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< Like every politician who comes out of nowhere to hit the big time, Clinton remains something of an enigma, the more so since he often seems a bundle of contradictions: a visionary leader and a poor manager; a propounder of bold programs and a waffler who talks on both sides of hot issues. All of which raises the insistent question: Is Clinton for real -- not only as front runner but as man, as Governor, as candidate? An attempt at some answers:
THE MAN. Though Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, tongue in cheek, introduced Clinton at a meeting two years ago as "the only politician to be a rising star in three decades," he knew pain and adversity in childhood. His father, a heavy- equipment salesman, was killed in a freak road accident three months before Clinton -- originally christened William J. Blythe IV -- was born on Aug. 19, 1946, in the little southwestern Arkansas town of Hope. Five months later, his mother Virginia returned to nursing school in Shreveport, La., to get a degree in anesthesiology, leaving Bill with grandparents who ran a small grocery store. When Bill was four, she returned to Hope and married Roger Clinton, a Buick dealer who moved the family to Hot Springs. Bill's stepfather was an alcoholic who sometimes beat Virginia and once fired a gun at her in their living room (she insists to this day he intended only to frighten, not to injure, her). Virginia and Roger divorced but quickly remarried; as a gesture to help keep the family together, Bill, then 15, had his name legally changed to Clinton.
The turmoil at home seems to have left two imprints on Clinton. One was a driving ambition to get out and make something of himself in the big world, initially by being the perfect student. As a high schooler, he was selected a senator in Boys Nation, an annual promotion by the American Legion in Washington, and he got to visit the White House and meet President Kennedy. He came home starry-eyed and fixed on politics as his career. He enrolled at Georgetown University largely to be near the Congress he hoped one day to enter. Then came Oxford, on a Rhodes scholarship, and Yale Law School, where he met the brightest woman in the class, Hillary Rodham -- today a successful lawyer and a feminist who did not call herself Mrs. Clinton until her unwillingness to do so began to hurt her husband politically.
Back home, Clinton lost a race for Congress but became state attorney general and in 1979, at 32, the youngest Governor in the country. Two years later, he was the youngest ex-Governor; he had impressed some of his constituents as an arrogant whiz kid who had surrounded himself with a bunch of outsiders who looked on Arkansans as barefoot hicks. In 1982 a chastened Clinton came back, apologizing to voters for developing a swelled head but vowing to reform; he has won every election since.