Roger Morris, Author Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America. He also wrote a biography of Nixon and worked on Nixon's National Security Council, but resigned over the Cambodia policy.
Interviewed June 13, 1996
MORRIS:
Hope. That's where the family origins are, that's where the mother is
raised and, Hope is an enormous influence because he's very much the creature
of his grandmother, his maternal grandmother, who really raises him in his
first years. But at the age of 4, he's transplanted to Hot Springs, and I
think that's the formative influence, the force really and the shaping of his
character and really of his adolescence and the rest of his life. He is very
much a creature of Hot Springs. And this is not just any hometown of an
American president. This an extraordinary place by any measure. Hot
Springs was the Geneva of organized crime in the 1920s and '30s. It's where
the barons, the gangster bosses came to meet. It was an open city, you weren't
allowed to, to gun anybody down in the streets, or to take any advantage, you
vacationed there and met other bosses and divided the spoils, and sometimes
gambled in a polite way...It was very much a summit site and yet was
under the control itself of one of the families, the Marcellos in New Orleans.
[W]onderful names associated with the old Hot Springs. Frank Costello, the
New York crime boss, sent his emissary, Dandy Phil Castel to the American south
in 1936 to divide up Louisiana and Arkansas and Kentucky and other states in
the mid-south. And they assigned Hot Springs to a wonderful character named
Ownie Madden who was an English gangster who had owned the Cotton Club in
Harlem. Very colorful character, he settled down right away and married the
daughter of the postmaster in Hot Springs and became not just the organized
crime boss of the city but very much the economic and, and political force for
everything that went on. He dictated the content of the city government, he
gave his bribes to the state government in Little Rock where the governor
was always accommodating, the legislature, of course, looked the other way.
Gambling in Hot Springs is entirely illegal now, in the 1920s and '30s, and
yet, for many, many years, into the '40s and '50s, even the mid-1960s-- Ownie
Madden dies in 1965--Hot Springs, Arkansas is the principle of illegal gambling
in North America. It's take, we now know, from the committee investigations,
exceeds that of Las Vegas, Nevada, where the gambling is legendary and quite
legal.
And it's a place where the politics are utterly and relentlessly corrupt, as a
result. The local government is, is owned by these people. There's an effort
to clean it up later in the mid 1960s after Owney Madden dies, but in many
respects it only goes underground. So for most of the time that Bill Clinton
is a little boy, growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, this is an organized
crime capital, in America. Really unlike any other in, in quality, in content.
And, the striking thing about all of this is that he is not divorced from it.
That his own family is quite intimately involved in it. His mother as we know
from her own memoirs, frequented the track at Oaklawn, which was one of the
centers of activity for the mob and was an almost nightly visitor to the clubs
of Hot Springs. The Vapors being her favorite. And all of these clubs were
fronts, you passed through a wonderful curtain discreetly put up, between the
restaurant or whatever was out front, and into a gambling parlor that was
befitting Hot Springs at its height and looked like Las Vegas or Reno or, the
casinos of Europe, with roulette, with blackjack, with slot machines and all
the rest. She frequented all of those with her husband, then Bill Clinton's
stepfather, and Roger Clinton. He's very much a product of all of that.
FL:
What are the lessons, for let's say, a young kid like Bill Clinton, aspiring
politician. What is it that he sees growing up and how does that shape him
specifically.
MORRIS:
Well, we don't know what he really sees because it's the want of American
politicians never to talk candidly about themselves, not even in their memoirs,
for which they always get a great deal of money. But I think we have a lot of
parallel testimony. Shirley Abbott, the writer, grew up in Hot Springs, just a
little older than Bill Clinton, and she wrote a wonderful memoir, called The Bookmaker's Daughter. Which tells us a lot about being a child in Hot Springs.
Her father, of course, was employed by the powers that be and was a bookie in
the town for years and years. And her era is the same. The '40s, '50s and
'60s. And she has a rather poignant sentence at the end of her memoirs, saying
that Hot Springs, Arkansas deconstructs and demolishes the American dream.
That it mocks all of the pretense of American democracy, of how the world seems
to work, how Americans think their society works and how it really works. All
the secret and covert arrangements by which, not just a political system but an
economy and a society as well. Hot Springs of course was a very, very strong
center of Baptist faith and practice. It was supposed to be a very religious
city, full of churches and little Billy Clinton went down Park Avenue to the
Baptist church every Sunday morning, with a Bible, with his initials engraved
in the cover. And, lived that life on Sunday morning while his parents were
attending the clubs and the race tracks and gambling, almost every night, of
the week, and coming home with raging fights and a lot of abuse of the mother
and of Bill and his brother by the stepfather. So there is, at once, an
enormous gap, a kind of disparity between two realities, in the life of any
child. Between the reality as one pretends it to be, as you pretend to the
outside world, and the real working reality. The most influential male
figure, very early in his life, and indeed later in his political start, is his
stepfather's brother. A man named Raymond Clinton, who was the dominant figure
in the Clinton family. Roger Clinton, Bill's stepfather, was sort of the weak,
younger brother who was never, never quite going to make it. He'd been set up
in a Buick dealership in Hope, which is where he met Virginia, Bill's mother,
and married her, and that failed because he flitted away the company profits in
gambling and dissipation and drinking and so on.
The stronger, older brother was Raymond Clinton who had a Buick franchise in
Hot Springs and was quite a political force. A member of the Ku Klux Klan and
had extensive organized crime ties. He ran his own slot machines, out of the
back, not only of the Buick dealership but other businesses and properties
around town. Bookmaking and bootlegging operations and all the rest. And it's
important to understand that one didn't do that on a freelance basis. You
didn't just come into a town owned by organized crime and set up your own vice.
You did that only at the sufferance and with the cooperation, indeed
collaboration of organized crime, and you gave kickbacks accordingly. So
Raymond Clinton, who was a very important figure in the family often rescues
Bill from abuse by his stepfather, and is a very dominant financial figure in
their, fortunes, was closely linked to those elements.
FL:
Somebody said he felt that was the real father figure at that point. The most
commanding male presence in his life. So talk a little about what drew Bill to
this man...
MORRIS:
Well, Raymond Clinton is a very, powerful figure, he's a tall, good-looking,
very assertive, aggressive man who is a striking contrast to his younger
brother who is weak, and an alcoholic and seemingly always in trouble. He
can't really hold a job, ends up going bust in the Buick dealership which
Raymond had arranged for him in Hope, coming back to Hot Springs and going to
work for Raymond as a parts manager in the Buick franchise. Raymond is always
there to take care of this little boy when he is mistreated or abandoned by the
stepfather and often by the mother, who's out night clubbing as well and who
works odd hours as a nurse at the local hospital. He's very protective, I
think it's clear that Raymond Clinton adopted Bill Clinton in many respects,
saw in him, very early on the political figure, the charmer, the publicly
acceptable face that he became. And he grooms him. He really raises and
nurtures this little boy I think to be, to be the kind of politician that he
ultimately became.
And then later, Raymond plays a very, very crucial role in Bill
Clinton's life. He is very instrumental, he's the man to whom Bill Clinton
turns in the Vietnam draft crisis, when he's confronted with this, with the
very real prospect of going to Vietnam. He goes first to Uncle Raymond, who,
as my book describes, goes to great pains to fix this up with the local board
and, staves off the draft. Turns out decisively. It does enable Bill Clinton
to escape the draft, in a very precise way. And he does this with political
influence. He's very close to Senator Fulbright, and to Senator McClellan. He
knows both Republicans and Democrats in the state and he travels around on
behalf of his nephew here, his step-nephew really, trying to save him from the
Vietnam draft. And then later when Bill Clinton returns, from Yale Law School,
to begin almost immediately, a campaign for Congress, launching a bid for
Congress in 1974, it's Raymond who is very important financially to him. It's
Raymond's house that becomes the campaign headquarters, in a house that he owns
in Fayetteville. It's Raymond's money and influence that secures the first of
so many bank loans that are so important in Bill Clinton's career. This is
the president that the banks of Arkansas made, and Raymond Clinton goes into a
bank in Hot Springs, and Bill Clinton comes out with a ten thousand dollar loan
which is really quite decisive for that campaign. And he's there also,
supporting the 1976 run for Attorney General, and the 1978 campaign for
Governor.
But he's not alone, among these people. There's a family friend named Gabe
Crawford who ran a string of drug stores in Arkansas, who also had his own
links to organized crime, bookie operations, and slot machines and so on. So
these are the people who are, in a sense, launching Bill Clinton, and who had
been his male role models. He has a very abusive, torturous stepfather, whom
the mother, tries to evade and manipulate, and who is hardly the dominant male
figure in his life. The really important, successful and helpful, nurturing
male figures in his life are Raymond Clinton and to some extent, Gabe Crawford.
These other elements, and they are, vintage Hot Springs.
FL:
Virginia What was she like, paint a picture for us, and what kind of influence
did she have on Bill....
MORRIS:
I think psychologists would say that it was probably emotionally incestuous.
She was a very, very important and potent figure in his life. She is the
present parent. She's the dominant influence. If he can talk to anyone, if he
can really rationalize to anyone, if he has anyone to look at as an adult
example, it is the mother. The stepfather is absent, of course, a great deal
and when he is present, he's usually drunk and very abusive, entirely
unpredictable. There are a few moments, that friends can recall and that
Virginia herself recalls in her memoirs, moments of tenderness between the
stepfather and the very little boy, scenes when Bill is 4 or 5 years old, and
Roger Clinton is sitting on the floor playing with him, or with a mechanical
train or something. But those moments are extraordinarily rare and even when
Bill Clinton was asked in 1992 about such moments, he remembered one train
ride, one trip to St. Louis, that was it. That was all he could summon.
So Virginia is the parent. She's the dominant adult force and she's a very
mixed bag indeed. She's something of a tart around Hot Springs. As I said
earlier, she's always there at the nightclubs, she's frequenting the race
track, she's rather addictive, a race track gambler, not a high roller but
always there at the two dollar window. She wears very heavy makeup, she's a
nurse working at the hospital, in anesthesiology and, I think had a good
professional reputation although she acquires a lot of professional
controversy later. There are lawsuits and all the rest, sort of mixed
professional record. But most of all she's a Hot Springs character. She's
attractive, she obviously has a number of male figures in her life besides
Roger Clinton. He is, savagely jealous of her. Many of the scenes between
them, public and private beatings are over the attentions of other men. And
she admits in her own memoirs that she had moments of revenge against the
abuse of her husband by courting the attentions of other men. So, she's a
flamboyant, character whose moral and ethical behavior is, I would guess less
than Baptist Hot Springs might have hoped for.
She again is part of this divided world, that Bill Clinton grows up with.
She's one thing on the surface, quite respectable, nurse and mother. On the
other hand, he witnesses her as a party girl, and a party girl well into his
adolescence and well into her 30s and even 40s. She's part of, I guess, a
lower-middle class stratum in the American south which is sometimes difficult
for the rest of the country to appreciate or to grasp. She's cocky, in a kind
of kitschy way. She's matronly but in a very different matronly way. She's
very protective, worshipful really of her, of her little boy, and yet strangely
absentee in his life. She admits at one point in her memoirs that she's not
quite sure where Bill Clinton and her brother Roger Clinton, little Roger got
their moral or ethical grounding because she can't remember that either she or
Roger Clinton ever particularly talked to them about sex or about moral or
ethical issues, but they seem to have done all right. They got fetched up on
their own. Bill Clinton is fetched up on his own, in old southern terms. I
think he spends a lot of time away from home and a lot of time in a very mixed
feeling about his mother. On one hand, he's very proud of her, and she's
attractive and his friends find her fascinating and congenial to be around. On
the other hand, I think there's evidence that he was ashamed of her. He
doesn't go with her to the nightclubs. At one point, when Roger Clinton and
Virginia are separated and she's seeking a divorce, they are divorced
eventually and there are periods in which Roger Clinton is gone, is away from
the home and out of the picture, and she tries to get Bill, as a young man, to
accompany her to The Vapors or elsewhere and he's very impatient about that,
doesn't really quite want to do it, wanna be seen with her. And then later, of
course, there's a terrific influence I think in what he finally preferred in
women himself. The choices that he made in his life.
Virginia Clinton is an abused child, herself. We're talking about a whole
string of abused children here. Virginia, a Roger Clinton and then, of course,
Bill Clinton, then the future President of the United States, is a very
savagely abused child, but Virginia Clinton grows up in Hope with a screaming
mother who really is savagely of her father who was an ice man and, who she
continually accused of having sexual affairs on his ice route and so on. She's
the woman who later becomes a morphine addict and is an extraordinarily
powerful force, of course, in Bill Clinton's life, but it's the mother of
Virginia, and we know from her memoirs, from Virginia's memoirs, beats her, and
abuses her in a number of ways.
So Virginia has a rather tortured childhood, and she learns very early on, at
the age of 10 or 11 or 12, that she recounts in her own memoirs, to build a
kind of black box inside her head, where all of the pain and the tragic
experiences go, where she learns to secret the really unbearable things that
have happened to her. And to present to the outside world this shining,
smiling, fun-loving, vivacious face that she presented most of her life. She
goes from that tortured and abused childhood in hope of course, to fall in love
with Bill Blythe, Bill Clinton's real father in a stormy and quick romance. He
goes off to World War Two, comes back and then, before they really have a
chance to get settled in post-war America, he dies tragically in an automobile
accident, heading back to pick up a pregnant Virginia in Hope and bring her
back to Chicago. I've always thought it was a very, very fateful moment. My
book begins with a scene on that range-like highway, where Bill Blythe dies and
determines then that a future President will not grow up in Chicago and will
not grow up with his natural father, but with a very different father, in a
very different culture and different atmosphere in Hot Springs of Arkansas.
But Virginia goes from that tragic experience, has her baby and then very soon
gets hooked up with this ne're do well alcoholic who's a very tragic figure
himself-- an abused child, lived on the streets a lot in Hot Springs, as a
little boy-- and goes from one abusive relationship to another. And if
anything, her relationship with Roger Clinton, of course, is even worse than
her childhood had been, and Bill Clinton is the witness to that, every day and
every night.
FL:
But the ability to passively put things away in a black box, to be able to not be undone, as
she says, or think about things---do you see that played out--that
capacity for denial in any shape or form?
MORRIS:
I think there's a very strong genetic influence, visible in Bill Clinton from
the mother and from his natural father, Bill Blythe, who has his own wonderful
story of being the classic traveling salesman with lots of women on the road,
and in fact, was a bigamist, was not divorced from another woman when he
actually married Virginia. So the President of the United States is,
technically speaking, according to the court documents, not quite legitimate
but, yes, I think there is a real sense and almost instinct for evasion and
for denial, which is passed on by the mother to the son. In fact, I think
denial is the essence of life in that family. It was absolutely essential to
present one face to the outside world, to conceal the deeper and darker secrets
of how awful it was inside his home. Not only because it was socially
embarrassing, but because it just brought so much pain. This is not an
uncommon reaction after all, to children of severe and abusive alcoholic
parents. And, this Hot Springs in the 1950s, when it was something of a
scandal to have had this kind of father.
And, Virginia perpetuates that in her children. She instructs them, she admits
in her memoirs, that they must not talk about this, they must not confront it.
There's a striking contrast for example, between Ronald Reagan's mother, who
tells her little boys----I mean, some really, incredible prescience, I mean
she's a woman of the early 20th century and she has this very modern, Mrs.
Reagan has this modern attitude----tells her little boys that the father is an
alcoholic but they must feel sorry for him and treat him with love and
compassion because he's ill. And, in some way, the Reagan kids deal with this
father in a much more healthy, modern, progressive sense than the Clinton boys
ever did with Roger. But, Virginia's intent upon concealing, and hiding this.
And I interviewed people who lived next door to them, who were the closest of
neighbors, who never knew that the police were there so often in the middle of
the night. To whom Billy, little Billy, or adolescent Bill never spoke about
what was going on inside the family, which was really quite raucous and brutal
and, these nightly scenes of Virginia and Bill being manhandled and hit and
often kicked by a drunken father. These were really seedy and tragic
episodes.
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