In Tough Times, Clinton Draws on Mother’s Gift

When President Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, was dying of breast cancer 4 1/2 years ago, she avoided telling friends, instead maintaining a sunny-side-up disposition that had served her well through a lifetime of adversity.

“She never told anyone she was dying. Obviously she knew,” recalled Thomas Caplan, a novelist who was close both to Kelley and her son Bill. “It was so classy in a way. She was never going to admit defeat and never going to give up.”

As Kelley’s older son faces his most perilous challenge in a career full of near-death political experiences, Caplan and other intimates of the president said they see more than a little of her in him as he confronts public humiliation and political attacks.

Widowed three times--including once while pregnant with the future president--Kelley raised two boys while living with an abusive husband and suffered from recurring breast cancer. Yet she approached each day with her eyebrows painted on, her false eyelashes glued in place and her zest for life and optimism intact.

“She’s the root of all this,” said Caplan, who was Clinton’s roommate at Georgetown University and still sees him frequently.

As Congress proceeds with its impeachment inquiry, Clinton seems to be borrowing his mother’s prescription for dealing with difficulties: Don’t judge yourself too harshly. Accentuate the positive. Empathize with others. Focus on their problems instead of your own. Live with gusto.

“I knew Virginia well,” said Thomas “Mack” McLarty, a boyhood friend of Clinton and his first White House chief of staff. “Clearly she faced a lot of adversity in her life. But she chose to dwell on the good things, the positive things. She had a resilience about her. Whether it was passed on to him genetically or by example, the president inherited it.”

Kelley’s example may be the key to Clinton’s iron-stomach approach to the public examination of his private behavior. But the confidence he displays, his self-assurance about overcoming this latest ordeal, also owes something to his history of prevailing over troubles.

After losing his first reelection bid for Arkansas governor in 1980, Clinton repackaged himself, campaigned incessantly and two years later won the first of five straight elections. After an intense battery of attacks on his character--from allegations of draft dodging to infidelity--in the 1992 campaign, he won the keys to the White House. And when the Republican revolution took over both houses of Congress in 1994 and its leaders called him irrelevant, Clinton reconstructed his presidency and became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be reelected.

Along the way, he has developed some survival techniques that his mother did not teach him. Chief among them are righteous anger, which has helped fuel his battle-ready posture in combating independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, and keen political acumen, which has helped him see a way out of this and other difficulties.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton also has played a key role in steeling him.

The Clintons “think they are doing good for the country. They feel that in their core,” said Harold M. Ickes, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, explaining why Clinton never will resign. “That’s reason No. 1. Reason No. 2 is they think this has been an unmitigated, totally politically driven witch hunt. They’re not prepared to capitulate and let Starr be the victor.”

Advisors who have spent a lot of time with Clinton since January, when the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal broke, agree that, after an initial rocky period, the president has been uncannily serene.

“I can’t say what’s going on internally, but I can say, from being around him a great deal for the last 10 months, he’s been upbeat and positive,” said Douglas B. Sosnik, the senior advisor who is at Clinton’s side whenever he is out of the White House. “Different people react differently to adversity. Some people shrink, others rise. He rises. It’s like game day every day.”

As if following Kelley’s formula, he plays hearts with aides on Air Force One to relax. He tunes out congressional debates on his impeachment and focuses on policy battles. He comes away from shaking hands with citizens along a rope line with a satisfied glow in his eyes. And he gets a charge out of helping people.

On the morning of Congress’ historic vote to open an impeachment inquiry, Clinton called three of his closest aides into the Oval Office. Instead of conferring with them on efforts to twist the arms of Democrats planning to vote against him, he shared a letter with them from Anastasia Somoza, a 14-year-old with cerebral palsy, from New York City.

In 1993, Anastasia appealed to him during a televised question-and-answer session to help her twin sister, Alba, who has a more advanced case of cerebral palsy that prevents her from speaking. Clinton choked up when she asked for his help in enrolling Alba in regular classes instead of special education courses.

Alba uses a computer to communicate. With Clinton’s intervention, she was transferred to a regular class. The family has been in contact with the president ever since, sharing news of the twins’ academic progress.

Anastasia wrote that she was “upset” by the president’s attackers, particularly those who are “supposed to be friends.”

“Please do not resign,” Anastasia wrote. “If you are strong, you will win, and then you can go on doing a good job for the country.”

Mom Was Like a ‘Rubber Ball’

Clinton started following his mother’s example at an early age.

His stepfather, Roger Clinton, drunkenly beat his mother periodically. But mother and son did not dwell on family problems when they went to work or school. Both worked hard and played hard and told very few people about their family troubles.

Kelley divorced Roger Clinton because of his alcoholic abuse, then took him back after three months because she felt sorry for him. She weaned her mother from a morphine addiction and stood by her younger son, also named Roger, when he was jailed on drug-trafficking charges. She celebrated his release.

On the night stand beside her bed she kept a needlepoint sampler that read: “Lord, help me to remember that nothing is going to happen to me today that you and I can’t handle,” according to Mrs. Clinton.

“She was like a rubber ball,” the Rev. John. P. Miles said at her burial. “The harder life put her down, the higher she bounced.”

Bill Clinton testified against his stepfather at the divorce trial but respected his mother’s decision to take him back and even legally changed his last name to Clinton on his own initiative. Both before and after the divorce, he interceded to stop his stepfather’s battery of his mother.

Kelley spent Christmas of 1993 in the White House. Because chemotherapy had caused her to lose hair, she wore a dark wig with her signature gray streak in the front. She talked enthusiastically about going to hear Barbra Streisand at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Hotel for New Year’s Eve--not about her approaching death.

She made plans to see Caplan the next day. When he called her, thepresident took the phone and said that she was busy self-administering her chemotherapy. But Kelley got on the line and cheerfully ordered Caplan to “get over here!”

Caplan spent that night at the White House. In the morning, he looked for Kelley to say goodbye.

“I said, ‘Virginia, see you soon,’ ” said Caplan. She replied: “You know I love you.”

She died Jan. 6, 1994.

A friend who took Kelley around Hot Springs, Ark., to visit friends about the same time told Caplan that she had repeated the same simple phrase to each one, “You know I love you,” but never mentioned dying.

Although the people of Arkansas already were acquainted with Clinton’s dogged determination, Clinton showed the rest of the country during the 1992 campaign that he could take an extraordinary number of punches and stay in the ring.

“There’s an inner core to this guy, an inner drive that is quite extraordinary,” said Ickes, who worked with Clinton on that 1992 campaign. “I saw him up close in New Hampshire in 1992. He was on the verge of collapse. He was on the road. He didn’t have the apparatus of the White House. You had Gennifer Flowers and the draft. It was his intellectual and physical strength, bolstered by [Mrs. Clinton’s] commitment, that did it. He just weathered it through. There’s an enormous reserve. It may be all narcissistic. But whatever it is, he ain’t no quitter.”

‘Adversity Is Our Friend’

Then as now, he relied on Kelley’s methods to face adversity. The press hammered him on character issues. He kept talking about policy goals.

Then as now, he sought to bolster staff morale with the same maxim. “Ninety percent of life is just showing up,” he told one aide recently, the same line he had used years before. “If I show up every day and do my job, we’ll be OK.”

Clinton grudgingly acknowledged to supporters at a Texas fund-raiser that “adversity is our friend. It’s a harsh teacher sometimes and I hate it.”

But his mother and his life have also taught him that adversity “inspires us to action. . . . It gives us steel and determination,” as he told another group recently.

Political advisor Dick Morris has helped Clinton stage more than one political comeback.

“The adversity becomes an organizing principle for him,” Morris said. “The things that distinguish him from many people in adversity is that there is no self-pity and no denial. Instead there is a focused, resolute search for a victory.”

His success at winning funding for some of his initiatives in last week’s budget battle with Congress despite the impeachment process and determination to prod the Middle East peace process forward this weekend illustrate this.

“Bill Clinton in some ways is at his best when he is cornered,” said Robert B. Reich, the former Labor secretary who has watched Clinton since they were friends at Oxford University 30 years ago. “The emergency seems to draw on deep wellsprings of energy. There may be a little Houdini effect here: Watch me get out of this one. I can surmount superhuman obstacles. I can extricate myself from almost impossible straitjackets.”

He has the influence of his mother to thank for that self-assurance and for much of the rest of his personality.

The first lady knows her husband so well as his compassionate mother’s son that she apparently believed him when he told her that he was helping a troubled young woman and not having an affair.

“If you knew his mother, you would understand it,” she told a senior White House aide.