Even Jerry Brown said the press should lay off because the issue wasn’t relevant. But the press had found another character issue. As for the “didn’t inhale” remark, I was stating a fact, not trying to minimize what I had done, as I tried to explain until I was blue in the face. What I should have said was that I couldn’t inhale. I had never smoked cigarettes, didn’t inhale with the pipe I occasionally smoked at Oxford, and tried but failed to inhale the marijuana smoke. I don’t know why I even mentioned it; maybe I thought I was being funny, or perhaps it was just a nervous reaction to a subject I didn’t want to discuss. My account was corroborated by the respected English journalist Martin Walker, who later wrote an interesting and not altogether flattering book on my presidency, Clinton: The President They Deserve. Martin said publicly that he’d been at Oxford with me and had seen me try but fail to inhale at a party. By then it was too late. My unfortunate account of my marijuana misadventures was cited by pundits and Republicans throughout 1992 as evidence of my character problem. And I had given late-night TV hosts fodder for years of jokes.
As the old country song goes, I didn’t know whether to “kill myself or go bowling.” New York was suffering from severe economic and social problems. The Bush policies were making things worse. Yet every day seemed to be punctuated by television and print reporters shouting “character” questions at me. Radio talk-show host Don Imus called me a “redneck bozo.” When I went on Phil Donahue’s television show, all he did for twenty minutes was ask me questions about marital infidelity. After I gave my standard answer, he kept on asking. I rebuffed him and the audience cheered. He kept right on. Whether I had a character problem or not, I sure had a reputation problem, one I had been promised by the White House more than six months earlier. Because the President is both the head of state and the Chief Executive of the government, he is in a sense the embodiment of people’s idea of America, so reputation is important. Presidents going back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have guarded their reputations jealously: Washington, from criticism of his expense accounts during the Revolutionary War; Jefferson, from stories about his weakness for women. Before he became President, Abraham Lincoln suffered from debilitating episodes of depression. Once he was unable to leave his house for a whole month. If he had had to run under modern conditions, we might have been deprived of our greatest President.
Jefferson even wrote about the obligation of a President’s associates to protect his reputation at all costs: “When the accident of situation is to give us a place in history, for which nature had not prepared us by corresponding endowments, it is the duty of those about us carefully to veil from the public eye the weaknesses, and still more, the vices of our character.” The veil had been ripped from my weaknesses and vices, both real and imagined. The public knew more about them than about my record, message, or whatever virtues I might have. If my reputation was in tatters, I might not be able to be elected no matter how much people agreed with what I wanted to do, or how well they thought I might do it. In the face of all the character attacks, I responded as I always did when my back was against the wall—I plowed on. In the last week of the campaign, the clouds began to lift. On April 1, during a meeting with President Bush at the White House, President Carter made a widely reported comment that he supported me. It couldn’t have come at a better time. No one had ever questioned Carter’s character, and his reputation had continued to grow after he left the presidency, because of his good works at home and around the world. In one comment, he more than made up for the problems he had caused me during the Cuban refugee crisis in 1980.
On April 2, Jerry Brown was booed in a speech to the Jewish Community Relations Council in New York for suggesting Jesse Jackson as his running mate. Meanwhile, Hillary and I spoke to a large crowd at a midday rally on Wall Street. I got some boos, too, for referring to the eighties as a decade of greed and opposing a cut in the capital gains tax. After the speech, I worked the crowd, shaking hands with supporters and trying to convince the dissenters.
Meanwhile, we poured the whole campaign operation into the state. Besides Harold Ickes and Susan Thomases, Mickey Kantor was camped out in a hotel suite, joined by Carville, Stephanopoulos, Stan Greenberg, and Frank Greer and his partner, Mandy Grunwald. As always, Bruce Lindsey was with me. His wife, Bev, came up, too, to make sure all the public events were well planned and executed. Carol Willis organized a busload of black Arkansans to come to New York City to talk about what I had done as governor for and with blacks. Black ministers from home called counterparts in New York to ask for pulpit time for our people on the Sunday before the election. Lottie Shackleford, a Little Rock city director and Vice-Chair of the National Democratic Committee, spoke in five churches that Sunday. Those who knew me were putting a dent in the Reverend Jackson’s efforts to bring a big majority of New York’s black voters to Brown.
Some people in the press were coming around. Maybe the tide was turning; I even got a cordial reception on Don Imus’s radio show. Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who cared a lot about the Irish issue, wrote, “Say what you want, but do not say that he quits.” Pete Hamill, the New York Daily News columnist whose books I’d read and enjoyed, said, “I’ve come to respect Bill Clinton. It’s the late rounds and he’s still there.” The New York Times and the Daily News endorsed me. Amazingly, so did the New York Post, which had been more relentless in its attacks than any other paper. Its editorial said:
“It speaks strongly to his strength of character that he has already survived a battering by the press on personal questions unprecedented in the history of American politics…. He has continued to campaign with remarkable tenacity…. In our view, he has manifested extraordinary grace under pressure.”
On April 5, we got good news from Puerto Rico, where 96 percent of the voters supported me. Then, on April 7, with a low turnout of about a million voters, I carried New York with 41 percent. Tsongas finished second with 29 percent, just ahead of Brown at 26 percent. A majority of African-Americans cast their ballots for me. That night I was battered and bloodied but elated. My one-sentence take on the campaign was a line from a gospel song I’d heard in Anthony Mangun’s church: “The darker the night, the sweeter the victory.”
When I was doing research for this book, I read the account of the New York primary in The Comeback Kid by Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis. In it, the authors refer to something Levon Helm, the drummer for the Band and an Arkansas native, said in the great rock documentary The Last Waltz about what it’s like for a southern boy to come to New York hoping to make it into the big time: “You just go in the first time and you get your ass kicked and you take off. Soon as it heals up, you come back and you try it again. Eventually, you fall right in love with it.”
I didn’t have the luxury of taking time off to heal, but I knew just how he felt. Like New Hampshire, New York had tested and taught me. And like Levon Helm, I had come to love it. After our rocky start, New York became one of my strongest states for the next eight years.
On April 7, we also won in Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. On April 9, Paul Tsongas announced that he would not reenter the race. The fight for the nomination was effectively over. I had more than half the 2,145 delegates I needed to be nominated, and had only Jerry Brown to compete with the rest of the way in. But I was under no illusions about how badly damaged I had been, or how little I could do about it before the Democratic convention in July. I was also exhausted. I had lost my voice and put on a lot of weight, about thirty pounds. I had gained the weight in New Hampshire, most of it in the last month of the campaign, when I suffered from a flu bug that filled my chest with fluid at night so I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour without waking to cough. I kept alert on adrenaline and Dunkin’ Donuts, and I had a bulging waistline to prove it. Harry Thomason bought me some new suits, so that I didn’t look like a balloon about to burst.