First In His Class (27 page)

The porter's lodge was a twenty-by-eight-foot room on the left side of the main gate. Two paned windows faced High Street and two tall windows looked back toward the college and the Front Quad. A small black door on the far side led into a hideaway bedroom. The T-shaped counter inside the lodge was crammed with keys, notes, mail, and card indexes. There were two telephones on the wall, and two chairs and a coin-operated heater behind the counter. This was the domain of Douglas—and, soon enough, of his buddy from Arkansas. Not long after the Rhodes Scholars arrived, Clinton entered the porter's turf and adopted it as his own. He spent hours in the lodge, answering the phone, passing out keys, spreading and gathering gossip. Isaacson would never forget the odd image of the two of them. “They'd be sitting there, their feet up on the counter, two bull-shitters swapping stories. Douglas would tell stories about the war and Bill would tell stories about Arkansas. Anyone who entered had to pay homage to them. It reminded me of the stores up in Maine where we'd go fishing when I was a kid. You'd walk in and there'd be the proprietor and a friend, and they'd look at you like you were an alien entering their world. That was the porter and Bill.”

Several more hours of Clinton's week were applied to another aspect of English life previously unknown to him: rugby. He was more successful at conquering the porter's lodge than at mastering this sport, but he gained some measure of esteem from his British mates for exuberance. The Univ squad practiced on the pitch off Folly Bridge Road every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and played matches against other colleges on Wednesdays. Univ was in the first division of Oxford colleges and supported two teams. Clinton played on the second fifteen. Chris McCooey, the Univ star and club secretary who played on both teams, thought that
Clinton “wasn't
very good, but it didn't matter because what he contributed was wonderfully American enthusiasm. Actually, a bit much enthusiasm. He flattened a guy in the first lineup who didn't have the ball. When the ref said you don't do that I had to explain, ‘sorry, he's from America, where you can flatten anyone.ߣ” Clinton was flattened himself more than once after getting his feet crossed while participating in the crablike formation known as a scrum. He played in the second row of the scrum, where his job was to push hard and try to make the ball go back to his side.

After the rugby matches, the players would repair to the clubhouse for
beers or go down to the buttery, the wine cellar at Univ, for wine and cheese served up by the college bartender. The cellar was located under the dining hall, about fifty yards from Helen's Court, convenient and cheaper than the nearby pubs. The pub favored by Clinton and his Rhodes friends was the Bear, whose old walls displayed the colorful ties of every school at Oxford. Clinton was a modest drinker by now. Two drinks and his face would turn bright red.
He was
partial to the shandy, a concoction of lemonade and beer. He and some of his pals took rather well to the uncelebrated British fare, especially steak and kidney pie and shepherd's pie. To further clog their arteries, they spent many mornings at another favorite hangout, George's, a sawdust-floored breakfast nook, consuming mountains of grease: eggs, bacon, and bread all fried in the same pan.
Rick Stearns
had a soft spot for the famously unhealthy dish known as Scotch Eggs, hard-boiled eggs wrapped in minced pork and fried in breadcrumbs. But some British food was scorned by the Americans, most notably the kippers that the scouts would occasionally bring around at breakfast. James Shellar, a Univ-based Rhodes Scholar in the class ahead of Clinton's, would “look at that fish-eye staring up from oil and say, ‘Oh,
no thank
you.ߣ”
He was
not alone. “It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes when they came around with the kippers—six kippers could feed the whole hall. The rest of us would settle for cornflakes.”

While Clinton engaged his British mates playing rugby, Bob Reich delighted them on stage. He was an actor and director who took part in every Univ production. That fall, outside an audition room, he caught sight of a seventeen-year-old girl who took his breath away. He was “too timid to ask her name at the time,” and when she left, he feared that he would never see her again. So he decided to direct his own play,
The Fantasticks
, and when the girl showed up for auditions, he cast her in the leading role. Claire Dalton later became his wife. Reich was more widely known around Univ than his big southern sidekick. It was an artsy college whose master was Sir John Maud, later to be known as Lord Redcliffe-Maud, a tall and distinguished statesman, after-dinner speaker, and actor. His wife was a pianist who brought fine concerts to the college. The Mauds and all the senior fellows at Univ enjoyed Reich for his dash and wit and theatrical talent. John Albery, then a chemistry don, thought of him as “
small and
twinkly, and very clever, very clever indeed.”

By the undergraduates at Univ,
Reich and
Clinton were viewed almost as an American tag team. It seemed to Chris McCooey that they “were kind of a double act, those two—Bill was big and lumpy and overweight, and Reich I guess was kind of a certified dwarf. It was like Laurel and Hardy. And they were very good value. They added a lot of fun to the college.” Wilf Stevenson also described Clinton and Reich as a team. “They were
quite a sight, swaggering around side by side. They were always deeply into some argument and you'd hear a snippet as they passed by. ‘No, you're completely wrong about that,' one would be saying about some political theoretician. ߣHe was saying something else in that part of the book!ߣ”

When he had surveyed Oxford to his satisfaction, Clinton began taking road trips with his friends. They called themselves the “Roads Scholars.” Clinton was known for his wanderlust: anyone who wanted to leave could call him and be fairly sure of landing a traveling companion.
They hitchhiked
everywhere, and used their college ties—or scarves, literally—to help them along. Each school at Oxford had a tie and a scarf, with the college colors. According to Mike Shea, “You'd put your scarf around your neck and get some interesting rides and conversations. It worked better during the daylight, when the striped scarves were clearly visible. One weekend Shea and Clinton hitchhiked to Nottingham for the weekend and headed back later than they had intended on Sunday night. It was raining and miserable and they stood by the side of the darkened road for hours before anyone stopped. Looming in the gloom in his long coat late at night, Clinton was not too inviting to pick up.” At the time, Shea thought he might be “a lot better off out there with Bob Reich.”

Clinton's frequent companion on the road was Tom Williamson, with whom he hitchhiked to London and back several times, and all across the United Kingdom, including a trip to Dublin to see the woman Williamson had been romancing since they met on The Big U crossing the Atlantic. The picturesqueness of the blossoming friendship between Williamson and Clinton, the only black Rhodes Scholar and the aspiring Arkansas pol, was not lost on them.
At Clinton's
suggestion one day, to break up the tedium on the road, they reversed roles of the worst black and white stereotypes. When cars stopped to pick them up, Williamson sat in the front with the driver and ordered Clinton to the back, Williamson assuming the haughty airs of a southern master, Clinton the shuffling humility of a servant-slave. They enjoyed each other's sense of humor. Williamson would poke fun at Clinton, saying, “You know, Bill, it's really nice that you are progressive and openminded here in England, but if you want to go back to Arkansas and make a political career, you'll have to make compromises. You'll have to be a Dixiecrat.”

Thoughts of Arkansas and his political future were never far from Clinton's mind. That fall a large group of Rhodes Scholars took a bus up to Stratford from Oxford to see a production of
King Lear
. Darryl Gless, the Shakespeare student, sat next to Clinton on the ride back.
Clinton talked
to him about the play all the way back, relating it to his life in different ways. He told Gless that he was moved by the scene in Act III when Lear is turned out of Gloucester Castle onto the heath and takes shelter in a
hovel where he encounters the poor for the first time. “That scene,” Gless recalled later, “prompted Bill to talk about his eagerness to go back to Arkansas—to give something back to the place that gave him opportunities that his family could not have bought. As we were riding home that night, Bill talked about his mother, a nurse like mine. He told me about his father and his stepfather, who had died, like mine. We were both from small towns in rural states. We talked a lot about our lives, but he kept coming back to his aspirations and the play. He was struck that Lear had been on the throne for decades before he learned the first thing about how his subjects lived.”

Clinton had
a fascination with how other people lived. Curiosity about the people around him was one of his strongest traits, the main intersection of his gregarious, empathetic personality and his political ambition. Some people watched Clinton in action and marveled at his big heart. Paul Parish could see it “any time you were with him and you met a third person, a friend of yours who Bill did not know. That friend would end up telling Bill things about himself. The kinds of things Bill brought out in people were the kinds of things you wanted to be around. People's souls shined in their faces when they were talking to Bill.” There was another dimension to it. Clinton had already heard the stories about how Lyndon Johnson could tell whether someone was for him or against him with one look into the person's eyes.

He was always searching out more eyes to practice on. After watching him operate that fall at Oxford, John Isaacson, the Dartmouth debater who had political dreams of his own, was intrigued by Clinton's political aptitude in artful conversation. Isaacson concluded that Clinton “had two moves, the Sponge move and the Radar move. The Sponge move was to soak information and give it back. The Radar move was Clintonesque. He was not so much a talker as a bouncer. He would try out different versions of what he thought and bounce them off you while looking at your eyes. That was his radar system. When the radar hit the eyes, he knew it. I remember feeling like he was throwing stuff at you and you had to react to it. It was charming and yet slightly annoying, like, what is this? People would say he was a great listener, and he was in a way, but you were on Bill's topics when you were with Bill. Not that he didn't have a lot of topics, but you were working in Bill's territory. Big territory, but his territory. He was capable of keeping it that way. I was frustrated and awed by it. I was aware of it as a source of power. He was smart and morally earnest, and also a bullshitter who told stories.”

How long could this leisurely life of nonstop bull sessions last?
Clinton pondered
that question one night in December, at the end of the Michaelmas term, as he walked the streets of London. He had listened to the
symphony that night at “the majestically royal Festival Hall on the Thames,” he wrote in a letter to Denise Hyland in New York. Then he had crossed the river and followed the lights of the city to Westminster. He stopped, he said, “for a brief conversation with Abe Lincoln, who stands in the square,” then walked on to Trafalgar Square, then to the tube station and back to the Chelsea apartment of a friend. “It was a beautiful night,” Clinton wrote. “One good for putting the pieces of life together and threading the past through today to tomorrow.” Too soon, he feared, the Oxford idyll would be his past and the U.S. armed forces would be his present and perhaps Vietnam his future. He told Denise that the Selective Service System wanted him to take his draft physical in London in January. He expected to be called for the draft by March 1, 1969.

F
OR
two months at Oxford
it had
been damp and cold, and it seemed to the Rhodes Scholars that it was as chilly inside as out. A forty-degree temperature there felt to them like twenty degrees back in the States. Even U.K. students from the north felt colder in Oxford than in their native realms. Wilf Stevenson, who had grown up in Glasgow, thought Oxford was worse than Scotland. “There's a cold edge that comes off the Thames and hits Oxford, making it at times enormously cold and wet and horrid and dark.” Oxford was a fine place from which to flee when term ended and a six-week break began. The Rhodes Scholars scrambled across the continent looking for sun. Darryl Gless headed for Italy, “descending from the Alps out of the mist and fog and rain and snow and ending up in this sunny land where the people were sunny, too.” Daniel Singer went “ass-running … to Alicante in search of the warmest spot on the European continent, ruminating on consciousness all the while.”

Strobe Talbott
ventured the other way, to where it was colder still. He was the first of his Rhodes group to visit Moscow. The forty-eight-hour train ride began in Holland and carried him across the continent into Russia. He spent almost a month there, living at Moscow's Metropol Hotel. At Yale, Talbott had concentrated on nineteenth-century Russian literature and poetry. He was so earnest about it that in his first-year Russian literature class he bought two copies of the textbook on the Russian short story and cut and pasted them into large notebooks so that he could annotate every page. But his prep school literalness concealed a poet's soul. He loved to read Russian poetry and tried to write his own.

At Oxford, Talbott took an interest in the modern Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a lyric writer who became known as the poet of the Revolution, the Bolshevik darling who had a falling out with Stalin and shot himself in 1930. Talbott was in Moscow to learn more about Mayakovsky,
and while there was granted an audience with the poet's mistress, Lillia Brik. He also connected with some passive dissidents, who quietly shared their sense of despair with him. They took him to a Polish Catholic church and to a synagogue. “It was the depths of the Brezhnev period, with the intelligentsia on trial, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had occurred earlier in the year, the depths of the Cold War with really bad cultural politics,” Talbott recalled later. “Moscow was grim, grim, grim.” In the midst of the grimness, Talbott started a tradition that all his friends who followed him there over the next two years continued. He bought as much Stolichnaya vodka as he could afford and brought it back to Oxford.