THE MAN. Though Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, tongue in cheek, introduced Clinton at ameeting two years ago as "the only politician to be a rising star in three decades," he knew painand adversity in childhood. His father, a heavy- equipment salesman, was killed in a freak roadaccident three months before Clinton -- originally christened William J. Blythe IV -- was born onAug. 19, 1946, in the little southwestern Arkansas town of Hope. Five months later, his motherVirginia returned to nursing school in Shreveport, La., to get a degree in anesthesiology, leavingBill with grandparents who ran a small grocery store. When Bill was four, she returned to Hopeand married Roger Clinton, a Buick dealer who moved the family to Hot Springs. Bill'sstepfather was an alcoholic who sometimes beat Virginia and once fired a gun at her in theirliving room (she insists to this day he intended only to frighten, not to injure, her). Virginia andRoger divorced but quickly remarried; as a gesture to help keep the family together, Bill, then15, had his name legally changed to Clinton.The turmoil at home seems to have left two imprints on Clinton. One was a driving ambition toget out and make something of himself in the big world, initially by being the perfect student. Asa high schooler, he was selected a senator in Boys Nation, an annual promotion by the AmericanLegion in Washington, and he got to visit the White House and meet President Kennedy. Hecame home starry-eyed and fixed on politics as his career. He enrolled at Georgetown Universitylargely to be near the Congress he hoped one day to enter. Then came Oxford, on a Rhodesscholarship, and Yale Law School, where he met the brightest woman in the class, HillaryRodham -- today a successful lawyer and a feminist who did not call herself Mrs. Clinton untilher unwillingness to do so began to hurt her husband politically.Back home, Clinton lost a race for Congress but became state attorney general and in 1979, at32, the youngest Governor in the country. Two years later, he was the youngest ex-Governor; hehad impressed some of his constituents as an arrogant whiz kid who had surrounded himself witha bunch of outsiders who looked on Arkansans as barefoot hicks. In 1982 a chastened Clintoncame back, apologizing to voters for developing a swelled head but vowing to reform; he haswon every election since.The 1980 defeat also intensified a trait that is universally considered Clinton's greatest weakness.Even as a young teenager, he recalls, he often felt compelled to act as a peacemaker, trying tosmooth over the violent quarrels at home. As a politician, he wants to be loved by everyone evenmore than most practitioners of his trade. Says Stephen Smith, a professor of communications atthe University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and onetime Clinton aide: "He would really like to get100% in an election." Clinton makes such extreme efforts to conciliate opponents that Arkansans jest that the way to get something you want desperately is to become an enemy of theGovernor's.Clinton's compromising bent also makes him appear at times to take both sides of a controversialissue. To cite the most prominent current example, he claims to be the only Democraticcandidate to have backed George Bush early and unreservedly on the gulf war. But on Jan. 15,1991, the war deadline, the Arkansas Gazette quoted him as saying that he agreed with themajority of Democrats in Congress who voted against the use of force and for longer reliance onsanctions.
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