Excerpt of Conversations by Janis F. Kearney

President William Jefferson Clinton spent most of his youth
in the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas, located almost halfway
between the state capital, where he would spend the balance
of his adult life, and his birthplace, Hope, Arkansas. It
was 1953 when seven-year-old Billy Blythe moved with his
mother and her new husband, Roger Clinton, to Hot Springs,
Arkansas, where Roger would continue work with the Clinton
Buick company. Mrs. Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton would
become a popular nurse anesthetist with the Hot Springs
Ouachita Hospital, where she would come to be known at the
best in the area.

By the time the Clinton family moved to Hot Springs, it was
a city reborn, having bounced back from the trouncing it
took from the Civil War and become an internationally
renowned tourist town. This quaint yet progressive community
boasted a population that included many non-southerners and
some foreigners. Despite Arkansas's reputation as backward
and insular, Hot Springs attracted nationally recognized
entertainers and well-known celebrities who enjoyed the
“freedom” of the town, including it medicinal spas and open
gambling.

Was the political timbre of the town as left-leaning as was
its social environment? The Sentinel Record, on June 26,
1959, wrote that Representative Ray S. Smith, Jr., of Hot
Springs was recognized for his courageous civil rights move
in casting the lone vote against Governor Orval Faubus's
school closing bill in 1959. Smith received the Edmond G.
Ross Award, named for Senator Ross of Kansas, who had
sacrificed his political career by casting a deciding vote
against the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

Bill Clinton was eleven years old in 1957, when Arkansas
became infamous around the world for the Integration Crisis
of Central High School. That one incident, Clinton would
later say, symbolized much of what he would spend his life
fighting against. In an interview that took place during his
presidency, he reflected on those tumultuous early years of
integration in Arkansas. “I was only 11 years old when the
nation's attention was riveted by the scene of nine black
children being escorted by armed troops on their first day
of school in Little Rock's Central High School... it had a
profound impact on me.”

“I was concerned about the racial separation between blacks
and whites that was taken for granted by so many of my
neighbors and friends. When I was a very young boy in Hope,
I spent time in my grandfather's grocery store. Many of his
customers were poor and black, but he treated everyone,
black or white, with the utmost dignity and respect. I often
played with black children. My grandfather tried to explain
why a little black boy I played with couldn't go to school
with me, or why the streets in the black neighborhood were
not paved like the streets in the white part of town. My
grandparents were not well educated or well off and I don't
know how they came to break from the conventional white
opposition to racial equality, but I'm so grateful to them
for what they taught me.”

During the ten years Bill Clinton spent in Hot Springs
before going off to college, he would shed much of his
rural, small town persona and begin to assimilate
comfortably into the more cosmopolitan Hot Springs
environment. He would also shed the name that had been his
biological father's and take on his stepfather's surname. No
longer Billy Blythe, he became William "Bill" Clinton. His
peers saw in him a bright, popular young man with an
infectious personality and a natural talent for music,
especially the saxophone.

In March 1963, he was selected as co-first chair for the
tenor saxophone; it was the first time Hot Springs High
School had ever awarded two first chair winners. He was
never very involved in school sports but had a great
interest in cars and could often be found hanging out at the
Clinton Buick dealership. He graduated with honors from Hot
Springs High School in 1963, and his peers predicted that in
20 years he would become “a social worker in a prairie dog
colony.”

Hot Springs, though, with all its exotic airs, was still the
South. Bill Clinton attended a segregated elementary school
and high school. The Clinton family lived in the white part
of town and had the privilege of eating in the segregated
restaurants and watching movies in segregated theatres.
Although the Cassidys' instilled in Clinton the importance
of looking beyond race, his new home, Hot Springs, might
well have taught him a practical lesson about the importance
of presenting a racially harmonious face to the visitors to
the city. Most of those visitors, after all, came from a
more liberal North.

While both of the cities Bill Clinton would call home -Hot
Springs and Hope-had been proud participants in the
Confederacy during the Civil War, the two cities'
similarities went little further than that. Hot Springs'
outside-the-box persona likely had much to do with Bill
Clinton's joie de vivre and, maybe, his open acceptance of
people and situations that others find harder to accept.

It was during the '50s and '60s that the unarticulated
questions that pestered young Billy Blythe in Hope,
Arkansas, began to reintroduce themselves in the form of
what was happening within and outside the state. During the
height of the civil rights struggle, the teen was
introduced, through television, to Reverend Martin Luther
King; and memorized the entire “I Have a Dream” speech. His
deep-felt sensitivities on race began to bud, and it was
there, that he forged his own philosophies and ideals about
America's race conflicts. Those theories and ideals, for the
most part, would remain with him.