First In His Class (24 page)

At Dartmouth, Reich acted as though he were a peer to the administrators and sometimes as if he were their boss. John Sloane Dickey, the college president, relied on him for advice on how to accommodate the contentious forces of youth, from the antiwar radicals to the black power advocates pushing for their own studies program and union.
They were
quite a pair, the talkative little Reich and the six-foot-six Dickey, a graceful Dartmouth scholar who would lope across campus with his golden retriever. Isaacson thought that Dickey had “begun listening to Reich out of sheer amusement and later listened out of sheer necessity.” It might not have been entirely coincidental that Dartmouth devolved into chaos soon after Reich departed for England.

Reich made several forays into the larger world of politics during his Dartmouth days, working in Robert Kennedy's Senate office the summer after his junior year, and returning to Washington the following October to participate in the March on the Pentagon, the one Clinton and his housemates had skipped. He served as a student coordinator for Senator McCarthy's antiwar presidential campaign in five states and ended his college days by being selected from the multitudes for a
Time
magazine cover
story on the class of 1968, placed on the cutting edge of a collection of 630,000 seniors that
Time
said included a fair share of draft dodgers and pot smokers but also “the most conscience-stricken, moralistic, and perhaps, the most promising graduates in U.S. academic history.”

At the time, Reich not only seemed more imposing than the six-foot-three Clinton, he also more clearly personified the agitated, rebellious mood of his comfortably born generation. Clinton brought with him the values of lower-middle-class Arkansas, not yet ready to reject an established order that he and his kinfolk were striving to become part of; not so eager to denounce American materialism when his family had never enjoyed it. Reich, who came out of the wealth and conservatism of suburban Westchester County, New York, fretted that his generation was being seduced by status and the accumulation of goods. He was rebelling against “status quoism,” he informed
Time
, and was promoting a new humanist ethic that allowed for self-initiative and creativity. “Destruction is the choice when creation is impossible,” he said, as a means of explaining the violence seeping into protest movements in 1968.

By the
second morning aboard The Big U., a North Atlantic storm pushing twenty-foot swells sent Reich back to his cabin where he remained thereafter, immobilized by seasickness, “vomiting quietly and wondering how [my] forefathers made it across.” He was by no means the only scholar
turning green. The
United States
was a rough-riding ship, designed with speed in mind at a time when the government thought it might be needed for troop transport. It rode light, fast, and high in the water, rather like a duck, rolling with the waves, undulating rather than chopping, its stern yawing.

Daniel Singer was also sick the rest of the trip: “It was horrible. I remember watching food slide around on the table. I spent most of my time in the hold.” George Butte never used his paid-for deck chair again. To Darryl Gless, a student of Shakespeare accustomed to losing himself in literary landscapes and castles dim and dank, the remainder of the trip evoked a familiar image, “one of extraordinary grayness.” Often penned indoors by the nasty ocean wind, the scholars and their friends set up camp in the bar and drank, smoked, and talked the days and nights away. It was in mid-ocean aboard The Big U, his stepfather dead and the memories of his abusive bouts of drunken rage buried with him, that Bill Clinton broke his long vow of alcoholic abstinence. Someone offered him a drink, and rather than automatically declining, he said to himself, “It'
s wrong
for me to be scared of this,” and he accepted. No longer “terrified of indulgence,” he became an occasional beer and wine drinker.

Clinton excused himself from the bar scene once and knocked on Reich's cabin door holding a tray of crackers and ginger ale. “I thought you might be needing these—heard you weren't feeling so well,” he said. As the story was retold and embroidered over the years, it seemed that Clinton devoted hours to nursing Reich back to health, forgoing all pleasure for the sake of a sequestered friend. In fact, Reich had several concerned visitors, and his wretched condition was one of the regular topics of discussion in the lounge, along with the draft and the war and the Democratic Convention in Chicago that August and the attractiveness of various young women aboard the ship.

Most conversations returned to each young man's draft status and how long he expected to last at Oxford before the fateful induction notice arrived. “A lot of us whose futures were uncertain were going to Oxford by the grace of God and weren't sure how long we would stay over,” Doug Eakeley said later. Hannah Achtenberg, a Smith College graduate on her way to St. Anne's to study economics, spent hours chatting with the Rhodes Scholars in the ship lounge. She thought that “
all the
boys were scared stiff because of the draft. Some didn't know whether they would last a month. Some were tortured about whether they should have left at all. Some were wondering whether they should ever go back. Everyone was trying to figure out how to manage the dilemma.” One scholar, Frank Aller from Washington, intimated that his inclination was to resist rather than accept induction.

Aller was at the center of the draft discussions, along with Strobe Talbott, who perhaps more than any other member of his Rhodes class captured the crosscurrents of the moment.
Talbott was
the cautious, correct, accomplished son of a liberal Republican investment banker from Cleveland, a straight arrow who, following in the tradition of his grandfather and father, was registered at birth for admission to Yale, and who would later become such an old blue that he would sing the Whiffenpoof song in the shower. Talbott had been trained at elite private schools for leadership by the establishment that was now unsettled because of the Vietnam War. At Yale he was Mr. Inside, close to campus officials and chairman of the
Yale Daily News
, at a time when the inside was in chaos, rebelling against itself. Disheveled and earnest in a prep school way, he was in the conservative wing of the antiwar movement and could never be a revolutionary. Unlike Reich, who painted his world with bold brush strokes, Talbott was precise and incremental. John Isaacson compared them by saying that “
Reich saw
nothing but forests, one forest after another, while Talbott saw every single tree in the forest.”

But Talbott was to Yale what Reich was to Dartmouth, a link to the administration and a student leader.
He and
his best friend at Yale, Derek Shearer, the son of the journalist Lloyd Shearer, met every month with Yale's president, Kingman Brewster, to talk about student social issues, including their proposal to make the institution coeducational. They also spent hours talking to Brewster about the war. Yale was one of the intellectual battlegrounds of the time. At Shearer's invitation, James Reston of the
New York Times
visited the campus and, after having lunch with Talbott, wrote a column saying that the Washington establishment was in trouble if it had lost the trust of responsible young men like Talbott.

Talbott's voice against the war in Vietnam turned out to be a surprisingly loud one. At the Yale class of 1968 commencement, he publicized a petition drive signed by four hundred of the one thousand seniors declaring that their opposition was so strong they would not accept conscription into the military. “
Many of
us simply could not, if ordered, pledge ourselves to kill or be killed on behalf of a policy which offends our deepest sense of what is wise and right,” Talbott said then. “We could not do so unless we were to betray our obligation to decide what is humanely permissible and morally possible for ourselves.”

Chosen to give one of two student speeches on Class Day during graduation week, Talbott directed his comments to the special circumstances of the young men in his class—the draft and the elimination of graduate school deferments. His class laced a paradox, Talbott said, for though it was “now no longer deferred and now faced with an order to report for induction, [it] is also the seat of the most intensive outrage against the war
which it is being ordered to fight. This generation, after graduating from studenthood to soldierhood, harbors the most deepseated opposition to the policies it is being ordered to defend.” Few members of his class had experience with the military, Talbott continued, but “all of us, the entire class of 1968, are in a sense already veterans of the war in Vietnam. We are certainly veterans of that dimension of the war which has brought such frustration and intellectual if not literal violence into our country, into our homes and into our lives.”

Now Vietnam reached them even in the darkest recesses of The Big U. When Talbott and his friends ducked inside the ship's cinema to watch a movie, they found themselves confronted by John Wayne starring in the Vietnam glory film,
The Green Berets
.

There was another aspect to the voyage that seemed even more incongruous—in retrospect, deliciously so. Also aboard the luxury liner, making his own escape of sorts to Europe, was Bobby Baker, the ultimate Washington wheelerdealer, a longtime LBJ crony who had been convicted in a splashy 1967 corruption trial of income-tax evasion, theft, and conspiracy to defraud the federal government. Baker knew that he was bound for prison sooner or later, whenever his defense lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, emptied his ample briefcase of appeals. In the meantime he would continue living the high life. Baker's set of first-class cabins lodged a traveling entourage that included some slick-haired sharpies in sharkskin suits and a few platinum blond escorts. “
The whole
scene was bizarre. Here were these bright academics slipping across the Atlantic to flee thoughts of the draft and Vietnam and
The Green Berets
is playing in the boat theater, and Baker and his boys are in the bar every time we go in there, trying to instruct us on the ways of the world,” recalled John Isaacson. “The whole crowd of us were appalled. They were racist and jingoistic and stupid. Here we were heading off as idealists and they persuasively convinced us that there was something sleazy and corrupt in the government.”

If the Rhodes boys were appalled by Baker, he was enthralled by them. Near the end of the voyage, Baker emerged at the center of a reception held in their honor. Rick Stearns, who was already active in the reform wing of the Democratic party, refused to attend “as a matter of principle.” But Clinton was there, standing at Baker's side, soaking in tales of power and intrigue. Robert Gene Baker of South Carolina had worked on Capitol Hill since he was a twenty-year-old page. When Lyndon Johnson became Senate Majority Leader, he tapped Baker for his staff and relied on him thereafter as a vote-counter, schmoozer, gossip, and bill collector. The other senators called him “Lyndon Jr.” or “Little Lyndon.” Clinton, a connoisseur of practical politics, loved to hear Baker's stories about Johnson and the Senate and the way things really worked. It was while watching his
performance with Bobby Baker that Strobe Talbott said he first understood Clinton's “
raw political
talent.”

T
HEY
reached Europe on the fifth day, first making a short stop early in the morning at Le Havre across the English Channel in France. Bob Reich stayed on deck, looking out at the port with a sense of awe, thinking to himself, “This is actually France!” He had never been overseas before. “I remember hearing people shout at each other in French. It seemed remarkable.” Ten of his fellow travelers skipped off the ship and roamed the dock, absorbing the foreign sounds and smells, but soon grew afraid that The Big U would leave without them. Hannah Achtenberg, who had become a little sister to the Rhodes crew, later remembered how they linked arms and started running wildly back to the boat together. As they clambered across the wharf, arm in arm, Strobe Talbott cried out, “What a motley group of Christian gentlemen!”

Late that afternoon they steamed past the Isle of Wight and landed at Southampton on the South English coast. The passengers lined the deck as The Big U eased up to the pier. Darryl Gless stood next to Clinton at the rail. They looked down and saw a slender man in big glasses, wearing a bowler and a long black raincoat, and holding an umbrella. “
Look at
him!” Clinton said, and they both laughed. He seemed to fit the upper-crust stereotype so perfectly that Clinton thought he might be an entertainer in period costume. In fact he was Sir Edgar Williams, who had served as chief of intelligence for British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery during World War II. Sir Edgar, the warden of Rhodes House, was a man of tradition who drank sherry every afternoon and quite enjoyed his annual trek to Southampton to meet the boat from America and escort the Yanks to their colleges at Oxford.

He rounded up his class of 1968 and directed them to a waiting bus for the ride north to Oxford. Two of the Rhodes group had shipped cars. Daniel Singer followed the bus in his old Volvo. It was a strange, disorienting ride through the dark English countryside that chilly October night.
Singer lost
the caravan at
the first
roundabout. The boys on the bus could see little but slanting rain pounding against the windows. When the bus reached Oxford, it deposited the scholars in clumps at each of the colleges to which they had been assigned.
Four of
them—Doug Eakeley of Yale, Reich and Isaacson of Dartmouth, and Bill Clinton of Georgetown—were dropped off at University College on High Street, a curving thoroughfare lined with the dark stone fronts of several medieval Oxford colleges.

At the front gate they were met by Douglas Millin, the college porter who was every bit as much an English character as Sir Edgar. Where the
warden came out of the officer corps, the porter was the veteran enlisted man—crusty, foul-mouthed, cynical, all-knowing, protective of his turf, scornful of his superiors. He took one look at the quartet and muttered, “
They told
me I was getting four Yanks and here they send me three and a half!” Then, turning directly to Reich, he bellowed: “You're the goddamn bloody shortest freaking American I've ever seen in my life! I didn't know it was possible for America to produce someone that freakin' small.” He assaulted each of the Americans in turn and intimidated them so thoroughly that they rarely dared venture too far into his cloistered world thereafter. All of them but one, that is. To Bill Clinton, this ornery porter was just another skeptical voter to swing his way.