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It is easy to imagine the Roger Clinton tour from watching his performance last month on The Maury Povich Show. In many ways, Roger offers a voyeuristic peek at the childhood trauma Bill Clinton buried so carefully that even close friends read about it for the first time during the campaign. Bill went on to become the smooth talk-show candidate; Roger remains, in some ways, Bill turned inside out, the soap-opera version. It took just the slightest prodding from Povich for Roger to break down at the thought of his violent father. "I still go up in my hometown in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and when I happen to be home on my birthday, I go and visit the gravesite and talk to him," he said, tears filling his eyes. Then he shook his head, trying to hold it all in, letting go a tiny "Oouuu," then slapping his knees as if to contain the pain again, then letting go another tiny "Oouuu," then looking up and saying slowly, "It's been a while. I should be able to get through this. It's not like it happened yesterday." Then, with perfect comic timing: "Makeup!"
In the Clinton household, Bill was the four-year-old who witnessed his drunken stepfather fire a shot at him and his mother. But Bill, who is 10 years older than his half brother, was also the son who got the chance to play hero. In a now famous confrontation, the 14-year-old Bill told his stepfather, "Daddy, you cannot hit Mother anymore," and the beating stopped. Roger's childhood is filled instead with memories of helplessness -- of having his older brother's arm constantly around him, of being rescued from the house by a brother who took him everywhere, even on dates.
And then there is the central fact that Roger did not have simply an older brother; he had a perfect older brother. "Everyone was excited when Bill would come home," says Roger's childhood friend Will Schubert. "We would just sit on the front porch waiting for him to drive up in his Mustang." Schubert is one of three close friends who describe how, early on, Roger internalized a sense of deficiency in relation to his brother and a need for approval from him. "When we'd get in trouble doing stupid things, he would punish himself so much because he perceived at a young age that Bill was pretty special and he might not be that special, and he put a lot of pressure on himself for that," says Schubert. "In a lot of the things Roger does, in the back of his mind he thinks, 'What would Bill think?' "