First In His Class (28 page)

Clinton made
the longest journey during that school break. He went home to Arkansas. He had not planned to go, but Virginia was getting married again, to her third husband, Jeff Dwire, and Dwire had contacted him at Oxford and made arrangements for Bill to come back to surprise his mother. “Mother's marrying a man who runs a beauty parlor,” is how Hannah Achtenberg recalled Clinton breaking the news to his Oxford friends. Achtenberg was touched by Clinton's utter lack of self-consciousness about it. He did not say businessman or entrepreneur—“he just said the man ran a beauty parlor.”

Dwire,
in fact
, had once run the most popular beauty parlor in Hot Springs, where he charmed Virginia and scores of devoted clients and traded gossip with them. He was responsible for creating Virginia's trademark coiffure, persuading her to keep the white racing-stripe streak in her hair by dyeing the hair around it. Dwire was a divorced handyman with a decidedly checkered past. In the early 1960s, he had been convicted in a stock-swindling case and served nine months in prison. Some of Virginia's friends were shocked and disappointed that she would consider marrying an excon. Many of Dwire's former clients were surprised that he would choose Virginia from among the many women he had charmed. With his sweptback slick hair, long sideburns, and soft, charming demeanor, Dwire embodied the contradictions of Hot Springs, the town of secrets and vapors and ancient corruption, and the two sides of Virginia, who worshiped her high-achieving son, yet was attracted to horse racing, gambling, and fast-talking men.

In a letter to Denise Hyland, Clinton said his mother had never seemed so happy as when she walked in her front door and saw him. “
The surprise
came off,” he wrote. “She cried and cried.” Virginia had thought it would be her first Christmas without her son. “
I had
no earthly idea he was coming back. Jeff had arranged it. I walked in the door and dropped the mail, and stooped down to pick it up, and there were these two big feet by the door. It was Bill. They were lucky I didn't die!”

There were plenty of friends eager to see Clinton when he got home,
including Carolyn Yeldell, who was back from Indiana University for the holidays. Since she had inadvertently seen Clinton kissing Miss Arkansas the previous summer, Yeldell had tried to quell her longtime affection for him. Now that Bill was home, she decided to give it one last try. Clinton invited her to a reception for his mother and new stepfather at the lakefront home of Marge Mitchell, Virginia's close friend. As they were driving along, Yeldell turned to him and said, “Bill,
you are
still really interested in Sharon, aren't you? You really do care about Sharon, don't you?” Clinton said nothing. He would not look at Yeldell. He was not only interested in Sharon Evans but also in Ann Markesun from Georgetown and several other young women he had met overseas. “There was no answer there,” Yeldell says. “So I had to read the silence.”

That night, back at her bedroom in the parsonage across the shrubs from the Clinton home on Scully Street, Yeldell sought out one final counsel. She fell to her knees and asked, “God, am I supposed to marry Bill Clinton?” The answer that screamed inside her was a resounding: “‘No! He'll never be faithful!ߣ”

T
O
young Bill Clinton, friends were links in an everexpanding network. Sharon Ann Evans, for instance, had introduced Clinton to Governor Winthrop Rockefeller the previous summer, and now, on a Saturday during his winter break, he managed to get himself invited up to Winrock, the Rockefeller estate. Although Rockefeller was a Republican, Clinton admired his progressive views on race. If Clinton broached the subject of his precarious draft situation with Rockefeller, there is no documentation of it. He does not mention the subject in a thankyou letter that he wrote to the governor a few days later. He was thinking farther into the future, past the draft and the Vietnam War to a time when he might have Rockefeller's job. “
Thank you
for having me at Winrock last Saturday and for taking the time to talk with me about your work,” Clinton wrote. “Now I have a better understanding of where we are in Arkansas and what we should be doing. Now I have more sympathy for you. But I have envy too, because your hard won chair, for all its frustrations, is full of possibilities.”

Few of
the boys Clinton grew up with were in Arkansas that winter. Two of his oldest friends, David Leopoulos and Ronnie Cecil, had gone through the ROTC program at Henderson College in Arkadelphia and were now serving in the Army overseas—Leopoulos near Pisa, Italy, and Cecil in Korea. Phil Jamison was completing his training at the U.S. Naval Academy, none too excited by the prospect of flying helicopters in Vietnam but ready to go when the time came. Jim French, die handsome high school quarterback whose father was a respected physician in Hot Springs, was at
the Marine Corps officer training school at Quantico. French's neighbor and friend, little Mike Thomas, a kid who kept getting cut from the high school football team but never gave up, had just arrived in Vietnam to lead a long-range reconnaissance platoon for the 1st Cavalry after being trained in jungle warfare in Panama. Bert Jeffries, the son of Clinton's Sunday school teacher at Park Place Baptist Church, was up near the demilitarized zone with a Marine Corps recoilless rifle platoon. Duke Watts and Ira Stone were also with the Marines near the DMZ.

Two soldiers from the Hot Springs High School class of 1964 were already back from Vietnam. Tony Fuller and Tommy Young had come home in caskets.

CHAPTER NINE
 
FEELING THE DRAFT

T
HE DAY WHEN
Bill Clinton would have to confront his military obligation was looming. Sometimes it appeared close at hand, sometimes further away. Almost every month his expectations shifted. During his surprise trip home to Hot Springs for Christmas, he must have had contact with the Garland County Draft Board or picked up a hint of inside information from his new stepfather, Jeff Dwire, who was in frequent contact with the board secretary, because he would return to Oxford believing that his induction might be delayed several more months. “Time to get back to my other newer life for whatever time I have left,” he wrote to Denise Hyland after watching the New Year's Day bowl games on television at his mother's house. “
Looks like
I will finish the year now.”

But not long after he arrived back at Oxford for the second eight-week term, it seemed less likely that he would finish the year.
On January
13, 1969, eight months after his draft board first reclassified him 1-A, Clinton finally took his preinduction armed forces physical examination at a U.S. air base near London. In a letter to Hyland, he noted that he had passed the physical and now “qualified as one of the healthiest men in the western world.” The order to take the preinduction physical was a signal that his draft board considered Clinton's induction imminent. Draft regulations allowed graduate students who received induction notices to finish the term they were in, but there was some confusion as to how that would be interpreted at Oxford, which worked on a three-term system. It remained unclear what Clinton would do. If only, he told one friend, the draft system had been reformed in the way he once proposed in a paper written at Georgetown, so that young men could seek alternative service in the Peace Corps or Vista rather than fight in wars that they did not believe in. There was no such choice for him now if and when the draft board called his name.

Still, the decision was not yet upon him.
For Frank
Aller, the Rhodes Scholar from Washington State, the time for action had arrived. Aller, an aspiring journalist, had received a notice from his hometown draft board in Spokane ordering him to report for induction into the Army. He could not claim to be a conscientious objector, Aller told friends, because he believed that some wars were worth fighting, though not the war in Vietnam. His friends sensed Aller's turmoil. They stayed up late at night with him and took long walks through the Magdalen deer park talking about the options of resisting and maybe going to Sweden or Canada. Aller chose to stay in Oxford and fight the U.S. Selective Service System. On January 20, he mailed a letter to his draft board saying that he could not in good conscience report for military service. “
I believe
there are times,” Aller wrote, “when concerned men can no longer remain obedient.” He later explained his motivations in a letter to Brooke Shearer, Derek Shearer's sister and Strobe Talbott's girlfriend and future wife:

When I
decided to refuse induction … there were really two considerations which were foremost in my mind. One was the hope, expressed by the resistance movement on the west coast and elsewhere, that the spectacle of young men refusing to fight in a war they opposed would “move the conscience of America” and have some kind of tangible impact on American politics. The other consideration was more personal: an expression of the horror and revulsion we have all felt about the war, and the belief that a person should try to take action in accordance with his convictions.

Of all the Americans at Oxford, Aller presented the most interesting juxtaposition with Clinton. They seemed alike in some ways: two bright young men out of the middle class, tall and engaging, gentle and empathetic, consumed by politics and world affairs, readers, talkers, listeners, always at the center of things. All of this they had in common, yet they were very different. Aller was thin, resolute, and fragileseeming; Clinton was lumpy and unbreakable. Aller was sweet and ironic, shaped by the reserve and skepticism of Pacific Northwest Presbyterianism, prone to quiet mood shifts. Clinton was warm, temperamental, and sappy, shaped by the gregariousness and face-value Baptist piety of his Arkansas roots and freewheeling Hot Springs. For Aller, every moment presented a moral choice. Clinton confronted life as an optimist: each moment offered an opportunity.

Aller was in Oxford on the day that he was supposed to report for induction in Spokane.
His friends
held a party for him that night at Isaacson's place at Univ. Willy Fletcher, who had shared that moment of joy
with Aller when they got off the Greyhound bus and stood in the drizzle in western Washington, freshly anointed Rhodes Scholars, the whole world in front of them, felt awkward at the party. He was as opposed to the war as his buddy, yet he had slipped around it by joining the Navy, and Aller had met it headon and was resisting. Fletcher was experiencing “not only great admiration and love for Frank” but a feeling of doubt about himself and the course he had chosen. Aller was quiet throughout the night. Reich, who kept making toasts, later wrote that the evening was one of his most vivid memories of the Oxford years:

I remember
it was drizzling…. John Isaacson's room was bedecked with flowers and champagne. We played Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen albums late into the night. At midnight we toasted Frank. He said a few words in response, something about the war, and friends, and America. By one o'clock most of us were slightly tipsy or beyond. I can vaguely see Strobe and John, gently guiding Frank out the door toward the bathroom. Hannah Achtenberg was in the corner, a bemused expression crossing her face. There was a sense of triumph, somehow. America and the war seemed sinister at that moment, and so foreign, and we so helpless to do anything about it, that Frank's decision seemed to fortify us against it. Within that tiny room … amidst the pillows and champagne, I felt that
we all
had triumphed.

Aller was the first one out of the foxhole. “We all knew how to work the system,” recalled Daniel Singer. “We knew what to do in the foxhole—to keep our heads down. We were going for a lot of ludicrous 4-Fs.” One American at Oxford was trying to eat his way out of military service. A former Yale classmate of Singer and Talbott's had starved himself into a 4-F. It was not uncommon for Americans at Oxford to check into the Warneford Hospital in pursuit of psychiatric deferments. Sara Maitland, then the girlfriend of Paul Parish, noted that “
there was
very much the feeling that no one was going to go and anything you could do was legitimate. But there was also the feeling at bottom that Frank was right and everybody else was cheating.” Fletcher thought Aller was idolized because he had done something the others had only talked about. “
All of
us in some form talked literally or metaphorically about resisting—‘What if I go to Canada or Sweden,' that type of thing, the options. And yet we knew at the time that Frank was one of the few who would really do it.”