist to disparage such jobs.

People who have watched Clinton deal with the Arkansas economy during the past decade tend to marvel at his political adaptability and propensity for selling himself and his state, but some say they feel a nagging concern about how his yearning for quick solutions might play out on a national level.

"He desperately wants consensus in everything, and that's the way he's dealt with the economy," said McRae, the former Rockefeller Foundation director. "If he can find a consensus, he does well, but the consensus is not always there, nor should it be. If he can put aside this intense capacity he's developed for politically positioning every single move he makes, if he can say, 'Hey, I was doing this to become president, and now I've done it and I can get on to what really needs to be done long-term to fix the economy,' then he can become a great president. I'm guessing he'll be the former, but hoping for the latter."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)