My Life

a right-wing monthly magazine, was about to publish an article by David Brock in which four Arkansas state troopers claimed they had procured women for me when I was governor. Only two of the troopers agreed to be interviewed on CNN. There were some allegations in the story that could be easily disproved, and the two troopers had credibility problems of their own, unrelated to their allegations against me: they had been investigated for insurance fraud involving a state vehicle they wrecked in 1990. David Brock later apologized to Hillary and me for the story. If you want to know more, read his brave memoir, Blinded by the Right, in which he reveals the extraordinary efforts made to discredit me by wealthy right-wingers with ties to Newt Gingrich and some adversaries of mine in Arkansas. Brock acknowledges that he allowed himself to be used in the smear by people who didn’t care whether the damaging information they paid for was true or not.

The trooper story was ridiculous, but it hurt. It hit Hillary hard because she thought we’d left all that behind in the campaign. Now she knew it might never end. For the moment, there was nothing to do but carry on and hope the story would blow over. While it was raging, we went to the Kennedy Center one night for a performance of Handel’s Messiah. When Hillary and I appeared in the President’s box on the balcony, the large audience stood and cheered. We were moved by the kind and spontaneous gesture. I didn’t realize how upset I had been until I felt tears of gratitude fill my eyes. After a memorable Christmas week, Hillary, Chelsea, and I flew Mother and Dick home to Arkansas. Hillary and Chelsea stayed with Dorothy in Little Rock, and I drove with Mother and Dick to Hot Springs. We all went to dinner with some of my friends from high school at Rocky’s Pizza, one of Mother’s favorite haunts, just across the street from the racetrack. After dinner Mother and Dick wanted to go to bed, so I took them home, then went bowling with my friends, after which we came back to the little house on Lake Hamilton to play cards and talk until the early hours of the morning. The next day Mother and I sat alone together over a cup of coffee for what turned out to be our last visit. She was upbeat as always, saying the only reason the trooper story came out when it did was that my poll ratings had rebounded in the last month to their highest level since my inauguration. Then she chuckled and said she knew the two troopers weren’t the “brightest lights on the horizon,” but she sure wished “the boys would find some other way to make a living.”

For a brief moment I got her to think about the sand running out of the hourglass. She was working on her memoirs with a fine collaborator from Arkansas, James Morgan, and she had put her entire story on tape, but there were still several chapters in the drafting stage. I asked her what she wanted to happen if she didn’t finish them. She smiled and said, “You’re going to finish them, of course.” I said, “What are my instructions?” She said I should check the facts, change anything that was wrong, and clarify anything that was confusing. “But I want this to be my story in my words. So don’t change it unless you think I’ve been too hard on someone who’s still alive.” With that, she went back to discussing politics and her trip to Las Vegas.

Later that day I kissed Mother good-bye, drove to Little Rock to pick up Hillary and Chelsea, and flew to Fayetteville to see the number one–ranked Arkansas Razorbacks play basketball, then on to the Renaissance Weekend with our friends Jim and Diane Blair. After a jam-packed year, so full of highs and lows, it was good to have a few days with old friends. I walked on the beach, played touch football with the kids and golf with my friends, went to the panels, and enjoyed the company. But my thoughts were never far from Mother. She was a marvel, still beautiful at seventy, even after a mastectomy, chemotherapy treatments that took all her hair and forced her to wear a wig, and daily blood transfusions that would have put most people in bed. She was ending her life as she had lived it, going all out, grateful for her blessings, without a shred of self-pity for her pain and illness, and eager for the adventures of every new day she could get. She was relieved that Roger’s life was on track, and convinced that I was mastering my job. She would have loved to live to be one hundred, but if her time was up, so be it. She had found her peace with God. He could call her home, but He would have to catch her on the run.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The year 1994 was one of the hardest of my life, one in which important successes in foreign and domestic policy were overshadowed by the demise of health-care reform and an obsession with bogus scandal. It began with personal heartbreak and ended in political disaster. On the night of January 5, Mother called me at the White House. She had just returned home from her trip to Las Vegas. I told her I had been calling her hotel room for several days and never found her in. She laughed and said she had been out day and night, having the time of her life in her favorite city, and she didn’t have time to sit around waiting for the phone to ring. She had loved Barbra Streisand’s concert, and was especially pleased that Barbra had introduced her and dedicated a song to her. Mother was in high spirits and seemed strong; she just wanted to check in and tell me she loved me. It wasn’t much different from the countless calls we’d shared over the years, usually on Sunday nights. About 2 a.m. the phone rang again, waking Hillary and me. Dick Kelley was on the line, crying. He said,

“She’s gone, Bill.” After a perfect but exhausting week, Mother had just gone to sleep and died. I knew it was coming, but I wasn’t ready to let her go. Now our last phone conversation seemed too routine, too full of idle chitchat; we had talked like people who think they have forever to talk to each other. I was aching to redo it, but all I could do was tell Dick that I loved him, that I was so grateful to him for making her last years happy, and that I’d get home as quickly as I could. Hillary knew what had happened from my end of the conversation. I hugged her and wept. She said something about Mother and her love of life, and I realized that the phone conversation was just the kind Mother would have chosen to be our last one. My mother was always about life, not death. I called my brother, who I knew would be devastated. He worshipped Mother, all the more because she never gave up on him. I told him he had to hold up for her and keep building his life. Then I called my friend Patty Howe Criner, who had been part of our lives for more than forty years, and asked her to help Dick and me with the funeral arrangements. Hillary woke Chelsea and we told her. She had already lost a grandfather, and she and Mother, whom she called Ginger, had a close, tender relationship. On the wall of her study room, she had a terrific pen-and-ink portrait of Mother by Hot Springs artist Gary Simmons, entitled Chelsea’s Ginger. It was moving to watch my daughter coming to terms with the loss of someone else she loved, trying to express her grief and keep her composure, letting go and holding on. Chelsea’s Ginger is hanging in her room in Chappaqua today. Later that morning we put out a release announcing Mother’s death, which was all over the news immediately. By coincidence, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich were on the morning news programs. Undeterred by the moment, interviewers asked about Whitewater; to one, Dole replied that it “cries out”

for the appointment of an independent counsel. I was stunned. I would have thought that even the press and my adversaries would take a time-out on the day of my mother’s death. To his credit, a few years later Dole apologized to me. By then, I better understood what had happened. Washington’s narcotic of choice is power. It dulls the senses and clouds the judgment. Dole was not even close to being its worst abuser. I was touched by his apology.

That same day Al Gore went to Milwaukee to deliver a foreign-policy speech I had agreed to make, and I flew home. Dick and Mother’s house was full of their friends, family, and the food Arkansas folks bring to ease common grieving. We all laughed and told stories about her. The next day Hillary and Chelsea arrived, as did some of Mother’s other friends from out of state, including Barbra Streisand and Ralph Wilson, the owner of the Buffalo Bills, who had invited Mother to the Super Bowl the previous year when he learned she was a huge Bills fan.

No church was big enough to hold all Mother’s friends and it was too cold to hold the funeral service at her preferred venue, the racetrack, so we scheduled it for the Convention Center. About three thousand people came, including Senator Pryor, Governor Tucker, and all my college roommates. But most of the attendees were simple working people whom Mother had met and befriended over the years. All the women from her “birthday club” were there, too. There were twelve members, each with a birthday in a different month. They celebrated them together over monthly lunches. After Mother died, as she requested, the other women picked a replacement; and they renamed their group the Virginia Clinton Kelley Birthday Club.

The Reverend John Miles presided over the service, referring to Mother as an “American original.”

“Virginia,” he said, “was like a rubber ball; the harder life put her down, the higher she bounced.”

Brother John reminded the crowd of Mother’s automatic response to every problem: “That’s no hill for a stepper.”

The service featured the hymns she loved. We all sang “Amazing Grace” and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Her friend Malvie Lee Giles, who once lost her voice completely, then got it back “from God” with an extra octave to spare, sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and Mother’s favorite, “A Closer Walk with Thee.” Our Pentecostal friend