Standing Face to Face with Bill Clinton Taught Me Some Things About Life
“Still want to be me?” he asked me.
If you ever get to meet Bill Clinton, he will blow your freaking mind. I promise you that.
He has a commanding presence that knows no ideological limits. His piercing gaze bores right through your skull; you can’t control the urge to look away.
I was nine years old the first time I experienced that.
My fourth grade class received an invitation to the Governor’s office one Tuesday in the fall of 1984. There were around 25 of us, and we all arranged ourselves cross-legged on the floor in the reception room in a semi-circle.
There was a single, velvet-covered chair in the center of the room; no one had to ask who that was for. Our teacher and one conscripted parent tried in vain to contain our juvenile energy as we waited for the Man Himself.
I don’t know if Fashionably Late was a conscious choice, but we were 15 minutes past the hour when the heavy oak door on the other side of the room swung open. Several nameless, faceless peons poured out of it with a palpable nervousness that my adult self finds quite comical in retrospect.
I swear the atmosphere in the room changed at that very moment. Gov. Clinton strode into that room with a sense of purpose that sucked the air from my lungs. His assistants frantically scurried about him, making sure his chair was centered perfectly.
He settled into it, crossed his legs, and snapped his fingers.
“You!” he said to one female assistant. “Go get my Pepsi!”
She took off for his office in a dead run like a cannonball in search of destruction.
He waited patiently, his trademark smirk affixed and his eyes dancing with delight as humanity gathered itself around him.
The assistant returned with a can of soda, popped it open, wiped the rim of it for him, and wrapped a fresh cloth napkin around it. He accepted it with a nod, then jerked his head toward the wall to his right side. She dutifully retreated to that wall, dissolving into a line of other staffers who were there for no apparent reason.
After watching her all the way back to that wall, the governor turned his head around, ran his eyes over his audience, and settled on me. I swear to God, his eyes could’ve melted a glacier.
“Young man,” he asked in his thick Arkansan drawl. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“You!” I said, without even hesitating. I was always the class clown and I wasn’t about to stop now.
He threw his head back and bellowed out a laugh that invited all of us to join him. He seemed genuinely pleased at that.
The rest of that encounter was fairly unremarkable. He droned on for nearly 30 minutes about his accomplishments as governor, which seems odd now considering none of us would be old enough to vote for another nine years.
The lesson I took from this encounter, though, has stayed with me all these years:
You can’t fake influence.
Many others have held the office of Arkansas Governor before and since Clinton, but he’s the only one who parlayed that position into the American Presidency. On that particular day, he displayed a masterful mix of charm and brutal command of his minions. To a room full of fourth graders.
It wasn’t just the office he held. It was the man himself. I don’t know what that mythical “It” is that some people have, but no one I’ve ever met — including other governors and one other president — possessed it to the degree this man does.
And this was not the only time I personally experienced his It.
An F4 tornado ripped through Arkadelphia, Ark., on March 1st, 1997. I was a junior in college that year, attending the smaller of two universities in that town.
The level of sheer destruction was breathtaking — it shredded about a third of the entire town, killing six people and injuring scores of others.
I walked through the town a few days later. There were literally cars stuck in trees, cars overturned on top of other cars, and whole neighborhoods that looked like war-torn Europe in the 1940s. Downed powerlines coiled throughout the city like dead snakes rotting in the sun.
Governor Mike Huckabee declared it a disaster area, opening up federal funding to help with recovery. FEMA came to town, and insurance agents walked the streets with hard hats and clipboards, assessing the monetary hit their companies were about to sustain.
Oh. And news quickly spread that a former governor would be accompanying Huckabee as he personally surveyed the damage. A former governor who had a much bigger job in 1997.
Nearly every one of the 10,000 residents of Arkadelphia lined the streets of the area of town that had not been destroyed by the tornado on that day. Secret Service agents took to rooftops and walked the streets, searching bags and wanding everyone before allowing us into the cordoned-off area there.
We figured we might catch a glimpse of the president, so some buddies and I made our way down there super early to try to get a spot on one of the main streets.
Around an hour later, we saw a large entourage making its way down the middle of 3rd Street. We were confused at first, because no one was allowed into the street — it was roped off on both sides and local cops were sternly holding that line.
It took around 10 or so minutes for that entourage to approach us. My eyes were much sharper back then, so I could tell that the lead persons were all wearing dark sunglasses and ear fobs. Just behind them, taking his sweet time, was President William Jefferson Clinton, shaking every hand on our side of the street.
When he reached our position, he stuck his hand out, grasped mine, and fixed that same steely gaze on me as from 13 years earlier. He leaned in.
“Still want to be me?” he asked me.
He squeezed my hand once, winked, and moved on.
I was speechless. How in the name of God could he remember the face of — and specific verbal exchange with — a nine-year-old child when encountering the 22-year-old version of that same person?
I talked this over with my senior-year English teacher from high school a few days later.
“He has an inexhaustible memory for faces and names,” she said. “I went to high school with him, and we only ever spoke once. I ran into him at a donor function two years ago and he greeted me by name.”
That second lesson, courtesy of Bill Clinton?
I was never going to be him.
Frank is an award-winning writer from Little Rock, Ark. He is a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., with a degree in Speech Communication, and the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Md., with an emphasis in journalism and media relations.
Frank is a longtime veteran of the U.S. Army, having deployed to Iraq on two separate occasions. He currently works with Soldiers and their families in the realm of spiritual resilience and relationship skills.
When he isn’t writing or working, Frank is usually playing Call of Duty and Fortnite with his sons.
You can reach out to Frank directly at frankvaughn@gmail.com.
