Hell To Pay Part 9

At that time, the governor of Arkansas served only a two-year term, allowing for a miserably brief period to make a mark on policy before launching a bid for reelection. The brief cycle of a governor's term ensured that a successful chief executive would be forced to wage a constant campaign.

A mature politician would have realized that given such a short term and with such stubborn legislators, the best agenda would have been the shortest. A governor could hope to achieve one--at best, two--big items.

But Bill Clinton, like his fellow governor Jerry Brown of California, set out to change the world by making his state the s.h.i.+ning example of what a farsighted, liberal government could do. Rather than control the bureaucracy, Governor Clinton created new departments for economic development and for energy (as though a state of two million people could set its own energy policy). In a region rich in petroleum, coal, and natural gas, the governor's advisors envisioned solar panels proliferating around the state like daffodils.

The young governor and his wife also had a plan to remake Arkansas's system of health care. Governor Clinton and Hillary sought to reorganize school districts and change teaching methods.

His thirst for reinvention extended to the governor's office itself.

The young governor had no need for a chief of staff. Instead, the governor's office was run by a troika of bearded young idealists who often liked to show up at the capitol in T-s.h.i.+rts and ragged cutoffs.

Two of them, Rudy Moore, Jr., and Steve Smith, were self-styled Young Turks who had served in the state legislature, where their most notable achievements had been to antagonize and bewilder their older colleagues. They had earned the contempt of the Little Rock political community, baggage Governor Clinton readily a.s.sumed by hiring them.

Steve Smith was an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) activist and was openly dismissive of the Little Rock business community, referring to them as "suits." In a state where jobs and economic growth depended on attracting factories and manufacturing jobs, Smith argued for state subsidies for quaint cottage industries. One such example was a $500,000 payment by the state (that is, the taxpayers) to train fifty people to chop firewood. An ardent and outspoken critic of timber practices, Smith quickly made powerful enemies for Bill Clinton with major state employers like International Paper and the Weyerhaeuser Corporation.

Nor was Bill Clinton the only one to blame for his personnel selection. As has been the case ever since, Hillary's fingerprints were all over Bill Clinton's staff. Another aide, John Danner, was the husband of Hillary's Wellesley friend Nancy "Peach" Pietrafesa.

A Berkeley lawyer, Danner outraged the legislature by spending federal money on staff seminars on such inane topics as "How to Tell What Turns You On." He astonished the state's civil servants by tacking butcher's paper to the wall during meetings and scribbling his stream-of-consciousness ideas as fast as he could write. Like Smith, Danner extolled a naive environmentalism that seemed to rule out the twentieth century.

It wasn't long before the Arkansas capitol crowd started referring to Clinton's office as the "children's crusade" and the "diaper brigade." Danner and Peach were too outrageous to last, even in the Clinton administration. They were gone in fourteen months. But under the Young Turks Steve Smith and Rudy Moore, the staff operation still remained out of control, and most everyone knew it except Bill and Hillary.

On the outside looking in was d.i.c.k Morris, an Alinsky protege and New York street organizer turned political consultant. From the start, Bill Clinton was impressed by Morris's ability to spot the essential challenge of a campaign and chart a strategy. Over the years, his quick mind, acerbic expressions and talent for intrigue have made Morris scores of enemies among Clinton loyalists (most notably Harold Ickes, a long-time rival from New York politics). Also, Morris was suspect among many Clinton friends for his willingness to help Republicans like Ed King beat Michael Dukakis in Ma.s.sachusetts, or help Congressman Trent Lott win a Senate seat in Mississippi.

Morris recalls Clinton as his first and best client. The truth is, in the long political relations.h.i.+p between the two men, d.i.c.k Morris may have been the Clintons's most perceptive political consultant.

Morris had imported the Hollywood technique of using polling and focus groups to sharpen a story line. He taught the young politician and his eager wife that polls could not be read as static points, but as indicators of dynamic trends in constantly s.h.i.+fting public opinion. He would eventually teach the Clintons the efficacy of the continuous campaign, one in which governing and politics were inseparably fused and in which a candidate had to be ever on the lookout for a defining moment or an issue that would polarize a majority and keep it on his side.

In his first term, Bill Clinton listened but did not learn. Once in office, he ignored Morris and grew bored with his polls. When Morris showed the boy governor poll results that contradicted one of his cherished policy goals, Governor Clinton fired him.

The issue that Morris brought to Bill and Hillary's attention, an increase in fees for car and pickup registration and a hike in the fees for transfer of vehicle t.i.tle, seemed trifling to a governor engaged in widespread social revision. Morris recalled in his book that Clinton reacted, "It's such a small amount of money, and why shouldn't the motorists pay for the roads?"*3 What Morris had tried to explain and what Clinton was unwilling to hear was how people felt about the whole system--how people felt about having their earnings eaten away at every turn by new taxes for everyday necessities.

"You went to the revenue office and took a number and waited through an interminable line--and then the lady told you you were missing one vital piece of proof," Webb Hubbell wrote. "She said you'd have to get in your car and drive over to the county clerk's office, where you would wait in another line to get a piece of paper that would ent.i.tle you to drive back to the revenue office and take another number."*4 Nor was the doubling of the registration fee a trivial A first lady such as Arkansas had never seen before.

On the campaign trail in New Hamps.h.i.+re, 1992.

Campaigning for first lady of the United States, with a new look--a microphone.

Of one mind--inauguration day, 1993.

Taking charge on health care...

...and reading out her enemies.

Warding off reporters--jokingly here, but also with serious new restrictions on their access to the White House.

Exasperation has struck Hillary often in her roller-coaster White House years with so many of her pet projects, like socialized medicine, going down in defeat.

Beating the drum for children--and government's role in child-rearing.

Campaigning as a demure housewife in a pink dress.

Triangulation at work--co-opting. religion. In Arkansas...

...and with the Reverend Schuller at the State of the Union address in 1997.

Wife, counsel, co-conspirator. Hillary gives advice while President Clinton denies having had a s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Global reach. Traveling in Slovakia...

...and addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Surprise, surprise. Hillary and Bill Clinton respond to a suggestion by Democratic Senator Chuck Robb that Hillary might run for the United States Senate. expense to many Arkansans subsisting on minimum wage jobs. Worst of all, the increase often came as an unpleasant surprise. Motorists often did not learn about the increase until they were already standing at the window. It was later publicized that the Clintons themselves had not had their car properly a.s.sessed. This alone was enough to crystallize the image of the young governor and his Yankee wife as arrogant and out of touch.

At dinner conversations in every home around the state, a price tag could be placed on the costs of allowing Arkansas to be run by a bunch of activists from the ivory tower. The car tax issue underscored that Clinton had become a world-cla.s.s talker and a third-rate listener.

Clinton made matters worse by appearing on the local bar scene, often with his brother Roger in tow. As "Sat.u.r.day-Night Bill," to use Morris's unforgettable phrase, made the rounds with his const.i.tuents of the night, more and more people remarked that his nose was positively glowing. Little Rock began to whisper that the governor's brother was a cocaine abuser, and that maybe the governor was, too.

The ridicule of the local press that had been directed at the governor's staff was now being heaped on the governor himself.

Editorial cartoons from this period often depicted Bill Clinton as a petulant baby.

The car tag blunder may have been survivable, but was soon coupled with another toxic issue. From Bill Clinton's days as a volunteer in 1976, he had sought to ingratiate himself with President Jimmy Carter and had been delighted to take Hillary to a state dinner at the White House. As the 1980 presidential reelection campaign approached and Carter found himself duped by Fidel Castro, President Carter was forced in turn to betray his young protege in Arkansas.

The issue was refugees from Communist Cuba. At first, Americans welcomed the Cuban "freedom flotillas." It soon became apparent, however, that among the "boat people" expelled by Castro was a deluge of hardened criminals and violent mental patients.

President Carter could not afford to let these murderers and rapists loose on America. Nor could he humanely return them to the dictator from whom they had ostensibly fled. In a panic, the Carter Administration twisted the arms of governors to house these refugees at detention centers within their states. Clinton, promised by Carter that this would be a temporary measure, willingly took his share of Cubans at a center just outside of Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Clinton later had to call out the National Guard after hundreds of refugees escaped, panicking local residents and stoking a white hot fury in the more Republican western edge of the state.

The governor's fortunes suffered a final catastrophic slide when Carter broke the pledge to send no more refugees. The political arithmetic was simple: Big states like Florida had more electoral votes than Arkansas did. Carter closed refugee detention camps in other states and consolidated them in Arkansas.

HILLARY AND d.i.c.k.

Another issue was Hillary's decision not to take Clinton's name--a decision she eventually realized had become a political liability for her husband.

"To her, it was an act of self-worth," her old Wellesley chum Eleanor Acheson told People magazine. "Many people felt she was one of those pointy-headed, overeducated Yale types who had come to Arkansas to spread the word to the uninitiated. There was an att.i.tude of 'Who the h.e.l.l does she think she is?'"*5 Now the signs of calamity had become unmistakable. Hillary made an urgent call to d.i.c.k Morris in Orlando. According to d.i.c.k Morris, she pleaded, "Bill needs you right now, and you've got to help him see how he can get his career back on track."*6 At the time, Morris was sealing a victory for Paula Hawkins, a Republican riding high on the wave of anger over the Cuban refugee crisis, to become a United States Senator. Morris dutifully came to Little Rock, reviewed the numbers, and declared the campaign hopeless.

Bill Clinton was confident, despite having lost a third of the primary vote to a septuagenarian turkey farmer protest candidate.

Governor Clinton's opponent in the general election was Frank White.

Many Clintonites believed that White simply could not win. White had switched to the Republican party in a one-party Democrat state. He was not a particularly attractive candidate: a homespun banker with a pot belly and bulging eyes. The polls consistently showed Clinton ahead. White simply was not taken seriously by the Clinton camp.

But White had several potent weapons. One of them was his wife, Gay, an evangelical Christian, a gracious and polite woman with red hair and ruby red lipstick. Among Arkansas voters, she compared favorably to Hillary, the first lady who kept her own name and refused to shave her legs or arm pits. White conspicuously introduced Gay as "Mrs.

Frank White," while Bill Clinton received stacks of letters demanding to know, "Doesn't your wife love you?"*7 Another weapon in White's a.r.s.enal was a keen understanding of the building anger against Clinton. White's ad campaign was based around the simple negative message of "car tags and Cubans."

"We've got to hit back!" Hubbell remembers Hillary saying. "We can't let those charges go unchallenged."*8 But perhaps the ultimate weapon in White's a.r.s.enal was the befuddled and ineffective Jimmy Carter, a Democrat in the White House who was the perfect impetus for the powerful Republican surge led by Ronald Reagan.

A photo from election day shows a haggard-looking Clinton between the parted curtains of a poll booth, gamely trying to smile and not succeeding at it. The boy governor went to bed that night declared a winner. He woke up in the morning to find out that he had, in fact, lost the governors.h.i.+p. The Clintons would soon move out of their mansion and into a modest frame house to one of the few houses ever paid for without taxpayer dollars where the former governor would complain about having to do his own laundry.

RECLAIMING THE LEGACY.

The day after his defeat, the governor was puffy-eyed and fragile appearing on the balcony of his mansion, where he glumly received well-wishers who came by to give their condolences. Always susceptible to bouts of self-pity, Bill Clinton slid into a deep depression. He managed to go through the motions of moving into an office in a law firm with Bruce Lindsey, his future right-hand and fix-it man in the White House.

For much of the time, however, the former governor walked about in a funk, wandering the aisles of grocery stores and challenging strangers to tell him why he lost.

Hillary was devastated but stayed on a more even keel. She dealt with the loss not by grieving but by acting. While Bill hashed and rehashed what had happened to him, Hillary put together the comeback plan. She started by ruthlessly weeding out the weaker members of their circle. Hillary's scorn was like "walking into a revolving air fan," one early Clintonite told the New Yorker magazine. "Her att.i.tude about Bill's old friends is, 'Why are you hanging around with these losers? They're not successful, not rich.'"*9 Hillary's campaign to retake the governor's mansion began even while they were still living in it. She organized strategy sessions in the living room and kitchen. Betsey Wright, Hillary's old feminist McGovern colleague from Texas, was persuaded to move from a good job as political director of a government union to live in Little Rock and manage the campaign to retake the governors.h.i.+p.

Betsey arrived in Little Rock before Bill and Hillary had even left the governor's mansion, taking up residence in the guest house. She organized the files of the governor's supporters, creating a system of index cards in which the candidate only had to glance down to see the essentials of his past dealings with the person on the other end of the line.

"It was always important to me that strong political feminists have relations.h.i.+ps with strong male politicians," she said later. "And Bill Clinton has no problem with strong women."*10 In Betsey Wright's case, it led to airing the idea that Hillary would be a better candidate and a better president than Bill.

Now, in order to win, Hillary and Bill would have to do something neither had a knack for doing. They had to humble themselves. How this happened in Hillary's case is a matter of dispute.

"Hillary's gonna have to change her name, and shave her legs," a powerful legislator had advised during the losing campaign.*11 As president, Bill Clinton told Connie Bruck of the New Yorker that he had never requested that Hillary change her name. In fact, Bill Clinton claimed he was dead set against it. "Hillary told me she was nine years old when she decided she would keep her own name when she got married. It had nothing to do with the feminist movement or anything. She said, 'I like my name. I was interested in my family.

I didn't want to give it up.'"

According to Bill Clinton's account, Hillary came to him and said, "We shouldn't lose the election over this issue. What if it's one percent of the vote? What if it's two percent?"*12 Whether Bill and Hillary did or did not have such a conversation, the president's account, as usual, falls short of the truth. In fact, it was such a testy issue between the two that Bill had to go to others to lobby his wife to change her name. He b.u.t.tonholed Webb Hubbell on a golf course, and persuaded him to talk to Hillary about what everyone knew as "the name issue."*13 When Bill announced his bid to retake the governors.h.i.+p in late winter 1982, Hillary Rodham was introduced as "Mrs. Bill Clinton." The press noticed and questions followed. "I don't have to change my name," Hillary demurred with typical Clinton disingenuousness. "I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I'm going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full time for Bill and I'll be Mrs.

Bill Clinton."*14 The Clintons seemed to be learning that a lie was easier than the truth and the public were willing accomplices. To compete with Gay White, Mrs. Bill Clinton ordered a total makeover, from the wisp of hair at her crown to her polished toenail. When it was complete, Hillary looked more feminine, more like a traditional first lady. Her hair had been lightened and she had a new wardrobe provided by a fas.h.i.+on consultant.*15 "I had been trying to wear contact lenses since I was sixteen," Hillary said. Suddenly, she was miraculously able to make the change, liberating her face and eyes from the owlish frames.

Hillary's makeover continued for the next twenty years. Hillary read the autobiography of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who wrote that some women should lighten their hair after a certain age. Soon thereafter, Hillary's hair became lighter and lighter. In fact she experimented with so many hair styles that in the 1990s, a Website was dedicated to tracking them all.

As first lady of the United States, Hillary Clinton even went so far as to make fun of her past frumpish appearance. She took an old hippie headband and gave it to the hosts of The Regis Kathie Lee Show, saying, "I don't need them anymore and thought you might want it for Halloween."

From the start, Arkansans appreciated the efforts Hillary made to accommodate their idea of what the first lady of the state should be.

It was, in part, because of her willingness to remake herself in these ways that Hillary Clinton was able to preside over a second inaugural in 1983. In perfect character, Mrs. Bill Clinton wore an elegant beaded inauguration gown with Chantilly lace over charmeuse silk.*16 Bill Clinton had other amends to make. He had to make the rounds of the state, apologizing to business leaders for allowing his aides to refer to them as "corporate criminals." Candidate Bill Clinton promised to advance their interests in the future. He also had to apologize to the voters, to publicly admit that he had been arrogant in his first term and had learned from the experience.

Clinton, however, is a fast and facile learner and the studied apology (and, as we later saw, repentance) comes as naturally to him as slick evasions. d.i.c.k Morris persuaded the Clintons that Bill needed to make a formal apology to the people of Arkansas. Clinton bridled but agreed to appear in a commercial designed to win back the voters. They flew to New York City, where Clinton looked into a camera, extemporizing much of his script. He spoke of the car license and t.i.tle-transfer fees, admitting they had been "a big mistake" because "so many of you were hurt by it." Bill Clinton skirted using the "a" word--he could not bring himself to an outright apology.

But he came up with something even better, something only Clinton could devise.

"When I was a boy growing up," he said, "my daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing."

Morris marveled at the ingenuity of Clinton's phrasing. The immediate reaction to the ad, however, was negative. Bill Clinton plunged in the polls. Morris bucked him up, arguing that the commercial was like being immunized. "You get a little sick, but you don't get the disease when you are exposed to it for real," he said.*17 In a few months it was apparent that Morris had been right. When White got around to attacking him "for real" on the car tags and the Cuban refugee issue, the voters' reaction was negative--against White. Bill Clinton had already apologized for this, they felt--why beat a dead horse?

In this way two cla.s.sic Clinton techniques were born.

First, conventional political wisdom has always held that advertising should be done late, when voters are paying attention and impressions are sure to last to election day. Bill Clinton aired his first campaign ads ten months before the 1982 election. In 1995 he successfully repeated this early and often technique, airing his first commercials to kill the Dole campaign before it even started.

The second cla.s.sic Clinton technique was to speed up the burn rate of a negative issue, making critics look mean-spirited and petty for continuing to harp on it.

White was unable to gain any traction in his attacks on the chastened young man who had seemed to open his heart to the people of Arkansas.

HOLDING PATTERN.

d.i.c.k Morris, Betsey Wright, and the Clintons coalesced into a team to keep the governor's mansion until the time was right to run for president of the United States. Of the four, Hillary was clearly the team leader.

"After he came back, she was going to make sure he never lost again,"

a Clinton cabinet officer observed.*18 Morris did the polling. Betsey Wright, who had brought her organizational skills to managing the database of supporters, now managed the governor's office and his legislative agenda as chief of staff. Bill, of course, was the candidate and front man. But Hillary was much more than just a front; she was the other princ.i.p.al, the behind-the-scenes candidate calling the shots on broad strategy.

She often brought the foursome together to work on scripts, on paid media, on earned media, and on ma.s.s mailings.*19 Hillary managed some of the trickiest issues for her husband during the 1980s. She worked out a compromise on a sticky school desegregation issue that, had it not been resolved, could have harmed Clinton politically. Behind the scenes, she saw to it that the Rose Law Firm represented the Public Service Commission in its dispute with the powerful utility Arkansas Power & Light over who should pay for costly electricity from the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant in Mississippi. She saved her husband from political embarra.s.sment while earning her law firm a cool $115,000 in state business.

Frank White exploited this blatant conflict of interest in a bitter 1986 rematch. A Rose Law Firm press release explained that these fees were "segregated" from Hillary's income--it was as though a partner would not benefit in ways other than monetary from bringing in a major client. White was never able to make his charges stick.

He never capitalized on the fact that the real conflict wasn't the money, it was the way in which Hillary used her law firm to defuse a dangerous issue for the governor.

When White pressed his attacks, the Clinton campaign fired back with a b.u.mper sticker that said, "Frank White for First Lady." Hillary and her people were becoming masters at the martial art jujitsu--of turning the force of an opponent's attack back on himself--a skill they were to refine and perfect against George Bush, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Ken Starr.

A change in the state const.i.tution had lengthened the governor's tenure to four years, giving the Clintons a margin of comfort. Bill Clinton's comfort level with strong women, however, was soon to be tested. The three women--Hillary, chief of staff Betsey Wright, and press secretary Joan Roberts--were satirized in a cartoon by a local wag as Valkyries. For a spell, they ran Bill Clinton's office and they ran his life. Betsey Wright, fearful of the governor's tendency to expose himself to dangerous situations, tenaciously controlled his schedule. It was reported that their fights grew so loud and bitter that the Clintons were forced to move Wright out of the governor's office.

Another key challenge during the long holding period in the governor's mansion was to neutralize John Robert Start, the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat and the former chief of the a.s.sociated Press's Little Rock bureau. Starr not only edited the news, he commented on it daily with a column that was keen, sharp, and caustic. In the small state, constant pounding from Starr did significant damage to Clinton. His frequent and bitter attacks were one reason Clinton lost his first reelection race. (One is forced to wonder whether any fortune-teller ever warned the Clintons to watch out for men named Start.) In the first term, the Clintons ignored Start. But in 1982 Hillary launched a "charm offensive," taking Starr to lunch. She worked to flatter him in the age-old way politicians have always flattered journalists--by soliciting his opinions and appearing to hang on his every word. Back in the office, Betsey Wright instructed Joan Roberts to make her first priority to keep Start happy.

The offensive worked. "I decided any man married to that woman couldn't be all bad," Starr said. "The deal he and I cut after I rea.s.sessed him was that I would not remind everyone what a bad governor he had been and would give him a new chance as long as he kept his campaign clean."*20 In their regular lunches, Start recalled, "one of Hillary's frequent sayings was 'Now, John Robert, you and I may disagree on this'--and I would say, 'Hillary, the only thing we disagree on is the worth of your husband.'"*21 MONKEY BUSINESS IN ARKANSAS.

Bill Clinton had served as governor of Arkansas for eight years by 1988. His was a rising luminary in the Democratic party, seen as a centrist southern Democrat with a Kennedyesque flair. The usual route for a sitting governor would be to move on to the United States Senate. However, that route was blocked for the Clintons by inc.u.mbents Dale b.u.mpers and David Pryor.

The time had come to consider going for broke, to go ahead and make a run for the White House. A serious bid to challenge George Bush was studied and debated among the Clinton team. Bill Clinton flew to New Hamps.h.i.+re, where he shared a stage with the Democrat front-runner, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado.

Hart and Clinton shared much of the same appeal. Young and charismatic, they both emulated John F. Kennedy and sought to win over a new generation of voters with a "third way" agenda that eschewed the old machine politics of the Democratic Party. In 1984, Hart had come close to wresting the nomination from Walter Mondale, a prospect that had worried Reagan campaign advisors.

Now it was Hart's turn to be knocked out of the saddle, this time by his own behavior. He had not appreciated the extent to which the rules of the game had changed since the Kennedy era. After foolishly daring the press to catch him in infidelity, the Miami Herald newspaper reporters took him at his word. The reluctance of the press to report on politicians' private lives, the factor that had protected John F. Kennedy so well, evaporated with this blatant challenge. The Herald staked out the senator's apartment, ultimately reporting the married senator's affair with Donna Rice. Tabloid photos of Hart and Rice on a Caribbean cruise aboard the Monkey Business left little doubt that the senator was a liar and a cheat.

It was over when the American public watched Senator Hart try to regain his viability while ignoring the humiliation he was heaping upon his victimized and helpless wife. Years later, the Clintons learned from this debacle and successfully had Hillary out front to defend Bill's affairs. She never let the American public feel that Bill had humiliated her to the point of silence. She was always front and center as his staunchest defender.

Hart's campaign fell apart and he soon had a brighter future as an entertainment lawyer than as a politician. These events posed an interesting dilemma for the Clintons as Hillary busily a.s.sembled a campaign, bringing in Susan Thomases and Harold Ickes from New York to create the nucleus of a presidential campaign. With Hart out of the race, the pressure grew on Bill Clinton to run. Yet he knew what Thomases and Ickes did not know. Bill Clinton knew the full range of his own indiscretions, and how much reason he had to fear exposure and national embarra.s.sment.

Arkansas-Democrat editor John Robert Starr spoke to Bill Clinton about what was often referred to as a potential "Gary Hart problem."

Clinton matter-of-factly confirmed that he did have such a problem.*22 No member of his top team was more aware of the liability Clinton faced than Betsey Wright, who had observed his compulsive and irresponsible promiscuity including his use of state troopers to procure women and cover his tracks. Betsey had often called the governor in the middle of the night just to see if anyone would answer. Often, of course, the phone would just ring into the night.

When the governor mused about the prospect of seeking the presidency, Betsey forced him to make a list of the women. Ali of them. When and where. Clinton did and Betsey looked at the list and told him flatly to stay out of the race.

Hillary, who apparently did not know the breathtaking extent and frequency of her husband's philandering, urged him to run. Betsey, who knew all, promised him he would be slaughtered if he did.

On a summer day in 1987, Bill Clinton called a press conference, alerting the networks to break in on daytime programming. As he spoke, Hillary's face was a mask of stone.

"There are many whom I treasure who have urged me to run again," the governor said, "who say that is the thing to do for the state and who are obviously worried about at least one of the alternatives. There are others who say with a great deal of conviction that ten years is a long time. And I can see that there is an argument for that proposition .... And then there is the whole question of the personal toll which is taken on every family, on every life in the public.

The things that make it so wonderful also make it quite difficult from time to time. Ambition always takes its price sooner or later."

Governor Clinton concluded by saying he would stay in Arkansas for the good of his family, especially his seven-year-old daughter.

As Bill Clinton delivered his letdown, Hillary's stony composure broke and she wept openly. These were tears of fury and humiliation, and of ambition publicly failed.