Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [5]
He was also thinking, specifically, about Hillary. A picture of Bill and Hillary, at the time they had just joined the law faculty at Fayetteville, flashed into his mind: One Sunday afternoon, the Clintons had attended a reception at the Newberns’ home on a tree-lined street off College Avenue. The senior professor had been standing on the porch with Hillary when he caught her stealing a glance across the street at a quaint home with a For Sale sign posted. The expression on Hillary’s face seemed to indicate that she “was thinking about the life they were about to lead [once Bill got into politics] and the life that they could lead if they wanted to just settle down. Stay there in Fayetteville—which is preposterous when you stop to think about it, given what occurred after that.” Yet as Newbern watched the impeachment votes recorded on his television screen on this Saturday in December, “it just struck me how different their lives would have been” if Bill and Hillary had told each other, “Let’s forget all this political stuff and become law professors, real law professors, and stay here.” As news commentators droned on about the impeachment, the image of Hillary staring wistfully at an old house in Fayetteville haunted him. The thought that Newbern couldn’t chase out of his mind was, Had Bill Clinton’s successes been worth the costs to him and his family?
In Hot Springs, the town where Clinton had grown up, one of his mother’s best friends sat in her house on Lake Hamilton, praying that she would not be overcome by anger. Marge Mitchell had known Bill since he was a boy; he had spent a hundred summer days drinking lemonade on her back porch. Bill’s mother—Virginia Clinton Kelley—had married her fourth husband, Dick, in Marge’s living room. They were like family; Bill was like a son. No matter how much Marge asked God to allow her to understand this crisis far away in Washington, she could not escape a dark conclusion: “They were out to destroy [Bill],” she said. “Whitewater didn’t get him, and they picked up something here” in the form of the Monica Lewinsky affair. “It was just politics of pure personal destruction,” she said.
Part of it, she believed, had been caused by a “resentment” harbored by people who could not accept that “a small-town boy from a small state” like Arkansas had ascended to the presidency. Although Marge would not deny that Bill “probably made some mistakes,” these were personal in nature. They had nothing to do with his duties as president of the greatest country in the free world; Bill had done “a magnificent job” when it came to serving as chief executive. As Marge saw it, any personal shortcomings were for a higher authority to judge. “Gosh, this has been going on since Adam and Eve,” she said. “I think the American people have forgiven him. I know the Lord has forgiven him.”
Just to be safe, Marge and some of Virginia’s closest friends, who had met regularly for lunch as part of a group called the Birthday Club, began praying to Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless and impossible causes.
In the towering Ozark Mountains, far removed from Little Rock and Hot Springs, another woman was praying fervently that this demon would pass, for different reasons. Betsey Wright had first met Bill Clinton when they were working on George McGovern’s 1972 campaign for president, cutting their political teeth together in Texas. For seven years during Clinton’s governorship, Wright had served as his chief of staff and had run three of Clinton’s gubernatorial campaigns. She had been in charge of dealing with “bimbo eruptions,” including the messy Gennifer Flowers scandal, during the presidential race of 1992. Wright had jumped off the Clinton merry-go-round, completely burned out, after the carousel had packed up and moved to Washington. She had tried