Beginning Of the Road

By GARRY WILLS

"He's beyond Arkansas now. He's more Yale and Oxford than Arkansas." That was the snap judgment, later modified, of columnist John Brummett, the best of the journalistic Clinton watchers in Little Rock. When several people told me that Bill Clinton brought them into the state and took them on tours of its beauties, Brummett said, "I wonder what they could be. Maybe he should take me on one of those tours." When Hillary Rodham first came to Arkansas, it took Clinton nine hours to drive the one-hour's distance from Little Rock's airport to his mother's home in Hot Springs. He showed off everything from mountain lookouts (Dardanelle and Mount Nebo) to obscure purveyors of fried pies -- a local delicacy Clinton has loved not wisely but too well, as he has continued to love his often unlovable state.

In 1931, when H.L. Mencken collaborated with a statistician on three articles trying to establish the worst state in America, Mississippi won that upside-down contest, but with Arkansas and Alabama hotly contesting the bad eminence. Arkansas, near the bottom in most categories, was at the bottom for insolvency. V.O. Key Jr., in his famous study Southern Politics in State and Nation, gave the prize for fraudulent elections to Tennessee -- but Arkansas was a close second. Diane Blair, a political scientist who has written the best study of the state's constitutional structure, calls Arkansas nearly ungovernable. Yet Clinton has governed it -- fairly well -- for 12 years. He seems to find in it things that elude the rest of us. As Brummett talked, he moved from his first judgment. "Clinton in Arkansas is like Bush in the nation -- he has hometowns everywhere and a network of friends in each place." Clinton can best be understood in terms of his four hometowns: Hope, Hot Springs, Fayetteville and Little Rock.

HOPE

Clinton was born at the bottom of the state, in its black belt, which has a bleak history. Twenty-five miles to the west, the state's most famous demagogue (Jeff Davis, named for the Confederate leader) was born, in a county (Little River) where more than a hundred freed blacks were murdered after the Civil War. About 25 miles south, a cemetery from early in the century was dug up, revealing African-American bones ravaged by the worst malnutrition recorded in this country. Hope is placed on stingy soil that raises, paradoxically, only large things: thick piney woods and 200-lb. watermelons.

Actually, Hope was in the midst of a minor boom when Clinton was born there in 1946. The Federal Government established an artillery proving ground outside the town, which brought in skilled workers during the war and created new jobs. Clinton's admired Uncle Buddy, Oren Grisham, worked in the fire department on the proving grounds, which are now an industrial park.

The town itself was and is small and slow. Because Clinton's father drowned in a freak accident before his birth, Bill's mother left him with her parents while she went off to New Orleans to become certified as a nurse anesthetist. Clinton's grandparents, Hardey and Mattie Hawkins, ran a grocery store outside town near the Rose Hill Cemetery. Clinton, who was often in the store as a child, remembers its clientele as half black, but his cousin Falva Lively says, "Oh, it was more than that. It was in what used to be called Niggertown." Clinton praises his grandfather for extending credit to poor black customers, but that was the only way to do business with people seasonally employed. Clinton also says he learned tolerance from his grandfather -- but it is a lesson the man did not pass on to his own daughter, Clinton's mother, who admits her prejudice toward blacks was not dispelled until late in her life. Clinton never played with black children, and the one ; black friend he remembers from Hope was his grandparents' maid Odessa. "I visited with Odessa years later. I remember rocking with her on her porch." Asked, he cannot remember Odessa's last name.

He lived among blacks, but not with them. He would have to grow, along with his region, in the stormy civil-rights days ahead. But he is at ease among blacks -- as Jimmy Carter was -- and they make up his most solid base of support in the state. He carries the black belt easily, with more than 90% of the African-American vote, in every election. Considered a moderate outside the state, he is opposed at home as "too liberal," too supportive of minorities.

Though he lost both parents -- his father permanently and his mother temporarily during the crucial years of his childhood -- Clinton's memories of Hope are fond. Uncles and aunts and cousins rallied round the bright little orphan left with his grandparents. He remembers being taken to various relatives' places of work, showered with compensatory kindnesses. His grandfather did a spell as a night watchman at one of the pine-tree sawmills. He would take Billy with him, let him play in the mill until the boy was tired, then put him in the backseat of his Buick to sleep. "I remember climbing the mountain of sawdust, how it smelled on those spring and summer nights -- such a vivid memory."

The supportive network of relatives and friends was typical of Arkansas clannishness. The state's white population is homogeneous and inbred. The base of its stable demographics was an influx of native-born Protestants from nearby states in the 19th century. It still has few foreign-born citizens -- or Jews (0.1% of the population) or Roman Catholics (3.1%, about a ninth of the national average). It is a Bible-reading and conservative state that passed one of the last creationism laws to teach an alternative to evolution.

Like many homogeneous societies, Arkansas delights in its eccentrics (think of England). Two of these were Clinton's mother and his Uncle Buddy. Virginia Kelley (nee Cassidy) is a free spirit who has outlived three husbands and goes to the racetrack with her fourth. In her home, not far from the large open Bible, hangs a sampler that says RACE TRACKS ARE THE ONLY PLACE WHERE WINDOWS CLEAN PEOPLE. She has maintained a career in nursing throughout her adult life.

Uncle Buddy, a lively (and off-color) raconteur, regaled the young Clinton with tales of hunting dogs, life's ironies and the maxims people should live * by. Asked about his own family tragedies, he told his nephew, "Yes, life's tough, but I signed on for the whole trip." To this day Clinton calls his Uncle Buddy "the wisest man I ever met." (Clinton talks Southern hyperbole, which raises a language barrier for some Northerners.) He describes his uncle and his mother in the same terms: they have weathered many trials with unfailing equilibrium and good humor. There is a streak in the Arkansas character that militates against expecting too much from life (and militates, as well, against political reform). I am not as surprised as I was when Clinton first told me that one of his favorite books is the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Clinton left Hope when he was seven, moving north to Hot Springs, but he and his mother were frequently back for relatives' graduations and funerals, for the Watermelon Festival, for long talks with Uncle Buddy. Clinton calls his grandfather and his uncle "the main male influences in my childhood." He kept up with all the interconnected family gossip and vicissitudes that make life in a small Arkansas town seem like an open-air soap opera. A thousand times over, Clinton heard and told the tale of how Uncle Buddy decided one day to "stop making a damn fool of myself" by heavy drinking -- and did it. Little moral sagas, losses taken with resignation, unexpected gains, made up the texture of Hope life. The marks of a small town are still on him, the intimate questions asked even of strangers, the touching and hugging at every entry to a house, the relaxed slouching walk Clinton shares with his mother. He may have done some bustling around the world of Yale and Oxford, but his preferred rhythms are the slow ones of his birthplace.

HOT SPRINGS

When Virginia Blythe (as she then was) retrieved her son from the relatives and married her second husband, Roger Clinton, this should have been a return to stability for the boy who had been handed around the small town. Instead, he experienced his first disorientation in this restored life with two parents. Roger Clinton's anger was explosive when he drank. In one of his rages, he fired a gun into the wall and was taken off to jail -- a searing memory for Clinton, and grist for the busy rumor mills of Hope.

The couple tried for a new start in Hot Springs. Roger Clinton, who had been selling Buicks in a town with little demand for new or expensive cars, joined his brother in a more prosperous dealership in the state's most affluent resort town. Virginia, meanwhile, got steadier work, better remunerated, as a nurse anesthetist. At first the Clintons lived in the country, in a house without indoor plumbing. Much has been made of Clinton's encounters with snakes in the outhouse, but he says, "We were not poor. A lot of rural Arkansas had no sewers back then." Billy was taken into town to attend a Catholic school, rather than the inferior county school nearer home. It was his first experience of Arkansas' dreary educational establishment.

It was a sign of Hot Springs' comparative cosmopolitanism that Catholics, rare elsewhere in the state, had a large parish and school in the city. The city's affluence came largely from the Federal Government, which had established a hospital and reservation around the mineral waters in the 1800s. The natives let a double jurisdiction grow up, and visitors to the spas were received with illegal (but openly practiced) gambling and prostitution. The local tales of Hope were traded for the legends of Al Capone carousing in the acrid steam of the bathhouses or at champagny circles around the roulette wheel.

After the Clintons moved into town, Billy tried out the slot machines (confiscated in various political campaigns and held by a compliant police force until the zealots had moved on). A natural stinginess soon made him give up on machines that gobbled his money and gave so little back. Like the other boys, he called up Maxine, the best-known madam, to tie up the line she used for customers. "We did it mainly to hear her cuss -- we never heard a woman use language like that."

Carolyn Staley, who lived next door to the Clintons when she and Bill were in high school, says that as a preacher's kid, she never even knew about the town's reputation as sin city. Did the Clintons know? I ask her. "Oh, yes, they were more sophisticated, more worldly-wise." Clinton's mother liked the gambling, and his stepfather, who was still drinking, flew into rages when he was not sure where she had been. In a deposition for divorce proceedings, the mother feared for her son's safety: "He has continually tried to do bodily harm to myself and my son Billy."

Eventually Billy got too big to beat, and threatened his stepfather, telling him never to lay a hand on his mother again. When the rages continued, the family broke up.

Hot Springs, unlike Hope, was a place where such problems could be kept secret. Billy's friends, teachers, counselors and pastors never knew what violence he faced when he went home. Staley lived next door when the Clintons' brief (three-month) divorce was still in effect, and did not realize that her friend was fatherless during that period. Eventually, Roger convinced Virginia that he could reform. Her son, 15 at the time, argued that he would never change and tried to persuade his mother not to remarry him. Why, I ask, did she? "She was old-fashioned and thought she must be to blame in some way; and she felt that Roger ((Clinton's half brother, born of this marriage)) needed a father." He does not mention what seems the obvious and (in this case) the real reason -- that Virginia still loved Roger.

Clinton has always been very close to his mother, despite the fact that he and his brother were largely brought up by a maid who cared and cooked for them while the mother was at her nursing jobs. It was a tradition in Hope for families of even modest means to have a black maid -- Virginia had one when she was growing up, and Billy had Odessa while he was at his grandfather's house. In Hot Springs the maid was white, and very religious -- she hoped Billy would grow up to be a preacher.

It was not an expectation that would have surprised anyone at the time. Facing chaos at home, Billy became super-responsible in school and church. "I was the most religious member of my family," he remembers now. "Mother got more religious later, as a result of the suffering she underwent." (She lost two more husbands to death.) Billy raised funds, organized for charities, became the band director's right hand for statewide planning. The band director acted as another surrogate father.

While others fancied him as a preacher, Billy was determined to be a musician. He attended band camp every summer in the Ozarks, won first place in the state band's saxophone section, and played in jazz combos. Musicians were always coming and going at the Hot Springs clubs, and the first blacks Clinton respected were jazz artists he heard and tried to emulate. Despite the joshing he takes now over his sporadic bouts with the saxophone, his band director, Virgil Spurlin, says he was very talented and dogged in his practice: "He could sight-read with the best, and he kept me busy finding scores for him to read." Music seemed a way to test the wider horizons offered in Hot Springs; despite excellent grades, he would be offered more musical scholarships than academic ones when he graduated from high school.

The Clintons acquired a television set just before the 1956 presidential campaign, and young Bill watched with fascination both parties' conventions. In 1958 Governor Orval Faubus closed the high school in Little Rock to prevent integration, and some families brought their children the 50 miles to Hot Springs to enroll them in Clinton's school. When Clinton and Carolyn Staley, class leaders as well as good friends, were elected to Boys Nation and Girls Nation, they went to Washington and shook John Kennedy's hand in the White House.

That glimpse of Washington, where the powerful Senator William Fulbright redeemed the clownish Arkansas Governor, helped banish ideas of playing jazz in smoky nightclubs. Clinton asked his high school counselor, Edith Irons, what college offered a good program in foreign service. The only one she knew, offhand, was Georgetown, but she would look up others.

The fact that Georgetown was in Washington settled the matter for him. He paid no attention when Irons brought him other names, and she was upset when he did not even apply to other colleges. As the acceptance period went by, and summer was half gone, he still had not heard from his school of choice, and Irons says she had visions of her prize pupil not entering college that year. Clinton says he was not worried because the University of Arkansas took any student with decent grades; he had long assumed he would be going there, where Fulbright had been the college president before going to Washington. Clinton had become familiar with Fayetteville, the Ozark campus town, during his summers at band camps, and he wrote his junior paper on the university. He had acquired a circle of friends in that corner of the state -- and even another surrogate father, Eli Leflar, who had been on a Masonic panel that gave Clinton one of his many prizes. Clinton began visiting Leflar and dating his daughter. Only Georgetown -- or, more precisely, only Washington -- was more attractive to him than the school in Fayetteville, where he would later apply to teach law.

When I repeat to Stephen Smith, a key aide in Clinton's first term as Governor, John Brummett's claim that Clinton is more Yale and Oxford than Arkansas, Smith says, "He is more Georgetown than Yale." I ask Clinton if he agrees with Smith. "Yes. At Yale I had to work at a number of jobs. At Georgetown I had only one outside job. It was my first time away from home, and I had a whole range of things to learn." Also, Arkansas kept intruding. His one job was in Fulbright's Senate office. Clinton took roommates from Georgetown to visit Arkansas, and friends from there came to see him. Staley was visiting him when, in the wake of Dr. King's assassination, Clinton drove food to churches in the riot area. Like Fulbright himself, Clinton won a Rhodes scholarship when he finished college.

In this period, too, Clinton discovered a dangerous talent, part of his gregarious and ingratiating way with all his friends: a puppylike eagerness and drive to please. A man who was at Oxford with him tells me, "Bill was one of the two people I have known who were just amazingly successful with women. You would hear him and say to yourself, 'No one is going to believe that line,' but they all did."

FAYETTEVILLE

Clinton, famously, applied to the University of Arkansas Law School ROTC as part of his casting about to avoid the Vietnam War. He had intended to go to Fayetteville because the local law school is a great place for forming political connections -- and everyone, by the time he was at Oxford, knew Clinton was permanently running for office. "We would kid him about it, but no one found it offensive," says Peter Hayes, now a historian at Northwestern University.

At Yale, Clinton did no interviewing for the major law firms. "All I wanted to do was go home. I thought I would hang out my shingle in Hot Springs and see if I could run for office." But a teacher at Yale said the University of Arkansas needed new faculty, and Clinton called the dean from the interstate highway as he was driving to Hot Springs. The dean said Clinton was too young, and he answered, "Well, I'm that, but I'll teach anything you need for now, and I'm not interested in tenure, so I'll be no problem. It's a one-year deal." On such terms he finally reached Fayetteville, where he had expected to go to college and law school.

Up in the northern corner of the state, mountainous Fayetteville is as far as it can be from Hope's flat piney woods. There were never many blacks in the clefts and dells where independent farmers tended little plots. This area had little sympathy for the owners of antebellum cotton plantations in the black belt, and many in this Republican stronghold fought for the Union. No wonder the Reconstruction government started the state college in this receptive, if isolated, place.

Fayetteville is now turning up on lists of the most desirable communities in America, but only for those who want to get away from urban problems -- and amenities. Richard Atkinson, a professor at the law school, says his faculty has trouble convincing potential members that a move to Fayetteville will not drop them off the edge of the world. What do you tell them? I ask. "Well, we boast that we get National Public Radio here."

Clinton did fill in the areas no others taught (admiralty law, for example), and found the academic life rewarding enough to turn down other offers (for instance, to be on the House staff for impeaching Nixon). He meant to run for office, but not locally -- this was the Republican corner of Arkansas, after all. But as the 1974 race approached, the popular Congressman from that area, John Paul Hammerschmidt, strongly vouched for Nixon, who was under fire for the Watergate offenses. Clinton knew, from his close friend Hillary Rodham, how vulnerable Nixon was to impeachment -- she had accepted the offer to work on the staff that he refused. The two were visiting each other, back and forth between Washington and Fayetteville, and spending long hours on the telephone. He was kept informed of her work, of her virtual certitude that Nixon would be convicted in the Senate after the House impeached him.

Clinton became convinced that Nixon would take Hammerschmidt down with him, and he began to canvass his new friends in and around the university for a candidate to run against Hammerschmidt -- he wanted a Democrat who planned to live permanently in the district. But when no one else would do it, he announced his own candidacy. As a young law professor with '60s-style hair, a Yale and Oxford background and liberal cohorts from the university on his team, he should have been an easy loser in this enclave of the state's few Republicans. But he ran surprisingly well, thanks to Watergate, giving Hammerschmidt the one scare in his long, safe tenure of the office.

Hillary Rodham came to Arkansas to help with the campaign, and -- when the House staff disbanded after Nixon's resignation -- she took up an offer the dean had made her, to come teach and run a legal clinic at Fayetteville. From the time they met at Yale, the two had circled each other warily -- Clinton confessing that he thought, "Oh-oh, this woman is trouble -- the one I could love." She had joined him in Texas during the McGovern campaign of 1972, where he was a paid member of Gary Hart's staff, and she was a vote registrar for the Democratic National Committee.

Atkinson says the two of them were living together at the time, but maintaining separate apartments, in deference to conservative local ideas of professorial ethics. When they decided to marry, Clinton bought a house, which his army of friends descended on to paint, inside and out, against the deadline of their marriage day. Atkinson, who was there, says it was a marriage all the friends saw as a merging of high talents. "I know brighter people singly, but I do not know any married couple with their combined strengths." It was fascinating to his friends that Bill, with his reputation as a ladies' man, chose for his wife the brainy and (at that time) frumpy- looking Hillary. Her indifference to matters of appearance was evident on the night before the marriage when, amid the bustle of painters, her mother asked to see her wedding dress -- and discovered that she had not bought one. Mother and daughter went up to the quaint town square of Fayetteville and found one store open, where Hillary bought the first dress she took from the rack.

His unexpected showing against Hammerschmidt gave Clinton the statewide attention he turned into electoral victories for attorney general (1976) and then for Governor (1978), offices that took him to the very center of the state, where the Arkansas River divides uplands from lowlands, Ozarks from Mississippi rice. He had, in effect, been circling this place for years, aiming at the power center of the state.

LITTLE ROCK

Precisely because it is the center of power in Arkansas, the city has long been resented. Jeff Davis, an enormously successful demagogue of the early century, always ran against Little Rock and kept declaring his independence of the place even when he had to live there as Governor. He tethered a goat on the Governor's lawn to show that his heart was still with the hill folks. He won his first term in office crusading against the construction of a capitol building in the city -- a new home for the despised politicians. The antipolitics of our own time is just rediscovering the ploys of Davis, who treated Little Rock as the Beltway of his time: "The judges have lived too long at Little Rock, which is why they ruled against the people."

Those scratching a living in the hills wanted to be left alone, and certain growers in the black belt did not want others to see how they ruled their plantations. This prickly isolation took on a rabid note after the Civil War, when federal interference created the "Carpetbagger Constitution" with strong powers. As soon as the "Redeemers" drove out the carpetbaggers, a deliberately weak government was created by the constitution of 1874, which is still in force.

To this day, the legislature meets only biennially, for two months, to keep the representatives of the people out of evil Little Rock. The power to tax is severely restricted -- the legislature must raise all state taxes by a three- quarters vote. The Governor, with only a two-year term, has a weak veto. Attempts to write a new constitution have been crushed twice in recent years by a populace afraid of giving any more power to the government. Even the New Deal, which brought blessings to all the South, met the most grudging reception in Arkansas, which refused to raise local funds to qualify for federal largesse, treating rural electrification as a plot against old local autonomy. When Winthrop Rockefeller gave $1.5 million to set up a model integrated school, on condition that local taxes take up the burden after five years, the school was allowed to close when its free run ended. Jeff Davis, after all, had tried to outlaw the education of Negroes, on the grounds that it ruined good field hands without creating intelligent citizens.

Faubus, the son of a socialist, tried to open up Arkansas to outside investment, making Rockefeller the head of a newly created investment council. Opposition on this front helps explain his unexpected defiance of federal integration orders in 1957. It was surprising that Arkansas, of all places, should be the first Southern state to take this stand. It had fewer blacks than most of its neighbors; and those were concentrated in one segment of the state, and they had been rapidly draining away since the collapse of cotton growing. (Black population shrank from 27% in 1920 to 16% in 1980.) But Faubus wanted to be seen standing up against outsiders. What bothered his state was not simply having to integrate schools but being told that it had to by the distant Federal Government.

People now adult in Arkansas were taught in school that theirs is the only state in America that, surrounded by a wall, could survive on nothing but its own products. The old boast was never true, but it was important to believe it, to find some blessing in the state's isolation. The most persistent vein of folklore in the state tells how a traveler so befuddled as to end up in Arkansas can be gulled with impunity by natives who are amused at this man from Mars.

Faubus was converted to government baiting by the popular reaction to his 1957 demagoguery. It helped that he was being vilified elsewhere. Arkansans rally to their own under assault. John Brummett says Clinton was never more popular at home than when the nation mocked his endless speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention or when he came under assault in New Hampshire and New York earlier this year. Even some inveterate foes of Clinton's came to his rescue during these moments of attacks by outsiders.

Faubus finally went a bit too far in his government bashing. Partly to compensate, the citizens in 1966 elected the first Republican Governor since Reconstruction, Winthrop Rockefeller, in 1966. Rockefeller, who served four years, instituted a number of reforms, largely with the help of a Federal Government still solvent at the time and intent on building a Great Society.

When Clinton became Governor in 1978, he tried to pick up where Rockefeller had left off. He lacked not only Rockefeller's private fortune but also the business ties Rockefeller had established in his long tenure as Faubus' investment counselor. Besides, the Federal Government was turning away from the Great Society. Clinton hoped for help from his fellow Southerner in the White House, Jimmy Carter, but that plan backfired when Carter used Arkansas to dump Cuban refugees at Fort Chaffee, where they rioted, broke loose and alienated the locals.

Desperate for funds, unable to get income or corporate taxes through the labyrinth of the constitution, Clinton tried to build badly needed roads with new-car registration and license fees. The costs of this angered small farmers in the key swing counties, who have a heavy turnover in junky cars and trucks, each change now entailing a higher registration fee.

Clinton launched ambitious plans for the environment and schools, relying on some experts brought down from the university or from out of state. Three of these visible aides wore beards -- an even greater offense than Hillary's retention of her original last name. Clinton was rejected after his first term for the second Republican of the century, Frank White, who was very far from Rockefeller Republicanism.

Like Michael Dukakis, who was defeated by an ex-footballer after his first term as Governor of Massachusetts, Clinton set about recasting his political persona. But where Dukakis was given a light cosmetic coating, Clinton returned to his most authentic self -- the gregarious schmoozer and good ole boy. Arkansas had the least-developed single-party system of all those states studied by V.O. Key Jr. It lacked even factions within the one party. Personality alone formed shifting clots of political alliance.

No one is better than Clinton at this kind of shoulder-patting, chat-about- the-family, how-is-so-and-so-back-in-such-and-such-a-town politics. In his second and subsequent terms as Governor, he sought out legislators in the halls of the capitol, acting as his own best lobbyist. Brummett wrote that it would be more dignified for the Governor to summon people to his office; but the informality of Clinton's new approach seemed to work. He realized that his long-range plans depended on building popular support, and he sent his wife out to talk about concern for education in every county of the state. The remade Hillary -- higher-class in her clothes, lower-class in her rhetoric, and now called by her married name -- was accepted as no longer an outsider, and Clinton's education reforms (testing of teachers, standard curriculums, aid to marginal students, vocational training) are the principal success of his 12 years in office.

To accomplish this, Clinton had to rely on regressive sales taxes rather than expend further energy trying to work an income tax through the constitutional baffles. He had to cut corners and improvise in ways that less hamstrung governments avoid. "Clinton is criticized for using corporate jets to get around the state, but every politician does that here," says Diane Blair. "Otherwise you don't go anywhere. I have seen Hillary fly through black storms to get to a high school graduation where they are waiting for her. She would never make it if some firm in the town did not fly her."

Clinton has instilled a new sense of pride in many citizens of his state. Ms. Rodham was shocked when she arrived at the University of Arkansas Law School and had a student complain of her demands: "What do you expect of me? I'm only from Arkansas." She did not realize that he might have been guying this traveler into Arkansas, in the defensive old form of mockery; but even this hangdog defiance of the outer world masked an uneasiness about the state's reputation. Journalists covering Clinton in Little Rock are constantly asked by a suspicious citizenry, "What have you heard about us up there?" % The state took a long time to recover after it sent its prized leader Jeff Davis to the U.S. Senate in 1907, only to have him laughed into fecklessness by a more sophisticated audience. The state has tried to send more presentable leaders to Washington ever since -- men like Fulbright, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor.

The constitution was finally amended to give Clinton a four-year term in 1986 (just when shorter term limits were gaining support elsewhere). At a time of pinched resources, Clinton has had experience of working within a financial straitjacket, setting priorities, concentrating on the essential tasks. The whole nation is in the grips of an antigovernment mood that he has dealt with in what was, until recently, the capital of opposition to government.

On the other hand, Clinton is a quintessential politician when the very name has become a swear word. He is a man who builds compromises and is accused of being slick. He tries to please, omnidirectionally, and is accused of pandering. I ask if he ever considered being anything but a politician. Yes, he answers, a doctor, because he saw his mother and her fellow nurses deferring to them. Then a musician. At Oxford, when he thought his opposition to the Vietnam War would preclude a political career in the patriotic South, he seriously considered becoming a journalist. "I would at least comment on the great events of my time." Why had he rejected those careers? "I would not have been great at them. I would have been a very good musician, but not a great one." Does that mean he thinks he's a great politician? He answers, matter-of-factly, "Yes." Why? "I like people, and like to help them. I can get them together, organize them, help them reach their goals." It is, I suppose, one definition of politics.