Chapter One: 'My Life' by Clinton
June 22, 2004 -- Bill Clinton recalls some of the darkest moments of his life — from his troubled childhood in Arkansas to his marriage problems in the White House — in his memoir My Life.
In his new book the former president recalls his early years with an alcoholic stepfather and the effects his childhood had on his behavior later in life.
The first chapter of My Life reveals the details behind the loss of his birth father and the early years of his political career.
Chapter One:
Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clearsky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the JuliaChester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwestArkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father,William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer inSherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According tohis sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up tobe a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was trainingto be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tellme the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a datewith some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working,and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated.On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she waswearing her boyfriend's ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered"no"-she was single. The next day he sent the other womanflowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explainingthat he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.
Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He servedin a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. Afterthe war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago,where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee EquipmentCompany. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park butcouldn't move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnantwith me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could getinto the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture intotheir new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch hiswife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lostcontrol of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on awet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, adrainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet ofwater. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was graspinga branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himselfout. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years andeight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.
That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. Allmy life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to everyphoto or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man whogave me life.
When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy's porch in Hope,a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, "You're Bill Blythe'sson. You look just like him." I beamed for days.In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the localpaper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffeeshop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friendwhen one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to herand said, "I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night." He thentold Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father hadretained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himselfup and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out toher car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.
In 1993, on Father's Day, my first as President, the Washington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over thenext two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press andmany smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and Iknew. They also turned up a lot we didn't know, including the fact thatmy father had probably been married three times before he met Mother,and apparently had at least two more children.
My father's other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retiredowner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, hesaid he had written me during the '92 campaign but had received noreply. I don't remember hearing about his letter, and considering all theother bullets we were dodging then, it's possible that my staff kept it fromme. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail wewere receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with himand later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northernCalifornia. We had a happy visit and since then we've corresponded inholiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his fatherwas mine, and I wish I'd known about him a long time ago.Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirmingnews stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythein Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sentcopies of her birth certificate, her parents' marriage license, a photo ofmy father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about "ourbaby" to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor's office.I'm sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I've never met her.
This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by thenhad been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. Shesaid young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the warthat people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was thatmy father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her.Whatever the facts, that's all she needed to know as her own life movedtoward its end. As for me, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all, butgiven the life I've led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was morecomplicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half acentury.
In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary ofD-day, several newspapers published a story on my father's war record,with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letterfrom Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiencesduring the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italywhen the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, whereone soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showinghim how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only asBill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired bywhat he had learned from the soldier who called him "Little GI Joe," heopened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived theAmerican dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said heowed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn't hadthe opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what hadhappened to him. Then, he said, "On Memorial Day of this year, I wasthumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morningcoffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in thelower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills tolearn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of theUnited States."
In 1996, the children of one of my father's sisters came for the firsttime to our annual family Christmas party at the White House andbrought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from hercongressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It's just ashort form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of theday, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy gettinghis first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on thesecond floor of the White House, and looked at it every night.
Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttlein Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me tosay that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with myfather and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet's phone numberand address, and the man said he didn't have it but would get it to me.I'm still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to myfather.
At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbyeand thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, whereHillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination onSt. Patrick's Day 1992; where many of my most ardent supporters liveand many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare,and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parentswent to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my fatherhadn't lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have grown upa few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My lastevent was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have ofmy parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small roomwhere I met a woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She toldme she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then hadgone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, andraised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the lettermy twenty-three-year-old mother had written on her birthday to herfriend, three weeks after my father's death, more than fifty-four years earlier.It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreakand her determination to carry on: "It seemed almost unbelievableat the time but you see I am six months pregnant and the thought of ourbaby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me."
My mother left me the wedding ring she gave my father, a few movingstories, and the sure knowledge that she was loving me for him too.
My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people,and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life heshould have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age thanmost, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, coulddie young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment oflife and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn't surewhere I was going, I was always in a hurry.
Excerpted from My Life by Bill Clinton. Copyright © 2004 by Bill Clinton. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.