grandpa clinton 1

Rachel Rubins is interviewing her grandfather, Michael Chapman, about his connection to the Clinton family. Michael attended St. Alice School and Lunary High School before going to Georgetown University. He chose Georgetown because it was in Washington, D.C. and had a reputation for excellence in subjects like history and government. Michael recalls that Bill Clinton, a classmate at Georgetown, had ambitions to become governor of Arkansas and improve the education system there. To Michael's surprise, Clinton went on to become president of the United States. Michael describes Clinton as gregarious, smart, and a person of strong character. He shares a story about how Clinton changed his name from Blythe to Clinton and spent time with his stepfather who had abused his mother before his death. Michael believes that strong character is important for anyone involved in government and public service. I am Rachel Rubins. I am here with Michael Chapman, my grandpa. Today is July 8th, 2024. It's a Monday and we are in the narrator's home discussing their connection to the Clinton family. So to start, can you introduce yourself? Yes. You can expand if you'd like, if you're comfortable. No, yes is sufficient. Okay. I'm agreeing to introduce myself. Yes. What's your name? Michael Chapman. Where are you from? Texas. Can you tell us about your educational history? Where'd you go? What'd you do? I went to St. Alice School in Fort Worth, Texas. I went to high school at Lunary High School for two years, which then merged with another school that was the Girls High School in Fort Worth for Catholic girls. And we had a joint high school for both Catholic boys and Catholic girls, and that was Nolan High School. I graduated in 1964. Where did you go after that? For education, I went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. And how did you end up at Georgetown? Well, there are a couple of reasons I ended up at Georgetown. One, that I was very interested in politics and had previously been looking at colleges specifically that had semesters in Washington. And somehow it occurred to my little brain that maybe it would be better if I was interested in politics and wanted to study and learn about government. The thing to do would be to go to a university that was actually in Washington, D.C. And besides the fact that Georgetown had a peculiar and quirky nickname for its athletic teams, the fact that it was in Washington, D.C. and had a reputation for excellence in subjects like history, which was one of my favorites, and government, and was right in the middle of politics. And my family was close to our congressman, Jim Wright, and Lyndon Johnson was a Texan then president. It seemed like maybe the place to be was Washington, D.C. So I applied to Georgetown and got in. What was the quirky nickname for sports? Which is the Greek word meaning, well, it's the Greek word for what, meaning sort of the universal great thing, like what a beautiful morning. And so they were the What's, because the team had been in the 1800s. The baseball team was very good, and their cheer was Greek and Latin, Hoya Saxa meaning what rocks, because they had such a great defense. And so I became a Georgetown What. And how was your experience at Georgetown? It was lovely. I met a lot of nice people, had some great professors, still friends with many of the guys in my class. And the teachers, whether they were Jesuit priests or lay professors, were universally fascinating. And I really enjoyed myself. I had wonderful courses, studied all sorts of interesting subjects. We were one of the first universities that had a religious bent to our education. Theology was required, for example, even of non-Catholic students. But we were one of the first, if not the first university, Catholic university in the United States to have Protestant Jewish and Muslim chaplains. And one of our professors taught several courses in Islamic civilizations. And another professor, who happened to be a rabbi, taught courses in Jewish theology and what he called Jewish life and thought. The introductory theology class, which everyone had to take, my section was taught by a Jesuit priest. And it had the interesting name, as it still does, of the problem of God. And you spent two semesters discussing God as a problem. And that's an interesting concept, which fascinated me. Because there are problems if there is a God, and there are problems if there is not a God. And so you spent an entire year discussing all of those problems and the aspects of those problems, not coming to any particular conclusion except that God is a problem. And the history and government courses were first rate. There was a lot of interest in government in the nation generally, and certainly among my classmates. The joke was that half the class were studying to be doctors, and the other half of the class was studying to be president, as it turned out. And one of them did? Actually, three of them became president. Who were the three? I'm going to blank on their names all of a sudden. One of them was this kid from Arkansas named Bill Clinton who wanted to become governor of Arkansas. That was his big ambition because he wanted to improve the education system in Arkansas and bring it into the 20th century before we got to the 21st. He did become governor, and after that, much to the surprise of everyone in the country, I think, and certainly to the surprise of everyone in the class, who thought if he went back to Arkansas he'd never be heard of again, he became president of the United States. The other two presidents, one of the young men in the class was elected president of El Salvador, and one of the women became president of the Republic of the Philippines. Wow. So far as I know, none of them became important enough to become governor of Texas. So do you remember meeting future President Bill Clinton the first time? I don't remember a specific first time. He was in the School of Foreign Service. I was in the College of Arts and Sciences. I know that by my sophomore year we had a class together, so I certainly would have met him there. In fact, we even talked about that years later the night that he was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president. We talked about that class and Dr. Quigley and what we had learned from that, which was the concept of future preference. That is that you don't get all that you want now or you sacrifice now so that something better will come along later, not necessarily for yourself, but for others. I think that really struck a chord in Bill's being that appealed to him. That was really what he wanted to do with his life, which up to then had been a very difficult one with the death of his father even before Bill was born and then his stepfather turned out to be not the best of fathers. Bill felt a real obligation to make life better for other people, but that was certainly part of it. In college, because I was in the College of Arts and Sciences and he was in what we called the Flying Circus School of Foreign Service, we were on opposite ends of the campus political spectrum. I reminded him of when he visited Fort Worth the night before the election in 1992. There was a big rally in Fort Worth and he flew in and we had thousands and thousands and thousands of people there. I joked with him that the last time he and I had been on a political ballot at the same time, I was elected senior class treasurer. He was defeated for student government president. That day I had already won since I was unopposed and he needed to get his act together so that he won the next day. How did he react when you brought that up? He laughed, hugged, and was about to tell Mary Ellen and I about a song that he had heard along with Hillary in Austin and then realized that the camera and the microphones were too close to him. Hillary tugged on him and said, no Bill, not out loud. So he turned and went to the microphones to give his speech instead. I have no idea what the lyric was he wanted to tell me. But it must not have been one that you would want to see in a family newspaper. Yes, I see. So what type of personality did Bill have that you remember in college? He was gregarious, he was friendly with everybody. The general feeling I think in the class was that after four years that there were two persons in the class who could become president of the U.S. And one of them was Bill and the other one was Larry O'Brien who was from the college. And that's why a lot of people thought Bill was going to disappear because instead of going to a state with a lot of electoral votes and political oomph, he was going to go back and reform Arkansas. And as it turned out he became president and Larry went on to become an important Washington, D.C. attorney and lobbyist. But at age 40 dropped dead of a heart attack up at the capitol. So I don't think he was headed to be president in any way but it turned out to be one of those things. Yeah, yeah. So what's your... Yeah, Bill was, he was easy going, smart, I mean just smart as a whip. Everybody I think who came in contact with him liked him, even if they disagreed with him about anything. He was a person, is a person, a real character and one of the proofs of that I think is his stepfather who had abused Bill's dad and Bill had to step in physically and stop him from hitting his mother. I said Bill's stepfather abused Bill's mom. Nevertheless, Bill, when he came of the age that he could do it, went down and changed his name from his birth name which was Blythe, his real dad. And he changed his name officially to his stepfather's name, Clinton. We sat with the Blythes at the 92 convention for a while and had a nice visit there from another Texas town north of Fort Worth. Anyway, anyway, Bill changed his name to Clinton and while he was in college, his stepfather, who I think by then had been divorced by Bill's mom, was declining from alcoholism and some other illnesses and was at a sanatorium in North Carolina and Bill would drive down there on weekends, about one weekend a month, to spend a weekend with his stepfather so that he wasn't completely alone when he died. Did he die in North Carolina? Yes. From alcoholism? Alcoholism and whatever else illnesses he had. It just impressed the hell out of me that after all the difficulty that man had given Bill's mom and Bill and Bill's little brother, that he would spend that kind of time. With him. And I thought that showed him, showed what real character he had and I think that's the most important thing anyone can have, particularly anyone who's involved in government and public service. Everyone ought to have a good strong character, whether you call it a moral character or not, particularly elected officials who have, I think, a duty of complete faithfulness to the persons who elect them, whether they voted for them or not, they still elected them. And I can't imagine that I would have done that. Then there's Hillary, who is a really good dancer. And that's it. That's all she's famous for, everyone. Right. She's a dancer. Yes. She should be on Dancing with the Stars. That would be a good idea. No, I mean, we have danced. Yeah. We did not know Hillary until after they married. So he met her after college. Yes, yes. He met her in law school. And we visited with them up at the governor's mansion in Little Rock on different occasions, as inaugurations for governor and sometimes for a party. But I've always enjoyed the time I've had with her. I remember the 92 campaign. She came to Fort Worth at some point, maybe in late September, early October. We had a little rally and a fundraiser there. And Mary Ellen and I were riding in from the airport with her. I asked her what she was up to. And she got on the phone with somebody. A very animated conversation that I could tell was about a lawsuit and asked her what was going on. And it was a trial, a non-jury trial, coming up involving intellectual property rights to a perfume where she represented, obviously, one of the parties. Who had the right to use this particular scent in their perfume. And I asked her, in the middle of a presidential campaign, you're getting things together to go to trial? And she said, yeah, it's in a couple of weeks. And we're finishing up. And she said, he's running for president. He's running for president. Somebody has to earn the money. And I assumed, since I never saw any big headline about a result, that the case settled. So, in college with Bill, was it, I know you said your class, talk with your class on a friend group, or was it different groups within? It's different groups within groups. Were you in the same group with him or no? No, not really. The college and the foreign service were different schools. Freshman year, you know, you had dormitory for the college students, dormitories for the foreign service. Nursing students had their own dormitories. We had a language school at that time. They were also in dorms that were set aside specifically for them freshman year. A few years later, the language school was abolished as a separate division within the university. Part of it went to the foreign service school and part of it went into the college. We had a business school, those men and women. Their freshman courses were pretty well separate from ours. About the only time you'd run into students from the other schools within the university. Were in the theology classes. As I said, everybody had to take the same Catholic freshman theology, using Catholic in the loosest sense. It was being taught essentially by the Jesuit priests, but it was not inculcation into the doctrines of the Catholic Church. It was a discussion about, is there a God or isn't there a God? That was where you would run across people from the other schools within the university. As you progressed, you might meet more students from the other schools depending upon what courses you took. Then there were, junior and senior year, there were courses specifically for the foreign service students to prepare them for the US foreign service exam. Of course the nurses were getting coursework at the medical school, but it was all on the same campus. A lot of the college students dated young women who were in the nursing school because our part of the campus was located closer to theirs. We tended to have boys in the college, men in the college, who might be studying for a medical career. You wouldn't run across that in the foreign service school. Like I said, I know Professor Quigley's course, my sophomore year with Bill. Was that theology? No, no. Dr. Quigley taught a course for the world since 1814. It was essentially about the world before 1814, that is the French Revolution. The end of the revolution, which ended spreading the Enlightenment liberty theories in Europe. It meant that they would be coming here rather than being spread around Europe. It was about the aspects of civil development that made western civilization unique. What in the view of Dr. Quigley had allowed it to progress in arts and sciences, finance, warfare, very much ahead of the other parts of the world. That's what that course was about. Interesting thing at that point was that there was the Vietnam War going on. Dr. Quigley was an advisor to the State Department and tended to be in what was called the dove camp of trying to bring the war to a swift conclusion and disengaging from Southeast Asia. Dr. Wilkinson who taught government was an advisor to the Defense Department and was in the hawk camp prosecuting the war. If you listen carefully or if some aspect of the class lecture got off on the subjects that were close enough to the Vietnam War issues, that sparked questions from the class, you could learn in each class what was being thought about in the State Department and the Defense Department in terms of developing American policy. It was really incredible to sit there and say, hey, we're listening to the same thing and we're hearing the advice that are being given to the highest councils of government and the fight that's going on down at the White House as all those people try to sell their part of it to President Johnson. Secretary Rusk, the Defense Secretary, and struggling at the time that if you were a reporter and wanted to really know what was going on, what you ought to do is come up to Georgetown and just sit in the back of a classroom. And you'd find just as much as you would trying to get someone to give you an off the record interview. In one class, we also discovered that if you were thoroughly unprepared to respond to a question from a professor, the thing to do was to bring up something that you heard or said you had heard from Dr. Quigley, say, to Dr. Wilkinson. He'd go off on telling you why Dr. Quigley was wrong and never get back to the question you didn't know the answer to. So after you graduated from Georgetown, how did you stay in contact with Bill? Because obviously there were no Bell Tones back then. Correspondence, mostly about the political elections we were involved in. He'd run for Congress while he was teaching law at the University of Arkansas, and I sent some money up to him. He lost that election. Two years later, he was running for Attorney General and I wrote to him and sent him some money for that. Two years after that, he was running for Governor and I was running for a judicial office in Texas. As it turned out, our primaries were the same night, so we talked on the phone that night. He won outright. I finished first but had to be in a runoff. A woman who was basically chief of staff for his governor's office, she might have been chief of staff at his AG office but I don't remember. But I know she'd been his chief of staff when he was governor. She was a friend of mine whom I met my sophomore year at Georgetown when I worked at the Democratic National Committee. She was from Texas and she was then the head of the National Young Democrats office or maybe the head of the office they had for women in politics. Betsy Wright was her name and I knew Betsy from my time working for Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas and she had been Senator Yarborough's, not his chief of staff, but she was like an assistant chief in his office. She ran the Senate office and then left that to run his re-election campaign office and then my senior year, no, in my sophomore year or second year at law school, she ran the Texas voter registration office out of Austin for the Democratic Party and I worked in that office and was like the assistant office manager and knew Betsy from all that. And so when she became his chief of staff, that was another entry into staying in contact with Bill. And as he obviously became more and more well known, did he change in person when you got to see him at all? No, no. He was always bright, he was always thinking. I remember there were a group of us and how the group got together or not, I don't know. We were on the steps of the Capitol in Little Rock talking and met Bill there and we were just, you know, about 10 or 12 people just shooting the breeze, as it were. And one thing he brought up was that, as we were talking about the problem of economic competition that the United States was facing, particularly from Europe at the time, and he pointed out that it was our victory in Europe that had made possible the advances that the European countries were making economically in terms of industrial production, trade, international commerce, because all of their industries were flattened by the war and we came in with economic aid to rebuild Germany, Italy, France, Britain. And because American factories had not been flattened by the Japanese or the Germans, we weren't spending money here to upgrade or reinvent American industry during the 1950s and 60s. And so our aid to Europe actually put them ahead of us and the fact that we had suffered no war damage meant that we hadn't rebuilt anything and modernized everything. And he said, you know, this is terribly ironic, but it might have been better for us if we had a bunch of bombings, or maybe it would have been better for us if somebody in the 50s and 60s had said, well, building all of these highways is a really good idea, which was Eisenhower's idea to have a road system that would basically be the same kind of road system that Germany built in the 20s and 30s, which was intended not so much to move the German people around, but to set up a system of roads and railroads that could move a German army around. And he said, we might have been a lot better if we'd not only built the interstate highway system, but while we were doing that, we'd torn down schools and factories and rebuilt them as we went along. And that it was ironic that, yeah, now we're going to have to do all this just to play catch up. And I thought, immediately I said, this is a guy who really can put two and two together, but he's not adding two and two. He's kind of multiplying and dividing, figuring out square roots, and seeing a whole big picture that had escaped everybody else. I mean, I never heard anybody else talk about it that way. So I wanted to ask you about, so when he became president, you knew a president. What was that like for you? Did people... Oh, it was fun. Do people know that you knew him? Oh, yes. The people in Fort Worth that I knew, lawyers, persons in politics, journalists, editors and publishers at the local newspapers, yes, they all knew that I knew Bill Clinton. A lot of it was mixed up. They would say, oh, yeah, you were Clinton's roommate. No, no, no, no. I wasn't his roommate. I just knew the man, that's it. And I remember I was in trial. I can't remember now what kind of a case it was, but it had been, I guess we were in the second week of the trial. And it was pretty tense. And I told my court administrator that I didn't want any interruptions during the trial. And somebody had an emergency order or whatever, they were just going to have to sit and wait or take it to another judge. And Judy came into the courtroom at one point to tell me something. And I very brusquely told her, I said, Judy, no, not now. Just get out. I told you, I didn't want to be interrupted. And she stood there and looked at me with these fierce blue eyes and stomped her foot. And she said, Judge, it's the White House. The President wants to talk to you. And I said, oh. Yes, I said, ladies and gentlemen, you know, excuse me, I think I need to go take this phone call. What did he want to talk to you about? Our class reunion that was coming up. So when I came back in the room, of course, everybody's looking at me like, what happened? You made some big decisions. Yeah. I told them I'd just stopped a war. Everybody looked at me and my bill said, what was that about? He asked me what I was going to wear. He wanted to talk about our class reunion. And so I spoke with him a little bit and then told him I'd call him back. So something I've always been interested in learning about Bill Clinton now in my history classes, when he was having his controversies and the impeachment trials and everything, how did that impact you as his friend? Not just someone in the American public, as the President, but as his friend. Did that impact you? Were you upset? I was not upset, except that, you know, it does show some of those things, a flaw in character. On the other hand, if you are tempted a hundred times to do something bad and do it three times, how bad is that really? Women were always trying to throw themselves at him. The first one, I can't remember her name now, although my wife will. She was claiming having met Bill and had a relationship with him, and the place that she identified as where they had met and had sex in this particular hotel, in fact, had not been built at that time. And as Mary Ellen said, as distinguished from me, since I'm not a female, she said any woman that has met Bill Clinton can tell you the day, the time, and lead you to the place at which they met him because he is that impressive. It didn't have the same impact on boys, but I thought some of that stuff was bullshit, some of it was real. Betsy Wright, who I've mentioned before, one of the aspects of her job in the governor's office was to control what she called bimbo eruptions, that is, women coming forth to claim some relationship with him, which in fact did not exist, and some that might have existed or did exist, and just making sure that it didn't erupt so badly that it made things difficult for him in doing his job as governor. Some of it was true, some of it was made up, some of it was thoroughly imaginary or deliberately false. And I figured the only person's opinion who really mattered was Hillary's, and if they were trying to work it out, that was their business and not mine, and whatever the hell it was they wanted, I'd support it. Did you think the impeachment was a fair trial? No. No. Well, the trial was fair, the impeachment was, I think, bogus. One of my nieces, I can't remember now, let's see, which one of Fred's kids would it have been? Rebecca, Teresa, Jason? No, not Jason, it was probably Rebecca. Fred was explaining to them what was going on, because in our family we were all very much aware of law and politics and the Clintons and all that, and so I'll give the credit to Rebecca since she's the oldest of the girls. And Fred said, you know, she listened and listened, and she said, so he did something bad, and he and Mrs. Clinton are working it out, just like you and Mom do when you have a problem. And Fred said, yes, that's what it is, and they want to make him not be president because of that? Yes. She said, that's stupid, they should just have him come in and say, that was very bad and you shouldn't do it, now get back to work. I thought at the time, you know, well, if a 10-year-old girl can figure this out. You were of the same opinion. The fact that the Congress of the United States couldn't figure it out indicated some kind of lack of judgment on their part. But anyway, the trial itself occurred while I was in Washington as General Counsel of the Small Business Administration. I actually had a ticket to one of the days of trial. Oh, you went? I went over and, you know, we sat there. Did you talk to Bill at all? No, no, no, he never attended a hearing. And I sat there with a friend of mine from one of the Senator's offices, and the Chief Justice came in and called the Senate to order. There was some discussion on some kind of business. And the leader of the Senate and the, I guess, Bill's lawyer and the manager from the House, who was the prosecutor, met with the Chief Justice and, you know, talked very quietly for about 20 minutes. And the Chief Justice announced that the Senate would stand in recess for 24 hours. And that was the extent of my view of the trial. I figured I better get back to work at my job. And so I went to the trial for, you know, probably about two hours, all told. And nothing happened. And then eventually, of course, they had a vote and he was acquitted. Did you talk to him personally at all during this time, or was he really busy? No, I did not think it was my role, particularly since by then I was in the administration, that I should talk to him at all. And anything that we had talked about would not be privileged, at least as far as I would be concerned. What role did you have in the administration? I was General Counsel to the U.S. Small Business Administration. So did you have to travel to D.C.? Headquarters were in D.C. And I managed the legal office for the SBA. And sometimes went to field offices. The SBA is in charge of making loans, emergency loans whenever there are disasters, and in charge of providing security for loans that are made during the course of the year through different government programs to provide money at a low interest rate to business startups and to existing businesses that are trying to build and expand what they're doing. Despite all the talk about, you know, the Republican Party is the party of business. Well, not really, and it's certainly not the party of small business. The entire small business program was dreamt up by Democrats in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and created by Democrats for small business and for budding entrepreneurs because General Motors is so big it doesn't need government help. How did you get that role in the administration? Were you appointed? Bill gave it to me, Bill. And moving forward, have you been in contact with him recently? Not within the last two years. Oh, wait, last year was our 55th reunion. Yes, I saw him there. It was at a reception. There were several hundred of us, so just kind of a brief, you know, visit, hi, how are you doing, what's going on with the family, blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing. And to start wrapping up, because we've been at it almost an hour, what do you wish the world would know about Bill Clinton as a human or as a leader? I think that his character is underestimated, as you can tell from some of the things that I've said. And his real intimate knowledge of government and finance and how it works. I can remember two things specifically that struck me. At one point during the campaign, I was in the same room, and he was at a retirement home and spoke to a group of probably 60 to maybe as many as 100, but I would say certainly about 60 retirees. And I overheard afterwards a reporter talking to this woman who was there, and she was absolutely convinced that that whole time that he was talking, it was a conversation between her and him, that it was that kind of a relationship he had with each of the people in the room. Every person thought, this is a personal visit to me. And I think that was a large part of his charm and the reason for his success. And maybe even the challenges in his life, too. Oh yes, yes. I've said two things, and I can't remember what the other thing was. Although I do remember that at our 25th reunion, we had a big party at the White House and danced and all like that, because at the time that we graduated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated a few days before, and all of the festivities were canceled. We'd already lost Martin Luther King, Jr. earlier in the year. And so anyway, the deal was made during the campaign that if he won, we'd have the reunion at the White House. And he did? And he did win, and we did have a reunion at the White House. And we also had other projects we did for the reunion. One of them was that we cleaned up a park in Washington, D.C. that had become the site of, well, it had not been well maintained by the district government because of lack of funds. There had been a lot of gang violence and drug use in and around the park. And for our class project, we took that as our project for the reunion to get the park cleaned up. It was being explained to Bill about how all these things were coming together for the reunion, and he said, Oh, good, and what day is the project? And they said, Oh, no, no, you'll be busy. You're the president. And he told his roommate, who was one of the guys in the room, Hey, I'm a member of the class. It's a class project. I'm coming. So he said, Okay, here's what it is, and this is the day and time. Charlie Zimmerman, a lawyer from Louisville, and I were in charge of management of the project that day. So we were giving assignments, and we've got our little clipboard and our sheet and things like that. The president's motorcade showed up, and he came over in jeans and ball cap and all and asked what he could do. Some jobs had been handed out, and he asked if he could use the lawnmower and mow the lawn in the park. And Charlie asked him, Why do you want to mow the lawn? And he said, Well, I worked my way through high school and college by mowing lawns in the summer, and I like it because you have time just to think or not think, because all you've got to do is push the lawnmower along. We nodded, and Charlie turned to me and said, The president of the United States just asked us if he could mow the lawn, and I said, Yeah, he did, and he brought the guys with the guns, so I think we should let him do it. So he got to mow the lawn, and somewhere I have a picture of that. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. You're welcome.