First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Lyda had not seen Clinton recently and gasped at the sight of him, with his sloppy work clothes, scruffy beard, and bushy brown hairdo. His side-kick Stearns was equally grubby, sporting stringy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache that he hoped gave him the flair of Pancho Villa. Not that Clinton had lost his Arkansas charm. One night in Madrid the four had dinner with Lyda’s aunt and uncle, who were visiting their daughter, Peggy Freeman, who was also living there that season. Jack Holt, known as Poppa Jack, was the political operator in the Holt family, and Clinton spent hours after dinner debriefing him on events back home. Clinton thoroughly delighted Lyda’s Aunt Marge Holt as well, though not enough to make her overlook his appearance. When he left, she turned to her daughter and sighed, “My goodness, I just don’t know, Lyda dating someone with that long hair and beard!” Lyda Holt thought her aunt “was of a mind to grab some scissors and cut that beard off!”

  The quartet spent hours touring the Prado, the world-class art museum that so enthralled Lyda that she visited it every day. She was surprised by Clinton’s taste in artists. “I thought he would go for Velázquez, who was humanistic and painted his subjects so craftily they didn’t realize they were being psychoanalyzed for history. Wrong. He loved El Greco. Then I took him to the Goya room and he loved that. El Greco I thought would be too contemporary for him, but he wasn’t. And he was enthralled with Goya. Goya didn’t pull any punches. He was graphic about how the world was ripping apart.” Clinton also liked the work of Hieronymus Bosch and spent several minutes analyzing Bosch’s Table Top with the Seven Deadly Sins.

  When they went off to tour the rest of Spain, the matchmaking effort devolved into a picaresque farce. Stearns thought the women were too clothes-conscious. “The girls had a preposterous amount of clothes—one suitcase was just full of shoes!” Stearns recalls. And Lyda found Stearns deadly earnest and uptight. The lessons Clinton had tried to give him on how to make friends and woo women were not paying dividends here. “I was trying to get poor Rick to loosen up. Relax. This is Spain,” Lyda said later. “He very seriously asked me what I intended to do with my life. I said I would like to go into retail, run a gift shop someday. That might have horrified him. It seemed like the harder he tried, the worse it got.” And try Stearns did. When they reached Seville, he felt so guilty about the way he and Clinton looked compared with their dates—“they were showing up at dinner every night like fashion plates!”—that he shaved off his mustache. But he sensed that by that time all was lost. While Holt and Thrift went shopping, he and Clinton traipsed off to the Mexican pavilion at Seville’s fair and started drinking what looked like orangeade at five centavos a cup. It was a sweltering day on the Spanish plain, and the beverage seemed especially refreshing to the American lads. They assumed that it could not have much alcohol. Soon enough they were tipsy. They were sitting on a curb, giggling, when the young women found them—one of the few times in Clinton’s life when he appeared drunk.

  SOON after he returned to Oxford, Clinton again assumed one of his favorite roles, playing tour guide for an Arkansas friend visiting England. David Leopoulos, mourning the recent murder of his mother, who had been stabbed to death at her antique shop in Hot Springs, rode the train north from Camp Darby near Pisa with his Army buddy Steve Gorman. Clinton hoped that the holiday in England might ease the grief of his closest friend from his childhood. They had not seen each other for more than a year, the longest they had been apart since they were eight years old. Leopoulos was always hungering to spend time with Clinton, who represented to him not only the sweet memories of their childhood in Hot Springs but also an imagined future of unlimited promise. He boasted to Gorman of the Rhodes Scholar they were traveling to Oxford to see: “This guy’s going to be president someday.”

  But the trip to England proved anything but relaxing. The thumping, screeching, rumbling, and lurching of the train as it twisted through the Alps kept them up all night. When the clean-cut Army computer specialists, sleepless and exhausted, dragged their heavy canvas bags through the station in London, Gorman turned to Leopoulos and muttered, “Where the hell is he?”

  Leopoulos looked down the corridor and saw “this guy with long hair, a bushy beard, blue jeans” walking toward them, accompanied by a young woman. “There’s Bill,” he said.

  “He’s going to be president?” Gorman asked, incredulous.

  “Yeah,” said Leopoulos. “He’ll clean up okay.”

  Throughout the visit, Leopoulos’s mother’s death was never mentioned, a polite avoidance that David not only appreciated but thought was typical of Clinton. “Bill will not talk about awful, negative things with his old friends,” Leopoulos said later. “He would rather avoid them. Shut them out. But I knew that the feeling was there.”

  IN the final term of his second year at Oxford, Clinton showed signs of becoming a serious student. He attended special cram courses, known as revision courses, that were intended to prepare students for degree examinations. Alan Ryan, a politics don at New College, ran the revision courses in politics. “It was a sort of two-year polishing-up session so that people could come and revise like mad for the actual examinations—a sort of thirty-three things you need to know in thirty-five minutes type thing.” Though Ryan could not remember Clinton being in his class, university records indicate that he was. Univ politics don Maurice Shock, who had returned from a leave, became Clinton’s supervisor for his final term. Shock filed a report stating that Clinton was working hard but that his effort to fulfill the B. Phil. requirements was a race against time which he would most likely lose. In the month before the June examinations, Shock suggested that Clinton was not ready and should instead return for a third year, switching from a two-year B. Phil. to a three-year D. Phil., which required a dissertation of as much as 100,000 words.

  Most Rhodes Scholars stayed at Oxford for two years, though there was money available for a third year for students who needed the extra time. Clinton considered the third-year option, which several of his friends, including Talbott, were taking, but decided that getting the Oxford degree was not worth the delay it would cause in his long-range plans to run for public office. He had already been accepted into Yale Law School, as had several other Oxford friends, including Bob Reich and Doug Eakeley. Yale Law seemed like the place to be—both an important establishment credential and a gathering place for many of the most politically astute members of his generation.

  When Clinton appeared at Shock’s rooms at Univ College one day that spring, accompanied by Reich, and announced that he would not be staying for a third year, the don was neither surprised nor disappointed. “I didn’t take any kind of dim view that he decided not to take a degree,” Shock recalled. “It was clear that he had gotten a lot out of it.” Although Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House, took pride in the academic accomplishments of his foreign charges at Oxford, he nonetheless had a subtle appreciation for what the scholarship really meant to the Americans. “If you were an American and entirely on the make, you would do well in college, try for the Rhodes, get your name in the newspapers for winning one, and then resign it and go to Harvard or Yale Law School,” Williams noted. “The motivation is to get it. What you do here doesn’t really matter so long as you enjoy yourself. Don’t fail to take notice that it’s a free trip to Europe. Make friends. And, we hope, don’t grow to dislike the English.”

  In the end, nine out of the thirty-two members of the American Rhodes class of 1968 never received Oxford degrees, the highest percentage in the post-World War II period. Among Clinton’s closest friends, only Reich and Eakeley took their Oxford degrees in two years. Although each scholar had his own story, the larger trend seems obviously related to the times. To some extent it had to do with a cultural shift in which the new generation was challenging traditional totems of academic achievement. But the complications arising from the war and the draft were more important in their thinking. Many of those who eventually left without degrees, including Clinton, later expressed regret an
d wished that they could go back and complete that unfinished period of their lives. Although later in his career Clinton never spoke bitterly about his Oxford experience, he rarely ex-tolled those years, either. One reason was a touch of embarrassment: Oxford represented unfinished business. Perhaps that sense of mild regret and ambiguity served as the fitting metaphor for an extraordinary, unrepeatable era.

  When the Trinity term ended, Frank Aller headed for Spain to work on an autobiographical novel. Strobe Talbott traveled to Boston, where he continued his translation of the Khrushchev memoirs before returning to Oxford, where he and several members of the class, including Paul Parish and Frank Aller, would study for a third year. And Clinton flew to Washington, where he would spend the summer as a low-level organizer in Project Pursestrings, an effort to persuade Congress to cut off funding for the Vietnam War. In mid-July, he drove to Springfield, Massachusetts, for the wedding of college roommate Kit Ashby, who was then a Marine Corps officer on his way to Vietnam. Clinton, who had no money, slept in the basement at the house of the parents of the bride. Early on the wedding morning, the prospective bride tiptoed down to the basement where the ironing board was stored, to iron the train of her wedding gown. “I was trying to hold the dress so it wouldn’t fall on the floor; doing it quietly but with great difficulty,” Amy Ashby later recalled. “All of a sudden this voice says, ‘Why don’t you let me hold it.’ Bill had taken the white sheet he had slept on and wrapped it around himself. I was shocked. He looked like Jesus. I said, ‘God, Bill, you look like Jesus Christ!’ He helped me hold down the train.”

  The wedding at Sacred Heart Church reflected the crosscurrents of the era. The six ushers were Marines in dress uniform. The six groomsmen included the brothers of the bride and groom as well as the Potomac Avenue housemates from Georgetown, except for Tom Campbell, who was flying Navy planes in Japan. Ashby and many of his Marine buddies were on their way to Vietnam. The lasting memory that Amy Ashby had of the wedding reception in her parents’ backyard was of Clinton, bearded and shaggy, standing face to face with a crewcut soldier, arguing one more time about the war that defined their generation.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LAW AND POLITICS AT YALE

  LUCK AND FATE always seem to appear at the edge of the road as Bill Clinton drives along his highway of ambition, two friendly hitchhikers, thumbs out, ready to be picked up for stretches here and there when other passengers appear less attractive. Usually there are less mysterious ways to explain how he got to where he wanted to go. But in the fall of 1970, luck and fate not only went along for the ride, they crowded him out of the driver’s seat and took over the steering wheel. How else to explain the combination of circumstances that awaited him when he moved to Connecticut to begin law school?

  After his adventuresome and enlightening, though officially unfulfilled, academic spell at Oxford, Clinton returned to the United States anxious to launch his political career, yet reluctant to head back to Arkansas without the imprimatur of an advanced degree from an elite institution. He rejected the option of staying at University College for a third year and earning his degree there, as Oxford officials had invited him to do, largely because his political itch, his need to get on with his life, made another year at Oxford seem indulgent if not irrelevant. He had already discarded the idea of attending law school back at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville for a number of reasons, not least his desire to remain in the company of the brightest of his generation. Yale Law School offered the answers to his every need—political, academic, social, and personal.

  But if luck and fate played their crucial roles for Clinton at Yale, they had little to do with his getting in. He earned his place by distinction of his Rhodes Scholarship and by scoring high on the law boards. That said, there could not have been a better setting for him. Clinton, impatient, wanted to attend a prestigious law school and to immerse himself in American politics at the same time. Nowhere could this be done more surely than at Yale, which was not only elite and distinguished but also experimental and adaptable to the free-form culture of the era. The stereotype of an Ivy League law school’s first year as a rigorous boot camp where crusty old professors did their brutal best to exhaust and demoralize students was turned on its head at Yale Law. Grades had been all but eliminated before Clinton arrived, replaced by a more egalitarian pass—fail system that freed students to devote more time to the issues of the day, or whatever diversions caught their fancy, than to grinding out four-point averages on the way toward slots on the Yale Law Journal and partnerships at Wall Street firms.

  The prevailing sentiment at Yale Law was that you truly had to put your mind to it to flunk out. It was, as one professor said, a very tough country club to get into, but once you were in, you were in. With that surplus of academic freedom, Clinton needed only a political campaign to round out his days. As luck would have it, one was ready and waiting for him when he arrived, and not just any campaign but perhaps the nation’s most compelling Senate race. One of the candidates, Joseph D. Duffey, a thirty-eight-year-old peace and civil rights activist and ethics professor at Hartford Seminary, had emerged as a successor of sorts to Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, leading the antiwar legions on another long march for peace two years after the crusades of 1968. Fate would reappear before the school year ended, when Clinton encountered a young woman who was to bring order and clarity to his life’s ambition.

  BUSLOADS of student volunteers rumbled into Connecticut in 1970 for the “New Politics” campaign of Joe Duffey. The pilgrimage had started during the first week in May, when college political activism, which had been faltering, returned after the invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of four young protesters by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio. Suddenly the old mill towns of Connecticut were the places to be for the mobile young masses of the antiwar movement. The movement’s ambitious young leaders came to Connecticut in force, too, some of them the same aspiring activists who had met on Martha’s Vineyard a year earlier at the gathering that was half-jokingly dubbed “ The Executive Committee of the Future.” They were drawn by a sense that the war in Vietnam would only be ended by changing votes in Congress, one election at a time, and because they saw the Connecticut campaign as a rehearsal theater for the big show, the struggle for the future of the Democratic party that was sure to come in 1972.

  Tony Podesta, a McCarthy campaign veteran who then qualified as the living definition of a political junkie, brought Clinton into the Duffey organization. They had worked together that summer for several weeks at Project Pursestrings. Of all the antiwar groups and projects in Washington during that era, Pursestrings was among the most conventional. It had been funded with help from several establishment figures and several young liberal Republicans were recruited to give it a bipartisan flavor. The Pursestrings office on K Street served as a meeting place for the mainstream of the young antiwar activists, including several from the Vineyard crowd, who would organize during the day and at night gather at taverns or apartments to talk and drink and play poker and impress young women. Clinton was clean-shaven again. (The beard appeared and disappeared depending on where Clinton was and what was expected of him. His mother, who never liked the beard, believed that Clinton grew it because “he had a baby face and decided it would look better for him,” and that he was encouraged to keep it by people who would “come along and say he looked like Jesus—well, he thought that was wonderful!”)

  By the summer of 1970, Clinton was beginning to build a reputation within this network of high-achieving peers. There was an unspoken understanding in the group that most of them were skilled organizers and strate-gists but only a few had the aptitude and ambition to run for office themselves. According to Podesta, there “were two guys at Pursestrings we all thought would someday end up in a primary running against each other. One was Jim Johnson and the other was Bill Clinton.” Johnson was several steps ahead of Clinton on the political ladder at that point. He ran Pursestrings while Cli
nton was among the assistants. And Johnson thought big: looking around the K Street office one day, he remarked: “This would be a great place to run a presidential campaign!” He considered running for office, but never did. He assisted other politicians instead, including Edmund Muskie and Vice President Walter Mondale, and eventually became a corporate executive.

  Many from the Pursestrings contingent ventured up to Connecticut before the three-way August 19 Democratic primary, which Duffey won. The political rush that Podesta felt after that victory—which took him by surprise; he had already sent out a press statement with Duffey’s concession before the votes were counted—caused him, he said later, to lose his senses and contract his first case of Potomac fever. He agreed to coordinate the Duffey forces in the general election, which promised to be another colorful three-way contest involving Duffey, Republican Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., and the incumbent, Thomas J. Dodd, who was running as an independent after being dumped by the Democrats when the Senate censured him for misusing campaign funds. Podesta served as Duffey’s number-two aide, known to the troops as “Deputy Dog,” behind Anne Wexler, a party activist and McCarthy campaign veteran from Westport who was Duffey’s campaign manager and future wife.

  They had “the pick of the best young organizers around,” including Podesta’s younger brother John; Steve Robbins, another Pursestrings veteran; occasional help from the moratorium leaders Sam Brown, David Mixner, and John Shattuck; Lawrence Kudlow and Michael Medved (antiwar activists who later undertook the ideological transformation to neoconservatism); a crackerjack all-women advance team consisting largely of students from Smith College; and Bill Clinton, who was recruited to run the Third Congressional District based in New Haven. For someone with Clinton’s personality, a political explorer always searching for exotic places to discover and fresh faces to charm, Connecticut’s tough old Third Congressional District presented itself like a bright new world. New Haven and the inner ring of towns around it, with their mixture of Italian and Irish ethnics, their police club and parochial school cultures, their ward captain style of old-fashioned politics, challenged Clinton’s resourceful-ness. So too, in their own way, did the fashionable outer suburbs dominated by patrician Republicans, another breed virtually unknown in Arkansas. The district was Democratic in those days, but barely so, and there were enough Dodd loyalists in the ethnic neighborhoods and Republicans in the suburbs to make the antiwar theology professor from Hartford less than an easy sell.