Bill Clinton's Hidden Life

This story originally appeared in the July 20, 1992, issue of U.S.News & World Report.

Americans think they know all about Bill Clinton. He's the presidential candidate who befriended Gennifer Flowers, avoided the draft and didn't inhale. "Maybe I underestimated the importance of biography in this campaign," Clinton told U.S. News last week, acknowledging that he lost control during the Democratic primaries over how the public viewed him. "I was shocked. Most people thought I came from a wealthy family and occupied a position in a state in the middle of the country until I could run for president. It was crazy."

U.S. News editors Donald Baer, Matthew Cooper and David Gergen engaged Clinton in a series of interviews about his life, his hopes and his struggles. A similar interview with Ross Perot has already appeared in U.S. News, and the same invitation for an in-depth conversation has been issued to George Bush. What follows is an edited text of Clinton's own words.

Youth. There are positive and negative things coming out of my childhood. If you had clothes on your back and a place to sleep and food to eat and you had people to love you and to discipline you, you were by definition not poor; you were rich, because you had the elements of a successful life. There was no sense of entitlement to anything more. In an alcoholic family [Clinton's stepfather was an alcoholic], I grew up with a much greater empathy for other people's problems than the average person has. It made me a lot more self-reliant and tougher than I might have been. And I learned some good skills about how to keep people together and try to work things out. On the negative side, if you grow up in an environment that causes you to want to avoid trouble, you tend to try to keep the peace at all costs. A leader can't do that. All my life, I've had to work to draw the line in the dirt, to make conflict my friend, not my enemy.

My natural father was killed in a car wreck about three months before I was born. I once went out to find the place where he died on Highway 61 in Missouri, where he just slipped off the wet road. He fell into a ditch full of water face down and drowned. It was just a fluke. I guess in ways I never permitted myself to admit, I missed my father terribly. I think because my father had died and my mother was probably a little too protective, I always had a desire to avoid conflict, which has led my political enemies to underestimate me.

My commitment to civil rights was basically inbred through my grandparents, who ran a grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood. They knew a lot of black people and thought they'd gotten a raw deal. I remember where I was when Martin Luther King gave that "I had a dream" speech in 1963. I was home in Hot Springs, Ark., in a white reclining chair all by myself. I just wept like a baby all the way through it.

When I was 16, I decided if I had a chance I would go into politics. I had been interested in being a musician, a physician or a politician. While I was very good at music, I would never be great. In politics, I thought I had unique abilities—I was genuinely interested in people and in solving problems. It was something I could be good at, something I could love.

Religious faith. I was very influenced as a child by the biblical stories of the Pharisees and the modern-day Pharisees I saw saying one thing and doing another. I came to see my church as a place not for saints but for sinners, for people who know they're weak, not who pretend to be strong. When I was a kid, I walked alone a mile or so to my church every Sunday. It wasn't something my parents did, but I somehow felt the need. I joined the Baptist church when I was 9. After I went off to college, I became an erratic churchgoer, even when I came back to Arkansas [after Georgetown University, a Rhodes Scholarship in England and Yale Law School]. But in 1978, when I got elected governor, it was important to me to have a dedicatory service. I selected a church whose minister, W.O. Vaught, I respected a lot, even though a lot of people thought I was this young firebrand and he was an old conservative minister. But I loved him a lot. After the service, my wife persuaded me to start going there and to join the choir—she said I obviously felt the need. Now, I pray virtually every day, usually at night, and I read the Bible every week.

I think serious people, the older they get, try to achieve a certain integrity in their lives. You try to put your mind, your body and your spirit in the same place at the same time. There's a great difference in that sense between integrity and honesty. Honesty is not lying in the moment, but integrity is much more difficult to achieve because you have to decide what you believe. The older you get, the more you want to actually confront the areas of doubt in your life, and you get to the point where you don't want to disappoint yourself any more. You realize that the time you have is limited, and you want to live like a laser beam instead of a shotgun.

I really believe in a lot of the old-fashioned things like the constancy of sin, the possibility of forgiveness, the reality of redemption. And I believe it in a Baptist way—that a lot of a person's spiritual journey should be intensely private and shared only with God. That's why I have real difficulty dealing with some of the apparent demands of modern politics—to discuss your personal life in excruciating detail. That's not a part of my religious faith where I come from. So I've been pretty open based on what I think people are entitled to know about my life. And in terms of what I've done that I shouldn't have done in my life, I believe God knows it all anyway, and I should confess it to God and deal with it that way. I'm not sure [without faith] that I would have endured what I went through in the primaries and had the inner strength to know that that wasn't me, that somehow I was being seriously misrepresented and that I couldn't just roll over and die in the face of it.

My faith has taught me to see this as a ministry. I think everybody has work to do, and you're supposed to do the best you can. Not a religious ministry. But every person has a calling in life, and you should try to make the most of your work. Each person can fulfill the intention of God for human life by giving dignity to whatever work they do.

On ambition. One reason I ran for president this year is I knew that I wasn't obsessed with winning it anymore. I didn't want to get into the race when the only thing in the world was winning. I think that's one of the things that's killing Bush. He says, "I'll do whatever it takes to win."

I've been a governor longer than most people serve. The longer I did this job, the more what turned me on was solving problems, not winning elections. If you look at how presidents have to live today, anybody that would turn down the life I've got for the life I'm going toward just to hold the job would be nuts. The only purpose of having the job is to change the country. When I got into this race, I realized, well, I'm going to do the very best I can. And if I get taken out, I'll find something else to do. You may only be fit to be president when you're not obsessed with it.

Political evolution. I supported George McGovern in 1972 based on his record and that he was against our involvement in Vietnam. That didn't mean that I had to be on the far left on every issue. I've always been for challenging the Democratic orthodoxy. I've always felt that unless we could become a party seen as pro-growth and pro-environment, pro-civil rights and tough on crime, pro-business as well as pro-labor, we were done as a national party.

When I was working for McGovern, I realized that a majority of Americans were just so alienated from what they thought of the Democratic Party. That had a big impact on me. It's why I was so hopeful about Jimmy Carter, who seemed to be a man committed to equal opportunity but who came out of a more mainstream political heritage. After Walter Mondale lost in 1984, I thought the only way we could win was not by bashing Reagan but by going beyond Reagan. I got involved in the Democratic Leadership Council not because I thought it was a collection of Southern white boys to pull the party to the right. I thought the party needed moderating, but I was driven more because I thought the DLC was a group of people who cared about ideas and were willing to think in new ways and not care whether they were politically correct. Too many debates in the party were about yesterday's issues in yesterday's language. What this country needs is dramatic change based on common-sense values, kind of a radical middle. I think this Perot boom, which I hope is a boomlet, reflects a desire for that.

The 1960s. I often joke with my friends that on balance I'm still glad I was a child of the '60s, but there sure was a price to pay, if nothing else in the way people look back at us, like the marijuana thing. The good was that people really caught up in the '60s cared about one another, cared about civil rights and poverty and making things better, and saw themselves as part of a larger whole, with responsibilities not only to themselves but to others. And even though there was a fair share of pain and disillusionment, there was a great sense of possibility, of hope—a sense that the system could be made to work. It's very different now, when the real problem is 70 percent of the people think there's no connection between what candidate Bill Clinton says and what President Clinton would do.

The bad side was that it was also a time when people maybe put too much emphasis on public things and too little on private things, when there was too much belief that it was OK to try anything—drugs or sex or whatever. I think for a lot of people in my generation, a lot of our adulthood has been about trying to keep what was great about the '60s alive and to grow out of what was wrong.

I've never become a cynic. In some ways, I'm just as idealistic today as I was when I was 22. I believe in the possibilities of this country and of this system. I hear people say it doesn't make any difference, and all that strikes me as crazy. The history of America is replete with examples that elections matter.

I still care profoundly about the things I cared about then. And yet I think I'm much firmer than 20 years ago on the role personal, family and community responsibility has to play in dealing with the problems of this country. There are some things the government can't solve. Nobody can substitute a program for personal character and conduct. My problem with this whole Bush-Quayle family-values strategy is not that I disagree with everything Quayle said but that I see it as a cop-out for their having no vision and assuming no responsibility.

His brother's drug addiction. It had, I guess, as big an impact on me as anything, maybe even more than the birth of my child. In 1984, state police caught him dealing cocaine and came to me and asked, "What do you want us to do? We can arrest him now, or we can treat him like we treat anybody else—do this five more times and make damn sure he's on his knees so he'll have to tell us who his supplier is. We think your brother is not a serious drug dealer. He's an addict. He's selling drugs to support his habit." So I said, "Do it." And I had to sit there on a secret for six weeks, while the undercover people kept setting him up over and over again. It was a nightmare. But I think it was the right thing to do, and I think it probably saved his life.

I never knew whether my brother or my mother would forgive me. But I had to be governor, not brother, not son. When it came out, he denied he was an addict. "You don't understand," I said. "If you're not an addict, I want you to go to prison for 10 years. You've been putting cocaine into the bodies of others for money. You're my brother, and I love you, but I want you to go away for a long, long time."

That's another thing that made me less obsessed, by the way. One of the things you learn with the counseling [which the Clinton family entered to help his brother] is that other people get so much into their own lives they shut out what's happening to family members in trouble. I should have probably known he was in deep trouble. In counseling, I learned that he and I were archetypes of children of alcoholics and that I basically was required to grow up before my time and had to be very careful, as I grew older, not to overuse the peacemaking skills that I developed as a child.

On Hillary and Chelsea. Hillary has just gotten better, like old wine. I mean, she always had great character, great passion for doing what was right. Her ability to deal with and to bring out the best in people as well as to pursue an incredible personal journey in her own mind and spirit is just extraordinary. I never cease to be amazed by her ability to grow. A lot of her growth has had to do with the time we've had to be parents, which made us different and better people. But when I see her now, she looks just like the person that I met over 20 years ago except better in every way. Her life turned out the way life ought to. She just got bigger and deeper and better. And I think she will for as long as she lives just because she has an incredible character and spirit and a great mind. It's amazing to me to watch.

I have a child who is much more tough-minded and savvy than I ever dreamed. I asked if she thought I ought to run and said, "It's going to be tough. They'll say terrible things about me." She said, "Dad, they always say terrible things about you. You ought to go to my school. You can't imagine the things they say. You just got to blow it off and go on."

Private versus public character. I didn't have any problem exciting the voters at first. I was running ahead of George Bush in New Hampshire. Nobody thought there was anything wrong with me until I started to have the misfortunes I had in the primaries. And then some of my opponents tried to reinforce it. I'm not complaining about it; it just happened.

What I hope will happen now is that people will have a fuller picture, that they'll know I'm not a perfect person, but they'll see what drives me, what motivates me, understand what I fought for at home and what I care about and then make a good judgment about what's best for them. I want the voters to vote on what's best for them. My job is to make sure if they vote against me they know exactly what they're doing. And I don't think today most voters have anything like a clear and complete picture of who I am, where I came from, what I fought for and what I want to do as president.

I've proved that I'm tough enough to take on tough problems and to stay there and fight them through. And I don't think people know that, and that's probably the fault of our advertising or maybe something in my style, a manner that's too reassuring. I've always hated artificial macho behavior by politicians. Ross Perot has always been open about saying that in Texas they borrowed some good ideas from our education-reform program in Arkansas. But I didn't run off from the fight; I got re-elected and eventually brought the teachers, who were angry about some reforms, into our camp. After they put the program through in Texas, Perot wasn't a part of the fight in the next election, and the incumbent governor got beat, in no small measure because the people who'd fought for the changes didn't fight them through in the election.

Hillary and I said at the beginning of this campaign, which I thought was an example of good character and not bad character, that we'd worked hard on our marriage; we'd had difficulties, and we'd saved it. You know, I've been treated like I had a character problem because I acknowledged that. And maybe I shouldn't have. But I think that's not evidence of bad character. I think change is tough for anybody. And I think we ought to elect somebody president who can face facts and make change and make tough decisions. Other people may have better rhetoric about it, but I think I've got a better record of it. It could be that revealing so much makes me look weak, not tough. But if that's so, then it's not my maturity that's at issue. Then people want to be lied to, they want to be conned, they want to be manipulated. And I'm just not very good at that.

I think we made a number of errors in the campaign. We should have spent more time talking about my record as governor and the fights I fought. I still think that that's a better example of political maturity and the readiness to be president than any of this personal stuff. I got elected governor in a state that is very tough politically five times for 14 years total. Nobody else ever did that. And I did it fighting for things that were good, not bad, building up the best in people. I never won an election based on fear or darkness. I won them because I was the candidate of hope and change.

I think a lot of this personal stuff can be way overblown. I've been reclined on the national couch. In some ways this obsession with the personal, to a far greater extent than in any presidential campaign in history, is partly because people can't imagine what an effective presidency would be like anymore. They don't know how to believe government can make a difference in their lives, so let's just vote on all this personal stuff. If you do that, you may wind up voting for somebody who's either lucky or dishonest. What really ought to count is: What have you put yourself on the line for? I can answer that question. And I think my answer is better than my opponents' answers. I have put myself on the line for more than 10 years to give kids a better education, to open opportunities, to modernize an economy with no help from Washington.

Those questions of public character ought to be the keystones of this election. If you look back in history, our best presidents were not blameless but were subject to a totally different standard and demonstrated public character, a commitment to certain things that got done that made a difference. So I don't mind discussing all this. But there is certainly no reward for being candid. In spite of all the press commentary, I think I win the candor contest, and it looks to me like it's all downside.

His governorship. I learned the hard way when I was defeated in 1980 that you have to really have priorities and make them clear to people. If you do a zillion things, even if you do them well, people may perceive that you haven't done anything. I need to relearn that in this race apparently. And I learned in politics, you'll be useless if you have no vision, nothing you're trying to do. But you can also be rendered useless if you ignore everybody else's vision. You have to spend time listening, bringing people along. You don't hire a dictator to tell people what to do. Since 1980, I know some people have said, "He became too cautious." But I think I accomplished more lasting change since I got beat.

The Republicans always say money doesn't matter until they start measuring somebody from a poor state. Then they want to rank him in money terms. I've kept our tax burden in the bottom five as a percentage of income—state and local taxes. We rank third in the nation in percentage of money we put into education, fifth in ratio of computers to kids in the schools. We're above the national average in college-going rate, though our income is only 47th. My answer to the Republicans is that in the last 12 years America has gone in the wrong direction and Arkansas in the right direction. It's pretty hard in a poor, rural state with no help from Washington to do that. My simple message is this: Politics is not about miracles; it's about direction. And the country's going in the wrong direction. Hire me.

Lessons from campaigning. I now know things that once I only imagined. For example, I know living in Arkansas is different from living in Florida or California or New York. I now know that our diversity is either the source of our great strength or the instrument of our undoing. I know that there are a lot of people who are real winners out there in this tough global economy, who are making good things happen, who prove that this still is the greatest country in the world and that what we have to do is to find a way for more of us to do that.

And I guess the thing that surprised me most of all—although I should have known this—is that underneath all the incredible diversity of America, there is a core of common caring and concern; we're a lot more alike than I think we think we are. That's the real tragedy of all these racial problems. The American people are so much more alike at a human level than they think they are, from how much they love their kids to how badly they want to be safe, how concerned they are about their jobs and their futures. I'd like to be remembered for making people really believe that we're all better off when we define our lives in terms of our common purposes, for really helping to re-establish a sense of community and bridging the troubled waters of race—particularly race—and all the other things dividing this country. I think life is lonelier than it ought to be in America because we are so isolated from one another.

My basic read on this is that inevitably about once a generation there's a crisis in any country and especially one that has our historic position, that's as big and diverse as we are. If you could look at it from any reasoned perspective, as tough as the deficit is and as tough as the underinvestment in America is—which I think is an even bigger problem and closely related to the deficit—the thing that's killing us now is our own skepticism and our vulnerability to being diverted from how we're going to rebuild America, how we're going to reunite America. What's killing us now is our vulnerability to being divided and diverted and cynical. But, objectively, the problems we face, as great as they are, are certainly no greater than those of previous generations. And to me, if we could say, OK, both parties have let the country down in many ways, the system in Washington is too paralyzed by organized interests and too dissipated by the lack of vision and driving leadership from a president, so we got to fix it. I just wish I could figure out a way to get America out of her deep funk. When you look at all the great things this country still has—the human resources, the material resources, the people out there winning against all the odds—this is not a time for pessimism. But it is a time for action.

I'm very optimistic. I want this election to be where the people vote for themselves to win. I don't want them to be diverted or divided or distracted or just in a deep funk. This is an exciting time. It's the dawn of a new era in the world, and nobody ever promised us automatic prosperity, automatic opportunity, everything working. Life has always been difficult and challenging, and this is just our generation's moment. And we need to do it. We need to quit bellyaching and do it.