Command and Control

Educated at Georgetown University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School, Bill Clinton was an unlikely person for the Air Force to include in deliberations about the fate of a ballistic missile. He’d organized a demonstration against the Vietnam War, never served in the military, and supported the decriminalization of marijuana. During his gubernatorial campaign in 1978, the New York Times described Clinton as “tall, handsome, a populist-liberal with a style and speaking manner as smooth as Arkansas corn silk.” His landslide victory that year seemed to mark a generational shift — the rise to power of a brilliant, charismatic representative of the 1960s youth counterculture. Many conservatives were disgusted by the idea of Clinton and his young, idealistic friends running the state government. “He was a punk kid with long hair,” one Arkansas legislator said, “he had all those longhaired people working for him, and he was a liberal.”

Governor Clinton began his two-year term in office with an ambitious agenda for one of America’s most impoverished states. He gained passage of the largest spending increase for public education in Arkansas history. He created a Department of Energy to subsidize research on conservation, alternative fuels, and solar power. He proposed a rural health policy that would bring physicians and medical care to low-income communities. And he set out to fix the state’s badly deteriorated highway system, promising infrastructure investments to create jobs and improve the lives of ordinary Arkansans. A number of Clinton’s top aides and cabinet officers were recruited from out of state — sending a clear message that posts in his administration would be filled on the basis of merit, not as a reward for political favors. Instead of having a chief of staff, Clinton relied upon three close advisers who had long hair, beards, and an aversion to wearing jackets or ties. Nicknamed “the Three Beards,” they looked like junior faculty members at Berkeley. Among Democratic officials nationwide, Little Rock was now considered a cool place to be, and the young governor became a frequent guest at the Carter White House.

By the second year of the Clinton administration, most of the enthusiasm and idealism was gone. Personal differences, political disputes, and feelings of betrayal had led two of the Three Beards to quit. Industry groups worked hard to block or dilute many of Clinton’s reforms, and the governor’s willingness to compromise alienated many of his allies. Instead of subsidizing road construction with higher taxes on the use of heavy trucks — a move opposed by the state’s trucking companies and poultry firms — Clinton agreed to raise the taxes paid by the owners of old pickup trucks and cars. The lofty rhetoric and grand ambitions of the young governor lost much of their appeal, once people realized they’d have to pay more to renew their license plates. During the spring of 1980, a series of tornadoes struck Arkansas. During the summer, the state was hit by a heat wave and the worst drought in half a century. Hundreds of forest fires burned. Cuban refugees, detained by the federal government at an Army base in the state, started a riot. They tried to escape from the base and fought a brief skirmish with the Arkansas National Guard, terrifying residents in the nearby town of Barling. Each new day seemed to bring another crisis or a natural disaster.

Having gained almost two thirds of the popular vote in 1978, Bill Clinton now faced a tough campaign for reelection, confronting not only the anger and frustration in his own state but also the conservative tide rising across the United States. Frank White, the Republican candidate for governor, was strongly backed by the religious right and many of the industry groups that Clinton had antagonized. The White campaign embraced the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, attacked Clinton for having close ties to Jimmy Carter, ran ads that featured dark-skinned Cubans rioting on the road to Barling, raised questions about all the longhairs from out of state who seemed to be running Arkansas, and criticized the governor’s wife, Hillary Rodham, for being a feminist who refused to take her husband’s name.

While Lee Epperson, director of the Office of Emergency Services, tried to find out what was happening at the Titan II site in Damascus, Governor Clinton spent the evening in Hot Springs. The state’s Democratic convention was about to open there, and Vice President Walter Mondale would be arriving in the morning to attend it. Hillary Rodham remained in Little Rock, where she planned to spend the weekend at the governor’s mansion with their seven-month-old daughter, Chelsea.

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Jeff Kennedy wanted a closer look at the white cloud drifting about two hundred feet away, on the other side of the perimeter fence.