Clinton Returns Home for Jaunt Down Memory Lane

President Clinton spent much of his early life dreaming of moving beyond his home state for a new life in Washington. But this week, with three years left in his second term, he was a man focused on home once again.

In a nostalgic return to Arkansas, Clinton inspected two possible sites around Little Rock for his presidential library.

On Saturday, he visited his now-shuttered high school in Hot Springs, joining old friends in the school’s “Hullabaloo” cheer and lending his name to a cultural center planned for the building.

Soon after, at a Democratic fund-raiser in Little Rock, he feigned bewilderment at criticism he gets in Washington, sounding remarkably like a lame duck: “They’ll be shed of me soon enough,” he declared of his enemies. “They ought to just relax.”

Clinton clearly has mingling thoughts of the past and the future in mind. On Friday, his motorcade stopped by two spots near the Arkansas River that are possible locations for his presidential library. There are six possibilities, although the search is in an early stage, according to Skip Rutherford, a longtime friend of Clinton’s.

While the president may choose to keep a residence outside Arkansas after leaving the White House, Rutherford said, “I think Arkansas will always be his home base.”

It was while visiting his high school in Hot Springs, an hour’s drive from Little Rock, that the nostalgia really poured out.

Residents are turning the old high school, which closed its doors in 1991, into the William Jefferson Clinton Cultural Campus, offering space to artists. On Saturday, the boosters invited alumni and supporters to the “Ultimate Class Reunion.”

“I thought you had to have at least one leg in the grave before they would name anything for you,” Clinton quipped to the crowd that included former teachers, classmates, friends and neighbors. “But if it helps raise another nickel, I accept and I thank you.”

Hugging old friends, cracking jokes, wiping away a tear--the president was in his element.

While Clinton has often seized on the symbolism of his roots in Hope, the small-town site of his first home, he actually grew up in Hot Springs, which in the 1940s and ‘50s was a wide-open resort town hospitable to gangsters.

“It was poetic to be born in Hope, but it meant more to grow up in Hot Springs,” wrote Clinton biographer David Maraniss in his 1995 book, “First in His Class.”

Before he spoke on Saturday, the president toured the 82-year-old school building and took in the modest collection of photos and childhood art in the “Clinton Room.” Two of his favorite boyhood photos were featured: A 4-year-old Clinton in a cowboy outfit, and a 6-year-old Clinton surrounded by his pals.

Gazing upon a nude baby picture of himself, he told his hosts: “I might have known you’d have that one.”

Speaking to the crowd later, Clinton said he knew everyone wished that departed parents, students who died in World War II and the Vietnam War, and others could have been at the reunion. But most of all, he said, he wished his late principal, Johnnie Mae Mackey, could have been there. When Mackey’s students joined the Marines, “it was a step down in discipline and order,” Clinton recalled with a laugh.

Then, to his delight, a classmate clad in a black dress and clutching a megaphone performed an impersonation of the principal: “Listen to me, son, you might make something of yourself,” she lectured the president, who was doubled up in laughter.

Clinton also joined former cheerleaders from his 1964 graduating class in a spirited rendering of the school’s “Hullabaloo” fight chant, shouting out “Trojans! Trojans! Rah rah rah!”

Clinton then mingled with the crowd for 40 minutes, responding to people who called out “Bill,” hugging and kissing many. He prompted cheers when he donned a Trojans cap.

“The older I get, the so-called little issues seem bigger to me,” Clinton had told a group of Democratic supporters at a fund-raiser Friday evening in Houston. “I want to save my high school.”