First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  IT was not until Clinton had offered himself to the military establishment, not until he had signed up for the University of Arkansas ROTC, that he started to become actively involved in the antiwar movement. In mid-August he traveled to Washington and spent several days with Rick Stearns at the McGovern rules staff and visited the Vietnam Moratorium Committee headquarters on Vermont Avenue, where activists were planning a one-day nationwide protest against the war, scheduled for October 15. Clinton had a few friends who were well connected in the movement, including Stearns, but he was virtually unknown himself. He was on the outer edge of the antiwar subculture, according to David Mixner, one of the principal organizers. With his affable manner and expressions of guilt about avoiding the draft, Clinton was regarded as “somewhat of a suspicious character.” But he was not without value. No one in the movement had better connections to Fulbright and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

  The brief visit to Washington restored Clinton’s spirits, but it also reminded him how out of place he now felt in Arkansas. In an August 20 letter, he thanked Stearns for a “wonderful week” that he said was “therapy for a sick man.” Stearns, who was more circumspect, took Clinton’s anxieties seriously, but not too seriously. “Bill was a lot more revealing about himself and more willing to talk in that vocabulary than I would be. Some of it was a bit tongue in cheek. Some of it was florid expression.” The August 20 letter went on to display both of those qualities. “I am home now, still full of the life that your friends and my friends and the city pumped into me. Before I forget, let me tell you how grateful I am to you for introducing me to all those people. Arkansas is barren of that kind, or at least I’ve found few of them. Maybe they have better sense than to traffic with such a naive, sloppy minded romantic.” Clinton added that he hoped he could go with Stearns to a September gathering in Martha’s Vineyard planned by young leaders of the antiwar movement. “I need and would like like hell to be doing something like that.”

  On the evening of September 8, Stearns called Clinton from Washington and they talked about Oxford and the draft. He felt guilty and hypocritical for having the ROTC deferment, Clinton said. Stearns was among the scholars who had managed to get graduate school deferments for the first year, but he had recently been reclassified 1-A by his draft board in California and expected to be drafted any week. Still, he said he was going back to Oxford for his second year. “I told Bill that the only fair thing for me to do was to take my chances,” Stearns later recalled. “If I get drafted, I get drafted, but I wasn’t going to worry about it. If the day came, it came. I felt that was more honorable than trying to connive a way of avoiding the whole thing.” The next day, Clinton wrote Stearns, saying that he had heard from Ann Markesun, who “seems far saner than I am.” The draft board in Mississippi, Clinton reported in that letter, was about to meet on Paul Parish’s appeal. He had just heard from Parish’s mother. “The feeling is he’ll get out, but will be called home at the end of the first term to do alternative service.”

  Clinton then described his own state of mind, a subject he and Stearns had been discussing on the telephone the night before. “My mind is every day more confused than it was before; and countless hours doing nothing save waiting for the phone to ring are driving me out of my head,” he wrote.

  Nothing could be worse than this torment…. And if I cannot rid myself of it, I will just have to go into the service and begin to root out the cause. I wish I could describe to you the quandary I am in, so you could counter with some helpful advice—I have been here all summer in a place where everyone else’s children seem to be in the military, most of them in Vietnam. I look forward to going to the U of A, the thing for aspiring politicos to do, and going to ROTC to become a second lieutenant at 26—in between then and now I have this thing hanging over me like a pall. I can’t justify putting it off. You see, I haven’t explained it very well—the anguish is not that apparent—I am running away from something maybe for the first time in my life—and I just hope I have made the correct decision, if there is such a thing. I know one of the worst side effects of this whole thing is the way it’s ravaged my own image of myself, taken my mind off the higher things, restricted my ability to become involved in good causes or with other people—I honestly feel so screwed up tight that I am incapable, I think, of giving myself, of really loving. I told you I was losing my mind. Anyway—I’m anxious to hear from you. I want so much to tell you we’re going back to England.

  Three days later, on September 12, Clinton stayed up all night writing a letter to William Armstrong, the chairman of the Garland County Draft Board, saying that he never had any real interest in ROTC and wanted to be reclassined 1-A and drafted as soon as possible. But if writing that letter was a cathartic moment for Clinton, it did not resolve his ambivalence. He carried the letter around with him every day for several weeks. But he never mailed it.

  The series of events that led Clinton on a path back to Oxford are in dispute. By Clinton’s account, he talked to Colonel Holmes and gained permission to return to Oxford for the second year since the basic training that he was required to attend before beginning advanced ROTC would not start until the following summer. Holmes said later that he allowed Clinton to return to Oxford for “a month or two,” but expected him to enroll in the law school as soon as possible. But a letter that Clinton wrote Holmes from Oxford in December 1969 in which he apologized for not writing more often—“I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month”—is the strongest evidence that Holmes was aware of and approved Clinton’s plan to go back to Oxford. It may be that Holmes made a private agreement with Clinton in 1969 that he was embarrassed to acknowledge years later. But if he did, he apparently never told his subordinates about it. The rest of the ROTC staff was expecting Clinton to enroll that fall. Ed Howard, the drill sergeant, later recalled that there was great anger when word spread through the ROTC office that Clinton was not on campus. “A lot of people in the unit were kind of mad about it, angry that he didn’t show up,” Howard said. “We did not know where he was. All we knew is that Bill Clinton did not show up. We didn’t normally have people promise to do something and not do it. He was supposed to enroll come enrollment time that fall. When he didn’t show up there was some disappointment.”

  Cliff Jackson was among those angered by Clinton’s decision. He said in a letter to his girlfriend that he was starting to suspect that Clinton’s friendship with him was mere convenience. “Bill Clinton is still trying to wiggle his way out of the ‘disreputable’ Arkansas law school,” Jackson wrote in one letter. “P.S.,” Jackson added in a letter on September 14, “Bill has succeeded in wiggling his way back to Oxford.”

  THAT was the day that Mike Thomas was killed in Vietnam. Thomas had been in Bill’s class at Hot Springs High, where they had served as class officers together. He was the class mascot, a scrappy little fellow who “wanted to be a jock in a big way,” according to Jim French, one of his closest high school friends and the quarterback of the football team. Mike tried out for the football team every fall, and was brought into games only to hold for extra points. Defensive nose guard Bill High, the biggest, player on the team, was stunned one day during the offseason when Coach C. B. Haney ordered the boys to pair off and wrestle each other and Thomas immediately challenged High. High later described him as “a fearless little tiger.” Thomas went off to the University of Arkansas but did not finish. His father, Herman Thomas, had been a captain in World War II, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who lectured his son on the meaning of patriotism. “Mike was in a fraternity at the University of Arkansas,” Herman Thomas later recalled. “All the boys in it were figuring out ways to get out of service. In his second year, Mike got all teed off at those guys. He joined the Army as a buck-ass private. He enlisted, went through basic training, then was held back so he could go to officer training school. He was the smallest man in his class, but made it all right.” He went through jungle warfare training in Panama
and got his orders for Vietnam. When he stopped at home on his way out, his father thought he seemed “gung-ho, ready to go.”

  In Vietnam he was a platoon leader in Company E of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), performing long-range reconnaissance in free-fire zones. His platoon loved Mike Thomas. “He had this kind of charming way of talking, this southern drawl,” remembered one of his men, Greg Schlieve from Washington State. “I had never been around anyone like that. He was matter-of-fact—‘If this happens, here’s the contingency plan.’ If we’d say, ‘Mike, that’s not a good trail to go down, we’re hitting contact,’ he had our concerns foremost. He wouldn’t ask anyone to go where he wouldn’t go. During battles and firefights, he was able to direct men and go around and check on your ammo, your water, and somehow by putting his hand on a man’s shoulder that was maybe terrified, he had the capacity to calm a man down, more or less say, ‘Hang in there, buddy, we’re going to make it.’ I despised most of the officers. They pissed me off. But Mike never forgot the number-one goal is for you all to come walking back. I just absolutely thought without a shadow of a doubt that Mike was the most courageous man I ever met. He was little—five foot five—but carried the heaviest pack in our platoon—one hundred and twenty pounds. No one could come up and say he needed a break, his pack was getting him down. Every time we took a break, Mike would scooch his pack against a tree and two of us would grab his arms and lift him up. It was too big for him to put on his back alone.”

  The war was undergoing a subtle transformation on September 14, the day Mike Thomas died. In Saigon that morning, General Creighton W. Abrams, the United States commander in Vietnam, paid an unusual visit to the residence of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to discuss President Nixon’s intention to withdraw 35,000 troops from Vietnam and to revise the military draft system back home. Some sixty-five miles from Saigon in the Vietnamese countryside, Lieutenant Thomas put on his pack and led his troops back from a mountain peak they had been guarding. A relief platoon had just arrived. Thomas was driving through a jungle trail in the second vehicle on the way back, with his radio operator at his side, when they were ambushed by Viet Cong. Everyone jumped for cover. The radio operator, who was overweight, got caught in his wires. Thomas crawled back from the brush and was untangling him when a mortar shell hit the hood and killed them both.

  Their deaths brought the American toll in Vietnam to 38,953. The Army posthumously awarded Thomas a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Good Conduct Medal. The mortar shell that killed Mike Thomas took other casualties as well. For a long time his father grieved that perhaps he had spent too much time glorifying war by talking so much about his own exploits in World War II. Greg Schlieve went through decades of psychological distress after returning from Vietnam. “I have always thought that I should have died, and not Mike. I am the one who was an asshole,” Schlieve said later. “I did not like God’s plan to take Mike and leave me.”

  Schlieve eventually came to believe that Vietnam led his entire generation into denial—soldiers and nonsoldiers alike. No one wanted to talk about the real reasons why he and Mike Thomas went to war or the reasons why Bill Clinton and his Rhodes friends did not. “I believe it is hard for a soldier to admit that he went to Vietnam and killed human beings just for the glory of it, or because he had nothing better to do,” Schlieve concluded. “But I also believe there is another truth to be told by the students, that they were protesting the war because they were deathly afraid of dying, which is what they should have felt if they were human. Approval and acceptance are of such importance to human beings. Antiwar protesters had smokescreens. They would get enormous approval from peers to be against it. And vets had their own smokescreens. We couldn’t see the truth about ourselves, either. We would say we were patriotic, responsible young men. That’s bullshit. Maybe ten percent of the true story. For a lot of us who went, we were going after the same thing—approval. We were trying to get it from our peers, from our father who had been in World War II. We were striving to get our father’s love. It’s hard to see the truth, and many will deny the truth before accepting it. And it doesn’t matter if you were a soldier fighting the war or a student fighting against it. We all had our reasons for taking up our battle cries, and I believe our battle cries very cleverly fooled us all.”

  BATTLE cries. They could be heard one weekend that September at the fashionable Martha’s Vineyard estate of John O’Sullivan, the antiwar son of an investment lawyer. Clinton and Stearns were there along with a few dozen former student leaders in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. The Vineyard conclave was a reunion one year after the chaos of Chicago. It was a long weekend of touch football, antiwar rhetoric, congressional vote counting, and posturing among a fraternity of ambitious young politicos. Like the teenagers who traveled to Washington for Boys Nation in 1963, like the Rhodes Scholars who sailed across the Atlantic in 1968, many in the crowd at O’Sullivan’s estate thought of themselves as future leaders of the free world. One of those in attendance, Taylor Branch, who had just arrived from Georgia where he had worked on a voter registration project, referred to the group as “The Executive Committee of the Future.” He said it with a touch of irony.

  In Georgia, Branch had seen an old black man dip inside his overalls and show him a hernia the size of a squash. Now he was surrounded by earnest young men in their early twenties sitting around calling senators by their first names. There was Frank (Church) and Harold (Hughes) and Gene (McCarthy) and George (McGovern). “The whole antiwar scene seemed inflated, unreal, compared with the experience in Georgia,” Branch recalled. “It was my first realization that people you thought were on the inside really are not so much inside or superior. There is a real nervousness for political people who feel important to get together and be together. This intense awareness of who was there and who had done what. It was the end of the sixties up there, but all those people had their tickets punched for the future.”

  Clinton took a long walk along the beach with David Mixner that weekend. They talked about their common roots from small-town America. Mixner had grown up in Elmer, New Jersey, a place not unlike Hot Springs in its patriotic fervor. Behind his tough facade as a movement leader whose name was constantly in the papers, Mixner confided to Clinton, he was just a rural kid who felt inadequate in this high-powered intellectual crowd and torn between his hatred for the war and his sense of duty. He felt more comfortable at a picnic in Elmer than at a dinner party hosted by a wealthy liberal. He did not even know how to eat an artichoke. Clinton reassured Mixner by telling stories about his life in Arkansas and how he felt torn between two worlds as well.

  “Are you embarrassed,” Clinton asked Mixner, “when you go home and meet someone who’s in the service?”

  “Yeah,” Mixner said. “I try to avoid them.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE LUCKY NUMBER

  RHODES SCHOLARS WERE provided rooms at their colleges only during their first year at Oxford. For the second year, they were expected to find their own digs. Rick Stearns rented a spacious, rectangular second-floor room at Holywell Manor overlooking a twelfth-century church and graveyard. The apartment had two appliances of note: a short-wave radio from which Stearns learned French and listened to the music of Berlioz, Schubert, and Mahler; and a space heater that created a warm comfort zone of perhaps ten feet. Anything on the far end of the room was apt to freeze. That included the tapwater in the sink as well as Stearns’s unanticipated lodger for the first month, his worried pal from Arkansas, Bill Clinton.

  No one had expected Clinton back for a second year. He slept on a rollaway bed. He was rootless, moving through Oxford with scruffy hair and a grubby Army coat, the preferred cold-weather garb of the student set. He seemed less connected to the establishment than at any other time in his life.

  When the American Oxonian, official journal of the Rhodes Association in the United States, published its list of scholars studying at Oxfor
d in the fall of 1969, Clinton’s name was not on the roll. He was, in fact, in school that year, but his unexpected last-minute arrival had kept him off the Oxonian list. Whether he was a scholar in spirit as well as fact is an altogether different question. The Michaelmas term of his second year was much like the Trinity term of his first—he had little or no interaction with Oxford dons. Zbigniew Pelczynski, who had struck up a harmonious relationship with him the first year before taking a sabbatical, returned to Oxford that fall unaware that Clinton was there. “I was under the impression that Clinton had left and been drafted,” Pelczynski recalled. “It was extraordinary and tragic. I might have been able to help him in a difficult time. I have a feeling he felt his future was so uncertain, his Oxford life was so hanging on a thread, that he simply stopped attending tutorials regularly.” Pelczynski later examined Clinton’s file to determine what had happened to him, and found that during the first term of the second year, Clinton’s relationship with another tutor was “very, very tenuous.” Or perhaps it was nonexistent. One contemporaneous account indicated that the politics don who was supposed to oversee Clinton was on sabbatical that fall.