Sir Edgar Williams might seem like an unlikely ally, given his military bearing and his distinguished wartime service, but he had taken to this Rhodes class in all of its intense and anxious brilliance. When Strobe Talbott had injured his eye in the squash match, the Williams family invited him to their house to convalesce after his release from the infirmary. Sir Edgar took delight in the practical jokes that his wife and daughter played on young Talbott, who was, he said, “utterly soberminded.” Parish was an even more frequent guest at the Williams manse. That spring he came by most days for an hour or so at teatime. “I needed company and they gave it to me.”
The Rhodes boys called Sir Edgar “The Rhodent,” though never to his face. Some were so intimidated by his presence and his circumlocutions that they never tried to get to know him. But those who did, like Parish and Talbott, appreciated his dry, amusing soul. He would sit in his leather chair and smoke his pipe and soon disappear in a cloud of smoke. He was not much for dispensing wisdom to Parish or any of the other troubled scholars, and when he did talk, he was not always reassuring. “He was such a prig about the war,” recalled Willy Fletcher, who opposed the war despite his status as a Navy ensign during his Rhodes years. “He once said to me, ‘Could you look yourself in the mirror in the morning if you didn’t fight in it?’” Yet Williams willingly wrote letters to draft boards in the United States “explaining what it was they were doing at Oxford.”
Clinton spent days drafting his letter for Parish, using it as a means of bringing coherence to his own thoughts. He had thoroughly researched the issue, and cited several Supreme Court cases that he argued had broadened the scope of the conscientious objection statute. He later said that he thought it was the best paper he had written all of his first year at Oxford. Parish agreed. He said it made his case.
On April 30, 1969, the number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam reached its all-time peak of 534,000. The next day, May morning, was a holiday in Oxford. Parish and Sara Maitland, Clinton and several friends went down to the Cherwell for a breakfast picnic, cooking eggs and sausages on a little outdoor stove. It was a glorious spring morning, and the Rhodes group watched with delight as the daughters of Oxford townsfolk, following an ancient tradition, covered themselves in daffodils, jonquils, and hyacinths, and got tossed into the slender river—clothes, hats, flowers, and all. The Lady Sara covered her pink corduroys and flowing silk shirt in flowers and got thrown in with the rest. The choir sang madrigals at 6:00 A.M. from Magdalen Tower and the church bells rang with joy. The days before and after might be clouded by anxiety, but here, briefly, was one perfect day.
Clinton’s own May Day of a very different sort had arrived that week in the form of a letter from the Garland County Draft Board. It was the five-page SSS Form 252, the Order to Report for Induction. Decades later, when recounting his dealings with the draft, Clinton would fail to mention that he had received this draft notice. He would claim that in the midst of everything else that happened in the months before and after, the draft notice slipped his mind. But it did not seem insignificant at the time. He called his mother and stepfather right away to tell them the news and to see what could be done. Somehow the letter had been sent by surface mail and had arrived in Oxford after the assigned reporting date. By the time the induction notice arrived, Clinton had begun another school term, and according to draft regulations that meant he was allowed to finish out the term before reporting. He was by no means alone in that regard. A study by the Scientific Manpower Commission released that spring indicated that between 16,000 and 25,000 young men received their draft notices while in graduate school that year and had their induction dates postponed until the end of the term. But there was no getting around the fact that Clinton had been drafted. He wrote letters to many friends back in the United States telling them the news. “You may have heard that I’ve been drafted,” he said in the letter to Hyland.
Clinton talked about the induction notice with Cliff Jackson, who was heading home May 22 to work for the Arkansas Republican party in Little Rock. Jackson wrote letters to his mother and his college mentor in which he mentioned his classmate’s plight. “I really hate to come back to Arkansas and start paying those expensive prices for everything,” he wrote his mother. “But I’m glad I’m coming back like I am and not like Bill Clinton from Hot Springs, who is a Rhodes Scholar here at Oxford. Bill has been drafted and will have to enter the Army probably in July. It is such a shame!”
Some of his closer friends at Oxford said later that they could not recall Clinton receiving a draft notice, although they remembered him under great duress during his final days in Oxford that spring. Paul Parish carried one image with him, but when he called it up in his mind’s eye he could not say for certain whether it happened in real life or in a dream. The memory was that one night Clinton knocked on his door at Christ Church. Parish and Sara Maitland “were really involved in something” at that moment, so Parish did not answer. The knocking persisted for a long time before it stopped. The next day Clinton found Parish and said that he had gone to his room the night before to tell him that he had been drafted. When no one answered, Clinton said, he sat on the steps leading down from the fourth floor of the hall, alone in the dark, put his head in his hands, and cried.
CHAPTER TEN
THE TORMENT
CLINTON STRETCHED HIS elastic personality almost to the snapping point during his final month at Oxford in the spring of 1969. An erratic sleeper, he slept less. A voracious eater, he ate more. A frenetic chatterer and letterwriter, his communications grew more intense. He spent much of his time alone jotting down his thoughts in a leatherbound diary that Denise Hyland had given him the year before. “The diary you gave me has become one of my most valued possessions,” he wrote her. “It is both an escape and an outlet, a staff to lean on and a mountain that defies conquest. I have written on almost all the pages.” An accumulator of friends, he found more time to cultivate young women who would listen patiently and with grave concern as he struggled with his conscience. He internalized the fragility of his friend Paul Parish, the conscientious objector, and the moral anguish of the soulful Rhodes resister, Frank Aller. In those ways he had become an exaggerated version of his own flexible character. Yet in spirit he was diminished. His lifelong sense of optimism had reached an all-time low. There seemed to be no larger purpose to his self-absorption. If only, he told his friends, the war would go away so that he could get back to thinking on a nobler plane.
“I do hope you are finding some purpose to living,” he lamented in one letter to Hyland. “Peace of mind is not always necessary, perhaps not even beneficial at this time.”
The tardy induction notice did not save Clinton from the draft, but only gave him a pocket of time. His future seemed limited to three options. He could submit to the draft and enter the Army that summer as a private. He could join Frank Aller as a resister. Or he could find a way to void the induction notice in exchange for enlistment in a military alternative—the National Guard or a Reserve Officer Training Corps program—that might allow him to continue his education and shield him. The discussions he had with friends about those options were the most difficult of his life, Clinton said later. But his friends knew that he had invested too much time, hope, and ambition in his political future to abandon it by resisting. “Maintaining viability within the system was very important to him. Right from the start we all took his aspirations with real proper seriousness,” recalled Sara Maitland. “His wish to be viable within the system was never treated as him copping out. It was clear Bill had a job to do within the system.” Resisting, according to Strobe Talbott, was “completely inconsistent in Bill’s case with what everybody knew to be Bill’s ambition. Bill was going back to the United States to go into public service. There was never any doubt.” Their classmates considered Talbott and Clinton the two members of their crowd most sympathetic to the establishment against which they were mildly rebelling. Daniel Singer thought that “Clinton and Talbo
tt wanted to solve problems by established solutions. This whole choice of whether to play by the rules or overthrow the system was not difficult for Clinton. He believed in the rules and he succeeded with them.”
Of the options which remained, then, the one Clinton said he wanted to take or expected to take fluctuated depending on the people he was with and the circumstances of the encounter, but most of his effort went into finding a military alternative.
In telephone conversations with his stepfather, Jeff Dwire, Clinton compiled a list of officials he should talk to when he got back to Hot Springs who might help him get into a National Guard or ROTC program. He contacted John Spotila, the friend from Georgetown who was attending Yale Law School, and asked what it would take for him to get into that school and enroll in the graduate ROTC program there. He telephoned Paul Fray, his political ally from the Holt Generation days. According to Fray, Clinton called collect and asked him for help getting into the Air National Guard. Fray, who was studying law in Little Rock and serving in the Arkansas National Guard, came from a politically connected family and had several contacts in the state’s military establishment. He arranged for Clinton to take an Air Force physical when he got back to the States.
Clinton also had a conversation in Oxford with Cliff Jackson, who was now about to depart for Little Rock to work for the state Republican party. As Jackson later recollected their meeting, Clinton told him that he had researched his situation and determined that since he had already received an induction notice, the only way he could enlist in an ROTC program or the National Guard was with the approval of the state Selective Service System director in Little Rock, an appointee of Republican Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. “He wanted my assistance getting the draft notice killed,” Jackson said later. On May 26, four days after Jackson, back in Little Rock, began work for the state GOP, he received a letter from Clinton. “I got a letter from Bill Clinton on Monday, indicating that he is coming home around July 1 to join the National Guard,” Jackson wrote to his girlfriend at Leicester University. “Although quite frankly, it was, I thought, somewhat excessive and politically oriented in that I’m a good person to be on amiable grounds with. Methinks he could have waited awhile in writing.”
Why would Jackson act as though he were Clinton’s ally and make himself available for assistance if he was as ill-disposed to Clinton as he appeared to be in his letters? “I was ambivalent,” Jackson said later. “But he was my friend. He was leaning on me.” An alternative explanation is that Cliff Jackson in 1969 was as torn as Clinton, and as manipulative, ready to trade favors with his Arkansas rival. Although there is little documented evidence other than Jackson’s letters that Clinton turned to him for help, there is also no evidence to the contrary. Jackson’s version of events demands caution but not outright rejection. The broad outline of his story matches a reasonable reconstruction of Clinton’s actions, except that he seems to have exaggerated his own role. His recollections possibly are colored by the competitive jealousy he felt toward Clinton during their Oxford days, an animosity that would become inflamed over the years in proportion to Clinton’s fame.
If Clinton was scheming with Jackson to void his draft notice, he gave little hint of that to some friends. One of his newfound British girlfriends that spring, Tamara Kennerley, later noted that in their conversations about the war, Clinton always “thought he was going to Vietnam.” The way that different people interpreted Clinton’s intentions so differently during this period can be explained at two levels. To a certain extent, the contrasting views of outsiders mirrored Clinton’s internal ambivalence. At a deeper level, though, it was an indication of his habit of adapting to the people around him and trying to present to them the version of himself he thought each would most admire.
In any case, Clinton’s friends bade farewell to him assuming that he would not be coming back. The party lasted three days. It began in the Univ courtyard with Arch the scout serving as bartender, offering the guests Black Velvets—Guinness and champagne. Eakeley presented Clinton with a walking stick and a two-way touring cap, with brims facing both directions. The stick and cap, he joked, were to help Clinton find his way through the jungles of Vietnam. At times the party winnowed down to a few stragglers. Darryl Gless sat in the candlelight with Clinton, “reflecting gloomily over the state of the world.” At other times it erupted into a noisy, convivial, let-your-hair-down affair. Rudiger Lowe, Clinton’s German friend, who was visiting Oxford, remembered it as the longest party he had ever attended. The highlights were a barbecue picnic on the roof of Univ and a punting adventure on the Cherwell with a less-than-steady Clinton working the pole and Lowe certain that “any second we would be taking an unwelcome bath.” To Sara Maitland, the party was another occasion in which every college rule was flouted without consequence. “Bill had this room at Univ that was easily accessible and the college porter adored him. All was waived for Bill at Univ. It was just, ‘Oh, yes, go on in!’” It was all sort of looking the other way. Bill was to have all the rules broken. It was dead impressive.”
On June 26, the farewell party moved to London’s Heathrow Airport, where Clinton boarded a plane for New York. Maitland drove to the airport in her sports car with Paul Parish. It was, she said later, “just a mess…. We had this tearful departure at the airport. It had all become an enormous sort of emotional drama. Bill had decided to go. Was it the right thing to do? The wrong thing to do? It was all very stressful, going back to Arkansas.”
When Clinton arrived in America, it all seemed very different. He stayed for two nights at Denise Hyland’s home in Upper Montclair. His relationship with Denise was changing again. When he appeared at the front door, Clinton found a suitor already there, Denise’s future husband, who was gracious if perplexed about sharing space with this fellow who was so burly and full of hugs. Clinton encountered another change when he ventured into Manhattan for a reunion with Willie Morris, the editor of Harper’s magazine and former Rhodes Scholar from Mississippi. Morris had impressed Clinton with his charm and wit the first time they met, eight months earlier, on the afternoon before Clinton sailed for England. But their meeting this time left him disillusioned. Morris did not seem the same man. “All the light is out of his eyes,” Clinton later wrote. “All the life is out of his stories.”
On his way to Arkansas, Clinton stopped in Washington. Rick Stearns, who was there that summer helping the McGovern Commission reform the Democratic party, introduced him to the network of political activists who still believed in the system and were trying to end the war through public pressure. And on Capitol Hill he visited the offices of Senator Fulbright. Lee Williams, the Senate aide who had hired Clinton to work in Fulbright’s shop three years earlier, was now one of the busiest unofficial draft counselors in Washington, advising hundreds of young men who sought alternatives to fighting in Vietnam. Clinton was by no means alone when at last he turned to the office of the influential committee chairman for guidance and help.
“They came to us in droves. I had so many young people to see, I couldn’t do my job. We talked about the alternatives. What could one do? I tried to help every young person who came to me do what their conscience dictated,” Williams said later. “You would never hear us, Fulbright or me, advocate violation of the law. That was not the way to go. But other than that we would offer to help them any way we could. We would call and find out where they were looking for people in the National Guard, where there might be an ROTC slot.” Williams, a proud veteran of World War II, thought the immorality of the war in Vietnam justified any effort within the law to avoid participating in it. He often said that he would not have gone to fight in Vietnam himself, but would have found some other way to serve. Williams later could not recall much about his discussions with Clinton beyond the sense that Clinton was going through “a terrible emotional struggle”—tugged in different directions by his hunger for public service and his disdain for the war and the draft. Williams offered to help him search for alternatives.
If Clinton learned anything in Washington that made him optimistic about finding an alternative, he did not share it with friends. In a thank-you note to Denise Hyland that he sent from Washington, he wrote merely: “No new developments in the service.”
WHEN his airplane touched down in Little Rock, Clinton’s mother was in the lobby, radiating excitement and concern. Standing nearby was Sharon Ann Evans’s mother, Honey Evans. Sharon had planned to greet Clinton at the airport but could not make it because Clinton had changed flights. She had sent her mother out to apologize. Virginia ignored Honey Evans. She had had a falling out with Sharon Ann earlier that summer when word got back to her that Miss Arkansas had delivered a speech in Hot Springs in which she implied that she might make her home in Hot Springs as Mrs. Bill Clinton some day. Evans had not really said that, though she did mention her friendship with Clinton in a lighthearted fashion; but whatever she said was too much for Virginia, who rarely found any of her son’s girlfriends satisfactory. This talkative beauty queen was not good enough for her boy, she thought.
Jeff and Virginia Dwire and thirteen-year-old Roger Clinton now lived in the house on Scully Street. Even though Clinton always talked fondly of home when he was away from it, he now seemed out of place. David Leopoulos was with the Army in Italy. Carolyn Yeldell was spending the summer away and would not be home for a few weeks. It seemed that hardly anyone his age was in town. His mother thought he seemed to have an emotional wall around him: “Bill and Jeff had a lot of conversations about the draft. But I didn’t really know the agony that he was going through. I just knew he played a lot of basketball in the driveway. He shot baskets hour after hour. Shooting off the frustration.” Clinton wrote letters of anguish to his Rhodes friend Paul Parish, who was spending the summer at Sara Maitland’s country mansion in Scotland and working on his appeal for conscientious objector status. The letters, Parish later recalled, “were all, ‘I could do this or I could do that.’ The tenor was: It is almost impossible to see anything that appeals to the moral sensibility. If good has a taste to it, didn’t any of his options have it. All the choices he saw were corrupt.”
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