please tell me you really don't believe that. everyone loves the underdog story, no matter the political persuasion. a man being able to pull himself out of poverty is EXACTLY why republicans champion many of the ideas they do.
Have to agree with that. In many ways, Bill Clinton is the embodiment of the Republican fantasy -- a man born into this world with next to nothing pulls himself up by his own boot-straps to make something of himself. It's too bad it is only a fantasy.
While I appreciate the love for the Big Dog, it's not something new. This is a Frontline (FL) interview with Gail Sheehy in 1996 in which she references interviews in the first campaign. I remember hearing the story during the first campaign... FL: What would a young kid like Bill Clinton see as he was growing up in Hot Springs and what would the lessons be for a young aspiring politician, who would look around and observe the commingling of these two different worlds, and two different sets of values... Sheehy: Well the lessons of Hot Springs perhaps on Bill Clinton would have been that there are two faces to everything. There's the spin, and then there's what's really going on behind the scenes and who's paying off whom and who's buying what and, who's gambling and who's winning and, I think he probably learned that that's how the real world works and he learned it very early as a pre-adolescent who had to take on the role almost of surrogate husband for his mother and protector of the family. As he told me in an interview later, he said, I was 40 when I was 16 and I hope that I wasn't going to be 16 when I was 40. But I think actually he was . FL: You talked to Virginia at length, what was she like... Sheehy: I spent some time with Virginia Clinton and found her, outrageous, over-the-top, but unstoppable. She was a force. She loved to be on stage and to shock people. She wore tube tops and short shorts and got her shoulders dangerously brown and took that Buick convertible and drove down Main Street with her shoulders flashing right passed the w**** houses into the racetrack everyday. And you know, this was a little bit out of place in a bible belt town. But she was also a professional woman, who went to work at night, came home after the night shift and walked in the house every morning and, as Bill Clinton told me, always said to him, nobody's told me all day how pretty I am. And she trained him very early that the way you get along with women in the world, is to flatter them and praise them. Virginia threw herself at life. She'd had a lot of bad chances, I mean, she went through four husbands, but she took chances everyday, she loved going to the racetrack, never missed a day in season. There was alcohol around her house, there were cigarettes, there was a lot of laughter, but she also was meek in terms of taking it on the chin literally from an abusive step-father. So, there was this double message in that house of a rather narcissistic mother who was also very courageous and out front and outrageous, but there was the sense of explosiveness in the household all the time, as if at any moment that the dining room tablecloth could be yanked out from underneath and everything would be in chaos. And that is the kind of explosive atmosphere in which Bill Clinton was shaped as the prematurely aged adult, who had to try to keep peace, who had to try to protect his mother, and his younger brother and really didn't have much of a childhood as told me himself. He really didn't get to have his childhood until he was much later in his 40s. FL: In talking about the father figure that was absent in Bill's life, could you talk about a conversation you had with Bill Clinton... Sheehy: The first time I interviewed Bill Clinton on his campaign plane, I asked him who was the male figure in your life, in childhood or adolescence that first endorsed you as worthwhile, and his genial face just kind of dropped into a real sad, hangdog look, and he looked out the window, and he started to recall, on his hand the 3 or 4 occasions that his step-father ever paid any attention to him at all. And it wasn't until-- he told me, that he, as a kid, as an adolescent, was fat and slow and not an athlete. And he was in the band, which was really dorky and it wasn't until a band leader, took an interest in him and tried to convince him that he had some talent which he himself didn't believe, for music, that he began to feel like much of anything at all. He even told me he didn't win his first political contest in high school because he was fat and slow and not an athlete. FL: Could you talk about the very tense situation in that house, anything that Clinton told you himself... Sheehy: Well the Clinton household when Bill Clinton was growing up was a pretty explosive place. There was a lot of alcohol around, there was a lot of physical abuse. The step-father that Virginia Clinton brought into his life, would just erupt without any warning and take some shots at the wall or take some blows at Virginia Clinton or at his younger brother. And Bill Clinton was this little kid who was trying to keep peace and keep it all together and be the adult in a situation where the adults were acting like children. And he told me in an interview that he thinks a lot of the mistakes in his life that he made were rooted in that situation because his mother, nobody ever explained what was going on. Nobody ever said who's fault it was. She was just trying to keep peace in an explosive situation. So he took the role of the kind of surrogate husband and finally, when he was 14 and physically big enough, a story that's often told, is that he confronted, physically, Roger Clinton, and told him that he could not touch his mother again. And at that point, he was strong and powerful, but it took Virginia Clinton some months to eject this stepfather from the house and then she later took him back. During that time though, she used to take Bill Clinton as a 14 year old, to these illegal gambling clubs in Hot Springs, particularly The Vapors, which was a smoky, play slot machines, blackjack tables, whores and he, as he described it to me, found it a very intriguing place, but also a very repellent place. He was afraid to be around people who were so out of control because he had seen what it did, especially mixed with alcohol in his own household. FL: Could you describe the whole landscape from which he came -- which is not only Hot Springs, it's also the situation at home. What were the defining qualities? Sheehy: Well, I almost think of Bill Clinton as like the character in East of Eden, who's standing on the edge of something that was fascinating, compelling, but dangerous and repellent. And I think he had a kind of two step reaction to all of that. On the one hand, he saw how things were never what they seem, that there are always back room deals, that there's always another side that isn't as pretty, and what you have to do is put a spin on your whole life, and he has been putting a spin on his whole life with the help of Hillary to make a heroic story out of what was really a rather sad and depressing story in terms of his own family background. But also, I think there was a big impact by being raised by a mother who was both extremely forceful and flamboyant, but very demanding in a narcissistic way of constant attention from him and, a child who is constantly being demanded of by a narcissistic parent, has very little opportunity to show his own distress, his own anxiety, his own temper. He had to keep the lid on in an explosive situation because the parents were acting like kids. And as he told me later, his mother was trying to keep peace, and never explain. Nobody ever explained, what's the cause of all of these eruptions, of this violence, of this bizarre behavior. And I think he then never developed really any very good outlets for his own anxieties and tempestuous feelings, emotions, very emotional man. So they came out later on, both in explosions of temper, which his aides have recounted, and in behaving like the eternal boy. Philandering, you know, betraying people who loved him and trusted him, cheating on them, and acting like the bad boy in a way that he'd seen so many people in Hot Springs act like bad boys and girls. When Bill Clinton's campaign was really in a downspin, after New Hampshire, I had another long talk with him and I asked him about what kind of defense has he developed to deal with this explosive situation at home, because kids can go one of two ways. Either they can copy the immature habits of the adults they've seen in a narcissistic household or they can become premature adults, and that seems to have been his pattern. And he told me, some of the mistakes I made later in life were rooted in all those things that were never explained when I was growing up. My mother, he said, was trying to keep peace in an explosive situation and nobody ever said what was really going on. And the aftermath of that, he said, really had a big impact on how he lived his life. And I think, part of that, is a parent who needs constant narcissistic gratification from a child because she can't get enough elsewhere, doesn't give, leave him any outlets to express his own distress, his own anger. And so Bill Clinton acted like the good husband for many years, kind of keeping the, control, keeping some peace in a family, protecting his brother, protecting his mother, acting as his mother's surrogate husband when she kicked his abusive stepfather out of the house. Didn't have time to be 16 when he was 16. And as he told me, you know, I guess I was 40 when I was 16 and I always hoped I wouldn't have to be 16 when I was 40. But as it turned out, he actually did act pretty much like 16 when he was 40, that was the period after which he had lost, he, pulled back from entering the election in, in '88 because it was thought that his, the stories of his philandering would, would sink the campaign. And at the last moment, on the steps of the state house, when he and Hillary were about to announce, he pulled back because he realized he just, he hadn't grown up enough, and he didn't know how to sell the story. FL: He was self-described to you as a fat kid...but look what the political life gives someone like that, with that image of himself. How important was that in the future Bill Clinton... Sheehy: One of the constants with presidential characters I find is that they're so often, really overcompensating for some things that happened in the past and, I think, for Bill Clinton part of it was that he did, as he told me, think of himself as a fat, slow kid, not an athlete, no particular social station or money in his background, and here's the life of politics where people express love for you all the time, and constantly wanting to be with you, rub shoulders with you, women are throwing themselves at you and you know, from his early campaigns that was one of the revelations, that women just couldn't, you know, get enough of a handsome political candidate. And I think what Bill Clinton identified as the great attribute that he had was charm. He was from an early age able to seduce both men and women with his charm. And a large element of that charm was not just his looks and his humor but his capacity for empathy, which was real. And, as he told me, I could always connect with people, I could always draw them out, I could always find some common ground. And we've seen him develop that and parlay that all throughout his career, to the point where, perhaps the Oklahoma bombing was some kind of a turning point in his presidency when he began to take on the role of older brother for the country, because there was this complicated love-hate relationship that most voters had with Clinton when he was first president. On the one hand, we liked the eternal boy, everybody wants to be Peter Pan in this country it seems like. But we also expect our Presidents to act like father. And Clinton wasn't father. He was initially, seemed rather like the younger brother. Nice, you love him but, he's always getting into mischief. And at the time of the Oklahoma bombing, when he was able to comfort people and speak for the whole country eloquently, with his capacity for empathy, I think he graduated to the status of older brother. FL: You write about his mid-life crisis..... Sheehy: Well, Bill Clinton did speak about his mid-life crisis, he takes it seriously. This is the first all-therapy presidency where both President and Vice-President have discussed openly, talking to therapists. That was a period when everything kind of broke loose. Roger Clinton was busted on drugs, Governor Clinton had to take the fall for him in a way. Virginia Clinton was brought into therapy with Hillary and a lot of those secrets and a lot of that explosiveness of his childhood was out on the table. He also lost an election at that time and was devastated. And, began acting out the adolescence that he really never had. Hillary, during that period, and this is the 4 years before he declared for the presidency, never gave him the option of divorce. They worked it through. Painfully, torturously, but, I think, with Hillary pretty much, you know, leading the team, and being the strong one.
