The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents: From Truman to Obama

William Jefferson Clinton

215 William Jefferson Clinton 1946–  president from 1993 to 2001 William Jefferson Clinton was born into a southern family descended from a long line of struggling farmers named for founding fathers. On his mother’s side, he was of Irish and Cherokee heritage. His biological father’s lineage is difficult to determine, but the family name is Scots. His maternal grandmother ,EdithGrishamCassidy,grew upaMethodist.Hisgrandfather,James (or“Eldridge”) Cassidy, was raised Baptist. Neither his mother, father, nor stepfather attended church regularly. In 1940, six years before Clinton’s birth, Arkansas’s population of nearly two million was roughly three-quarters white and one-quarter black.Clinton later described his home state, one of the most impoverished in the nation, as “composed mostly of white Southern Baptists and blacks.” Of the total number of Baptists, African Americans accounted for approximately 40 percent. Evangelicalism permeated the state’s rural and small-town culture, and white and black children received substantial instruction in religious matters outsidethe home.Thus Clinton was brought up as and has remained a Southern Baptist. In 1923,Clinton’s maternal grandfather,James Eldridge Cassidy—Clinton later described him as“an uneducated rural southerner without a racist bone in his body” —left his small farm at his wife’s insistence and moved to the market and railroad town of Hope. Located in southwest Arkansas not far from the Texas border, Hope had a population of roughly five thousand. Following a series of other jobs, Cassidy eventually operated a grocery store and sold bootleg liquor. Clinton’s grandmother, a stern but compassionate woman who was frustrated by the difficulties life had dealt her, worked as a registered nurse. The Cassidys’daughter,Virginia Dell—Clinton’s mother—was intelligent, ambitious,and passionate.While a student at Hope High School,she served as secretary of her class, belonged to numerous clubs, and was elected to the 216 William Jefferson Clinton National Honor Society. Yet she also began“a lifelong affair with provocative clothing and megamakeup” in her teens. In time, judgmental citizens in Hope looked down upon Virginia for“loose morals, inattentive mothering , love of money [and] costume jewelry, excessive make-up, tawdry bright colored clothes, glitter, partying, [and] drinking.” Later,in Hot Springs,townspeople were more tolerant.“Oh,she gambled and all that kind of stuff,” a childhood friend of Bill Clinton’s noted, “but she was a lady of very high standards in terms of helping other people and making a difference in this life.” Unable to afford college but wishing to get away from home, Virginia chose the best alternative available. She took a two-year course in nursing at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana. There she continued the active social life she had begun in Hope. In 1943, in the midst of World War II, Virginia fell“crazy in love,” as she later described it, with William Jefferson Blythe Jr. A traveling auto equipment salesman who had a hardscrabble upbringing in Texas, Blythe had dropped out of school after the eighth grade.At the age of fifteen he had become his family’s provider when his father died. Genial,eager to please,and possessed of an easy intelligence and wit, he was also, as Virginia eventually learned,“contradictory and mysterious . . . constantly reinventing himself . . . surviving off charm and affability.” After a two-month wartime romance, the pair married shortly before Blythe left for military duty in Europe. Unknown to Virginia, he was still married to his third wife at the time. He secretly divorced her seven months later.Discharged from the army at the end of 1945,Blythe died in a freak car accident a few months before Bill Clinton’s birth in August 1946. Virginia was left to raise their son, Billy, with the assistance of her parents. After four years as a young widow, Virginia married the divorced Roger Clinton in a Baptist parsonage in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her parents opposed the marriage.A gambler,alcoholic,and notorious womanizer,“Dude,” as he was known, was an abusive husband prone to jealous rages.“He and Virginia didn’t seem to match,”a friend from Hot Springs declared,“her being the loud and him being the quiet, and her being a medical professional and him being an advanced mechanic.” During this marriage,Virginia endured a dozen years of violence and heartache. She divorced Clinton in 1962, but remarried him after only three months. [18.119.131.178] Project MUSE...