Back in simpler times, when Bill Clinton`s face graced the pages of national magazines with a smile as sweet as an Arkansas watermelon, and his march to the Democratic nomination for president had a golden glow, a certain story about his childhood would come up in interviews.
It had to do with the time he was 14 years old and witnessed another violent encounter between his mother and his alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton. As Bill Clinton told the story, he confronted his stepfather that fateful night and told him there would be no more violence.
”I couldn`t wait to get big enough to know there would be peace in my home,” he told the Los Angeles Times. ”I was proud (to have) put an end to the violence in my house.”
” . . . one of the most difficult things for me was being 14 years old and putting an end to the violence,” Clinton told New York magazine.
The story appeared in other newspapers and magazines as well, conveying the image of a courageous and mature youth who stopped the violence that racked his family home in Hot Springs, Ark.
As with many anecdotes about Clinton, though, there is a footnote. That riveting scene of confrontation, courage and peacemaking may reflect precisely what happened. Or it may not.
There is another version of what life was like in the Clinton home, one that describes Roger Clinton`s continued abuse of his wife until she moved out and also Bill Clinton; he gave it when he was 15 years old, in a deposition during his mother`s divorce proceedings.
”For the last four or five years the physical abuse, nagging and drinking has become much worse,” said Clinton under oath on May 10, 1962.
”On one occasion in the last month I again had to call my mother`s attorney because of the defendant`s conduct causing physical abuse to my mother, and the police had to be summoned to the house.”
In the space of a few weeks, the presidential campaign of the Arkansas governor has undergone a remarkable transformation. He has gone from front-runner to also-ran to the self-declared ”comeback kid” with a string of impressive primary victories.
Yet as he heads to Illinois for the crucial March 17 primary, the same question posed by the conflicting tales of his youth continues to dog his campaign:
Who is he?
Is he the one who, on ”60 Minutes,” beamed at his wife, Hillary, as she affirmed her love and respect for him? Or is he the one whom a supermarket tabloid accused of carrying on a 12-year affair with a sometime cabaret singer named Gennifer Flowers?
Is he the noble one who felt so guilty about the deaths of high school classmates that he gave up his deferment and made himself available for the Vietnam War draft? Or is he the one who admitted, in a 1969 letter, that he had misled an ROTC recruiter to get that deferment and thanked the recruiter for ”saving me from the draft”?
Is he the one who, when running for re-election as governor in 1990, made a public promise that he would not turn around and run for president? Or is he the one who, contrary to that promise, is the eager presidential candidate?
And in Hot Springs, was he a peacemaker who managed at the age of 14 to end the violence in a volatile household? Or was he, at 15, forced to summon the police because of another episode of physical abuse?
When asked recently about the differing versions, Clinton gave a third explanation, charting a middle ground between the story of courage told on the campaign trail and the story of helplessness given in the deposition.
As a result of his confrontation with Roger Clinton at the age of 14, Clinton said, his stepfather never again behaved violently toward his mother- as long as Clinton himself was in the house. But by the time he was 15, Clinton said, he was spending more time at school and less time at home. And he was so concerned for his mother`s safety that he urged her to get out of the marriage. ”I just was worried that every time I was out of the house something was going to happen,” he said.
To those in Arkansas who know Clinton, the idea of him offering three explanations for the same event-one heroic, one helpless, and one somewhere in between-is not surprising.
Clinton`s record during five terms in the statehouse has made it increasingly difficult to tell what, if anything, he truly stands for.
Few denigrate his tenure as governor. On the contrary, even his toughest critics say he has made important strides in education and economic growth. He dazzles political pros with his charm, brilliance, rhetoric and uncanny ability to digest complicated issues.
Friends and foes alike say his unlimited potential for leadership seems tailor-made for the White House. Even in his 20s, Clinton electrified voters with his speech, style, sincerity and confidence. As time passed, he got better. Yet despite these considerable attributes, those who know him well also perceive a certain hollowness.
”He is so eager to be accepted everywhere,” said Brownie Ledbetter, a Democrat who heads the Arkansas Fairness Council, a group that has vainly strived to overhaul the state`s system of taxation. ”It makes him willing to tell different constituencies different things and hope everybody`s happy.”
When you talk to Clinton, ”most of the time you feel good,” said J. Bill Becker, head of the Arkansas AFL-CIO, who is officially neutral in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary. But, Becker said, ”most of the time it`s just rhetoric. Maybe he doesn`t have follow-through. It`s very frustrating.”
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If there is a seminal event that begins to answer some of the questions posed by Bill Clinton`s political life, it probably occurred on Nov. 4, 1980, just two years after he became the nation`s youngest governor at 32 and the day his re-election bid suffered a humiliating defeat.
To some, it was the day Bill Clinton grew up and finally understood what it meant to be a politician. But to others it was the day he stopped doing what he thought was right, and started doing what he thought was politically right.
By all accounts, Clinton was a firebrand during his first term, from 1978 to 1980. Willing to embrace issues with little regard for their political fallout, Clinton recruited outsiders to run agencies. His coterie of advisers wore beards and traveled Arkansas with Dostoyevskyan gloom, calling members of the state`s timber industry ”corporate criminals” and exposing the secret dealings of utility companies.
His lawyer-wife used her own name professionally, and he sponsored legislation to raise vehicle license fees, seemingly unaware of the havoc a fee increase would cause in rural areas.
He championed controversial issues, including environmental reform, energy conservation and scrutiny of utility company rates.
After his ouster, however, Clinton returned to Arkansas politics with a different slant. Appearing on television, he apologized to voters for trying to do too much too soon. When he regained the governor`s chair in 1983, beards were no longer in vogue. His wife no longer used her maiden name. And there was a very different political style.
”He came back as someone who wouldn`t make any move without a poll,”
said Thomas McCrae, the former president of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation who unsuccessfully challenged Clinton in the 1990 Democratic primary for governor. ”Here was someone who had been brash and kind of exciting, was kind of cowed by the experience, and came back very cautious.” The 1980 loss, said Scott Trotter, who had been a state Department of Energy official in Clinton`s first term, ”made him stronger as an individual, as someone who can take the heat and take the pressure. I think it also made him really think about what types of issues he was going to get involved in;
what`s the downside, what`s the upside, who will be opposed to me, how sweeping an issue it will be, and how will it affect my political career?
Clinton`s supporters say he simply realized that he could accomplish more as a pragmatic leader, one who picked his issues carefully and pushed them through an often-hostile legislature that eventually enacted praiseworthy programs for educational reform and economic development.
”He`s been criticized for being a conciliator, which may be one of his strengths,” said Mike Beebe, a Democratic state senator from Searcy. ”I think he`s deeply committed to things.”
”The Bill Clinton that everybody loved got kicked royally out of office,” added press spokesman Mike Gauldin. ”The Bill Clinton that those
(critics) hate has been re-elected four times.”
Gauldin readily admits that the governor`s efforts have focused on education and jobs, perhaps to the exclusion of other things. But he said such attention was necessary for the state, which has historically placed near the bottom in every imaginable ranking.
Clinton has enacted substantive education reform. Foreign languages, which weren`t offered at many Arkansas schools, are now offered at every school. So are advanced courses. In 1983, 5,100 students took advanced math courses in the schools; that number is now up to 75,000.
Perhaps most significant, the rate of college-bound seniors has gone from 38 percent to 51 percent, and Clinton has significantly raised teachers`
salaries.
Arkansas` economy, too, has grown faster than the economies of surrounding states. During the current recession, the state has outperformed the nation in every category of employment. Last year it ranked seventh in the country in job growth and had a rate of manufacturing growth 10 times the national average.
”Education and jobs are the core that we have to build everything on. If we`re accused of placing too much emphasis on education and jobs, I guess we`re guilty,” Gauldin said.
Critics say other crucial issues facing the state, such as child welfare and environmental reform, have not fared nearly so well.
In both areas, critics say Clinton followed his standard approach: He formed task forces to report on the issues. He announced reorganizations. He expressed compassion and appeared genuinely committed to reform. But in the end, he did little to correct abuses until they had reached the crisis stage. Last July a class-action lawsuit filed against Clinton and the Arkansas Department of Human Services charged that ”public officials responsible for the protection of Arkansas` most vulnerable children have consistenly ignored their legal duties.”
As many as 23 other states across the country have been slapped with similar suits. What distinguished Arkansas from other states on the problem was the poor level of care relative to the state`s small overall caseload, said William Grimm, a San Francisco attorney representing one of the plaintiffs in the Arkansas case.
”It`s not a Los Angeles with 55,000 kids. We`re talking about 1,300 to 1,400 kids in care. It is amazing that it has done so poorly with so few children,” he said.
The suit was filed after a string of tragic disclosures. In one case, Steven Walters, 4, died after allegedly being beaten and abused by his parents. Two Department of Human Service employees involved in the case were fired.
In another incident, 6-year-old Daniel Toric`s left leg had been placed in scalding water; it developed gangrene and was amputated. When Daniel was taken to the hospital, he had more than 50 scars, scabs and cuts covering his body. Three years earlier, the state had closed its file on the boy.
Clinton said in an interview that efforts were consistently made to cure the state`s child welfare problems. In 1985 the Arkansas Department of Human Services underwent a massive reorganization, and in 1987 the state added a $5 fee on marriage licenses to help establish child abuse and neglect programs around the state.
”The governor spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on studies and task forces,” Grimm said. ”But acting on those studies and reports was not done. I think it took a lawsuit to make it a high priority.”
Meeting last month in special session, the Arkansas legislature effectively settled the suit by agreeing to a package of child welfare reforms that will cost approximately $15 million over the next several years.
Critics charge that Clinton`s inattention to the problems of the environment is equally disheartening.
Just ask Jack Weaver. Every couple months, he goes out to the hilly acres behind his home at the base of the Ouachita Mountains and pours chlorine bleach into his well, hoping to clean his drinking water.
Living in a part of western Arkansas once known for its pristine mountain lakes and dazzling, spring-fed rivers, Weaver now finds that 80 percent of the private wells in the area are polluted, according to state officials.
”Twenty years ago, you could drink from any stream around here. Now you can`t even drink your own well water,” said the retired Air Force chief warrant officer.
State officials say the pollution comes from one of the state`s leading industries, an economic engine that churns out goods worth nearly $2 billion a year and puts an estimated 42,000 people to work: Arkansas chicken and hog houses.
More than any of the environmental hot spots in this so-called Natural State-like the clear-cutting that has ravaged Arkansas` forests, or the cleanup of chemical plants outside Little Rock-regulation of the livestock industry falls squarely on the governor`s shoulders.
The 1.6 million tons of manure produced annually by the bird and bacon houses is used by farmers as a cut-rate fertilizer or dumped in ditches and creeks, where the nitrates and disease-carrying bacteria in it seep through the porous, hilly earth and into the local wells and underground aquifers.
Today, some 270 miles of Arkansas rivers are polluted with fecal coliform bacteria and are unsafe for humans or fish, according to a report by the state Department of Pollution Control and Ecology.
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Acknowledging that hog- and chicken-farm pollution is ”one of the worst ecological problems in the state,” Clinton impaneled a special Animal Waste Task Force in 1990 and mandated its members to devise reforms that could be enacted into law in the 1993 state legislative session.
But the response comes late and will likely do too little, conservationists say. The governor`s 28-member task force is dominated by Clinton appointees from the poultry and hog industries, as well as state officials and academicians beholden to them. The three or four appointees with backgrounds in conservation say they are consistently outvoted.
”We`re virtually landlocked,” said conservationist Larry Snodgrass, a task force member. ”We haven`t been able to do anything.”
Even Clinton`s supporters say he did not attend to the growing environmental issue until the last gubernatorial election, when Tom McCrae gave him a strong race in the Democratic primary by hammering his alleged neglect of the land.
In 1991 he created sweeping legislative reforms that include tough laws empowering Arkansas to deny permits to companies who have records of noncompliance with environmental laws. Working with the federal government, his administration has helped clean up some of the pesticide-choked waterways in Arkansas` fertile eastern delta region. State workers have planted 25 million trees in the last two years. And the cash-poor state ranked fifth in the nation in per capita spending for environmental programs last year, according to City and State magazine.
But for Jack Weaver, Clinton`s awakening came too late.
Two years ago, when his well water started to taste funny, Weaver joined a local citizens committee that wrote to the governor and appealed for his help in stopping the proliferation of livestock houses in their area.
”It took about two months, but we did get a reply,” Weaver said. ”He wrote, in essence, that he thought the interests of everyone could be balanced out, and he didn`t think it was such a serious concern.
”Let`s face it, this task force has become a political thing,” Weaver said. ”It has caused many of us to become downhearted and lose interest in Mr. Clinton.”