ALTHOUGH being in England could not rid the Rhodes Scholars of their anxieties and concerns, it did remove them from the chaos and excesses of 1969 student activism in the United States. Their histories make it probable that the most active scholars would have steered clear of violence had they been in American graduate schools that year. They were on the moderate side of the youth rebellion. But the rage of the times might have placed them in more precarious situations than they encountered in Oxford and London. It was partly a matter of numbers. According to the sociologist Todd Gitlin, the first year that Clinton and the Rhodes Scholars were in England marked a dramatic turn toward violent confrontation on American campuses, with “over a hundred politically inspired campus bombings, attempted bombings, and incidents of arson nationwide, aimed at ROTC buildings, other campus and government buildings. In the spring of 1969 alone, three hundred colleges and universities, holding a third of American students, saw sizable demonstrations, a quarter of them marked by strikes or building takeovers, a quarter more by disruption of classes and administration, a fifth accompanied by bombs, arson, or the trashing of property.”
The increasing violence of the American protest movement was a debate topic that spring at the Oxford Union when Allard Lowenstein made an appearance. Lowenstein—the demanding, charismatic leader of the “Dump Johnson” movement, the early Pied Piper of student antiwar activism—was as articulate in his opposition to the Vietnam War as ever, but had become equally vehement in his denunciation of movement violence. By the spring of 1969, his campus speeches were often attacked by student radicals who derided him for still believing in an electoral system. Everywhere he went that spring, Lowenstein encountered a sense of despair among onetime allies in the student movement that led them either to become more confrontational and sectarian or to drop out altogether. Many of the same students who earlier had shorn their hair for Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaigns had now, in the wake of the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the violence of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the election of Richard Nixon, and the continuation of the war, concluded that democracy was nothing more than a racket.
When Lowenstein spoke at Oxford, Clinton went with Darryl Gless to hear him. They were both taken by Lowenstein’s combination of passion and reason, but the intensity of their reactions differed in one significant respect. When Gless listened to Lowenstein, he heard only the ideas. When Clinton listened to him, those ideas became a part of a political calculus. “I was naive, effusive, extremely enthusiastic about Lowenstein,” Gless recalled later. “Bill brought me up short by saying, ‘Well, he’s good for the times.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? He’s good, period!’ But Bill said he was a good politician, and politicians must invariably compromise. I was making him out to be a flawless hero and Bill wanted me to rethink it.” Gless got irritated at Clinton for being less enthusiastic, but later concluded that Clinton was right. “Bill’s little lecture was: Don’t be naive in your hero worship. You must qualify such views by understanding what politicians must do. Bill several times tried to teach me to be a little less naive about the way the world works.”
The inner circle of Rhodes politicos, which included Clinton, Rick Stearns, Strobe Talbott, Bob Reich, John Isaacson, and Frank Aller, prided themselves on their sophisticated understanding of the world. They searched for historical connections, eager for the next book that might put their political and personal unease in the sharpest intellectual context. One day that term, Talbott and Isaacson were playing squash on the Univ court when Isaacson took a swing at the ball and thwacked Talbott in the right eye. Talbott was wearing protective glasses, but they were cheap ones that he had bought in New Haven the year before, and they shattered, severely cutting his cornea. His friends took him to Radcliffe Infirmary, where he underwent surgery. Clinton visited Talbott almost every day during his recovery, and since Talbott’s vision was temporarily impaired, he sat at his friend’s bedside and read to him. After passing along the Rhodes gossip of the day, Clinton would open Pax Americana by Ronald Steel, a foreign policy analyst, which explored the interventionist impulses that had led the United States into Vietnam, and argued that intervention could become “an end in itself, dragging the nation down a path it never intended to follow, toward a goal it may find repugnant.”
“What we need are fewer historical compulsions, less Manifest Destiny, more skepticism about the ideals we are promulgating, and a greater realism about the causes in which we have become involved,” was Steel’s conclusion. “Above all, we need to develop a sense of proportion about our place in the world, and particularly about ourselves as the pathfinders to the New Jerusalem. America has little to fear from the world, although perhaps a good deal to fear from herself—her obsession with an obsolete ideological struggle, her well-meaning desire to enforce her own conception of virtue upon others, her euphoria of power, and perhaps most dangerous of all, the unmet, and often unacknowledged, inadequacies of her own society…. It is now time for us to turn away from global fantasies and begin our perfection of the human race within our own frontiers.” What Clinton was reading echoed in many respects the work of his mentor, Senator Fulbright.
Another scholar at Oxford who would play a key role in developing that theme in years to come was Richard Stearns of Stanford, perhaps the most accomplished political mind in the Rhodes crowd. Stearns was a year older than most of the other scholars and had arrived in Oxford after a hectic student political career that included a year as vice president of the National Student Association and another working in the McCarthy campaign. At the time they met, Stearns was well ahead of Clinton on the national Democratic stage, though he was the insider type, more comfortable dealing with party functionaries than with constituencies. He seemed outwardly as dour and sarcastic as Clinton was irrepressibly eager. At Balliol College, the incubator of British politicians, he enjoyed leaving the impression with avid Marxists that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Where Clinton was open and obvious, Stearns moved about shrouded in mystery. But he was smart and slyly funny, and he and Clinton hit it off. Stearns later noted that they both “came from middle-class backgrounds and were not embarrassed by it.” “And we were the two most interested in electoral politics in the entire group. The fact that I had worked on a presidential campaign fascinated Bill.”
When the middle term at Oxford ended in late March, Clinton and Stearns traveled together to Germany, arriving at 9:26 on the morning of March 23, according to the records of Rudiger Lowe, who picked them up at the station. Lowe, the former Fulbright fellow from Germany who had met Clinton during a conference at Georgetown in their senior year, had by then developed a penpal relationship with Clinton that would continue through the decades. Also waiting for them in Munich were Ann Markesun, Clinton’s last Georgetown girlfriend, and a friend of Markesun’s who was already there working as an au pair. The group roamed Bavaria together, exploring Munich and the Bavarian castles. In a postcard to Denise Hyland on March 27, Clinton wrote: “Have been in Bavaria in snow for week seeing churches, castles, landmarks. Staying in a little village outside Munich. Sunday I went ice skating for the first time in my life…. In the shadow of the Alps with beautiful light snow falling.”
The brief note to Hyland left out an adventure at a rink in Garmisch, where Stearns got ordered off the ice by local authorities. He had been speed-skating around the oval in Olympic style, his arms pumping long and smooth, one fist occasionally placed with casual grace behind his back, feeling free and easy, obviously impressing the awkwardly slip-sliding Clinton and the young women, when rink officials told him to knock it off because he was digging ruts too deep in the ice for the figure skaters. It seemed always thus with Stearns and women in those days: trying too hard for his own good. His friend Clinton would have much advice for him on that subject in later months, but not now. Right now Clinton was having enough trouble of his own.
Clinton and Markesun were quarreling again
, much as they had been the previous September when Markesun had visited him in Hot Springs before he left for Oxford. “She was very attractive and fiery and they were always fighting,” Stearns recalled. “If the trip was an effort to get them back together, it didn’t succeed.” They stayed together long enough to travel with Stearns to Vienna, where they spent much of their time at the opera house, standing in the rafter area to watch La Bohème and Don Giovanni. Then the tempestuous relationship exploded. Clinton and Markesun not only parted ways, but they threw Stearns into the middle of the dispute. He had been planning to travel on to Italy alone. Instead, suddenly, he was hitting the road for Graz and Venice with Ann Markesun at his side.
On March 29, traveling alone, Clinton headed north to reunite with Rudi Lowe at the family home in Bamberg. Clinton, who had been studying Eastern Europe in his work with Zbigniew Pelczynski, was eager to see the border. He and Lowe drove to the village of Blankenstein in Upper Franconia, a town that was divided east from west by a small stream and a fence guarded by East German troops. Clinton was “very taken by the physical manifestation of repression and animosity,” Lowe recalled, and asked his host to take pictures of him at the border. He stepped two meters across the line to pose. “I told him to be careful, they are watching,” Lowe recalled later. “He said they wouldn’t shoot an American.”
NO sooner had Clinton arrived back in England than he went off to meet Sharon Ann Evans. She landed at Heathrow for a whirlwind ten-day tour in which Clinton served as her escort, host, and tour guide. That Clinton could move in such quick succession from the brilliant, assertive Markesun to the beauty queen Evans showed that his tastes were as eclectic in women as in everything else.
Evans felt that she was “running with the herd” in England. That was how it always seemed with Clinton, she thought. Back in Arkansas the previous summer, they were together amid a larger crowd of friends. Now it was the same with this new herd: Paul Parish and his girlfriend; Frank Aller and his; Strobe Talbott, Bob Reich, Tom Williamson, Rick Stearns, sometimes Jim Waugh and Charlene Prickett—there was always some combination of interesting new people with them wherever they went. They spent the first five days in London, according to a record of the trip that Clinton kept and later gave to Evans. On Friday the 4th of April they saw Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Lincoln Statue, No. 10 Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Piccadilly Circus, the parade of the Horse Guards, and London Bridge. The following day they toured the Houses of Parliament and watched a national band festival at the Royal Festival Hall. On Easter Sunday, they went to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and listened to black power advocates from the West Indies, observed an Irish Republican Army rally in Trafalgar Square, and returned to Westminster Abbey for evensong services.
The next day they toured the National Gallery. When they came outside, they noticed a peace demonstration in Trafalgar Square. The speaker’s platform was set up near the statue of Lord Nelson; banners proclaiming “Americans Go Home” were draped across the dais. Evans and Clinton and that day’s herd of friends watched the scene for an hour or so from the steps of the gallery. It was the first antiwar demonstration Clinton had witnessed during his time overseas. His presence there could not have been more innocuous, although decades later Republican operatives would attempt to give it a sinister meaning. Later that day Clinton wrote a note to Denise Hyland, relating that he had gone to the antiwar rally and “sat for hours” watching it. “Times are getting tough,” he said, referring to the way he and his friends were struggling with the draft and the war. Although he had been playing tourist and tour guide for nearly three weeks and had given hardly a glance at his studies, he felt compelled to give Hyland a report on his academic progress at Oxford. “My work is going well,” he wrote. “I might even become an educated man here.”
He also gave an optimistic draft update in the April 7 letter. “For now,” he wrote, “I hope to finish two years here before being drafted.” Why he would write this remains a mystery. Perhaps he had received an inside report from his uncle Raymond Clinton or his stepfather Jeff Dwire. Or perhaps he was just acting out of his innate need to please and to avoid unpleasant thoughts. In any case, it is difficult to imagine why Clinton, three months after passing his preinduction physical and classified 1-A, would think he could avert the draft for more than another year.
One moment when they were alone, Clinton talked to Evans about the draft and the war. In that conversation, he told Evans that he sometimes felt misplaced among the cynical expatriates at Oxford. “My friends,” he said, “just don’t understand my need to serve.”
BERT Jeffries was killed in Vietnam. The word from his mother reached Clinton the day after he and Evans got back to Oxford. James Herbert Jeffries was one of Clinton’s oldest friends in Hot Springs, a neighborhood pal from the carefree preadolescent days up on Park Avenue, the son of A. B. (Sonny) Jeffries, Clinton’s favorite Sunday school teacher at Park Place Baptist Church. They had stayed in touch through the years with letters and occasional visits home on holidays. Clinton kept up with Jeffries even in Vietnam, and had received a letter from him the previous December. On the morning after hearing of his friend’s death, Clinton wrote a note to Jeffries’s parents:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jeffries,
I heard about Bert just yesterday when I returned to Oxford. Since then I have thought of him so much, remembering backyard football and dreaded band rehearsals and throwing knives in the floor in Sunday school. I remember too that we were baptized on the same night and playfully argued over who would be the last one into the water …
Bert had lived a different life from his friend Bill in the years since high school. While Clinton was at Georgetown, Jeffries struggled to find himself. He attended the University of Arkansas for a few years, but never felt comfortable there and dropped out. He fell in love, got married, fell out of love, and got divorced. He moved to Dallas and worked for a printing company. He learned that two of his high school friends had been killed in Vietnam, and decided with two buddies, Duke Watts and Ira Stone, to join the Marines and go over to Vietnam, at least in part to avenge their deaths. “I didn’t want him to go,” his father said later. “He was only twenty-one, and I was worried about him.” But Jeffries signed up and was sent to Vietnam in the summer of 1968—at the time Clinton was hoping he could delay being drafted long enough to sail for England and Oxford.
On March 20, 1969, Jeffries and his squad in the 106th recoilless rifle platoon of the 9th Marines went out on routine patrol ten miles north of Khe Sanh in Quang Tri Province near the demilitarized zone. At just after ten that morning, a member of his squad stepped on an enemy land mine. Jeffries was only a few feet away. The explosion sent shrapnel into his body, his face, head, neck, chest, abdomen, back, right leg and both arms, amputating his left hand. He died instantly. A. B. Jeffries was working out of town when the Marine Corps officers came to his house to break the news. His wife answered the door and knew that her son was dead. The Western Union telegram arrived the next day: “Please accept on behalf of the United States Marine Corps our continued sympathy in your bereavement.” More than four hundred friends mourned Bert Jeffries’s death at the funeral services at Gross Mortuary on the morning of April 4. He was buried in a graveyard on the edge of town. Duke Watts and Ira Stone came back from Vietnam to serve as honorary pallbearers.
“The thing about Vietnam was that either you wanted to go or you did not want to go,” Watts reflected decades later. Jeffries wanted to go. So did he. Watts was proud of the fact that he went to Vietnam, even though he later decided that he hadn’t accomplished anything there and he left feeling that “it never amounted to a hill of beans.” But he would never want to say that to Mr. Jeffries.
• • •
THE final term of the Oxford school year started out a mess and deteriorated from there. The tutor Clinton thought so much of, Zbigniew Pelczynski, took an academic leave to work on a book on Polish communism in a palazzo on
Lake Varese in Lombardy. Clinton’s supervision was transferred to a sociologist at Hertford College, but it was never the same. He stopped attending tutorials, and though he continued reading a lot, he essentially stopped working toward his degree. Most of the books he read had nothing to do with his studies. One week his reading list included True Grit, a western written by Charles Portis, a native Arkansan; The Moon Is Down, by John Steinbeck; Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver; and Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, by Andrey Sakharov. He also reread North Toward Home by Willie Morris, the autobiographical account of a Mississippi-bred writer dealing with his roots and the disorientation he felt when he left the South. Senator Fulbright had helped Clinton meet Morris in New York City back in October on the day before Clinton sailed for England. They had toured Manhattan in a taxi, lunched at Elaine’s, a writers’ hangout, and talked about the South and watermelons and Oxford, where Morris had been a Rhodes Scholar twelve years earlier.
In letters to friends back home, Clinton talked constantly about how much he was hurting and how “heavy” the situation was for him and his friends at Oxford. He said that he could not shake the feeling that he should return to America and fulfill his military obligation. But he hated the war and did not want to fight in it. The war was all around him. Bert Jeffries was dead. Frank Aller was resisting. Paul Parish was going for a conscientious objector exemption; he had asked five people to write letters to the Claiborne County Draft Board in Mississippi attesting to his character. Bill Clinton; his mother and father; Lucy Turnbull, his professor of classics at Ole Miss; and Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House.
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