First In His Class (32 page)

C
LINTON STRETCHED HIS
elastic personality almost to the snapping point during his final month at Oxford in the spring of 1969. An erratic sleeper, he slept less. A voracious eater, he ate more. A frenetic chatterer and letterwriter, his communications grew more intense. He spent much of his time alone jotting down his thoughts in
a leatherbound
diary that Denise Hyland had given him the year before. “
The diary
you gave me has become one of my most valued possessions,” he wrote her. “It is both an escape and an outlet, a staff to lean on and a mountain that defies conquest. I have written on almost all the pages.” An accumulator of friends, he found more time to cultivate young women who would listen patiently and with grave concern as he struggled with his conscience. He internalized the fragility of his friend Paul Parish, the conscientious objector, and the moral anguish of the soulful Rhodes resister, Frank Aller. In those ways he had become an exaggerated version of his own flexible character. Yet in spirit he was diminished. His lifelong sense of optimism had reached an all-time low. There seemed to be no larger purpose to his self-absorption. If only, he told his friends, the war would go away so that he could get back to thinking on a nobler plane.

“
I do
hope you are finding some purpose to living,” he lamented in one letter to Hyland. “Peace of mind is not always necessary, perhaps not even beneficial at this time.”

The tardy induction notice did not save Clinton from the draft, but only gave him a pocket of time. His future seemed limited to three options. He could submit to the draft and enter the Army that summer as a private. He could join Frank Aller as a resister. Or he could find a way to void the induction notice in exchange for enlistment in a military alternative—the National Guard or a Reserve Officer Training Corps program—that might allow him to continue his education and shield him. The discussions he had with friends about those options were the most difficult of his life, Clinton said later. But his friends knew that he had invested too much time, hope, and ambition in his political future to abandon it by resisting. “
Maintaining viability
within the system was very important to him. Right from the start we all took his aspirations with real proper seriousness,” recalled Sara Maitland. “His wish to be viable within the system was never treated as him copping out. It was clear Bill had a job to do within the system.” Resisting, according to Strobe Talbott, was “
completely inconsistent
in Bill's case with what everybody knew to be Bill's ambition. Bill was going back to the United States to go into public service. There was never any doubt.” Their classmates considered Talbott and Clinton the two members of their crowd most sympathetic to the establishment against which they were mildly rebelling. Daniel Singer thought that “
Clinton and
Talbott wanted to solve problems by established solutions. This whole choice of whether to play by the rules or overthrow the system was not difficult for Clinton. He believed in the rules and he succeeded with them.”

Of the options which remained, then, the one Clinton said he wanted to take or expected to take fluctuated depending on the people he was with and the circumstances of the encounter, but most of his effort went into finding a military alternative.

In telephone
conversations with his stepfather, Jeff Dwire, Clinton compiled a list of officials he should talk to when he got back to Hot Springs who might help him get into a National Guard or ROTC program. He contacted John Spotila, the friend from Georgetown who was attending Yale Law School, and asked what it would take for him to get into that school and enroll in the graduate ROTC program there. He telephoned Paul Fray, his political ally from the Holt Generation days. According to Fray, Clinton called collect and asked him for help getting into the Air National Guard. Fray, who was studying law in Little Rock and serving in the Arkansas National Guard, came from a politically connected family and had several contacts in the state's military establishment. He arranged for Clinton to take an Air Force physical when he got back to the States.

Clinton also had a conversation in Oxford with Cliff Jackson, who was now about to depart for Little Rock to work for the state Republican party.
As Jackson
later recollected their meeting, Clinton told him that he had researched his situation and determined that since he had already received an induction notice, the only way he could enlist in an ROTC program or the National Guard was with the approval of the state Selective Service System director in Little Rock, an appointee of Republican Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. “He wanted my assistance getting the draft notice killed,” Jackson said later. On May 26, four days after Jackson, back in Little Rock, began work for the state GOP, he received a letter from Clinton. “I
got a letter from
Bill Clinton on Monday, indicating that he is coming home around July 1 to join the National Guard,” Jackson wrote to his girlfriend at Leicester University. “Although quite frankly, it was, I thought, somewhat excessive and politically oriented in that I'm a good person to be on amiable grounds with. Methinks he could have waited awhile in writing.”

Why would Jackson act as though he were Clinton's ally and make himself available for assistance if he was as ill-disposed to Clinton as he appeared to be in his letters? “
I was
ambivalent,” Jackson said later. “But he was my friend. He was leaning on me.” An alternative explanation is that Cliff Jackson in 1969 was as torn as Clinton, and as manipulative, ready to trade favors with his Arkansas rival. Although there is little documented evidence other than Jackson's letters that Clinton turned to him for help, there is also no evidence to the contrary. Jackson's version of events demands caution but not outright rejection. The broad outline of his story matches a reasonable reconstruction of Clinton's actions, except that he seems to have exaggerated his own role. His recollections possibly are colored by the competitive jealousy he felt toward Clinton during their Oxford days, an animosity that would become inflamed over the years in proportion to Clinton's fame.

If Clinton was scheming with Jackson to void his draft notice, he gave little hint of that to some friends. One of his newfound British girlfriends that spring, Tamara Kennerley, later noted that in their conversations about the war, Clinton always “
thought he
was going to Vietnam.” The way that different people interpreted Clinton's intentions so differently during this period can be explained at two levels. To a certain extent, the contrasting views of outsiders mirrored Clinton's internal ambivalence. At a deeper level, though, it was an indication of his habit of adapting to the people around him and trying to present to them the version of himself he thought each would most admire.

In any case, Clinton'
s friends
bade farewell to him assuming that he would not be coming back. The party lasted three days. It began in the Univ courtyard with Arch the scout serving as bartender, offering the guests Black Velvets—Guinness and champagne. Eakeley presented Clinton with a walking stick and a two-way touring cap, with brims facing both directions. The stick and cap, he joked, were to help Clinton find his way through the jungles of Vietnam. At times the party winnowed down to a few stragglers. Darryl Gless sat in the candlelight with Clinton, “reflecting gloomily over the state of the world.” At other times it erupted into a noisy, convivial, let-your-hair-down affair. Rudiger Lowe, Clinton's German friend, who was visiting Oxford, remembered it as the longest party he had ever attended. The highlights were a barbecue picnic on the roof of Univ
and a punting adventure on the Cherwell with a less-than-steady Clinton working the pole and Lowe certain that “any second we would be taking an unwelcome bath.” To Sara Maitland, the party was another occasion in which every college rule was flouted without consequence. “Bill had this room at Univ that was easily accessible and the college porter adored him. All was waived for Bill at Univ. It was just, ‘Oh, yes, go on in!'” It was all sort of looking the other way. Bill was to have all the rules broken. It was dead impressive.”

On June 26, the farewell party moved to London's Heathrow Airport, where Clinton boarded a plane for New York. Maitland drove to the airport in her sports car with Paul Parish. It was, she said later, “just a mess…. We had this tearful departure at the airport. It had all become an enormous sort of emotional drama. Bill had decided to go. Was it the right thing to do? The wrong thing to do? It was all very stressful, going back to Arkansas.”

When Clinton
arrived in America, it all seemed very different. He stayed for two nights at Denise Hyland's home in Upper Montclair. His relationship with Denise was changing again. When he appeared at the front door, Clinton found a suitor already there, Denise's future husband, who was gracious if perplexed about sharing space with this fellow who was so burly and full of hugs. Clinton encountered another change when he ventured into Manhattan for a reunion with Willie Morris, the editor of
Harper's
magazine and former Rhodes Scholar from Mississippi. Morris had impressed Clinton with his charm and wit the first time they met, eight months earlier, on the afternoon before Clinton sailed for England. But their meeting this time left him disillusioned. Morris did not seem the same man. “
All the
light is out of his eyes,” Clinton later wrote. “All the life is out of his stories.”

On his
way to Arkansas, Clinton stopped in Washington. Rick Stearns, who was there that summer helping the McGovern Commission reform the Democratic party, introduced him to the network of political activists who still believed in the system and were trying to end the war through public pressure. And on Capitol Hill he visited the offices of Senator Fulbright. Lee Williams, the Senate aide who had hired Clinton to work in Fulbright's shop three years earlier, was now one of the busiest unofficial draft counselors in Washington, advising hundreds of young men who sought alternatives to fighting in Vietnam. Clinton was by no means alone when at last he turned to the office of the influential committee chairman for guidance and help.

“
They came
to us in droves. I had so many young people to see, I couldn't do my job. We talked about the alternatives. What could one do? I tried to help every young person who came to me do what their conscience
dictated,” Williams said later. “You would never hear us, Fulbright or me, advocate violation of the law. That was not the way to go. But other than that we would offer to help them any way we could. We would call and find out where they were looking for people in the National Guard, where there might be an ROTC slot.” Williams, a proud veteran of World War II, thought the immorality of the war in Vietnam justified any effort within the law to avoid participating in it. He often said that he would not have gone to fight in Vietnam himself, but would have found some other way to serve. Williams later could not recall much about his discussions with Clinton beyond the sense that Clinton was going through “a terrible emotional struggle”—tugged in different directions by his hunger for public service and his disdain for the war and the draft. Williams offered to help him search for alternatives. If Clinton learned anything in Washington that made him optimistic about finding an alternative, he did not share it with friends. In a thank-you note to Denise Hyland that he sent from Washington, he wrote merely: “No new developments in the service.”

W
HEN
his airplane touched down in Little Rock, Clinton's mother was in the lobby, radiating excitement and concern. Standing nearby was Sharon Ann Evans's mother, Honey Evans. Sharon had planned to greet Clinton at the airport but could not make it because Clinton had changed flights. She had sent her mother out to apologize. Virginia ignored Honey Evans. She had had a falling out with Sharon Ann earlier that summer when word got back to her that Miss Arkansas had delivered a speech in Hot Springs in which she implied that she might make her home in Hot Springs as Mrs. Bill Clinton some day. Evans had not really said that, though she did mention her friendship with Clinton in a lighthearted fashion; but whatever she said was too much for Virginia, who rarely found any of her son's girlfriends satisfactory. This talkative beauty queen was not good enough for her boy, she thought.

Jeff and Virginia Dwire and thirteen-year-old Roger Clinton now lived in the house on Scully Street. Even though Clinton always talked fondly of home when he was away from it, he now seemed out of place. David Leopoulos was with the Army in Italy. Carolyn Yeldell was spending the summer away and would not be home for a few weeks. It seemed that hardly anyone his age was in town. His mother thought he seemed to have an emotional wall around him: “
Bill and Jeff
had a lot of conversations about the draft. But I didn't really know the agony that he was going through. I just knew he played a lot of basketball in the driveway. He shot baskets hour after hour. Shooting off the frustration.” Clinton wrote letters of anguish to his Rhodes friend Paul Parish, who was spending the summer
at Sara Maitland's country mansion in Scotland and working on his appeal for conscientious objector status. The letters, Parish later recalled, “were all, ‘
I could
do this or I could do that.' The tenor was: It is almost impossible to see anything that appeals to the moral sensibility. If good has a taste to it, didn't any of his options have it. All the choices he saw were corrupt.”