My Life

They had concluded that the nominating speech was an opportunity to introduce him as a leader whose personal qualities, record in office, and new ideas made him the right person for the presidency. Because I was his colleague, his friend, and a southerner, they wanted me to do it and to take the entire allotted time, about twenty-five minutes. This was a departure from the usual practice, which was to have three people representing different groups within our party give five-minute nominating speeches. No one paid much attention to them, but they made the speakers and their constituents happy.

I was flattered by the invitation, but wary. As I’ve said, conventions are loud meet-and-greet affairs where the words coming from the platform are usually just background music, except for the keynote address and the presidential and vice-presidential acceptance speeches. I had been to enough conventions to know that another long speech would bomb unless the delegates and media were prepared for it and the conditions in the hall remained conducive to it. I explained to the Dukakis people that the speech would work only if I spoke with the lights down and the Dukakis floor operation worked to keep the delegates quiet. Also, they couldn’t clap too much or it would substantially increase the length of the speech. I told them I knew that was going to be a lot of trouble, and if they didn’t want to do it, I’d give him a rousing five-minute endorsement instead.

On the day of the speech, July 20, I brought a copy of my remarks to Mike’s suite and showed it to him and his people. I told them that, as written, it would take about twenty-two minutes to deliver, and if there wasn’t too much applause we could stay within the twenty-five-minute window. I described how I could cut 25 percent of the speech, or 50 percent, or 75 percent, if they thought that would be better. A couple of hours later I called back to see what they wanted me to do. I was told to give it all. Mike wanted America to know him as I did.

That night, I was introduced and walked out to strong music. As I began to speak, the lights were dimmed. It was all downhill after that. I wasn’t through three sentences before the lights came up again. Then every time I mentioned Mike’s name, the crowd roared. I knew right then I should scrap the speech in favor of the five-minute option, but I didn’t. The real audience was watching on television. If I could ignore the distractions in the hall, I could still tell the folks at home what Mike wanted them to hear:

I want to talk about Mike Dukakis. He’s come so far, so fast that everybody wants to know what kind of person he is, what kind of governor he’s been, and what kind of President he’ll be. He’s been my friend a long time. I want you to know my answer to those questions, and why I believe we should make Mike Dukakis the first American President born of immigrant parents since Andrew Jackson.

As I proceeded to answer the questions, the convention got back to talking, except to cheer when Mike’s name was mentioned. I felt as if the speech was a two hundred–pound rock I was pushing up a hill. I later joked that I knew I was in trouble when, at the ten-minute mark, the American Samoan delegation started roasting a pig.

A few minutes later, the ABC and NBC networks started roasting me, showing the distracted convention hall and asking when I was going to finish. Only CBS and the radio networks ran the entire speech without critical commentary. The convention press people obviously hadn’t been told how long I was expected to speak, or what I was trying to do. Also, the way I wrote the speech was all wrong. In an attempt to tell Mike’s story without too much interruption by applause, I made it both too conversational and too “teachy.” It was a big mistake to think I could speak only to people watching on TV without regard to how I would go over with the delegates.

I had some good lines, but, alas, the biggest applause I got was near the painful end, when I said, “In closing….” It was thirty-two minutes of total disaster. I kidded Hillary afterward that I wasn’t sure just how badly I’d bombed until we were walking out of the arena and she started going up to total strangers and introducing me as her first husband.

Fortunately, Mike Dukakis wasn’t hurt by my misadventure. He got good reviews for naming Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate; they both gave good speeches; and the ticket left Atlanta with a hefty lead in the polls. On the other hand, I was a dead man walking.

On July 21, Tom Shales wrote a devastating piece in the Washington Post that summed up the press reaction to my speech: “As Jesse Jackson had electrified the hall on Tuesday, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas calcified it Wednesday night.” He called it “Windy Clinty’s classic clinker,” and described in agonizing detail what the networks did to fill time until I finished. When we woke up the next morning, Hillary and I knew I had jumped into another pit I’d have to dig myself out of. I had no idea how to begin, except to laugh at myself. My first public response was: “It wasn’t my finest hour. It wasn’t even my finest hour and a half.” I kept my game face on, but I promised myself I would never again abandon my own instincts about a speech. And except for a brief moment in my speech to Congress on health care in 1994, I didn’t.

I was never so glad to get back home in my life. Arkansans were mostly supportive. My paranoid supporters thought I’d been set up by somebody. Most people just thought I’d sacrificed my normal spark and spontaneity to the shackles of a written speech. Robert “Say” McIntosh, a volatile black restaurateur with whom I’d had an on- again, off-again relationship, rose to my defense, slamming the media coverage and hosting a free lunch at the state Capitol for anyone who turned in a postcard or letter hitting back at one of my national media critics. More than five hundred people showed up. I got about seven hundred letters on the speech, 90 percent of them positive. Apparently the people who wrote them had all heard the speech on radio or watched it on CBS, where Dan Rather at least waited until it was over to get his digs in.

A day or so after I returned, I got a call from my friend Harry Thomason, producer of the successful TV show Designing Women, which his wife, Linda Bloodworth, wrote. Harry was the brother of Danny Thomason, who sang next to me in the church choir. Hillary and I had gotten to know him and Linda in my first term when he came back to Arkansas to film a Civil War television movie, The Blue and the Gray. Harry told me I could make silk out of this sow’s ear, but I had to move fast. He suggested I go on the Johnny Carson show and poke fun at myself. I was still shell-shocked and told him I needed a day to think about it. Carson had been having a field day with the speech in his monologues. One of his more memorable lines was “The speech went over about as well as a Velcro condom.” But there really wasn’t much to consider—I couldn’t end up any worse off than I already was. The next day I called Harry and asked him to try to set up the Carson appearance. Carson normally didn’t invite politicians on the show, but apparently he made an exception because I was too good a punching bag to pass up, and because I agreed to play the sax, which he could use as an excuse to keep his ban at least on nonmusical politicians. The sax argument was Harry’s idea, not the last clever one he would think up for me. A couple of days later, I was on a plane to California, with Bruce Lindsey and my press secretary, Mike Gauldin. Before the show, Johnny Carson came by the room where I was waiting and said hello, something he almost never did. I guess he knew I had to be hurting and wanted to put me at ease. I was slated to come onstage shortly after the show started, and Carson began by telling the audience not to worry about my appearance because “we’ve got plenty of coffee and extra cots in the lobby.” Then he introduced me. And introduced me. And introduced me. He dragged it out forever by telling everything his researchers could find out about Arkansas. I thought he was going to take longer than I did in Atlanta. When I finally came out and sat down, Carson took out a huge hourglass and put it down next to me so that the whole world could see the sand running down. This performance would be time limited. It was hilarious. It was even funnier to me because I’d brought my own hourglass, which the studio people said I absolutely could not take out. Carson asked me what had happened in Atlanta. I told him I wanted to make Mike Dukakis, who wasn’t known for his oratorical skills, look good, and “I succeeded beyond my wildest imagination.” I told him Dukakis liked the speech so much, he wanted me to go to the Republican convention to nominate Vice President Bush, too. Then I claimed I’d blown the speech on purpose, because “I always wanted to be on this show in the worst way, and now I am.”

Johnny then asked if I thought I had a political future. I deadpanned an answer: “It depends on how I do on this show tonight.” After we traded one-liners for a few minutes and got good laughs from the studio audience, Johnny invited me to play the sax with Doc Severinsen’s band. We did an upbeat version of

“Summertime,” which went over at least as well as the jokes. Then I settled in to enjoy the next guest, the famous English rocker Joe Cocker, as he sang his latest hit, “Unchain My Heart.”

After it was over, I was relieved and thought it had gone about as well as possible. Harry and Linda threw a party for me with some of their friends, including two other Arkansans, Oscar-winning actress Mary Steenburgen, and Gil Gerard, whose first claim to fame was his starring role in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

I took a red-eye flight home. The next day, I learned that the Carson show had earned good ratings nationwide and astronomical ones in Arkansas. Normally, not enough Arkansans stayed up late enough to earn those ratings, but the honor of the state was at stake. When I walked into the state Capitol, a hometown crowd