Pogue was the house radical. He wore a leather jacket and drove a racy red Norton Commando motorcycle to school. When the beach house discussions strayed into the economic realm, Coleman remembers, “Don would accuse us of taking too superficial a look at it. He’d say, ‘This is part of the capitalist system that needs to be changed.’”
Coleman was the son of William T. Coleman, Jr., a black Republican civil rights lawyer who later became Secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration. His family “believed in integration and the idea of blacks assimilating and becoming part of white society,” and as part of his socialization process Coleman went to predominantly white private schools, first Germantown Friends in Philadelphia, and then Williams College in Massachusetts. At Williams, his sense of pride in being part of the black bourgeoisie was “promptly dealt with and taken apart” and he discovered the concept of black pride. He and his black compatriots at Williams took over the administration building one night. One fellow called himself the minister of defense and tried to surround the building with electrical wires to shock anybody who came in. On the third day of the takeover, Coleman’s mother obtained the telephone number inside the building, called him, and begged him to come out. “I said, ‘Mother, I’ve got to do this, please don’t embarrass me by calling anymore!’” By the time he reached Yale, Coleman had resolved the inner question of who he was. He could move between the black and white worlds comfortably by then, and in fact was known as an extremely friendly, laid-back student with a sardonic sense of humor and a tendency, like Clinton, to cram for exams.
“NEW Haven is the vile crotch of Connecticut,” Bob Reich wrote to his fellow Class of 1968 Rhodes Scholars in his first annual letter that winter for the American Oxonian magazine. “Travelers avoid it, letters and telephone calls rarely penetrate its polluted periphery. Those of us who have braved it for a year find ourselves strangely out of touch with the rest of the world, even when we leave it. Maybe we smell. As a result, news of our Rhodes group must be based primarily on rumor, scandal, muck-raking, hearsay, Bill Clinton, gossip, and intuition—not the most reliable sources, I’m afraid, and I apologize in advance for borderline fiction.”
The original plan was for Reich to live at the beach house with Clinton and Eakeley, his friends from Univ College, but he had decided that he wanted to stay in a dormitory to be closer to the Yale Law library. One semester in a dormitory proved enough even for him, however, and for the second semester he moved with Bekavac and two other students into a house on Crown Street that featured a front door painted bright orange. The landlord, a stranger to the cultural revolution exploding around him, was reluctant to rent to a mixed-sex group. He required his tenants to provide letters of approval from their mothers, but luckily for him, he rarely probed inside the orange door.
Reich was notable, wherever he went and whatever he was doing. Time magazine, which had featured him in a profile years earlier on the college seniors of 1968, sent a reporter up to Crown Street to file an update. The writer described Reich’s house as “an urban commune”—a hyperbolic touch that did not reassure Bekavac’s mother back in Clairton. And how had Reich changed since the fiery days of 1968? “Robert Reich is now less confident about how to achieve” social change, the reporter wrote. He noted that “life as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford’s 700-year-old University College gave him his first serious look at democratic socialism, a system he thinks is inevitable for the U.S.” Of his own future, Reich told Time, “I hope to be a kind of cross between a philosopher and a political hack.”
The Rhodes Scholars had scattered. Reich noted in his alumni letter. Tom Williamson was in Ethiopia working as a consultant on public policy. Danny Singer was at medical school at Harvard. Keith Marshall was an art curator in New Orleans. George Butte was fulfilling his conscientious objector obligation in Dallas. Rick Stearns was commuting between Oxford and Washington, where he was working on the nascent presidential campaign of George McGovern. John Isaacson was “living it up in the nether-world of political hackery, and occasionally attending classes at Harvard Law School.” A batch of scholars were still at Oxford, including Bo Jones, who was spending “an idyllic year in a cottage fifteen miles outside Oxford”; Mike Shea, who had been relieved from his Army obligation because of his bum knee; Paul Parish, who had returned from his nervous breakdown and was finishing his honors courses at Christ Church College, still unsure about when he might serve out his conscientious objector requirement; Darryl Gless, who missed getting drafted in the lottery by one number and was finishing his advanced degree in literature; and Strobe Talbott (“Izvestia’s ‘rising young CIA agent,’” Reich wrote), who was completing the Khrushchev memoirs and trying to get back into the Soviet Union.
And what had become of Frank Aller, the brilliant, troubled Rhodes draft resister? “Frank Aller made a traumatic reentry into the States, having missed his original induction day,” Reich wrote. “Much to everyone’s relief, a new induction day never came, and Frank spent the remainder of the year safely in Newton, Massachusetts, doing research into cable television. With the recent thaw in China’s foreign policy, Frank hopes to be able to continue his Oxford studies on the Chinese mainland. He is now in Spokane, Washington.”
Reich’s account was incomplete. Aller traveled on a much more difficult journey that year than merely heading from Oxford to Newton to Spokane. When the Leckford Road gang parted company at the end of their second year at Oxford, Aller went to Spain to work on an autobiographical novel about a draft resister. It became his obsession and he continued writing it early that fall in Oxford and London. He wrote the novel twice through and never considered it done, yet the very act of writing it had a profound effect on him. “My whole experience with the book … was really the first time I tried to deal honestly with the questions of draft resistance and exile,” he later confessed in a letter to Brooke Shearer, who was then studying at Stanford. “It was an exciting but also sobering experience, as I tried to assess what the decision meant after two years of living with it and what it was likely to mean in the long run. At the end of the period when I was actively revising the second draft … I realized that I was being led toward another decision just as difficult as the first one, if not more so.”
Aller did not regret his decision to resist, nor consider it futile; but in grappling with its consequences while writing the book, he concluded that the symbolism of his action had outlived its usefulness. By early November 1970, he had come to believe that “the effect has ended, or nearly ended.” With his effectiveness diminished, he and his “fellow criminals and conspirators,” he wrote, could have “very little influence on what happens in the US in the future. Out of sight is out of mind. It’s taken me some time to realize that.” His positions on the war and the direction of American politics had not changed, but he was starting to feel irrelevant. He dreamed about going home. “To stay in this situation is to have my life defined by the war in Vietnam—sort of like being locked into a political time-capsule.” Finally, the practical burdens of his decision were wearing him down as well—“the problems of passports, immigration requirements, citizenship regulations etc.—or my family.”
Aller decided to come home. It was not an easy decision for someone who had been transformed into a martyr, a hero, by his Oxford friends. Brooke Shearer was but one of many friends Aller felt compelled to write to and warn about his decision, to “reassure them—when they hear about it—that I haven’t suddenly lost control of what few mental faculties I originally had.” Although he spent six weeks, after turning away from the second draft of his novel, trying to find another course of action, he could see “no other exit.” It had become “a question of realizing when you’re on a losing track—and doing something about it—or letting life pass you by.”
When Aller finally arrived in Spokane, he was met by his family and a U.S. marshal, who was there to arrest him. As he walked off the plane, Aller made a gesture—hands up and bent at the elbows, fists closed, a
s though he expected to be handcuffed on the spot, but the marshal waited until they were in the car before he made the arrest. After his arraignment, Aller flew back to Boston, where he visited a draft lawyer who sent him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist concluded after one visit that Aller was severely depressed and unqualified for military service. With the psychiatrist’s letter in hand, Aller flew back to Spokane. He finally took his draft physical, which he failed. He was reclassified 1-Y, a deferment that protected him from service except in case of a national emergency. The next day his indictment for draft resistance was dropped. It was a rather anticlimactic ending to a three-year drama. Now Aller was again faced with the prospect of what to do with the rest of his life. He bounced back and forth between Spokane and Los Angeles trying to line up work as a journalist.
Clinton went out to California for a brief gathering of the Leckford Road housemates late that spring. They gathered at Lloyd Shearer’s house and at Brooke Shearer’s on Arbor Road in Menlo Park: Clinton and Aller in their beards, Talbott in his fine mustache. Shearer, an English literature major who specialized in Virginia Woolf, was part of a feminist consciousness-raising group that met at her house. The boys were not invited, and in “a show of defiance, they went bowling, their feelings hurt.” They also went to Santa Cruz, played football on the beach, walked the hills of San Francisco, and went to the movies. It was, for the boys from Leckford Road, their last fine time together.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RODHAM AND CLINTON
BILL CLINTON AND Hillary Rodham. From the opening round of courtship, here was an evenly matched romance and a fair fight. Two strong-willed personalities—ambitious, socially conscious, and political—they were introduced to each other in the cafeteria during the first week of law school by Bob Reich, who had known Rodham since her undergraduate days when she had traveled from Wellesley up to Dartmouth to attend a meeting Reich had organized of student leaders active in the academic reform movement. “I said, ‘Bill, this is Hillary; Hillary, this is Bill,’ but obviously it didn’t take,” Reich recalled. Not then, at least. In their later remembrances of their courtship, they both replaced his prosaic account with a more melodramatic scene. In their version, seemingly accurate except for its deletion of the Reich introduction, they circled each other for weeks before exchanging their first greetings. Clinton followed Rodham out of a civil liberties class, thought about an effective approach, then backed away. Rodham spotted Clinton in the law school lounge boasting about—yes, of course—the watermelons in Hope, and in her diligent fashion, unobtrusively, she began gathering information about him.
One day Rodham was sitting at a table piled with books, journals, and notepads in the library reading room, a peaceful wood-paneled chamber with high ceilings and light-flooded Gothic-arched windows on the third floor of the law school. Clinton loitered in the middle distance with a clear line of sight down the narrow-shafted room, pretending to study. Jeff Glekel, an editor of the Yale Law Journal, provided cover, hovering next to Clinton and trying to persuade him to try out for the prestigious journal. Struggling to hold Clinton’s attention, Glekel laid it on thick: the best judicial clerkships, the most powerful law firms in Manhattan, the elite law school faculties—all of these awaited the Journal’s select editors. If he had said the State House, Congress, the White House, perhaps the sales pitch would have worked. As it was, Clinton said that he did not want to do it. His plan after law school was to go home to Arkansas and run for public office. Whether he wrote for the Yale Law Journal, he noted, did not matter to anyone down there. Clinton seemed inattentive in any case. He was looking across the room at Rodham. Soon enough she walked toward his table. “Look,” she said. “If you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves. I’m Hillary Rodham.” Clinton was knocked dumb by Rodham’s bold approach, her classic pickup line, and scrambled to remember his own name.
On their first outing, Clinton and Rodham went together to sign up for second semester classes. When they reached the front of the line, the registrar was puzzled by Clinton’s presence. “Bill, what are you doing here?” came the query. “You registered yesterday!” Clinton and Rodham then went for a walk and toured the college art museum, which happened to be closed, but which Clinton charmed his way into anyway by convincing a custodian to open it up for a private tour after he and Rodham picked up some trash. Clinton “locked in on” her after that. Rodham focused on him as well. He was that rare guy, she told friends, who did not seem afraid of her. It might have been that he was more adept at concealing his fear. Rodham’s intellect, her reputation, her refusal to be cowed or wowed, seemed to attract him and scare him at the same time. He prepped his housemates before each of her visits to the beach house, hoping they could help impress her. It took a little time, Don Pogue said later, “before she decided he was going to be up to snuff. She had to be encouraged to see that point of view. She was brought out to the beach house to engage in lively conversation. We were all recruited to participate in it.”
Rodham expressed mixed feelings about Clinton’s style, especially the way he accentuated his Arkansas roots. Like so many contemporaries who had encountered him before her, she was taken by his sense of place, a rarity among students eager to shed their middle-class pasts. “He cared deeply about where he came from, which was unusual,” Rodham said later. “He was rooted and most of us were disconnected.” But she was not bamboozled by his down-home palaver. “They were funny together, very lively. Hillary would not take any of Bill’s soft stories, his southern boy stuff,” according to Pogue. “She would just puncture it, even while showing a real affection. She’d say, ‘Spit it out, Clinton!’ or, ‘Get to the point, will you, Bill!’ ” Housemate Doug Eakeley remembered Rodham, in her sharp voice, interrupting Clinton in the middle of one of his Arkansas tales with the mocking reprimand, “Come off it, Bill!” Her midwestern directness, Eakeley thought, was “the perfect counterpoint to Bill’s southern charm.” Her focused intellect was also a perfect counterpoint to his restless, diffuse mind, and made her the superior law student. In one class they took together during the spring semester of 1971, Tom Emerson’s Political and Civil Rights, Emerson kept private numerical grades even though the report cards were pass-fail. He gave Rodham a 78, one of the highest grades, and Clinton a mediocre 70.
There was, without stretching the point, a certain reversal of gender stereotypes in the Clinton-Rodham match. Steve Cohen, who was among Rodham’s circle of friends from her first year at law school, concluded that “Clinton had the charm and the sex appeal whereas Hillary didn’t so much. Hillary was straightforward, articulate, and self-possessed.” Yet within a month of meeting Clinton, Rodham was talking about his depth. Some of her friends thought Clinton was interesting but too eager to be the focus of attention. Rodham decided there was more to him than that. “There’s lots of layers to him,” she told Cohen one day. “He’s more complex than I thought. The more I see him, the more I discover new things about him.” She also told Cohen about her new friend’s determination to do something with his life, which was very much what she was about as well.
At the time they met, Rodham, though one year younger, had developed more of a reputation as a student leader. When Clinton was in the first year of his Oxford studies, she was at Wellesley College outside Boston, where her intellect helped her school win several matches on the College Bowl television quiz show. She also got her picture in Life magazine for delivering a commencement speech that was seen as a statement of purpose for her generation—philosophically curious, politically committed, and passionately antiwar. She arrived at Yale Law in the fall of 1969, one year ahead of Clinton, during the height of the hippie-radical period there, with an activist reputation. “The story of what she had done at Wellesley preceded her. We were awed by her courage,” recalled Carolyn Ellis, one of her law school friends. “She arrived with many of us thinking of her as a leader already. We had seen her picture i
n the national magazine and here she was, three months later, in our class.”
Rodham quickly befriended the antiwar activists in the class, including Cohen, Greg Craig, and Michael Medved, three leaders of the October 15 moratorium in New Haven, one of the largest regional demonstrations that day. Craig, who had delivered a class day speech at Harvard that had also gained national recognition, thought of Rodham as a “mainstream, conscientious, politically astute person who still believed in American institutions.” In the context of Yale Law School, “that meant she was conservative.” Craig exaggerated to make a point. Rodham more accurately was in the middle of the flux at Yale Law. She was, “like ninety-five percent of her classmates, passionately convinced that the war made no sense.” She “looked like a hippie,” according to Carolyn Ellis. She kept her hair long and flowing and came to class in sandals and blue jeans. Nothing about this attire made Rodham stand out from the other young women there. She wore thick glasses and was constantly changing the frames. Ellis regarded Rodham’s frame-changing habit as “her whimsy—just the way she would change her hairstyle later, she changed her glasses all the time then.”
What set Rodham apart was her combination of social commitment and pragmatism. During her first year, third-year students James Blumstein, Stanley Herr, and Jack Petranker founded the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, a leftist alternative to the Yale Law Journal. In the egalitarian ethic of the time, there was no hierarchy at the review. Rodham served as a commentator who critiqued articles before publication. The first volume featured an article written by Blumstein and Jim Phelan entitled “Jamestown 70.” The authors, thinking that America was on the brink of insurrection, counseled against armed revolt on practical grounds, but suggested that their alienated generation should gain control of a state where they could experiment with different lifestyles, marital rules, and patterns of democracy: “What we advocate is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process.” They linked their proposal to the American frontier ethic, “where alienated or ‘deviant’ members of society can go to live by their new ideas; providing a living laboratory for social experiment through radical federalism.”
First In His Class Page 34