First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  If the Rhodes boys were appalled by Baker, he was enthralled by them. Near the end of the voyage, Baker emerged at the center of a reception held in their honor. Rick Stearns, who was already active in the reform wing of the Democratic party, refused to attend “as a matter of principle.” But Clinton was there, standing at Baker’s side, soaking in tales of power and intrigue. Robert Gene Baker of South Carolina had worked on Capitol Hill since he was a twenty-year-old page. When Lyndon Johnson became Senate Majority Leader, he tapped Baker for his staff and relied on him thereafter as a vote-counter, schmoozer, gossip, and bill collector. The other senators called him “Lyndon Jr.” or “Little Lyndon.” Clinton, a connoisseur of practical politics, loved to hear Baker’s stories about Johnson and the Senate and the way things really worked. It was while watching his performance with Bobby Baker that Strobe Talbott said he first understood Clinton’s “raw political talent.”

  THEY reached Europe on the fifth day, first making a short stop early in the morning at Le Havre across the English Channel in France. Bob Reich stayed on deck, looking out at the port with a sense of awe, thinking to himself, “This is actually France!” He had never been overseas before. “I remember hearing people shout at each other in French. It seemed remarkable.” Ten of his fellow travelers skipped off the ship and roamed the dock, absorbing the foreign sounds and smells, but soon grew afraid that The Big U would leave without them. Hannah Achtenberg, who had become a little sister to the Rhodes crew, later remembered how they linked arms and started running wildly back to the boat together. As they clambered across the wharf, arm in arm, Strobe Talbott cried out, “What a motley group of Christian gentlemen!”

  Late that afternoon they steamed past the Isle of Wight and landed at Southampton on the South English coast. The passengers lined the deck as The Big U eased up to the pier. Darryl Gless stood next to Clinton at the rail. They looked down and saw a slender man in big glasses, wearing a bowler and a long black raincoat, and holding an umbrella. “Look at him!” Clinton said, and they both laughed. He seemed to fit the upper-crust stereotype so perfectly that Clinton thought he might be an entertainer in period costume. In fact he was Sir Edgar Williams, who had served as chief of intelligence for British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery during World War II. Sir Edgar, the warden of Rhodes House, was a man of tradition who drank sherry every afternoon and quite enjoyed his annual trek to Southampton to meet the boat from America and escort the Yanks to their colleges at Oxford.

  He rounded up his class of 1968 and directed them to a waiting bus for the ride north to Oxford. Two of the Rhodes group had shipped cars. Daniel Singer followed the bus in his old Volvo. It was a strange, disorienting ride through the dark English countryside that chilly October night. Singer lost the caravan at the first roundabout. The boys on the bus could see little but slanting rain pounding against the windows. When the bus reached Oxford, it deposited the scholars in clumps at each of the colleges to which they had been assigned. Four of them—Doug Eakeley of Yale, Reich and Isaacson of Dartmouth, and Bill Clinton of Georgetown—were dropped off at University College on High Street, a curving thoroughfare lined with the dark stone fronts of several medieval Oxford colleges.

  At the front gate they were met by Douglas Millin, the college porter who was every bit as much an English character as Sir Edgar. Where the warden came out of the officer corps, the porter was the veteran enlisted man—crusty, foul-mouthed, cynical, all-knowing, protective of his turf, scornful of his superiors. He took one look at the quartet and muttered, “They told me I was getting four Yanks and here they send me three and a half!” Then, turning directly to Reich, he bellowed: “You’re the goddamn bloody shortest freaking American I’ve ever seen in my life! I didn’t know it was possible for America to produce someone that freakin’ small.” He assaulted each of the Americans in turn and intimidated them so thoroughly that they rarely dared venture too far into his cloistered world thereafter. All of them but one, that is. To Bill Clinton, this ornery porter was just another skeptical voter to swing his way.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE DREAMING SPIRES

  THE FIRST ROOMS that Bill Clinton occupied at Oxford were on the second floor of an old stone almshouse, ornamented with honeysuckle, which faced Helen’s Court in the right rear corner of University College. He had a sitting room and a bedroom. Doug Eakeley lived across the opposite stairwell in similar quarters. There was a toilet on the first floor and a cold-running shower on the second. The only warmth came from coin-operated electric heaters. No shillings in the pocket, no heat at night. The Americans at Helen’s Court were cared for by a “scout” named Arch, a chubby-cheeked servant who according to college lore once waited upon Feliks Yusupov, the Russian prince who had assassinated Rasputin. Bob Reich and John Isaacson, the other two Rhodes Scholars at Univ, were housed on the far side of the college in a modern red brick building with central heating that disappointed them with its featureless twentieth-century efficiency.

  Even in the gray gloom of that Oxford autumn, University College was a museum of enchanting colors. The gold-yellow stone walls streaked with black-brown dirt from ages past. The green Front Quad, different somehow from the green of Arkansas and other verdant plots in the New World: richer, sublime, as though every blade of grass had been hand-colored in deep green day after day, century after century. The white marble statue of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Muse of Poetry, a Univ man himself once, long ago, before he was sent down, expelled in 1811 for publishing an atheist tract, but now honored in his own mausoleum, a drowned romantic figure in Carrara marble the white of white chocolate. The soft reds and greens of portraits in the Hall above red-brown oak paneling and below a warm brown hammer-beam roof. The luminous blues and yellows of painted glass in the chapel depicting the Fall and expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.

  Every morning during his first week, Clinton bounded down the cold stairwell of the almshouse out onto the brick courtyard, weaved through the Gothic maze of Univ past the porter’s lodge, and stepped out into the mist of the High Street to explore his new surroundings. He visited most of the nearly thirty colleges that comprised Oxford University, separate academic fortresses with their own personalities and traditions, walled off and imposing from the street, entered through heavy oak doors opening onto brilliant lawns framed by ancient stone buildings. He loped across the street to inspect the classic beauty of Queens College and the new digs of Frank Aller, the tall, brilliant Asia scholar from Washington. He traipsed past the Bodleian Library and under the Bridge of Sighs along dark and narrow Catte Street, and turned left on Broad to Blackwell’s bookshop, a bibliophile’s paradise that he would revisit countless times, then on to Balliol College, new home of eight Rhodes Scholars, including Rick Stearns and Tom Williamson. He made his way north to Rhodes House with its squared rubble front, where Sir Edgar resided and occasionally invited his Rhodes charges to dinner. He ventured east to the slender, meandering River Cherwell and the deer park in the forest grove of Magdalen College, where Strobe Talbott was staying. To the west he absorbed the bustle of the covered market and the hustle of shops along Cornmarket. South down St. Aldate’s he found Pembroke College, where J. William Fulbright learned to smoke a pipe and wear tweed knickers.

  He walked fourteen hours a day that first week or so, returning in the dark to his room to plop down “sore and exhilarated.” Reich was his frequent companion and fellow explorer. They talked nonstop, gesticulating as they roamed the ancient streets. “We were suddenly within ruins! We were in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century ruins! I can’t describe the feelings we shared,” Reich said later. “The architecture, the customs, the manners, the strange ways the English talked. We were constantly comparing notes.” For centuries, their college, affectionately known as Univ, had laid claim to being the first of the Oxford colleges, going back to King Alfred in the year 872. It turned out that this boast was spurious and that the founding of Univ was more accurately placed in the thirteenth century,
slightly after Merton and Balliol. Such ancient quibbles were of some importance in a place where an institution called New College was indeed new in 1379.

  Clinton was so excited by his daily excursions through Oxford that he could not sleep much at night. In an October 14 letter to Denise Hyland, he reflected on how beautiful he found it all, even with the miserable weather. “I am happy if lonely,” he wrote. “And I’m convinced I was right to come even if I’m drafted out soon.”

  America seemed very far away. In the Weir Common Room, he and Reich, Eakeley, and Isaacson sipped tea, ate Cadbury biscuits, and read the London newspapers for political news from home. Through a foreign lens, the United States often appeared chaotic, a land troubled by assassinations and wars. Londoners complained of the Americanization of their city every time another cement slab rose on the skyline. The Sunday Times ran articles on the obesity and violence of Americans, quoting one as saying, “We are the most terrifying people on earth.” Oxford, in contrast, seemed insular and quaint, if not irrelevant, to many of the Americans. Perhaps that was always the case—Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “the wind that blows in Oxford blows out of the past”—but it seemed especially so that year. Tom Williamson, removed from a country where “our cities were burning and our campuses were in turmoil,” found life in Oxford “like being put in a crypt and awakened one hundred years before.” There were no telephones in their rooms. The scholars communicated through notes or by showing up at one another’s quarters and hoping someone was there. They ate at fixed times, dining in college halls wearing fashionably shabby black waist-length academic gowns, listening to fellows recite grace in Latin and Greek in dialogues that were part prayer, part witty repartee with the college master.

  At times it seemed that Clinton stood out like a multicolored plaid sports coat in this atmosphere of subdued tweeds. He was, thought Doug Paschal, a scholar at Christ Church, “always the character who wanted to do one more thing, go one more place, stay up one more hour, have one more drink. He came across as somebody with a great appetite for life … a bit clumsy physically and verbally, making waves.” To Paschal, Clinton seemed unguarded. “He would say things others might have said if they weren’t so worried about it. The Oxford of that time was a very complicated place, and we could not escape the sense of the brash and loutish and insensitive American presence, always slightly aware of not fitting in exactly. On the other hand, there were lots of people who responded quickly to the robustness and good nature of people like Bill, though there would always be some class-conscious Englishmen who would bristle at someone like him crashing around in the china shop.”

  The cultural gap led to some measure of tension in the relationship between the Americans and certain Oxford dons. George Butte, studying literature at New College, encountered one tutor who, while gazing out his office window as he sipped his sherry, said with a chuckle that he was amazed to read Faulkner and discover that he was a good novelist. Tom Williamson’s dons gave a cool reception to his proposal to write about slavery, dismissing the topic as too American and parochial, but were far more enthusiastic when he switched his interest to Ethiopian politics. John Isaacson found his philosophy dons disdainful of the attempts by American students to relate philosophy to the ethical dilemmas of the age.

  That is not to say that the ancient town of dreaming spires was devoid of the confrontational politics of the sixties. Emboldened by the student uprisings that had swept through the capitals of Europe, the young men and women of Oxford were pushing up against the walls of tradition. “People were starting to question all kinds of assumptions about how the place should be run, the extent students should be involved,” recalled Nick Browne, an Englishman in his third year at Univ when Clinton arrived. “It was a time when the Rolling Stones were extolling the street fighting man and you could hear The Who on campus. The revolution in dress had reached Oxford: hair down to your shoulders, bright yellow satin shirts, an affected scruffiness.” Wilf Stevenson, a Scottish undergraduate at Univ, noted that students then were catching a wave of generational energy from the street revolt in Paris the previous spring and were looking for ways to ride it. “We knew about the barricades of Paris. But we were absolutely naive and hopeless. We didn’t know how to turn into action everything we were feeling. It was evanescent, with nothing at the end of the day to show for it.”

  The protests at Oxford did not match the bold student actions in Paris, but they did offer a decidedly British satiric touch. Dozens of agitated junior fellows disrupted the matriculation ceremony outside the Sheldonian Theatre, complaining that the formal rite accepting new students to Oxford was anachronistic. The protest gave birth to a memorable picket sign: “Matriculation Makes You Blind.” Another satirical protest was launched against the stuffiest college, All Souls, which had no undergraduate or graduate students, only fellows for life, and was derided as a haven for reactionaries. Of an All Souls master by the name of Sparrow, one sign proclaimed: “Sparrow Is a Tit.” Humorous radicals led by Christopher Hitchens of Balliol College, who went on to become a rambunctious British journalist, seemed to enjoy nothing more than lampooning Master Sparrow. They adopted the albatross as their logo of the left, a sarcastic symbol of intimidation. “Albatross Eats Sparrow” was one of their signs.

  On broader issues, the student body leaned leftward. The most ferocious Oxford Union debate of the term addressed the question of whether American democracy had failed. Arguing the negative, Clive Stitt declared that “had it not been for one major boob in Vietnam, the Johnson-Humphrey administration would have gone down as one of America’s greatest” Arguing the affirmative, a purple-shirted young aristocrat named Viscount Lewisham “poured scorn” on the American presidential candidates, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Republican Richard M. Nixon. The motion that American democracy had failed carried 266 to 233. All this denunciation of America unsettled the Rhodes Scholars during their first term at Oxford. Many of them were harshly critical of American foreign policy and disappointed in the choice offered in the 1968 presidential election, but they were not ready to give up on American democracy, and certainly not to hear it blasted by class-conscious Englishmen. Darryl Gless was often angry with the Brits. “They assumed that because we were Rhodes Scholars we were prowar and rich. They were so critical of America, I often found myself defending my country.”

  Clinton’s reaction was similar. Martin Walker, a British student at Oxford, sat near Clinton at a party that year where the dissolution of the United States was the primary topic of discussion. “One guy was going on about how democracy had failed and the country was in a prerevolutionary situation, and Clinton countered that. He said, no, the system was able to work. And he cited civil rights. At the time that was not a fashionable position to take. Everyone else in the room was taking the fashionable position that America was hopeless.”

  In early November, the Americans stayed up all night at the Rhodes House watching the stateside elections, and returned gloomily to their rooms the next morning after learning that Nixon had won the presidency. One of the few bright moments of the long night was when word came that Senator Fulbright had won reelection. The next day Clinton sent a telegram to Fulbright in Little Rock:

  BILL

  GOT RESULTS AT RHODES HOUSE ELECTION PARTY YOU RECEIVED A GREAT CHEER EVERYTHING FINE HERE HAPPY FOR YOU AND MRS FULBRIGHT CONGRATULATIONS

  Fulbright sent back a short note.

  Dear Bill: I appreciate so much your warm telegram. It was thoughtful of you to wire me at such a busy time. I am looking forward to seeing you on your return. Merry Christmas.

  With all good wishes, I am sincerely yours,

  J. W. Fulbright.

  Fulbright seemed to have a soft spot for Clinton, despite the disastrous driving episodes of the previous summer and his disdain for Clinton’s ever curlier locks. Long hair was selfish and counterproductive in the fight against the war, Fulbright would constantly tell his young charges.

  The Viet
nam War was another point of contrast between the Americans and the British. Most of the Rhodes Scholars opposed the war; yet during their first months overseas, they were slow to immerse themselves in the antiwar movement. Many of them did not want to jeopardize their scholarships. There had been reports from back home that Lieutenant General Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, was attempting to punish dissenters by ordering the drafting of known war protesters. Others were still relishing the sense of escape that had overwhelmed them as they sailed away from America. None took roles in the large antiwar march in London on October 27 where there was a confrontation at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. British students at Oxford, some marching under the banner of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Society, had gone to London proclaiming that the protest was “a rehearsal for the Revolution,” and returned frustrated that they had not stirred up more of a fuss. Chris Hitchens, who was also a prominent Oxford Union debater, one of those who argued that American democracy had failed, said the student socialists were “building up an important mass Marxist movement in the country,” but that the legion that went to London was somewhat thin because “nobody wants to get sent to jail at this stage of term.”

  At times the fire was aimed at Rhodes Scholars, which frustrated them. They thought their British counterparts were grandstanding. “It was easy for us to say all these things,” recalled Martin Walker, then a correspondent for Chenvell. “But the Americans were the ones who really had to deal with it. For them, it was a deeply private grief. They had this threat of conscription hanging over them. They faced the draft. We did not.”