How well off (or not) was young Bill Clinton, really? [View all]

Amazing how memes go unquestioned for a long time, including by me.

When I imagined the school years of Bill Clinton, I had always had a vague notion of a poor kid, raised by a single mom and on his own a lot. However, I recently read his wikipedia and did some thinking and some research.

President Clinton was born in 1946. Sadly, shortly before President Clinton was born, his father had died. Soon after his birth, his mother left to study nursing in New Orleans. (His wiki does not explain why she did not study in Arkansas.) At that time, nursing was one of highest-paying, most respected professions for a woman.

She left her son with her parents, who, wiki says, owned a "small" grocery store. Again, remember the times. Small stores, not huge conglomerates, were the rule, not the exception. If you owned a business of any kind that was a going concern, you were considered relatively well off. Perhaps not rich, but certainly not poor.

In 1950, his mother returned and married the President's stepdad, Roger Clinton (whose surname the President later took as his own).



President Clinton in 1950, via wikipedia creative commons.

Roger Clinton owned an automobile dealership. Demand for cars was great in 1950, having built up through World War II, while many factories were devoted to the war effort. Bill remembers Roger as a drunk and a gambler, but, still, he (and Bill's mother?) apparently made a good living because Bill went to a private, Catholic elementary school. He went to public high school. Supposedly, while in high school, he decided that he wanted to go into public service and also decided that he wanted to be a lawyer.

His wiki says that he attended college in Georgetown with the aid of scholarships, but it does not say that he had a full scholarship. I spoke with a woman I know who is 80. She said she, too, had had several scholarships for college, one for $2000 as a result of being valedictorian of her high school class, quite a sum at the time. However, some of her scholarships were for as little as $200. So, even with several scholarships, she had to work part time and summers and also get help from her parents, both of whom were laborers. Also, she had to live at home and commute.

At that, she felt lucky her family had allowed her to attend college. Her female cousins had been expected to get a job after high school so they could contribute to the household--and they, in turn, felt lucky that their parents did not make them quit school at age 16 to get a job. Only the males in their families had been able to go to college and some could not even do that, but went into the military. Apparently Bill Clinton was much better off than that. (I will emphasize that this woman is 13 years older than the President, so not exact parallel. Still, the difference seems clear.)

Bill attended Georgetown, which meant room and board as well as tuition, studying foreign service. The choice of major in itself would not have been typical for an impecunious student, especially one without connections. A poor student at the time would have been more likely to choose a more practical major that pretty much assured him or her of getting a job very soon after graduation, perhaps teaching.

While in college, he got an internship for three years with Senator Fulbright. I don't know if that has been explained in any of the President's books, but it was certainly a plum for someone with political ambition. Being described as an internship and not as a job, I assume it paid little or nothing, another indication that Bill was more comfortable financially as a young person than I had assumed.

After college, he received, and accepted, a Rhodes Scholarship, to attend Oxford, in England. He left that program early, apparently because of Vietnam War draft concerns, then went to graduate school (law school).

Wiki does not mention any scholarships for law school. At some point, he followed Hillary to California. Yadda, yadda, it seems he got his first steady paying job after graduation from law school in 1973, at age 27, as a law professor at the University of Arkansas. (This seems like an extraordinary job for someone fresh out of law school.) In 1974, he ran for Congress and lost. In 1975, he married and ran for Attorney General and won. We pretty much know the rest.

Coincidentally, the woman to whom I spoke for some rough comparisons, had been offered a Fulbright Scholarship. However, she had to turn it down because she definitely had to get a job after college graduation and stay employed. She was out of money, and though she and her mother sewed her clothes, down to her slips, she was in desperate need of supplementing the items of her wardrobe they could not sew.

And, yes, she had to contribute to the household budget so that her parents could help her younger siblings go to college, too. Also, she was engaged and needed to save for her wedding as her parents could not afford to give her any help at all with that. Quite a contrast.

At that, she does not believe she was poor at all for her time because she was able to finish college, something theretofore reserved for males in families like hers; she never went hungry or homeless, etc. In addition, her parents had even been able to put a down payment on a three-family home while she was in high school. (The two rents enabled them to get their own floor almost free, which is why they had been able help her some with college tuition, books, carfare, etc.)

In all, this was an eye-opening experience for me. I am not sure why I had been imagining an impoverished childhood, with a single, working mother. It seems clear there was a relatively financially comfortable life for his grandparents, his mother and his stepdad and him, and possibly some political contacts as well, that enabled him to get the internship with Senator Fulbright.