First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Walker’s college, Balliol, which housed the most Rhodes Scholars, was the intellectual center of Oxford radicalism, the walls of its Junior Common Room lined with posters of black power leaders and burning inner cities. “People there were always shouting, ‘Enough talk, it’s time for action!ߣ” recalled Daniel Singer. “It was an effete, supercilious characteristic of the Brits, when only the Americans faced a real problem.”

  LATER in his life, when recounting his academic efforts at Oxford, Clinton would say that during his first year there he read for a degree in PPE—politics, philosophy, and economics—an undergraduate program requiring a series of tutorials and examinations in the three broad subjects. PPE was a popular choice at Oxford among Rhodes Scholars, including Bob Reich. But the archival records show that Clinton was never in the program. Uncertain about what he wanted to pursue at first, he began in what was called B. Litt, politics probational. The probational meant it was a tentative choice, the B. Litt, denoted a research degree program that required no tutorials or lectures but a massive fifty-thousand-word dissertation at the end of two years. The politics don at Univ was on sabbatical that term, so Clinton was assigned a supervisor from Balliol. Such cross-college moves occurred frequently as students discovered that their college did not specialize in their field or that the dons in that subject were not available. Clinton was supervised by the Balliol don only in the loosest sense. The topic he chose for his dissertation was Imperialism. He checked out dozens of books on the subject from the college library and the larger Bodleian Library and read them in late October and early November.

  In the middle of that first eight-week term, Clinton changed his mind and transferred to a B. Phil. program in politics, which called for more interaction with college dons: weekly tutorials, fortnightly essays, a shorter dissertation at the end of the two years, and examinations in four subjects—political theory, comparative government, and two electives. He also changed supervisors, switching to Zbigniew Pelczynski at Pembroke College, Senator Fulbright’s old haunt. Students in the Oxford system are not necessarily supervised and tutored by the same don, but Pelczynski took on both tasks with Clinton. He was a soft-spoken intellectual of forty-three whose genteel life as an Oxford don was not something that had come to him as a birthright. Pelczynski grew up in Grodzisk, Poland, and as a teenager during World War II joined the Polish resistance. He was captured by the Germans but liberated by the British, and finished the war fighting in the Polish armed forces under British command. He came to Oxford in 1946 at age twenty-one to study political theory and never left.

  During the fall and early winter of 1968, Pelczynski was lecturing on Soviet politics. He was an anti-Communist with leftist tendencies that were diminishing year by year. Although radical students regularly attended his lectures, they had begun to strain his patience. He thought that they “were always posing. They weren’t genuine. They were always painting America as the bad guy, the bogey, and they gave me hell on political theory. They would get up and quote Marx. Once I’d had enough and I said, ‘Well, you’re not going to give me this Marxist shit again!ߣ” During his lectures on the Soviet Union, Pelczynski explored the totalitarian model and questioned whether it was still valid. Splits in the Soviet ruling elite suggested to him that it was no longer the totalitarian monolith of Stalin’s day.

  For his weekly tutorials, Clinton visited the Polish don in his old bachelor rooms in the North Quad at Pembroke. Pelczynski swiveled pensively in “the Egg,” his tomato red modernistic chair, as Clinton discussed readings and essays with him. They went through a mix of political theory and comparative government subjects: the presidential versus cabinet systems of government in the United States and Britain, the separation of powers, notions of democracy, and totalitarianism and pluralism in Eastern Europe. The tutor found his young Rhodes pupil engaging and sharp if not academically brilliant. Clinton was not the ablest American graduate Pelczynski taught at Oxford, “at least not in a purely academic sense,” he would note later. “But he had a sharp analytical mind and an impressive power to master and synthesize complex material.” It was clear to Pelczynski that Clinton “had the mind of a politician, trying to figure things out, rather than the patience of an academic.” He was also “a rather effective arguer, on paper and verbally.”

  Clinton wrote a number of essays for Pelczynski. He struggled somewhat with the short subjective essay form at which British students excelled. “What suited Clinton was the longer form, laying out all the different lines of thought and synthesizing them rather than independently developing his own line of thought,” according to Pelczynski. The essay that most impressed Pelczynski was entitled “Political Pluralism in the USSR.” Clinton had been given two weeks to write it, during which he read or looked through some thirty books and articles on the subject. Pelczynski considered Clinton’s eighteen-page essay a model of clarity. He kept it in his files and used it later as a teaching tool.

  In an essay that was virtually all synthesis, Clinton divided the writings on Soviet pluralism into three schools. First was the Totalitarian school, which came into prominence before Stalin’s death. “This group does not accept the viability of factional disputes over policy issues or vested interests of long standing,” Clinton wrote. “Any divisions within the leadership are attributed to personal struggles for power, which inevitably will end in the triumph of one man, who, by his victory, returns absolutism and stability to the system.”

  Then came the Kremlinology school, whose proponents argued that the Soviet system featured a continual power struggle among various factions who, if they could not achieve absolute power for themselves, sought to make sure that no other faction gained a dominant position. This theory was applied to the troubles Khrushchev had with his opponents in the Presidium in the early 1960s and his eventual ouster. “Kremlinologists go beyond the Totalitarian school in acknowledging a very limited but persistent kind of political pluralism in the existence of factions within the party leadership, factions which, in turn, are related to divisions within the bureaucracy and society as a whole,” Clinton wrote. But this theory was not without its weaknesses, he said, and was especially vulnerable to the charge that it was bogged down in micro-history.

  Clinton gave no name to a third school of Soviet scholarship, which, he said, “begins with the assumption that industrialization and urbanization lead to the differentiation of society and the multiplication of interest groups. In short, a pluralistic society emerges, and with it, the demand and the necessity for more political pluralism.” In this theory, the Soviet Union might be compared to “a large Western corporation, with all the inbred resistance of bureaucracies to change, plus the additional albatross of a past marked by the use of terror and the dominance of ideology, a past which lingers on into the present and could reemerge full blown in the future.” There were both optimists and pessimists in this third school. Some believed the Soviet Union would evolve into a parliamentary democracy; others predicted that it would either move gradually to more pluralistic politics or disintegrate.

  In his summary, Clinton stayed on moderate ground, agreeing with Pelczynski that political pluralism did exist in the Soviet Union to a certain degree, and that many social forces—the intelligentsia, the youth, the peasants, the churches, the consumers, the nationalities, and the bureaucrats—had developed agendas “more or less independent of the priorities of the rulers.” This could lead to any one of six futures for the Soviet Union: oscillation between liberalization and repression as the dictators deem necessary; immobilism and degeneration; continued domination by conservative bureaucrats seeking to maintain their positions within the system; rule by a coalition of elites; evolution toward pluralism within a one-party system; or evolution to a multiparty parliamentary democracy. Although Clinton did not pick his favorite among the six alternatives, he implied by listing his favorite authors on the subject that he inclined toward the theory that the Soviet Union would either move toward parliamentary democracy or
collapse.

  “One final warning in closing,” Clinton wrote. “Any conclusions herein must be hypothetical and no more. Certainty is precluded by the volatility of Soviet politics, fragmentary evidence, questionable reliability and variety of plausible interpretations of available evidence, and this writer’s very limited background and competence in this field.”

  THE scholar’s life at Oxford was unlike anything the Americans had experienced. They had oceans of time and virtually no responsibilities that first year beyond the tutorials and occasional papers. The lectures were not tied to the courses and did not have to be attended. Even some British students were disoriented by this freedom. Martin Amis thought it could lead to feelings of isolation. Oxford, he later wrote, “is for the most part a collection of people sitting alone in their rooms, one of which turns out to be you.”

  But for Clinton, who hated to be alone, there were plenty of diversions. Here he was, after all, surrounded by people who loved to talk as much as he did. Doug Eakeley’s strongest memory of Clinton at Univ is a lunchtime scene: Clinton lingering at the long table in the Hall, surrounded by undergraduates long after the noontime meal is finished, chatting away. The younger English students, Eakeley noticed, “were in constant fascination with Bill and he with them. They were so verbally facile. It was expected that you would not just eat and run but eat and talk and debate the great issues of the day until you were thrown out of the dining hall. Bill was always in the thick of it.” Clinton also joined a dining club run by George Calkwell, a Greek history don at Univ. The informal club consisted of six dons and fourteen junior fellows. They met in the Senior Common Room to eat, drink, and talk away the night.

  There was another club that met more often, a floating seminar that gathered late at night in Clinton’s rooms on Helen’s Court, or over at Reich’s on the other side of Univ in the modern Goodhart Building, or across the street at Frank Aller’s place at Queen’s College, or over at the Taj Mahal, a cheap Indian restaurant near Balliol College favored by Rick Stearns, who challenged the cooks to find a dish too hot for his palate. This club had no name and a flexible membership of Rhodes Scholars and friends. They would sit in the corner of the restaurant or in the shadows of their rooms, slumped on the floor, leaning against beds, warmed by a heater and some wine, and talk politics for hours. The floating seminar, thought Univ politics don Maurice Shock, “introduced Clinton to a central thing—that politics consists of making use of people you can trust who really are very clever.” The topics ranged widely, from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to the sorry state of American politics to the ideology of Mao Zedong to the British influence in nineteenth-century Crimea, but always, weaving in and out of the conversation, came their feelings about a war they hated and a draft they did not want to face. They were all “quite fanatically political,” thought Doug Paschal, and none more so than Clinton, who came to the discussions “with his antennae absolutely alerted and trained.”

  But Clinton could never cast himself in only one role. He could play the expatriate at night with his American friends, yet move from there to an entirely different level of discourse as he befriended the ultimate source of power at Univ—Douglas, the college porter who had greeted the four Americans on arrival with such disdain. Douglas was a hardliner on the war and most everything else. He intimidated everyone, even the master and fellows at the college, whom he might order to get a haircut or tell to go to hell. Wilf Stevenson considered Douglas “a true martinet, an old-school guy. He was terrifying. His stern upbraiding shot like a bullet through you. But he was the guy who ran the college and he knew everything.” He knew, for instance, where to get formal attire or contraceptives and what rooms were available for guests. But it took some nerve to ask him about such matters. The first year, noted Nick Browne, “he might ignore you completely. The second year he might start talking to you. Douglas was a classic of his time, the old staff sergeant. He had a way of seeing through people.” John Isaacson, after experiencing Douglas’s hazing on the day they arrived, decided that befriending the porter was not on his must-do list. “I checked him out for thirty seconds and decided it was too much for me. I said the hell with it. I wasn’t capable of dealing with him.”

  The porter’s lodge was a twenty-by-eight-foot room on the left side of the main gate. Two paned windows faced High Street and two tall windows looked back toward the college and the Front Quad. A small black door on the far side led into a hideaway bedroom. The T-shaped counter inside the lodge was crammed with keys, notes, mail, and card indexes. There were two telephones on the wall, and two chairs and a coin-operated heater behind the counter. This was the domain of Douglas—and, soon enough, of his buddy from Arkansas. Not long after the Rhodes Scholars arrived, Clinton entered the porter’s turf and adopted it as his own. He spent hours in the lodge, answering the phone, passing out keys, spreading and gathering gossip. Isaacson would never forget the odd image of the two of them. “They’d be sitting there, their feet up on the counter, two bull-shitters swapping stories. Douglas would tell stories about the war and Bill would tell stories about Arkansas. Anyone who entered had to pay homage to them. It reminded me of the stores up in Maine where we’d go fishing when I was a kid. You’d walk in and there’d be the proprietor and a friend, and they’d look at you like you were an alien entering their world. That was the porter and Bill.”

  Several more hours of Clinton’s week were applied to another aspect of English life previously unknown to him: rugby. He was more successful at conquering the porter’s lodge than at mastering this sport, but he gained some measure of esteem from his British mates for exuberance. The Univ squad practiced on the pitch off Folly Bridge Road every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and played matches against other colleges on Wednesdays. Univ was in the first division of Oxford colleges and supported two teams. Clinton played on the second fifteen. Chris McCooey, the Univ star and club secretary who played on both teams, thought that Clinton “wasn’t very good, but it didn’t matter because what he contributed was wonderfully American enthusiasm. Actually, a bit much enthusiasm. He flattened a guy in the first lineup who didn’t have the ball. When the ref said you don’t do that I had to explain, ‘sorry, he’s from America, where you can flatten anyone.ߣ” Clinton was flattened himself more than once after getting his feet crossed while participating in the crablike formation known as a scrum. He played in the second row of the scrum, where his job was to push hard and try to make the ball go back to his side.

  After the rugby matches, the players would repair to the clubhouse for beers or go down to the buttery, the wine cellar at Univ, for wine and cheese served up by the college bartender. The cellar was located under the dining hall, about fifty yards from Helen’s Court, convenient and cheaper than the nearby pubs. The pub favored by Clinton and his Rhodes friends was the Bear, whose old walls displayed the colorful ties of every school at Oxford. Clinton was a modest drinker by now. Two drinks and his face would turn bright red. He was partial to the shandy, a concoction of lemonade and beer. He and some of his pals took rather well to the uncelebrated British fare, especially steak and kidney pie and shepherd’s pie. To further clog their arteries, they spent many mornings at another favorite hangout, George’s, a sawdust-floored breakfast nook, consuming mountains of grease: eggs, bacon, and bread all fried in the same pan. Rick Stearns had a soft spot for the famously unhealthy dish known as Scotch Eggs, hard-boiled eggs wrapped in minced pork and fried in breadcrumbs. But some British food was scorned by the Americans, most notably the kippers that the scouts would occasionally bring around at breakfast. James Shellar, a Univ-based Rhodes Scholar in the class ahead of Clinton’s, would “look at that fish-eye staring up from oil and say, ‘Oh, no thank you.ߣ” He was not alone. “It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes when they came around with the kippers—six kippers could feed the whole hall. The rest of us would settle for cornflakes.”

  While Clinton engaged his British mates playing rugby, Bob Reich deli
ghted them on stage. He was an actor and director who took part in every Univ production. That fall, outside an audition room, he caught sight of a seventeen-year-old girl who took his breath away. He was “too timid to ask her name at the time,” and when she left, he feared that he would never see her again. So he decided to direct his own play, The Fantasticks, and when the girl showed up for auditions, he cast her in the leading role. Claire Dalton later became his wife. Reich was more widely known around Univ than his big southern sidekick. It was an artsy college whose master was Sir John Maud, later to be known as Lord Redcliffe-Maud, a tall and distinguished statesman, after-dinner speaker, and actor. His wife was a pianist who brought fine concerts to the college. The Mauds and all the senior fellows at Univ enjoyed Reich for his dash and wit and theatrical talent. John Albery, then a chemistry don, thought of him as “small and twinkly, and very clever, very clever indeed.”

  By the undergraduates at Univ, Reich and Clinton were viewed almost as an American tag team. It seemed to Chris McCooey that they “were kind of a double act, those two—Bill was big and lumpy and overweight, and Reich I guess was kind of a certified dwarf. It was like Laurel and Hardy. And they were very good value. They added a lot of fun to the college.” Wilf Stevenson also described Clinton and Reich as a team. “They were quite a sight, swaggering around side by side. They were always deeply into some argument and you’d hear a snippet as they passed by. ‘No, you’re completely wrong about that,’ one would be saying about some political theoretician. ߣHe was saying something else in that part of the book!ߣ”