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When I repeat to Stephen Smith, a key aide in Clinton's first term as Governor, John Brummett's claim that Clinton is more Yale and Oxford than Arkansas, Smith says, "He is more Georgetown than Yale." I ask Clinton if he agrees with Smith. "Yes. At Yale I had to work at a number of jobs. At Georgetown I had only one outside job. It was my first time away from home, and I had a whole range of things to learn." Also, Arkansas kept intruding. His one job was in Fulbright's Senate office. Clinton took roommates from Georgetown to visit Arkansas, and friends from there came to see him. Staley was visiting him when, in the wake of Dr. King's assassination, Clinton drove food to churches in the riot area. Like Fulbright himself, Clinton won a Rhodes scholarship when he finished college.
In this period, too, Clinton discovered a dangerous talent, part of his gregarious and ingratiating way with all his friends: a puppylike eagerness and drive to please. A man who was at Oxford with him tells me, "Bill was one of the two people I have known who were just amazingly successful with women. You would hear him and say to yourself, 'No one is going to believe that line,' but they all did."
FAYETTEVILLE
Clinton, famously, applied to the University of Arkansas Law School ROTC as part of his casting about to avoid the Vietnam War. He had intended to go to Fayetteville because the local law school is a great place for forming political connections -- and everyone, by the time he was at Oxford, knew Clinton was permanently running for office. "We would kid him about it, but no one found it offensive," says Peter Hayes, now a historian at Northwestern University.
At Yale, Clinton did no interviewing for the major law firms. "All I wanted to do was go home. I thought I would hang out my shingle in Hot Springs and see if I could run for office." But a teacher at Yale said the University of Arkansas needed new faculty, and Clinton called the dean from the interstate highway as he was driving to Hot Springs. The dean said Clinton was too young, and he answered, "Well, I'm that, but I'll teach anything you need for now, and I'm not interested in tenure, so I'll be no problem. It's a one-year deal." On such terms he finally reached Fayetteville, where he had expected to go to college and law school.
Up in the northern corner of the state, mountainous Fayetteville is as far as it can be from Hope's flat piney woods. There were never many blacks in the clefts and dells where independent farmers tended little plots. This area had little sympathy for the owners of antebellum cotton plantations in the black belt, and many in this Republican stronghold fought for the Union. No wonder the Reconstruction government started the state college in this receptive, if isolated, place.
Fayetteville is now turning up on lists of the most desirable communities in America, but only for those who want to get away from urban problems -- and amenities. Richard Atkinson, a professor at the law school, says his faculty has trouble convincing potential members that a move to Fayetteville will not drop them off the edge of the world. What do you tell them? I ask. "Well, we boast that we get National Public Radio here."