First In His Class (18 page)

It was
a summer of uncertainty. In his philosophy class he read the works of Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre. For a graduate-level class on U.S.
relations in the Far East, he prepared a twenty-eight-page paper with ninety-two footnotes on the events in August 1964 that led to congressional approval of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution—“the one that gave LBJ his blank check in Vietnam,” as Clinton told Denise in a letter. The material he needed for that report was available in the back room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was in the midst of historic hearings on the subject. Chairman Fulbright was by then convinced that he and other senators had been lied to by President Johnson about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin three years earlier—reports of aggression against U.S. vessels by North Vietnamese gunboats had been exaggerated. The adminis-tration, Fulbright said, “had already set its policy intentions and used the attack to implement them, while misrepresenting the actual event.” He also now believed that the congressional resolution resulting from that deception did not authorize the administration to wage full-scale war. Clinton's paper reached the same conclusions.

For the first time,
Clinton was
overtaken by feelings of disillusionment. Not only did he disagree with his party's policies in Vietnam, policies that had escalated the war to the point where thirty thousand young men were being drafted each month, but he was worried that the nation's commitment to civil rights was diminishing. In a letter to Denise, he fretted that the status of race relations “and the good Americans who want to bomb North Vietnam into the Stone Age” made him wonder “if our nation has any shared values.”

In the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin hearings, Clinton was assigned a rather odd diversion. Sharon Ann Evans, who had just been named Miss Arkansas, came to Washington for a day on her way to the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Fulbright's office had been asked to provide her with an escort. Clinton got the job. He told Denise that it was because Evans was a six-footer and “I was the only one in Fulbright's office over six feet.” It turned out that they had several things in common. Both had lived in Hope as youngsters. Evans's roommate at Ouachita Baptist University was Linda Yeldell, the younger sister of Clinton's friend and neighbor, Carolyn Yeldell. But they were political opposites. When Evans was asked which dignitary she would like to meet during her visit, she chose FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Clinton cooled his heels in the lobby of the FBI building as Evans disappeared into Hoover's inner chamber, shook the director's hand, and chatted for five minutes, overcome, she said, by “the power, the mystique.” When she emerged, it was obvious from the look on Clinton's face that he disapproved. She thought that he did not like her because she would rather meet Hoover than Fulbright.

In fact Clinton was infatuated with Evans, as he was with many young women that summer. He and Denise Hyland had slowly broken off the
romantic side of their relationship, though not their friendship. As their college years were nearing an end, they came to a mutual understanding that neither one of them had an interest in marriage and that it was time for them to see what else was out there. Clinton saw a lot out there. He was dating several times a week, according to one friend, “like a guy getting out of prison.”
He stayed
that summer at the house on Potomac Avenue with Kit Ashby and Jim Moore, and constantly seemed to show up with a new date he had met on Capitol Hill. Moore thought it was “a revelation” to Clinton that “there was a whole culture of people in Washington just there for a few years to have a good time and not focused on long-term relationships. He had met women on the Hill before but never followed up on the opportunities. Then he became a free agent, and young ladies figured it out, and it was, ‘Holy shit, Bill Clinton is free and available and looking forward to having a good time!'”

Only the summer before, Clinton had said that the Arkansas heat was burning Washington out of his system. Now it seemed that the swirl of Washington was distancing him some from his Arkansas roots. He got home for a brief visit in early September before the start of his senior year. Several boys from his high school class had quit college or flunked out and joined the Marines.
Duke Watts
was about to leave for boot camp when Clinton arrived back in town. All summer, Watts and Joe Newman, one of Clinton's close friends from band, had been “chasin' girls” in bars and restaurants. One Friday night, as Watts later remembered it, “I was all set to go, duded up real nice, when the phone rang and it was Joe, and Joe said, ‘Clinton's in town and he wants to go with us.' I kind of winced a little but said all right and he tagged along.”

They went to Coy's Steakhouse on the edge of Hot Springs. Watts looked at Clinton and saw an alien being. He could not imagine how this fellow, the same guy who was so coveted by young women in Washington, could ever get to first base. Clinton was wearing sandals. His hair had grown out a little. Watts thought that he and Joe “knew how to dress for the women,” whereas Clinton “wasn't well groomed, to put it mildly; I don't know if he had any money or even ate there at Coy's. His demeanor wasn't equal to ours.” Watts had joined the Marine Corps and was proud of what he had 11done. He had it in his mind that he had chosen a path of honor. He was “thinking all these noble thoughts.” And then Clinton started talking about the war and how strongly he opposed it. There were, Watts thought,“some anxious moments there. I know I was glad when the night was over.”

CHAPTER SIX
 
ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE

T
HE FIVE YOUNG
men who shared the white house on Potomac Avenue for their senior year in college were “boringly respectable,” according to Tommy Caplan. This was the fall of 1967, the season that followed the summer of love in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, the time when college campuses across the nation became theaters of protest, scented by tear gas and the sweet smell of pot, echoing with the chants of “One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war!” Even the moderate young men and women of Georgetown were encountering the culture of the sixties. Allen Ginsberg, a veteran guerrilla fighter in the battle against boring respectability, visited Gaston Hall that school year and asked how many happy Hoyas in the crowd had ever smoked marijuana. He smiled beatifically when fifty hands rose. Perhaps to some of his high school classmates back in Hot Springs, Bill Clinton seemed a shade on the rabble-rousing and unkempt hippie side, but within the wider spectrum of sixties behavior, Clinton and his housemates were trim and tame.

These were five collegians, after all, who celebrated Caplan's twenty-first birthday that fall by flying up to New York City with their dates to dine at the fashionable “21”—not exactly an alternative food co-op. It was an elegant affair, staged in an upstairs room. Ashby sat across the table from one of Caplan's high society friends, Jamie Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy's younger stepbrother, watching in wonderment as the son of the ruling class ate an artichoke with his hands, something the Texan had never seen. A trip to Manhattan with Caplan, the bon vivant of the housemates, was always a grand and potentially awkward step into the high life for his college pals: this time Caplan underwrote the entire feast, with bottles all-around of Dom Pérignon, and then booked rooms at the Carlyle.

In a moment of frustration that month, someone had scrawled “George-town Gentlemen Are Lapdogs of the Establishment” on a plywood fence surrounding the site for a new library on campus. Few on the hilltop felt compelled to dispute the insult or respond with graffiti. While one poll indicated that a majority of Georgetown students opposed the war in Vietnam, for the most part they had not yet soured on the system. One of the magnets that drew them to the School of Foreign Service was its ready access to the power establishment: Congress, the White House, Washington society, the Department of State, the Pentagon. The Potomac Avenue house was typical in that sense. Two of
the five
senior friends worked on Capitol Hill: Clinton for Senator Fulbright and Ashby for Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. Caplan volunteered in the office of Senator Robert Kennedy. The other housemates had military attachments: Campbell was preparing to fly planes for the Marines after graduation, and Moore, an Army brat, was buying food for the group at the commissary at Fort Myer across the Key Bridge in northern Virginia.

Lapdogs or not, none of the Potomac five were among the fifty thousand “shaggy doves” who gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial on October 21 in the first mass demonstration against the Vietnam War, the March on the Pentagon later celebrated in prose in Norman Mailer's
Armies of the Night
and in poetry in
Robert Lowell
's “October and November” (“… then to step off like green Union recruits for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers, the notables, the girls … fear, glory, chaos, rout … our green army staggered out on the miles-long green fields, met by the other army, the Martian, the ape, the hero, his new-fangled rifle, his green new steel helmet”).
Clinton shared
the conviction of many of those peace recruits that the war in Vietnam was wrong, but his opposition remained a conviction, not activist, rooted in the documents he read at the foreign relations committee and in the arguments of Chairman Fulbright.

Fulbright, in his book
The Arrogance of Power
, presented a clear philosophy on political dissent, both its vital role in a democracy and its most effective means of expression, and his views played powerfully on the mind of his clerk, who cherished his autographed copy of the treatise. “
To criticize
one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment,” Fulbright wrote there. “It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences that the country can do better than it is doing…. In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.” But for dissent to be persuasive, Fulbright argued, it had to be presented in less raucous ways than the street demonstrators were deploy-ing. “The most effective dissent is dissent expressed in an orderly, which
is to say a conservative, manner,” he added. “The student, like the politician, must consider not only how to say what he means but also how to say it persuasively. The answer, I think, is that to speak persuasively one must speak in the idiom of the society in which one lives.”

Speaking the idiom, wherever he was, ranked among Clinton's greatest talents. By his second year in Fulbright's shop he was a certified Hill rat who knew the lingo of the place, the tunnels and subway shortcuts, the lore, all the latest rumors and inside stories about LBJ and the frailties of senators who only a year earlier he had viewed as gods. He loved nothing more than to talk politics, and often on Fridays he would find his way over to the House office of freshman congressman David Pryor for late afternoon bull sessions. “
Sometimes he'd
bring a friend over and we'd just sit around and talk politics for an hour or so,” Pryor says. “He was inquisitive. He wanted to know why people did things and how the system worked.”

Clinton's manner with congressmen was similar in many respects to the way he dealt with professors: by showing a keen interest in their stories and special concerns, he gained insight and scored brownie points at the same time. But this was not necessarily the manipulation of a sycophant or social climber. His interest in people seemed egalitarian.
His closest
friend at work was Bertie Bowman, the fellow back room boy and former Senate janitor who was the only black on the foreign relations committee staff. They would talk all the time and sing duets together in the back room while they were working. Sometimes they would be walking down the hall together, running errands, singing “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Return to Sender” in harmony. They both liked Elvis. Bowman was sixteen years Clinton's senior, yet their relationship transcended age and race. “He would say, ‘Come on, go here with me,' and I'd say I had to check with my wife, and he'd say she can come, too,” Bowman later recalled. “Sometimes white folks invite you only to certain things, other things they don't think of you. Bill would introduce me to whites as an equal, not as ‘Bertie' and ‘Mister.'”