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Bill and Hillary
The Politics of the Personal
By William H. Chafe Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2012 William H. Chafe
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5554-6
CHAPTER 1
Bill Clinton: The Early Years
It would be difficult to invent a childhood more bizarre than Bill Clinton's. He was born the son of Virginia Blythe, a nurse proud of her flirtatious nature who spent ninety minutes each morning putting on her makeup. Virginia's husband, Bill, lied serially about his past, and shortly after their marriage during World War II, he went overseas with the army. Five months after returning — and three months before Bill's birth — Bill died in an automobile accident. A year later, Virginia went off to New Orleans to train as a nurse anesthetist, leaving the care of her infant son to her parents. Virginia soon married her second husband, Roger Clinton, whose record of multiple marriages and troubled relationships made Bill Blythe's past look angelic. Soon alcoholism and spousal abuse consumed the Clinton household. Through all of this, Billy Clinton stood as the symbol of hope, the adored special child who would make everything right, the savior of an otherwise unredeemable situation. He emerged as a "family hero" who soon came to see himself, and be seen by others, as destined to become a leader, not just of his family and community but of the American nation as a whole.
* * *
Virginia Cassidy, Bill's mother, grew up in a household torn by conflict. Her mother, Edith Grisham, later called Mammaw by everyone, was born poor in rural Arkansas. She craved money and material goods but felt condemned to a life of working in the fields, trying to make ends meet. She married the boy across the road, James Eldridge Cassidy, a sweet, gentle, fun-loving man — not because he guaranteed her a better life, but because he was submissive and she could control him. Virginia's mother demanded that they move in pursuit of more opportunities, so they crated their belongings and settled in Hope, a small city of five thousand. It was big enough to be a stop on the train line and boasted movie theaters, a commercial district, and a greater variety of people. There, Eldridge got a job delivering ice, while Mammaw trained as a nurse through a correspondence course and hired herself out to private patients. She reveled in her status, proudly wearing her starched white uniform and blue cape embroidered with gold initials. Eldridge had fewer pretensions, but he loved gossiping with his customers and making friends.
But it was not a happy home. "My mother created sparks wherever she went," Virginia later wrote, "which meant that my father and I were the ones who got burned the most." Despite her professional pride in being a nurse, Virginia's mother was at heart mean-spirited, showing little affection for other people. "She had hellfire in her," one friend, Margaret Polk, recalled. Virginia agreed. "Her worst trait was her temper," she said, "which was uncontrollable. She was angry somewhere deep inside her, and she took it out on anybody who happened to be around." On the one hand, she enjoyed being able to help those in need. On the other, she could lash out at those who crossed her, stopping "at nothing to undermine them, to hurt them, in terrible ways." It was as if she possessed two personalities. One was the professional helper she showed the public, dressing up in her uniform and making a mask of rouge and lipstick, "like a stylized character in a Japanese kabuki show," in the words of the Clinton biographer David Maraniss. The other, a tyrant, was obsessed with controlling those around her, hiding a vicious streak of sadism. Her husband and daughter bore the brunt of this second personality.
Not surprisingly, Virginia adored her father. "[I loved him] as much as it was possible for a daughter to love her dad," she wrote. "He was kind and gentle, and he loved laughing and fishing and storytelling and people — especially me." Eldridge Cassidy embraced people, reached out to them. When delivering ice, he often stopped off at a customer's home and stayed for a cup of coffee while he sent his coworkers on to the next stop. Some of his coffee companions were his prettiest customers. "He was a ladies' man," Margaret Polk remembered. Later, when Eldridge developed a bronchial condition, he was forced to give up his ice route. Initially, he opened a liquor store, then a small grocery, where, under the counter, he also sold bootleg alcohol. Virginia, whom he called Ginger, loved hanging out at the store, watching her father interact with customers, extend credit to those in need, and laugh with his friends.
Edith — Mammaw — was less appreciative. Hearing stories of Eldridge's "coffee-klatches" with his female customers, Virginia remembered, "she began her nightly screaming fits." Lunging at him, throwing things, and trying to hurt him physically, she accused him of philandering, though Edith herself was rumored to be romantically linked to doctors in town. When the Depression caused them to lose their house, she blamed Eldridge for "failing us." The Cassidy home was neither nurturing nor kindly.
Virginia watched both parents. In early adolescence, she started to emulate her mother's cosmetic habits. She used mascara, eyeliner, rouge, and lipstick, starting a ritual that would become obsessive through the rest of her life. But there could be no question of where her emotional loyalties rested. "Whenever I did something wrong," she wrote, "Mother would whip me furiously." Father, on the other hand, taught her to think the best of people, give them the benefit of the doubt, and reach out a helping hand.
Ironically, the one issue on which both Edith and Eldridge shared a common outlook was race. One might expect that in a Southern small town the habits of generations of white people would prevail, with racism one way that whites could express their need to feel superior. But neither of Virginia's parents succumbed. Her father cultivated a clientele that was both black and white. He granted credit to blacks as readily as, if not more readily than, to whites. Every customer was treated with dignity and fairness. Edith, in turn, expressed horror when one day she heard Virginia use the word "nigger." Often she volunteered her services to black patients in need. It was the Cassidy home's one saving grace.
* * *
Virginia took from each parent certain qualities. Like her mother, she became a consummate makeup artist, shaping the image she would present to the world while masking her own agenda. Willful and tempestuous, she had her mother's flair for independence. She insisted on pursuing her individual objectives regardless of what others thought, a trait that would fuel her decades-long campaign against male doctors who she felt stood in the way of her professional development. But beyond those parallels lay a virulent anger at Edith's capricious and selfish behavior. Like the father she worshipped, Virginia chose to see good rather than bad in people. Purposefully, she set aside the unpleasant to focus on the positive. Denying all the negative realities that surrounded her became a habitual pattern of behavior. In her own words, she "brainwashed" herself to be positive. "Inside is love and friends and optimism," she wrote. "Outside is negativity, can'tdoism and any criticism of me and mine. Most of the time, this box is strong as steel." It became the normative mode by which Virginia conducted her life — with profound consequences for her marriages and her children. Looking at a photo of herself taken in late adolescence, with her eyes hooded, she subsequently wrote: "By this time, I guess, I had already learned to keep my dark secrets to myself."
Having finished high school, Virginia set off to realize her dreams, almost immediately engaging in a love affair that dramatically underscored her penchant to "brainwash" herself. Already known for being flirtatious and different, she left Hope to go to Shreveport, Louisiana, to train as a nurse anesthetist. That she was "going steady" with a boy back in Hope posed no problems at the Shreveport hospital the night she encountered Bill Blythe, a twenty-five-year-old who had brought another woman to the hospital for treatment. When he asked Virginia what that "ring on her finger" meant, she replied "nothing." "There is such a thing as love at first sight," she later wrote. And the moment she laid eyes on Bill Blythe, "all the rules were out the window." Like her father, Blythe seemed to love everybody. He told Virginia he was in sales, and she believed him. Charming, funny, ebullient, and, like Virginia, an ardent fan of dancing and a good time, Blythe won her heart immediately. "We talked fast," Virginia recalled, "[we] played fast [and we] fell in love fast." Virginia introduced him to her parents, who also were charmed. Two months after they met, the two married, and five weeks later, Bill Blythe went off to Italy to serve as a mechanic in the U.S. Army.
What had transpired was a triumph of fantasy over reality and a profound testimony to Virginia's instinct for seeing only her own version of what was true. In fact Bill Blythe was not a car salesman. All during the time they were seeing each other — on a daily basis — he was already in the army. Beyond that he came from a large family she knew little about. Most important, she had no notion that he had been married three times before, had divorced all three (and perhaps four) previous wives, had fathered at least one (and perhaps two) children, and in one of the legal cases preceding a divorce had been declared by a judge to be "guilty of extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty." Everything about Bill Blythe, David Maraniss has written, "was contradictory and mysterious. He constantly reinvented himself, starting over every day, the familiar stranger, an ultimate traveling salesman, surviving off charm and affability." That Virginia did not discover the full story until more than four decades later highlights the absurdity of what had taken place. More telling was her blind-faith assertion that she could "go to my grave knowing that I was the love of his life."
When Blythe returned to Shreveport in the fall of 1945, he and Virginia talked about moving together to Chicago, where he had a job awaiting him as a salesman. They envisioned a life in which they could raise a family and live out the American dream. For three months, the reunited couple lived together in a hotel in Illinois while waiting until a house in Forest Park opened up. That process took longer than expected, and after she discovered she was pregnant, Virginia went back to Arkansas to wait. Shortly afterward, Blythe set out to drive through the night to spend the weekend with her in Hope. Driving too fast, he passed a car, then on the next curve, hurtled off the road and hit a tree. Though he managed to extricate himself from the car, he fell into a ditch full of water and drowned. Three months later his son Bill was born.
Perhaps. Bill Blythe was still in Italy nine months before his son's birth, making it unlikely that he was the father of a child carried to full term. Virginia would later claim that Bill had been born prematurely. But during the period when she was writing her own book, Virginia never mentioned to her collaborator and coauthor that doctors had recommended an early, induced delivery — the story that she subsequently brought forward. Moreover, the birth was not typical of premature deliveries. Bill weighed six pounds eight ounces at birth, a weight not unusual for a full-term delivery. In his speech explaining his decision not to run for president in 1988 in order to spend more time with his daughter, Chelsea, Bill Clinton said: "I made a promise to myself a long, long time ago, that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was." To Maraniss, the use of the word "who" suggested doubts in Clinton's mind about the true circumstances of his birth.
Yet the story was about to become even more complicated. After giving birth to her son Bill on August 19, 1946, Virginia returned to her parents' home in Hope. Almost immediately, a war started between Virginia and her mother about who was going to raise — and control — the child. Before long, the winner became clear. As long as Billy was in her home, Mammaw would be in charge. To the exacting daily schedule Mammaw set — when Billy was fed, when he took his naps, what time he went to bed — there would be no exception. The few good moments of mother and son getting to know each other faded before the omnipresent power of her mother, who insisted on "monopolizing him." There was no place to go. Escape became the only option.
After only one year of being a mother, Virginia went off to New Orleans, intent on securing the credentials to become a full-time nurse anesthetist. It was in many ways the only answer — fleeing an untenable family environment where humiliation and resentment were rampant, seeking the skills that would make possible an independent life, and doing so in a city perfectly suited for a girl who loved to flirt, dance, and gamble. As Bill Clinton noted in his memoirs, New Orleans was "an amazing place after the war, full of young people, Dixieland music, and over-the-top haunts like the Club My-Oh-My where men in drag danced and sang as lovely ladies. I guess it wasn't a bad place for a beautiful young widow to move beyond her loss." Yes, she sorely missed her son. He always remembered her kneeling by the train crying as she waved good-bye to him after one of his visits to see her. But compared with the misery of her mother's total domination back in Hope, this was liberation.
* * *
In the meantime, Bill Clinton had to survive on his own the contested world of his grandparents, torn between the regimented authoritarianism of Mammaw and the warm embrace of his grandfather. Mammaw ran a tight ship, with clear destinations in a narrow sea lane. As he was eating, a friend of Mammaw said, "she was showing him flash cards ... [The coffee table] was filled with kindergarten books ... She had him reading when he was three." At some level, Bill appreciated her dedication. "I knew the poverty of my roots," he later wrote. "I was raised by people who deliberately tried to disabuse me [of the] idea [that I was inferior] from the time I was old enough to think."
He also appreciated the tortured dynamics of his grandparents' relationship. They loved him, he remembered, "much better than they were able to love each other, or, in my grandmother's case, to love my mother." Mammaw was "bright, intense and aggressive [with] a great laugh, but she also was full of anger and disappointment and obsessions she only dimly understood." Instead of dealing with her inner demons, she took out her pathology in "raging tirades against her husband and her daughter." Like his mother, Bill needed to escape, and as it had been for his mother, his outlet was his grandfather's store, where he went every day to play, eat chocolate chip cookies, and revel in the warm embrace of someone who clearly worried about the needs of others more than he worried about his own. In language almost identical to his mother's, Bill Clinton later wrote: "I adored my grandfather." He described him as "an incredibly kind and generous man."
Among other things, Eldridge Cassidy taught his grandson Bill the meaning of racial equality — the natural gift of relating to black Americans, even in a racist Southern state, as friends and equals. "It was rare to find an uneducated rural southerner without a racist bone in his body," Clinton remembered. "That's exactly what my grandfather was." His grandson learned the lesson. He was "the only white boy in that neighborhood who played with black kids," said the daughter of a black customer who remembered what it was like to have fun with a white boy. So even as he squirmed under his grandmother's ironclad tutelage at home, Bill blossomed under the inclusive warmth of his grandfather at the store.
In the end, Bill was shaped by that difficult family dynamic in ways remarkably like his mother. He chose to believe that people were more good than bad, to look on the bright side, to be positive and deny negativity. "A lot of life," he wrote, "is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only response to pain. Perhaps most important, I learned that everyone has a story — of dreams and nightmares, love and loss, courage and fear, sacrifice and selfishness." His grandfather's store had provided a democratic space where he could learn to look on the positive side of human experience and not be possessed by the demons of negativity. "When I grew up and got into politics," he would state, "I always felt the main point of my work was to give people a chance to have better stories."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bill and Hillary by William H. Chafe. Copyright © 2012 William H. Chafe. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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