Beginning Of the Road

Monday, Jul. 20, 1992 By GARRY WILLS
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It was not an expectation that would have surprised anyone at the time. Facing chaos at home, Billy became super-responsible in school and church. "I was the most religious member of my family," he remembers now. "Mother got more religious later, as a result of the suffering she underwent." (She lost two more husbands to death.) Billy raised funds, organized for charities, became the band director's right hand for statewide planning. The band director acted as another surrogate father.

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While others fancied him as a preacher, Billy was determined to be a musician. He attended band camp every summer in the Ozarks, won first place in the state band's saxophone section, and played in jazz combos. Musicians were always coming and going at the Hot Springs clubs, and the first blacks Clinton respected were jazz artists he heard and tried to emulate. Despite the joshing he takes now over his sporadic bouts with the saxophone, his band director, Virgil Spurlin, says he was very talented and dogged in his practice: "He could sight-read with the best, and he kept me busy finding scores for him to read." Music seemed a way to test the wider horizons offered in Hot Springs; despite excellent grades, he would be offered more musical scholarships than academic ones when he graduated from high school.

The Clintons acquired a television set just before the 1956 presidential campaign, and young Bill watched with fascination both parties' conventions. In 1958 Governor Orval Faubus closed the high school in Little Rock to prevent integration, and some families brought their children the 50 miles to Hot Springs to enroll them in Clinton's school. When Clinton and Carolyn Staley, class leaders as well as good friends, were elected to Boys Nation and Girls Nation, they went to Washington and shook John Kennedy's hand in the White House.

That glimpse of Washington, where the powerful Senator William Fulbright redeemed the clownish Arkansas Governor, helped banish ideas of playing jazz in smoky nightclubs. Clinton asked his high school counselor, Edith Irons, what college offered a good program in foreign service. The only one she knew, offhand, was Georgetown, but she would look up others.

The fact that Georgetown was in Washington settled the matter for him. He paid no attention when Irons brought him other names, and she was upset when he did not even apply to other colleges. As the acceptance period went by, and summer was half gone, he still had not heard from his school of choice, and Irons says she had visions of her prize pupil not entering college that year. Clinton says he was not worried because the University of Arkansas took any student with decent grades; he had long assumed he would be going there, where Fulbright had been the college president before going to Washington. Clinton had become familiar with Fayetteville, the Ozark campus town, during his summers at band camps, and he wrote his junior paper on the university. He had acquired a circle of friends in that corner of the state -- and even another surrogate father, Eli Leflar, who had been on a Masonic panel that gave Clinton one of his many prizes. Clinton began visiting Leflar and dating his daughter. Only Georgetown -- or, more precisely, only Washington -- was more attractive to him than the school in Fayetteville, where he would later apply to teach law.