My Life

from August 7 through October 20, 1969. Even worse, Colonel Eugene Holmes, who had agreed to let me join the program, now claimed that I had misled him to get out of the draft. In 1978, when reporters asked him about the charge, he said he had dealt with hundreds of cases and didn’t recall anything specific about mine. Coupled with my own misstatement that I had never had a deferment, the story made it seem that I was misleading people about why I wasn’t drafted. That wasn’t true, but at the time I couldn’t prove it. I didn’t remember and didn’t find Jeff Dwire’s tape relaying his friendly conversation with Holmes in March 1970, after I was out of the ROTC program and back in the draft. Jeff was dead, as was Bill Armstrong, the head of my local draft board. And all draft records from that period had been destroyed.

Holmes’s attack surprised me, because it contradicted his earlier statements. It’s been suggested that Holmes may have had some help with his memory from his daughter Linda Burnett, a Republican activist who was working for President Bush’s reelection.

Closer to the election, on September 16, Holmes would issue a more detailed denunciation questioning my “patriotism and integrity” and saying again that I had deceived him. Apparently, the statement was drafted by his daughter, with “guidance” from the office of my old opponent, Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt, and had been revised by several Bush campaign officials. A few days after the story broke, and just a week from election day in New Hampshire, Ted Koppel, anchor of ABC’s Nightline, called David Wilhelm and said that he had a copy of my now famous draft letter to Colonel Holmes, and that ABC would be doing a story about it. I had forgotten all about the letter, and ABC agreed to send us a copy, which they graciously did. When I read it, I could see why the Bush campaign was sure that the letter and Colonel Holmes’s revised account of the ROTC episode would sink me in New Hampshire.

That night Mickey Kantor, Bruce Lindsey, James Carville, Paul Begala, George Stephanopoulos, Hillary, and I met in one of our rooms at the Days Inn Motel in Manchester. We were getting killed in the press. Now there was a double-barreled attack on my character. All the television pundits said I was dead as a doornail. George was curled up on the floor, practically in tears. He asked if it wasn’t time to think about withdrawing. Carville paced the floor, waving the letter around and shouting, “Georgie!

Georgie! That’s crazy. This letter is our friend. Anyone who actually reads it will think he’s got character!” Though I loved his “never say die” attitude, I was calmer than he was. I knew that George’s only political experience had been in Washington, and that, unlike us, he might actually believe the press should decide who was worthy and who wasn’t. I asked, “George, do you still think I’d be a good President?” “Yes,” he said. “Then get up and go back to work. If the voters want to withdraw me, they’ll do it on election day. I’m going to let them decide.”

The words were brave, but I was dropping in the polls like a rock in a well. I was already in third place, and it looked as if I might fall into single digits. On Carville’s and Mickey Kantor’s advice, we took out an ad in the Manchester Union Leader containing the full text of the letter, and bought two thirty- minute segments on television to let voters call in and ask me about the charges and whatever else was on their minds. One hundred fifty Arkansans dropped what they were doing and came to New Hampshire to go door-to-door. One of them, Representative David Matthews, had been a law student of mine and one of the strongest supporters of my legislative programs and my campaigns at home. David was an eloquent and persuasive speaker who soon became my chief surrogate after Hillary. After he warmed up the crowd for me at several rallies, I think some people thought he should have been the candidate. Six hundred more Arkansans listed their names and home phone numbers in a full-page ad in the Union Leader, urging New Hampshire Democrats to call them if they wanted to know the truth about their governor. Hundreds of calls were made.

Of all the Arkansans who came to help, no one made a bigger difference than my closest childhood friend, David Leopoulos. After the Flowers story broke, David heard TV commentators say I was finished. He was so upset, he got in his car and drove three days to New Hampshire. He couldn’t afford a plane ticket. When he reached our headquarters, Simon Rosenberg, my young press aide, scheduled him for an interview on a Boston radio station with a large New Hampshire audience. He hit it out of the park, just by talking about our forty-year friendship and making me seem more human. Then he spoke to a gathering of our discouraged volunteers from across the state. When he finished, he had them in tears and full of resolve for the final push. David worked the state for a whole week, doing radio interviews and passing out homemade flyers with pictures of our childhood friends as proof that I was a real person. At the end of his journey, I saw him at a rally in Nashua, where he hooked up with fifty other Arkansans, including Carolyn Staley, my old jazz partner Randy Goodrum, and my grade-school friend Mauria Aspell. The “Friends of Bill” probably saved the campaign in New Hampshire. A few days before the election, I went down to New York for a long-planned fund-raiser. I wondered if anyone would come, even if only to see a dead man walking. As I made my way through the Sheraton Hotel kitchen to the ballroom, I shook hands with the waiters and kitchen workers, as I always did. One of the waiters, Dimitrios Theofanis, engaged me in a brief conversation that made him a friend for life.

“My nine-year-old boy studies the election in school and he says I should vote for you. If I do, I want you to make my boy free. In Greece, we were poor but we were free. Here, my boy can’t play in the park across the street alone or walk down the street to school by himself because it is too dangerous. He’s not free. So if I vote for you, will you make my boy free?” I almost cried. Here was a man who actually cared about what I could do for his son’s safety. I told him that community police officers, who would walk the blocks and know the residents, could help a lot, and that I was committed to funding 100,000 of them.

I was already feeling better, but when I walked into the ballroom, my spirits soared: seven hundred people were there, including my Georgetown friend Denise Hyland Dangremond and her husband, Bob, who had come from Rhode Island to show moral support. I went back to New Hampshire thinking I might survive.

In the last few days of the campaign, Tsongas and I had a heated disagreement over economic policy. I had proposed a four-point plan to create jobs, help businesses get started, and reduce poverty and income inequality: cut the deficit in half in four years, with spending reductions and tax increases on the wealthiest Americans; increase investment in education, training, and new technologies; expand trade; and cut taxes modestly for the middle class and a lot more for the working poor. We had done our best to cost out each proposal, using figures from the Congressional Budget Office. In contrast to my plan, Tsongas said that we should just focus on cutting the deficit, and that the country couldn’t afford the middle-class tax cut, though he was for a cut in the capital gains tax, which would benefit wealthy Americans most. He called me a “pander bear” for proposing the tax cuts. He said he’d be the best friend Wall Street ever had. I shot back that we needed a New Democrat economic plan that helped both Wall Street and Main Street, business and working families. A lot of people agreed with Tsongas’s contention that the deficit was too big for my tax cuts, but I thought we had to do something about the two-decade growth in income inequality and the shift of the tax burden to the middle class in the 1980s. While I was glad to debate the relative merits of our competing economic plans, I was under no illusion that the questions about my character had gone away. As the campaign drew to a close, I told an enthusiastic crowd in Dover what I really believed about the “character issue”: It has been absolutely fascinating to me to go through the last few weeks and see these so-called character issues raised, conveniently, after I zoomed to the top by talking about your problems and your future and your lives.

Well, character is an important issue in a presidential election, and the American people have been making character judgments about their politicians for more than two hundred years now. And most of the time they’ve been right, or none of us would be here today. I’ll tell you what I think the character issue is: Who really cares about you? Who’s really trying to say what he would do specifically if he were elected President? Who has a demonstrated record of doing what they’re talking about? And who is determined to change your life rather than to just get or keep power?… I’ll tell you what I think the character issue in this election is: How can you have the power of the presidency and never use it to help people improve their lives ’til your life needs saving in an election?

That’s a character issue….

I’ll tell you something. I’m going to give you this election back, and if you’ll give it to me, I won’t be like George Bush. I’ll never forget who gave me a second chance, and I’ll be there for you ’til the last dog dies.

“’Til the last dog dies” became the rallying cry for our troops in the last days of the New Hampshire campaign. Hundreds of volunteers worked furiously. Hillary and I shook every hand we could find. The polls were still discouraging, but the pulse felt better.

On election morning, February 18, it was cold and icy. Young Michael Morrison, Jan Paschal’s wheelchair- bound student, woke in anticipation of working a polling place for me. Unfortunately, his mother’s car wouldn’t start.