DB's Pixnet

Bill Clinton, An American Journey, Great Expectations, Nigel Hamilton, 2003

Chapter 38, Five Times Governor;

1.David Chang, Sophomore of NCTU 1990 Nov. 1 has lunch with Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. The restaurant video tape and/or real-time transmission from Hsinchu City, Taiwan, was sent back to Arkansas for a television live show. The next week there was a query of the authenticity of the "live" program. The answer was given by saying that it was happened just within a week. Then the TV producer or supervisor acknowledge it a "live" program as long as it recorded within 14 days.

Reference 1: page 542...my understanding is that [Morris] had to call Clinton and get him out of bed at midnight Saturday night, which would have been early Sunday morning, to tell him that we had knocked him to 44 [percent] in the polls and he was in deep trouble, that the chances of coming back were slim, that they had to come out with something that was dynamite.

Reference 2: page 542..."We got a call on Saturday night, before the election on Tuesday," "...So we did the same thing" as in 1982--except it was, this time, "a Saturday night, not a Friday. And Bill Clinton and I stayed up all night. And got us this little studio, and we do video, we do audio, we get volunteers. I mean, the drill, we know the drill! We do it again."

Reference 3: page 543...It was war--and war waged as ruthlessly as real war in certain respects. The drill involved a series of thirty- or sixty-second ads. "You threw in some negative and then the positive," Watkins recounted of the countercontent. "We did some negative on Sunday and Monday. Always on Tuesday it was positive: it was just 'Get out and vote!" 

2.Descriptions about Frances Swaggart, wife of Jimmy Swaggart, the Reverend:

Paragraph 1: page 546...In 1988, the year after the Bakkers' fall from grace, the Reverend Swaggart had made a widely television confession...he was a preacher with a mission, "a commission" given to him personally "by God" to "reach the world by television."...In carrying it out, Swaggart had had the support of an extraordinary wife. Frances Swaggart was the soul of rectitude.

Paragraph 2: page 547...When his cousin Cecil Beatty demanded to see him face-to-face and posed the question whether "all this I've heard is true," Swaggart had responded with apparent sincerity, "Cecil, I'm gonna tell you the truth, I got railroaded. I was framed." Thanks to his wife's sterling support, Swaggart had avoided Bakker's fate...

Paragraph 3: page 548...Frances, the "Dragon Lady," masterminding the operations behind it. "That's superwoman," a follower had once remarked when Frances mounted the stage to join her husband: a wife who excoriated the vast conspiracy of her husband's rivals and opponents, calling them liars, hypocrites, or tools of Satan...that it was impossible not to admire her. The only impeaching factor was her absolute refusal to give any credence to her enemies. Watching and reflecting on Jimmy Swaggart seemingly miraculous survival, Bill Clinton had perceived what many didn't; that a terrier wife was, in the case of a man suffering from sex addiction, a must.

Paragraph 4: page 548...Frances, his wife, helped him; indeed, she was his rod and guide. "What are you doing to my husband?" She'd screamed and bawled as she banged on the locked doors of the Assemblies of God Committee of Executive Presbyters--while inside, the thirteen male members had grilled Swaggart in a ten-hour investigation into of his misdeeds in 1988.

Paragraph 5: page 549...Had he not been assailed by demons...

Paragraph 6: page 550...Swaggart's child-bride story, like that of his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, had been redolent of the South: the South of William Faulkner and Reynolds Price. "The child-bride phenomenon and its cousin..."

3.The 1980s Arkansas Law Court, of testifying legal documents materials in court, of the former Governor's daughter, her female companion, the first lady Hillary Rodham, and Governor W. J. Clinton:

Reference 1: page 555...Addiction doesn't make sense--afterward. At the time, however, the "groin demon," like the giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk," demanded his supper. A state trooper approached the diminutive Ms. Jones, telling her that the governor had asked if he might speak with her in his room upstairs. She wondered why but did not say no...young Paula Corbin...

Reference 2: page 556...when the diminutive Paula...found her hand being taken and the six foot, three-inch governor backing her up against the windowsill. He had gone "beetroot red"--a sure sign, to those women who knew him intimately...

Reference 3: page 556...Unaware what a fool he was making of himself, Bill had tried to slip his hand into Paula's shorts. "And I said, 'What are you doing? What is going on?' He was trying to nibble on my neck and I was trying to back off." The governor's unctuous words made his effort at seduction no better. "I was just noticing [you] downstairs." Clinton parlayed his excitements into speech, since action seemed premature. "I was looking at your curves and the way you walked around the front of the table..."

Reference 4: page 550..."I had a conversation with Bill one night out at the governor's mansion, when he and Hillary first started talking about running " for president, Betsey Wright recalled a decade later. "This was in 1991. And he said he didn't think--"..page 551, Betsey was surprised by the governor's reaction. "I mean, it took Bill's breath away that I felt that way. But I do! I mean, I'm not a prude, but I do think that something is rocky in your personal life if you're running for president and having an affair!"...He wasn't a steady person then! He just wasn't steady! He was in some kind of tumult. And what I was saying to Bill was that if you behave that way, it will mean that you don't have your act together." Was Betsey right? Or was she completely wrong...

Reference 5: page 560...Betsey Wright (said), "the guy represented generational change. He was a baby boomer. He'd been on campuses when birth control pills were first invented, and 'free sex' became a big deal. He had a brother who had gotten in trouble with drugs...There were a million rumors, and there were lots of people who will be willing to make allegations...the first baby boomer who got out there by himself...

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
March 7, 2012,
New Taipei City Library,
Panchiao, New Taipei City