Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [13]
Natural empathy was one thing that stood out about Bill Clinton as he came of age. David “Paul” Leopoulos, one of Clinton’s best childhood friends in Hot Springs, remembered Bill as a boy with an uncommonly well-developed sense of solicitude toward others. Leopoulos would never forget one November day when Clinton dragged home a boy whom he had met at the bus stop. Virginia Clinton asked, “Who’s this?” Bill whispered to his mother, “Well, we were talking, and his parents are divorced; he’s not going to have any Thanksgiving dinner. Can he have dinner with us?” It was an attribute that Leopoulos saw on display over and over. In early adulthood, when Leopoulos’s mother was stabbed to death at her Hot Springs antique shop while Clinton was away at Oxford, Bill immediately bought Leopoulos a plane ticket to England so that they could grieve together. When Leopoulos got married, Clinton traveled over a thousand miles to stand in his wedding.
Another quality that defined Clinton was his personal magnetism. Even at the earliest stages of his political career, he seemed able to convey his passionate beliefs using simple, compelling words. Ernie Dumas, state capital reporter for the Arkansas Gazette, remembered the first time he met candidate Bill Clinton. It was during the 1974 primary season, when Clinton was making his first run for political office seeking to represent Arkansas’s Third Congressional District. Dumas was dispatched to cover the Pope County Democratic Women’s Rally, the first major political event of the season. There, all the Democratic candidates engaged in an “old-time speaking affair” in a big gymnasium. The scene was one of pandemonium. Recalled Dumas: “I remember that there were hundreds and hundreds of people filling this place and everybody drinking Cokes, and they were serving hot dogs, and there was just this din.” One candidate after another stood up to give his perfunctory speech, with nobody “paying them much attention.”
When the baby-faced Bill Clinton was introduced, Dumas would recall, “nobody was paying much attention.” Clinton stepped up and began his allotted two-minute talk. Then, as Dumas would tell the story, “for some reason, there was just a quiet settled over the place, just a hush soon after he began to speak. And everybody kind of hushed up and listened. And he had this voice that kind of carried and people paid attention to what he had to say.” Clinton spoke no longer than his allocated 120 seconds. Yet somehow he received a standing ovation. As Dumas recalled, “I looked at my notes and I thought, ‘He didn’t say a damn thing.’ There wasn’t a word—there was nothing there worth quoting. But it was a few beautiful sentences and ordinary thoughts” that captivated those crammed into the auditorium.
Dumas witnessed that scene repeat itself across the state. Old union loyalists and party stalwarts began “passing hats and raising money for [Clinton].” The result was that newcomer Bill Clinton came close to beating incumbent John Paul Hammerschmidt in the 1974 race for Congress.
Justice David Newbern, even before going on the court in Arkansas, witnessed a similar charisma on display from the moment Clinton became governor. Newbern recalled attending a country music concert featuring an attractive female country superstar at the Robinson Auditorium in Little Rock. When Clinton walked onstage to present the singer with an “Arkansas Travelers” certificate, making her an honorary daughter of the state, the woman “almost swooned.” As Newbern observed it, the attractive singer came