They say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and in the case of America's President-elect and his mother, the proverb holds. If you want to know where Clinton first learned to use his head—not to mention where he got his indomitable, take-a-licking-and-keep-on-ticking spirit—look no further than Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley. In her 69 years, Kelley, a former nurse-anesthetist, has survived the deaths of three husbands (one of them an abusive alcoholic), suffered the heartbreak of having her younger son, Roger, jailed for dealing cocaine, battled breast cancer and, during her son Bill's campaign, endured disturbing scrutiny—including a State Department search of her passport records and accusations that she provided improper care to two patients.
But just as nothing stopped Bill Clinton in his drive for the presidency, Virginia Kelley wouldn't quit either. "I'm not worried about her," said Clinton, "because my mother has dealt with people a lot tougher than George Bush." The three-bedroom lakefront bungalow in Hot Springs, Ark., that she shares with her fourth husband, Dick, 77, a retired food broker, is filled with poignant mementos of her turbulent life. There is a photo of Bill embracing his half brother, Roger, the night Bill was elected to his first term as Arkansas Governor in 1978. On the shelves, a picture book of Oxford, where Bill spent two years as a Rhodes scholar, stands next to a manual titled Adolescent Alcohol Awareness, a reminder of family troubles. And since Virginia likes to bet on the races, a carving of three racehorses hangs over the mantel.
Typically, Kelley plunged whole-heartedly into the presidential campaign. Each morning she drank her coffee from a Clinton mug; she checked the time on her Clinton watch; she drove daily to her son's Hot Springs campaign headquarters in a blue 1984 Mercury Marquis plastered with Clinton-Gore bumper stickers.
Virginia Cassidy was born 12 miles from Hope, Bill Clinton's birthplace, in little Bodcaw, Ark., in 1923. When she was 5 months, she moved with her mother, Edith, a nurse, and her father, Eldridge, to Hope (pop. 10,000), where he worked as a sawmill watchman and later owned a small grocery store. In 1941, while she was a student nurse at a hospital in Shreveport, La., Virginia met her first husband, William Jefferson Blythe III—"the most handsome man I had ever seen," she says. He had brought his date, who was suffering from appendicitis, into the emergency room where Virginia was on duty. He asked her to dinner, and two months afterward they were married. Later, Blythe spent three years in the Army in Europe during World War II, while Virginia lived with her parents.
After the war, while Virginia was pregnant with Bill, her husband decided to move the family to Chicago, where he planned to open an auto-parts company. "He was on his way to pick me up, and his tire blew out in Sikeston, Mo.," recalls Virginia, her voice breaking as she relives the incident. "It was after heavy rains, and he was thrown from the car." He died from the impact, and a passing motorist found Blythe's body in a ditch by the side of the road. Four months later, William Jefferson Blythe IV—the future Bill Clinton—was born.
When Bill was about 2, Virginia enrolled in a two-year program in New Orleans to become a nurse-anesthetist. She calls it "the most difficult decision in my life," because it meant leaving her son with her parents and seeing him only infrequently. Returning to Hope in 1950, she met and married Roger Clinton, who worked in a car dealership. The family moved to Hot Springs, and in 1956, Bill's half brother was born. Not until last winter on the campaign trail did Clinton reveal the grim story of life with his stepfather, and even Virginia's closest friends were shocked to learn what the family had lived through.
"Roger adored his sons," says Virginia. "He really did. But he had a problem with alcohol." And the problem made him violent. Once, Roger drunkenly shot at Virginia and 4-year-old Bill; the bullet hit a wall. The violence continued until Bill, at age 14, could stand no more. One night, while a fight was in progress, he broke down their door and told his stepfather that he was bigger than him now, saying, "Daddy, you cannot hit Mother anymore." Soon afterward, Bill took his stepfather's last name.
The only time Clinton has even mentioned these troubles in his mother's presence was during his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last July. "She held our family, my brother and I, together through tough times..." he told the delegates. "You know where I get my fighting spirit? It all started with my mother." The eyes of the nation upon her, Virginia Kelley, who nearly fell off her chair at that moment, steadied herself and kept smiling. She now says simply, "I have the ability to put unpleasant things in the back of my mind for so long they disappear."
In May 1962, Virginia divorced Roger. But she remarried him two months later—in spite of Bill's objections. "[Roger's] family told me how he was suffering so," she says. "Perhaps it was meant to be, because the family was together when Roger got sick." Five years later, Roger died of cancer. The following year, Virginia married her former hairdresser, Jeff Dwire, who died in 1974 from complications of diabetes.
Though she was often on call at the hospital while her sons were growing up, Kelley cooked dinner for them every night. "We talked about quality things like honesty, integrity, love and respect," Kelley says. "I tried to live that example for them, and when you do, it catches on."
Her older son left Hot Springs to begin his career, but after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, he returned to Arkansas to practice law and enter politics, winning his first race—for Attorney General—in 1977. Soon the family suffered another setback. In 1983, in his second term as Governor, Clinton learned that his half brother, then 28, had been among those filmed by the police in a drug sting operation; he spent a month knowing Roger would have to be arrested but told no one except Hillary. When Virginia heard about her son's arrest, she says, "I thought I would surely die. It tore Roger to pieces that he had hurt me like this." She joined Al-Anon, attending meetings until the presidential campaign began. Roger, now drug free, works for a TV production company in Los Angeles and is lead singer in a band called Politics.
Kelley retired from nursing in 1981, after two lawsuits concerning patients who died under her care. One case was settled out of court. She was cleared of wrongdoing in the other incident and has said that her conscience is clear. A doting grandmother, Kelley worries about her granddaughter, Chelsea, having to move so far away now and hopes to visit her in the White House often. But the mother of the President will have plenty to keep her busy at home in Hot Springs. There's her almost daily trip to the Oaklawn racetrack—she makes only $2 bets—and there is fishing for black bass and crappies with her husband, whom she married in 1986. And, of course, there are her beloved Elvis records, which she listens to often. When Presley died, Clinton called Virginia while she was assisting in the operating room. "Bill told the nurse. "I have a message for Mother that I don't want her to hear from anybody else,' " says Virginia. "I guess I'm not really over it yet."
Not that she spends much time lamenting what cannot be changed. Virginia Kelley savors the present. She will turn 70 next June, but that didn't keep her from partying half the night her son won. "There's no way in the world," she says, "I could have had so much fun and been any younger!"
ELIZABETH GLEICK
DAVID ELLIS in Hot Springs
- Contributors:
- David Ellis.
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