First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Mary Jo Nelson, Bill’s friend from high school, was with him when Roger died. She had gone to the house to deliver pain-killing drugs from the pharmacy where she worked. She watched Bill follow the stretcher out to the driveway and stand there, wordless, as the ambulance conveying his stepfather’s body rolled down the street, the wagon’s red taillights brightening in the distance as it braked at the corner, turned left, and disap-peared. Bill stood there, shoulders slumped, staring through the November mist. Two fathers dead—and in a sense he knew neither of them. He put his big left arm around Mary Jo and walked back into the house.

  THE notion that Bill Clinton might be selected as a Rhodes Scholar was the subject of a running joke among his housemates, who assumed that Rhodes winners had to be not only A students and campus leaders (categories where Clinton fit the bill) but also athletes of some sort. These good friends knew Clinton’s athletic prowess, or lack thereof, all too well. He had started running the previous summer but was still somewhat out of shape. He had never played a varsity sport in high school or college. Even his mother called him “gawky and not quite coordinated enough.” As a touch football player, his best talent was winning arguments about whether someone had been touched. As a basketball player, he was lumbering, his feet seemingly glued to the gym floor. In golf, he was a mid-handicap hacker. He was a decent bowler, but bowling shirts seemed a bit unstylish for the Rhodes scene.

  But Clinton always had a plan. This time he decided that he could best demonstrate his sporting manner by employing his greatest skill: politics. He maneuvered his way into a slot as chairman of the Student Athletic Commission in time for the Rhodes interviews. The Rhodes selection process had two levels, state and regional. Clinton survived the Arkansas competition in Little Rock and reached the regional finals in New Orleans. By then, he and his counterparts in the regionale across the country came to realize that they had harbored a misconception about the athletic skill requirement. Although the Rhodes questionnaire asked applicants to list activities that demonstrated their “fondness for and success in sports,” track stars and quarterbacks fell away while debaters and Shakespeare scholars advanced. George Butte in the Southwest region said playing the concert piano was his sport. Robert Reich in the New England region was a self-described “anti-athlete who vigorously avoided athletic events.” Compared to these fellows, Clinton seemed less the clumsy ham loaf and more like Jim Thorpe.

  The interview process for Rhodes candidates ranks among the most peculiar enterprises in academia, equal parts dissertation defense, locker-room sizing up, television quiz show, cocktail party bull session, debating society, and drawing of straws. Some of the young men were the proverbial big fish from smaller ponds, who felt intimidated the moment they walked into the traditional interview eve cocktail parties where candidates and their judges—the Rhodes secretaries from the states in their region-sipped sherry and chatted. Darryl Gless out of tiny Schuyler, Nebraska, felt so nauseated after the cocktail party that he went back to his room, called his sponsoring professor at the University of Nebraska, and said he wanted to go home. The whole scene, he said, made him angry. “A lot of the guys were using the occasion to show off and members of the selection committee were provoking confrontations. They’d pick up a point from one person and turn to me and say, ‘Do you agree with that?’”

  Some candidates, especially those recruited by the Rhodes networks at Harvard and Yale, which in those years supplied as many as one-third of the thirty-two scholars, seemed to be sure things and sprinted through the process with nary a worry. Nelson Strobridge Talbott III was one such sure bet—a squash-playing scholar of Russian and chairman of the Yale Daily News, who had spent the previous summer in London as a Time magazine intern and was hand-picked for a go at the Rhodes by his Yale mentors. During Talbott’s final interview, one lawyer on the selection committee decided that the young man was having it too easy, and so started asking him a series of arcane questions about the oil depletion allowance about which, Talbott later confessed, “I didn’t know shit from shinola.” But just as Talbott was struggling with an answer, the chairman of the committee interrupted. “I have a question, too,” said the chairman. “How in the Mid-west did you learn how to play classical guitar?” The lawyer now stewed in his seat. It was as if he had broken an unwritten rule: the chosen recognize the chosen.

  Everyone got an odd question or nasty challenge from someone on his selection committee. Mike Shea, a psychology major from the University of Iowa, encountered a professor from Luther College who badgered him mercilessly for not having read a certain psychohistory of Martin Luther. Keith Marshall was asked, “As an Episcopalian, how do you feel about that issue?” To which Marshall responded, “I am not an Episcopalian.” Certainly the strangest scene that year unfolded at the interviews in New York, where Daniel Singer and one other candidate competed for the last of four regional slots. Singer waited in the hallway as the selection committee grilled the other student. The fellow finally emerged, ashen-faced. “They asked me the craziest stuff,” he muttered. Singer was called forward and took his seat. “We’ve about run out of ways to settle this, you’re such good candidates,” the chairman said. “So we want you to debate this point: Why should the cow jump over the moon?”

  So often in his adult career as a medical researcher, Singer recalled decades later, he had hoped that some sort of divine inspiration would strike him and he would say “aha” and have a mystery of life solved or a question answered—so often he had hoped for that and so often it had not happened. But it did happen once, back then in that stuffy room in Manhattan with the somber selection committee members staring at him and his Rhodes on the line and a nursery rhyme clanging around in his head. All of a sudden he was loose. He found an answer out of nowhere.

  “It’s pretty obvious that the cow should jump over the moon,” he said, “because the purpose of having cows is to produce more milk and you need heat on the udders for effective milk production so at night instead of wasting time if you could get the cows to jump over the moon they’ll get warm from the refracted light and keep the udders heated and the milk flowing.”

  Daniel Singer made Rhodes Scholar.

  Good fortune came to Bill Clinton in other ways. The first was that he was competing for a scholarship from Arkansas and the South, which many then considered the least competitive of the eight Rhodes regions—not that the scholars selected from the South were any less outstanding, but that there were fewer of them. Tom Ward, a Rhodes Scholar in the class of 1967 from Meridian, Mississippi, considered the South, “candidly, the easiest region to get in.” From his area, Clinton was competing against a relative handful of equally talented candidates, according to Kit Ashby, “whereas if he were trying for a Rhodes from New York he would have faced hundreds.”

  Here was another situation in which Clinton’s provincial roots worked to his advantage. East Coast contemporaries often seemed puzzled by his rise. How could someone come out of Hope, out of Hot Springs, out of Arkansas, and move up so surely and quickly? The answer may rest in the presumption of the question Hope and Hot Springs nourished Clinton as few larger communities could have done. And Arkansas, unpretentious, slow moving, relatively uneducated, inordinately proud and possessive of its favorite sons, was the land of opportunity for a young man on the rise.

  At the South regional in New Orleans, Clinton told Arkansas stories with gusto and made it known that he intended to return to his home state after his academic training and embark on a career in government service. Keith Marshall, a candidate from Louisiana and Yale, who was an artist, stood on the balcony of the Royal Orleans Hotel in the French Quarter with Clinton that Friday night in December. They waved down at the jubilant crowds moving along the narrow street below. People waved back. Clinton turned to Marshall with a smile and said, “This is just like being president of the United States.” During his appearance before the selection committee the next day, Clinton was asked several questions concerning politics and
a few related to medicine. One interviewer asked him about heart transplants—something he had known nothing about until the day before, when on the flight to New Orleans he had read a magazine article on the subject.

  Clinton survived the cut, along with Marshall, Paul Parish, a diminutive English major from the University of Mississippi, and Walter Pratt, another student from Mississippi who attended Vanderbilt. The four selected scholars were separated from the eight who had been rejected and led to a small room, where they were interviewed one by one by a local newspaper reporter. Clinton was the first to be interviewed. Parish listened intently to the young man from Arkansas and at first was angered by what he heard. Clinton was talking about “how proud his mother would be, how excited she would be, how she was looking forward to this so much and all her faith in him was going to be worth it.” Listening to Clinton, Parish thought about his own mother, and how he would not dare say how much he wanted to please her, even though he did. When it was Parish’s turn to be interviewed, he said he did not want to be a human interest story.

  Some young men were rendered speechless, ecstatic, the moment they learned they had been chosen as Rhodes Scholars, a prize that would rank them first in their generational class. Walter Pratt was so overwhelmed that when his plane arrived back in Jackson, “they opened the door and I was about to step out without the stairs being there. It was euphoria of that kind.” Up at the New England regional in Boston, when Dartmouth friends Robert Reich and John Isaacson were driving back to school after being selected, they were stunned silent until they got about thirty miles north of Boston and then, according to Reich, “we just howled and howled with laughter.” Willy Fletcher of Seattle and his colleague from Washington State, Frank Aller, rode a Greyhound bus back from Portland up through western Washington, shocked that they had both been selected. Fletcher would never forget the moment when they got off the bus in Centralia, where he was going to spend the night at his girlfriend’s house. “Frank got off for a moment to meet her, and we were standing there next to the bus in the Northwest drizzle and I suddenly felt overwhelmed. It was the best moment of all. We had been anointed. We were awed and bewildered. It seemed that the whole world was in front of us.”

  In New Orleans, after leaving the interview with the local reporter, Clinton turned to Marshall with tears in his eyes. Sobbing, he spoke lovingly of Roger Clinton, and said he was sorry his father had not lived long enough to see this day. Virginia Clinton had stayed home on Scully Street that Saturday. She would not leave the house until she had heard from her son. He finally called, and his first words to her were: “Well, Mother, how do you think I’ll look in English tweeds?”

  THE house on Potomac Avenue was a two-story white stucco cottage with brown wood trim, nestled beside a vacant lot on a shaded slope high above the river. It had five bedrooms, one for each senior, with several bath-rooms, two upstairs sun porches, and a picture window in the living room that offered a magnificent view of the Potomac. The entrance led directly into the kitchen, which served as the house’s gathering place. Though the five friends had hectic schedules, on many evenings they managed to get home for supper. Moore was the principal chef. He was, according to Kit Ashby, “big on pork chops and minute steak. Never got into sauces or stuffed trout.” They ate at the kitchen table, close enough to the stove so that they could reach back and grab a pan from the stove for second helpings.

  Supper at the kitchen table promised not only a well-rounded meal but often an engaging debate on civil rights or the war in Vietnam. Clinton was the house liberal on civil righfs—“a Martin Luther King man, through and through,” Jim Moore called him. He had memorized King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech and when the mood struck he might recite whole stanzas right there during dessert. He chided Tom Campbell for growing up in a suburb with a covenant prohibiting Jews—as prejudiced, he would say, as anything back in Arkansas—and argued vehemently with Ashby over the federal civil rights laws, which Clinton considered historic and necessary but Ashby thought unfairly superseded the doctrine of states’ rights. But the civil rights movement had shifted its attention by 1968 away from the ideal of integration and toward the concerns of poverty and black nationalism and economic power. As the larger debate grew more contentious, Clinton struggled to find his footing. Race had always been the issue with which he defined himself, as a progressive son of the New South, but now it was more complicated. The housemates talked a lot about black power and King’s move toward economic power. They were difficult issues and Clinton, Moore thought, “did not seem clear in his own mind about them.”

  On the war in Vietnam, the ideological spectrum again ranged from Clinton, as a moderate dove, to Ashby, the Scoop Jackson protégé, as a moderate hawk. Moore usually sided with Clinton, while Campbell and sometimes Caplan joined in with Ashby. Their dinner conversations, perhaps mirroring debates in homes across the country, grew intense in late January and early February 1968 when the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched their heaviest attack of the war, the Tet Offensive, which started on the first day of ceasefire marking the lunar new year. By the old standards of body counts and positions lost and taken, U.S. and South Vietnamese troops prevailed during the Tet Offensive; but what the American public saw was a graphic picture of bloodshed and vulnerability, one that led a majority of people to think that the war had gone on too long at too great a cost. A Viet Cong squad attacking the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon, U.S. troops getting wiped out in the inner city of Hué, the Saigon police chief summarily executing a Viet Cong prisoner on the street, plugging a bullet into his brain—these became symbols of a faraway war spinning out of control. Public confidence in President Johnson’s handling of the war dropped to a new low, with only 41 percent in a Gallup Poll saying they approved of his policies in Vietnam.

  Ashby argued that Tet showed that the U.S. military was losing not to the enemy but to its own media. The media, he said, were trying to interpret Tet as negatively as possible. But to Clinton, what happened on the battlefield was in one sense beside the point. He shared the opinion of Senator Fulbright, who in a speech the month before had proclaimed that even if the United States won in Vietnam, it still would have been fighting an immoral and unnecessary war. “All that we are demonstrating in Viet-nam,” Fulbright had said, “is America’s willingness to use B-52s, its napalm and all other ingenious weapons of counterinsurgency to turn a small country into a charnelhouse.” One night they argued for hours about whether U.S. troops should be able to follow the enemy into Cambodia. “If it was me,” Ashby said, “I wouldn’t stop at the border.” Clinton looked at it from a risk point of view, trying to limit the scope of the war.

  Two weeks after Tet came “Black Friday,” perhaps the single most important day of the Vietnam era for Bill Clinton and the estimated 226,000 young men who were then college seniors or in their first year of graduate school. On February 16, President Johnson and the National Security Coun-cil (NSC) abolished draft deferments for graduate students except those in various fields of medicine. The NSC declared that keeping nonmedical graduate students in school was no longer essential to the national interest. In a letter to his state directors, Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, said the graduate school deferments were being eliminated because they represented one of the obvious inequities of the draft system, allowing the educated elite to avoid military service altogether while sons of the working class fought the war. “Many of those deferments,” Hershey said, “can be pyramided into exemption from military service.”

  Now, suddenly, the pyramid scheme was gone and the college seniors of 1968 stood exposed as the most vulnerable group in the draft. When a plan for eliminating graduate school deferments was first proposed by a national advisory commission on selective service, part of the concept was also to change the chronological order in which men were drafted, replacing the oldest-first policy with one in which nineteen-year-olds were drafted first and twenty-six-year-olds
last. But Johnson administration officials decided not to change the oldest-first policy, meaning that not only would Clinton and his cohorts lose their possible deferments but they would be ahead of younger men who had no college plans. For those who thought that educational deferments had placed an unfair burden on poor men who did not go to college, the new policy seemed to address the inequity with a vengeance. Early reports indicated that some local draft boards had so many college-educated men becoming available that they might not have to draft any nineteen-year-olds at all. The year before, only 14,000 college graduates had been drafted. With the deferments gone, that number would rise to 150,000, officials predicted, with another 75,000 college graduates enlisting voluntarily.

  For the young men in the class of 1968, the draft now became an obsession. It had been an occasional subject at the Potomac Avenue dinner table before; now it came up constantly. “What are you going to do?” was the essential question.

  Tom Campbell had resolved it the previous year by signing up to train as a pilot for the Marines. To learn to fly, he was willing to risk being sent to Vietnam.

  Tommy Caplan had been knocked out of the college ROTC program after four years because of an injury and was undraftable as a 4-F.

  Kit Ashby, though supportive of the war, was determined to go to graduate school and “fight off the draft” for as long as he could. Figuring that the military would find him sooner rather than later, he applied to the University of Texas graduate business school in his home state, at least in part because it was less expensive than an Ivy League program.

  Jim Moore, who had been accepted into the Foreign Service, thought the best course was to volunteer rather than take his chances with the draft. He soon signed on with an officer training program in the Army, hoping that he would never see combat: either the war would end or he would get called back for a slot in the Foreign Service.