My life

I n 1956, I finally got a brother, and our family finally got a television set. My brother, Roger Cassidy Clinton, was born on July 25, his father’s birthday. I was so happy. Mother and Daddy had been trying to have a baby for some time (a couple of years earlier she’d had a miscarriage). I think she, and probably he too, thought it might save their marriage. Daddy’s response was not auspicious. I was with Mammaw and Papaw when Mother delivered by caesarean section. Daddy picked me up and took me to see her, then brought me home and left. He had been drinking for the last few months, and instead of making him happy and responsible, the birth of his only son prompted him to run back to the bottle. Along with the excitement of a new baby in the house was the thrill of the new TV. There were lots of shows and entertainers for kids: cartoons, Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody, with Buffalo Bob Smith, whom I especially liked. And there was baseball: Mickey Mantle and the Yankees, Stan Musial and the Cardinals, and my all-time favorite, Willie Mays and the old New York Giants. But strange as it was for a kid of ten years old, what really dominated my TV viewing that summer were the Republican and Democratic conventions. I sat on the floor right in front of the TV and watched them both, transfixed. It sounds crazy, but I felt right at home in the world of politics and politicians. I liked President Eisenhower and enjoyed seeing him renominated, but we were Democrats, so I really got into their convention. Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee gave a rousing keynote address. There was an exciting contest for the vice-presidential nomination between young Senator John F. Kennedy and the eventual victor, Senator Estes Kefauver, who served Tennessee in the Senate with Al Gore’s father. When Adlai Stevenson, the nominee in 1952, accepted his party’s call to run again, he said he had prayed “this cup would pass from me.” I admired Stevenson’s intelligence and eloquence, but even then I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want the chance to be President. Now I think what he didn’t want was to lead another losing effort. I do understand that. I’ve lost a couple of elections myself, though I never fought a battle I didn’t first convince myself I could win. I didn’t spend all my time watching TV. I still saw all the movies I could. Hot Springs had two oldfashioned movie houses, the Paramount and the Malco, with big stages on which touring western stars appeared on the weekends. I saw Lash LaRue, all decked out in cowboy black, do his tricks with a bullwhip, and Gail Davis, who played Annie Oakley on TV, give a shooting exhibition. Elvis Presley began to make movies in the late fifties. I loved Elvis. I could sing all his songs, as well as the Jordanaires’ backgrounds. I admired him for doing his military service and was fascinated when he married his beautiful young wife, Priscilla. Unlike most parents, who thought his gyrations obscene, Mother loved Elvis, too, maybe even more than I did. We watched his legendary performance on The Ed Sullivan Show together, and laughed when the cameras cut off his lower body movements to protect us from the indecency. Beyond his music, I identified with his small-town southern roots. And I thought he had a good heart. Steve Clark, a friend of mine who served as attorney general when I was governor, once took his little sister, who was dying of cancer, to see Elvis perform in Memphis. When Elvis heard about the little girl, he put her and her brother in the front row, and after the concert he brought her up onstage and talked to her for a good while. I never forgot that.

Elvis’s first movie, Love Me Tender, was my favorite and remains so, though I also liked Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, and Blue Hawaii. After that, his movies got more saccharine and predictable. The interesting thing about Love Me Tender, a post–Civil War western, is that Elvis, already a national sex symbol, got the girl, Debra Paget, but only because she thought his older brother, whom she really loved, had been killed in the war. At the end of the film, Elvis gets shot and dies, leaving his brother with his wife.