In his first days home it appears that Clinton saw no choice but to submit to the draft. There was little time left. In a letter he wrote to Denise Hyland, he revealed that he had been given a new induction date: July 28. The local National Guard and Reserve units, which had been checked out by his stepfather, Jeff Dwire, and his uncle, Raymond Clinton, were full. “I am home now and every day it becomes clearer the draft is the only way,” he wrote to Hyland on July 8. Later in the same letter he was more emphatic: “I’m going to be drafted. There isn’t much else to say. I am not happy, but neither was anyone else who was called before me, I guess.”
But the mood of resignation Clinton expressed in that letter was swiftly replaced by a determination to beat the July 28 deadline and find a military alternative. Sometime during that period he tried to take the first step toward enlisting in officer candidate school by taking physicals for the Air Force and Navy officer programs, but he failed them both. “I was just under the maximum size, so I could have got in,” Clinton later said of the Air Force examination. “But I didn’t have fusion vision so I couldn’t live in a plane.” He apparently failed the Navy officer examination because of faulty hearing.
On July 10, he drove to Little Rock and met with Cliff Jackson. A letter Jackson wrote to his girlfriend in England the next day described the meeting. “Bill Clinton visited with me most of yesterday and night,” Jackson wrote.
He is feverishly trying to find a way to avoid entering the army as a drafted private. At this moment, though he is still pursuing several leads, all avenues seem closed to him. The Army Reserve and National Guard units are seemingly full completely, and there is a law prohibiting a draftee from enlisting in one of those anyway. The director of the state selective service is willing to ignore this law, but there are simply no vacancies. I have had several of my friends in influential positions trying to pull strings on Bill’s behalf, but we don’t have any results yet. I have also arranged for Bill to be admitted to U of A law school at Fayetteville, where there is a ROTC unit which is affiliated with the law school. But Bill is too late to enter this year’s class unit and would have to wait until next April. Possibly Colonel Holmes, the commander, will grant Bill a special ROTC “deferment” which would commit him to the program next April, but the draft board would have to approve such an arrangement. They have already refused to permit him to teach, join the Peace Corps or Vista etc., so Bill has only until July 28 to find some alternative military service. I feel so sorry for him in this predicament—it could have easily been me!
Jackson asked his boss, Van Rush, who was then head of the Arkansas Republican party, to arrange a meeting for Jackson and Clinton with Willard A. (Lefty) Hawkins, the head of the state Selective Service System, who had been appointed to that post by Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. It would take Hawkins’s approval to kill the draft notice in exchange for alternative military service, a common practice during that era. Rush made the call, urging Hawkins to meet with Jackson and an unidentified friend who was having a draft problem.
Jackson’s claim that he “arranged for Bill to be admitted to the U of A law school” was an exaggeration, but it correctly focused on Clinton’s ultimate course of action. The advanced ROTC program at the University of Arkansas did not have quotas and was open to law students. It had grown rapidly in size in the year since graduate deferments were eliminated, becoming a safe haven for students looking for a way around the draft. “We were used to guys with long hair and beards enrolling,” recalled Ed Howard, then the master sergeant and drill instructor for the Arkansas program. “I remember one law student saying to me, ‘I’m doing it because I don’t want to be drafted, but I’ll do my best while I’m in.’ Another law student in ROTC marched in peace marches. The marches would come by our building and I would look out my second-floor window and see him waving up at me.” Fayetteville, then, seemed the best available option for Clinton.
Lee Williams, Fulbright’s chief aide, a graduate of the University of Arkansas Law School, had several contacts there and worked the telephone from his Capitol Hill office trying to arrange Clinton’s enrollment. His papers indicate that he contacted the director of the ROTC program, Colonel Eugene J. Holmes, on July 16, after discussing the specifics of Clinton’s situation earlier with one of Holmes’s assistants. A page of notes Williams took while talking by telephone with the ROTC staff indicates that Clinton was hoping to delay his enrollment in the program until he finished his second year at Oxford. The precise though abbreviated notation relating to that call reads: “Must have first year ROTC def[erred].” Another abbreviated notation indicates that Clinton would not undertake the required basic training for the program until the following summer: “Comb[ine] Basic—6 weeks, Fort Benning, Ga. Summer [197O].”
At about the time Williams made his phone call, at least one inquiry came from the office of Governor Rockefeller, according to Holmes’s top assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Clint Jones. Jones later recalled that both Fulbright’s office and Rockefeller’s office asked him essentially the same question—“Could we do anything to help young Bill Clinton?” His reply was: “Probably, have him come in and see us.” Clinton, his hair now trimmed, traveled up to Fayetteville that week to make his case. He met with Colonel Holmes at his home and with Lieutenant Colonel Jones at the ROTC headquarters on campus in the old business administration building. Holmes later said that his meeting with Clinton involved “an extensive, approximately two-hour interview.” Clinton did not tell Holmes during that interview that he was an opponent of the Vietnam War and of the draft. The next day, according to Holmes, he took several calls from members of the Garland County Draft Board telling him that Senator Fulbright’s office was putting pressure on them and that they needed the colonel to relieve it by enrolling Clinton in the program.
Whether Holmes felt unduly pressured is a question that he answered in widely different ways in later years when Clinton’s draft history became of political interest. In any case, he enrolled Clinton in the program and the July 28 induction notice was nullified. His draft board soon granted Clinton a 1-D deferment as a reservist.
“On the 17th, eleven days before my induction date, I was admitted to a two-year, two-summer camp ROTC program at the University of Arkansas for graduates and junior college transfers,” Clinton wrote to Denise Hyland on July 20. “I will have a two-year obligation just as if I’ve been drafted, but I’ll go in as an officer three years from now. It’s all too good to be true, I think. There is still the doubt that maybe I should have said to hell with it, done this thing and been free!” Clinton’s sense of being out of place in Arkansas permeated the letter. “It seemed really strange going back to Fayetteville, like going back to my boyhood,” referring to the few weeks he had spent at band camp in Fayetteville during the summers of his adolescence. Of Hot Springs he said: “At least I have my hair cut a little … and will not be run out of the hometown on appearance. But I will have a month in which I will try to get involved with some interesting and fairly forthright activities of the local blacks and kids of both races…. If this letter is a bit disjointed and rambling,” he concluded, “it is because I am not yet fully adjusted to the new circumstances and my apparent future.”
The letter leaves the clear impression that Clinton thought he would be going to the University of Arkansas Law School that fall, even if he could not begin the ROTC program until he completed the basic training camp the following summer. One clue is the line “… but I’ll go in as an officer three years from now.” If he were to return to Oxford for a year and then attend law school, which takes three years to complete, he would not finish until four years later. Another clue is the line in which he says that he will “have a month” in Hot Springs to work with children. Law school began in a month. Oxford’s first term was not until October.
Before working out the ROTC deal, Clinton had vacillated between being resigned to going into the Army and working to prevent it. Now that he was protected from the draft, h
e seemed as troubled as before. In a letter to Tamara Kennerley in England, Clinton said that the idea “of not being in the Army now and going to Arkansas law school is almost more than I can handle—just having a hard time adjusting.” But in that same letter, he also emphasized the antiwar sentiments that had driven him to fight the draft notice in the first place. Looking ahead to the time when he would be done with law school and enter the service as a commissioned officer, he wrote, “Hopefully, there will be no Vietnam then.”
One weekend during that period, Clinton drove to Houston for a reunion with three of his Georgetown housemates. Kit Ashby had just finished a year of graduate business school at the University of Texas at Austin. He, too, had been drafted the previous spring and had tried to find an alternative that would allow him to complete his schooling. He had finally struck a deal to sign up with the Marines if they allowed him to finish his program at Texas. It was a deal much like Clinton’s agreement in Arkansas, with one major difference: Ashby had a time certain for reporting to active duty and knew that he might end up in Vietnam. The other two housemates at the Houston reunion, Tom Campbell and Jim Moore, were already in the service. Campbell, a Marine Corps pilot, was stationed at Beeville, Texas, and Moore, an Army intelligence officer, was between points on a path that would take him to Vietnam. Although Clinton did not dwell on his own circumstances, his buddies came away with the impression that soon enough he, too, would be in the military. But they also found him having a hard time accepting the likelihood that he would not be going back to Oxford. “His basic desire,” according to Ashby, “was to be able to go back.”
Strobe Talbott traveled to Arkansas in early August and stayed at the Clinton house in Hot Springs for several days. Attempting to recollect that visit decades later, Talbott remembered hanging out at Jeff Dwire’s beauty parlor, playing basketball in the driveway with Bill and his little brother Roger, and waiting for what seemed like an hour or more for Virginia Dwire to put on her makeup in the bathroom. He also recalled taking a tour of graveyards, one where Roger Clinton was buried in Hot Springs, and another where William Jefferson Blythe rested in Hope. He was certain that he and Clinton talked about the war and draft deferments, but he could remember no specifics. Cliff Jackson later claimed that Talbott was “one of the chief architects of Bill Clinton’s scheme to void his draft notice” and avoid reporting for the scheduled July 28 induction. Jackson said he had a “crystal-clear recollection” of Talbott and Clinton visiting him at Republican party headquarters in Little Rock and discussing their plan of action. His memory in this is counter to the facts. It places Talbott in two places at once. Talbott was in the Soviet Union in July when Clinton got his deferment. It is possible that Clinton and Talbott, during their time together in August, talked about whether Clinton could find a way to go back to Oxford and delay his enrollment at law school in Fayetteville; but whether any discussions of that sort were held in front of Jackson is based on Jackson’s testimony alone. Talbott could not remember meeting Jackson.
WHEN he visited Clinton in Hot Springs in August, Talbott already knew that he could return unfettered to Oxford for a second year. He had obtained a 1-Y physical deferment for a lateral cartilage injury he had suffered while playing football at the Hotchkiss School as a teenager. His “gimpy knee,” Talbott later wrote, “was enough to keep me out of the Mekong Delta but not off the squash courts and playing fields of Oxford.”
And so it was with many Rhodes Scholars. Boisfeuillet (Bo) Jones, studying at Exeter College, received his induction notice at about the same time that Clinton did and went home that summer resigned to the fact that he would soon be in the Army. He reported to the Atlanta induction center on Ponce de Leon Street at eight o’clock one morning carrying a bag of paperback books and clean underwear, expecting to be a soldier before the day was out, but failed the physical because of high blood pressure and by two that afternoon was free to continue his life of academics and top-flight tennis. In the University College quartet alone, all but Clinton were saved by their own bodies. When Bob Reich took his Army physical, he was greeted by a sergeant who barked out, “Hallelujah! We got ourselves a tunnel rat.” Reich gave him a puzzled look. “What’d you say?” he asked. “A tunnel rat,” repeated the sergeant. “We need short guys like you to flush the VC out of tunnels with hand grenades.” As Reich later remembered the scene, his life flashed before his eyes. Then, in the physical, when he reached the height-measuring station, another sergeant put his hand on Reich’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, son.” Sorry about what? Reich wondered to himself. Sorry I’m going or sorry I’m not going? But the sergeant relieved him with the words, “You’re just too short.” Reich was an inch and a half under the five-foot minimum. The other roommates had less dramatic draft adventures. John Isaacson, another squash player, suffered migraines, and Doug Eakeley had a shoulder that dislocated enough to get him out of the Army but not enough to keep him off the Univ tennis team.
And so it was with millions of privileged and lucky young men. The student deferment, the gimpy knee, the bad back—most of those who did not want to be in the military found a way out. Of the 26.8 million men of draft age during the Vietnam era, 8.7 million enlisted and 2.2 million were drafted. The ranks were filled with the poor and undereducated. High school graduates were twice as likely to serve as college graduates. The great majority of young men, nearly 16 million, avoided military service altogether through deferment, exemption, disqualification, or resistance. Those like Frank Aller were by far the smallest group: 209,000 were accused of resisting or dodging the draft; of whom 8,750 were convicted.
Many young men who could not get physical exemptions sought refuge in the National Guard or ROTC. The extent to which these were viewed as last-ditch choices for potential draftees was documented by a Department of Defense study, which found that nearly half of all officers who came up through ROTC programs said they would not have enlisted had they not faced the draft. Clinton was one of several Rhodes Scholars who received an induction notice during the spring term at Oxford and came home looking for a way out through the Reserves or the National Guard. The manner in which two of those scholars, Mike Shea and Tom Ward, handled their situations lends perspective to Clinton’s behavior.
Mike Shea spent his first year at Balliol College at Oxford protected by a graduate deferment that was no longer supposed to exist. Finally, near the end of the spring term, his draft board in Iowa realized that it had made a classification error and sent him a notice of induction. Shea was not the sort to spend his time “pondering the true correctness and morality” of the war and how best to respond. “I did not have a serious conscience about this. I was not at the same level of introspection and analysis that Aller and Clinton were at. I merely thought this is a really stupid war and I don’t think I can stop it but I have no desire to cooperate.” So he went home and enrolled in the ROTC program at the University of Iowa Law School. “I did exactly what Clinton almost did. But Clinton had all these conscience problems.” Shea went off to basic training at Fort Benning without worrying about whether he had sold out to the military even though he opposed the war. “My feeling was the system was totally fucked. It was just a thousand clowns. I was not making a grand political statement, loved by all—‘Oh, okay, I’ll go to Fort Benning and learn how to shoot flamethrowers.’ My decision was viewed as being an expedient gesture devoid of any moral input at all—which it was.”
Shea’s casual attitude led to a casual conclusion. He developed bad knees, got a medical discharge, and returned to Oxford after one year in the States.
Tom Ward, in the Rhodes class ahead of Clinton’s, also received an induction notice near the end of the 1969 spring term and returned to Meridian, Mississippi, looking for a way out. His position on the Vietnam War was that it was a faraway conflict and that he would just as soon it stayed that way. He acknowledged that his opposition was “in direct proportion” to the closeness of his draft notice. The contrast between his life in
England and his upbringing in Mississippi confused Ward even more. The Rhodes crowd had been the most political group he had ever associated with in his life. Now he was trying to find his roots again, to figure out what had happened to him in England. He had been thinking about staying in England, he said later, or “whether to go to Sweden, Canada. Or go to jail. All of that was part of the context of the conversation. I was overwhelmed, frankly. I knew I was in over my head. I had a hard time distinguishing in my own life how much craziness I was going through and how much was just the growing political reality.”
His father, an influential Republican lawyer in Meridian, told Ward that he would be making a grave mistake if he went to jail or sought a conscientious objector exemption. He convinced his son that he had only been talking to alienated Americans. But although Ward’s father supported President Nixon, he did not want his son getting shipped off to Vietnam as a drafted private. They found a slot in a National Guard unit where he could also coach basketball at a junior college. “It was easy for me to get help. Mississippi is like Arkansas—with the good ole boy network.” But Ward, who eventually became an Episcopalian minister in Nashville, felt empty and distressed by the ease with which he escaped the draft. The realization that young men who lacked his connections were fighting a war that he could so easily avoid haunted Ward for years. Yet he also came to believe that even the limited vulnerability that Rhodes Scholars faced in that summer of 1969 hastened the end of the war. “I just think historically the war broke down when we started drafting the Bill Clintons and the Tom Wards. People like my father were not going to have their sons dying in that war and were politically influential enough to stop it. That is the moral ambiguity of the situation.”
First In His Class Page 24