Clinton's Forgotten Childhood

By GARRY WILLS

"I REMEMBER THE POLICE COMing and taking him away. That was a pretty spooky deal." Bill Clinton was less than six when his drunken stepfather was arrested for firing a gun during a marital quarrel. But, he says, "I remember it like it was yesterday." That was in the little town of Hope, where Clinton was born. "The neighbors knew about it." Shortly afterward the family moved to Hot Springs, where, Clinton says, "we never had a public incident."

But they did. As a 15-year-old, Clinton gave a sworn deposition against his stepfather: "I was present on March 27, 1959, and it was I who called my mother's attorney, who in turn had to get the police to come to the house to arrest the defendant. The last occasion in which I went to my mother's aid, when he was abusing my mother, he threatened to mash my face in if I took her part." Clinton not only forgot that event; he also forgot that he ever gave the deposition, now on file in the Garland Chancery Court.

When I reminded his mother about this, she said, "Bill and I have always been able to do that. I know you people are amazed at this, but we would always put away anything unpleasant." In fact, his mother does not remember her own deposition given in the same divorce proceedings. The name of her lawyer is a stranger's name now. She doesn't even remember the timing or circumstances of her remarriage to Roger Clinton -- a remarkable suppression of the past. In fact, when a cousin suggested she did not pursue the divorce to its conclusion, she could not deny that with certainty -- and neither could her son. Only the court records restore the sequence. Her divorce did become final in May 1962 -- and three months later she remarried the man she had divorced.

Even during the short time when the family was separated, Bill, then the only son, hid from others the disgrace of his father's drunken behavior. The mother and son moved into a new house then, and Bill remembers having to get a neighbor, Jim Clark, to show him how to use a posthole digger for putting up the mailbox. But the girl next door, a minister's daughter who became his close friend in school, never knew about the furies raging inside the Clinton home. No one knew -- not Clinton's high school counselor, not his pastor, not his closest friends.

Going back into his childhood is a form of emotional spelunking that Clinton has always avoided. He did not break his silence until Joe Klein of New York magazine, working from hints he had picked up from Clinton's mother, asked the candidate direct questions about his stepfather's drinking and violence. Clinton told more about his past as court records came to light and as his younger brother described their home to reporters. "One of the frustrating things about this whole deal, this nationwide attempt to make me look slick -- to which I may have contributed -- is that people expect me to remember things I don't remember all of, or to share things I thought I was never supposed to share. I mean, it's a strange sort of deal."

Clinton now says he learned a lot about himself in the therapy sessions he and other members of the family attended after his brother was caught peddling cocaine in 1984. Says Clinton: "We ((the brothers)) were sort of the two prototypical kids of an alcoholic family . . . Like most families of alcoholics, you do things by not confronting problems early, you wind up making things worse. I think that the house in which we grew up, because there was violence and trouble, and because my mother just put the best face on it she could -- in later years a lot of the stuff was dealt with by silence."

During his childhood, Clinton was torn by contending emotions toward his stepfather. He had urged his mother not to reunite with him. "I didn't think he would straighten up, even though I loved him." Both mother and son remember one traumatic confrontation when a 14-year-old Clinton broke in the door to threaten his father. Both, until their memories were recently jogged, thought this ended the physical threats. Now they admit that could not have been the case. Why does Clinton remember the break-in episode and not later ones, which he described in his deposition? "That ((break-in)) was a dramatic thing. It made me know I could do it if I had to. But it made me more conflict-averse. It's a really painful thing, you know, to threaten to beat up your stepfather."

Some think it is odd that Clinton changed his name (from Blythe) during this period, taking his stepfather's name. But that would be typical of the emotions that go with growing up in an alcoholic's home: the reconciliations, relapses, pretenses of reform and the urgent maintenance of a facade for the outside world. His mother remembers him, even in the confrontation when he threatened his stepfather, as beginning, "Daddy, if you're not able to stand up, I'll help you. But I have something to say."

Clinton was dutiful to a fault in this period, becoming a superachiever in school and a drudge at community service. He not only played in the band but also helped its director organize statewide musical events. He was a devoted Boy Scout. His readiness to volunteer was so great that his high school principal called a halt when she felt adults were exploiting him -- as when the local heart fund wanted to make him an officer. "Bill just couldn't say no to these requests," she told Clinton's mother.

Clinton was a reconciler in the home and outside it, the responsible one whom other adults treated like their own son. The bandleader Vergil Spurlin became especially important to Clinton, whose major interest at the time was music. Looking back now, Clinton says, "He was a real good man, real religious, spent a lot of time with his kids, cared a lot about them." He was everything Clinton's stepfather was not, and once Clinton startled Spurlin by saying he really did not have a daddy of his own. The inscriptions "Billy" put in Spurlin's yearbooks are eloquent. In his sophomore year he wrote, "In the years to come, I shall try with all I have to be deserving of your friendship." In his junior year: "Some things can't be written down . . . I truly hope I don't let you down next year." In his last year: "I honestly tried to do a good job for you."

People from damaged homes can be quick to empathize with others' suffering and try to do something about it. Clinton's friend Carolyn Staley has often told how, when she visited him at Georgetown, he delivered food to a church in the Washington riot area after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. A less well-known incident from the same time comes from a fellow student, Neil Grimaldi, who had begun a service to help feed and house alcoholics. Clinton | went to the shelters and impressed Grimaldi with his sympathy for the alcoholics. He even played his saxophone to break the ice with them. In 1969, when there was racial tension in Hot Springs, during Clinton's visit at his home he organized an integrated jazz group to play in the K Mart parking lot -- though, as he admits now, "we caused more trouble than we cured."

Some of Clinton's high school contemporaries recall him as disgustingly responsible, always trying to impress his elders. The draft letter he wrote from Oxford after his enlistment problems were over looks like a bid for the ROTC man's respect. Sometimes Bill could be more adult than adults: when his mother, a free spirit who still loves the racetrack, a kind of Arkie Auntie Mame, took him to nightclubs to listen to jazz, he was offended by the smoke and the drinking.

Whether a damaged childhood cripples or strengthens one in later life depends on many factors. Some find the continuing mark of his violent upbringing in Clinton's desire to please everybody, in his attempt to put the best face on things, in his maintenance of a sunny facade with darker things behind it. Others find its legacy in his sympathy for others and his urge for reconciliation. Much of his past is permanently blanked out, though Clinton acknowledges that those experiences play themselves out in patterns of behavior. "If you live in that kind of constant environment where conflict is never resolved, you tend to repeat that pattern when you grow up," he says. "That was an early problem with me, so that I would let things fester too long and then try to deal with them in an emergency situation. Now I think I do a much better job of just dealing with life as it comes along."