First In His Class (34 page)

Many young men who could not get physical exemptions sought refuge in the National Guard or ROTC.
The extent
to which these were viewed as last-ditch choices for potential draftees was documented by a Department of Defense study, which found that nearly half of all officers who came up through ROTC programs said they would not have enlisted had they not faced the draft. Clinton was one of several Rhodes Scholars who received an induction notice during the spring term at Oxford and came home looking for a way out through the Reserves or the National Guard. The manner in which two of those scholars,
Mike Shea
and Tom Ward, handled their situations lends perspective to Clinton's behavior.

Mike Shea spent his first year at Balliol College at Oxford protected by a graduate deferment that was no longer supposed to exist. Finally, near the end of the spring term, his draft board in Iowa realized that it had made a classification error and sent him a notice of induction. Shea was not the sort to spend his time “pondering the true correctness and morality” of the war and how best to respond. “I did not have a serious conscience about this. I was not at the same level of introspection and analysis that Aller and Clinton were at. I merely thought this is a really stupid war and I don't think I can stop it but I have no desire to cooperate.” So he went home and enrolled in the ROTC program at the University of Iowa Law School. “I did exactly what Clinton almost did. But Clinton had all these conscience problems.” Shea went off to basic training at Fort Benning without worrying about whether he had sold out to the military even though he opposed the war. “My feeling was the system was totally fucked. It was just a thousand clowns. I was not making a grand political statement, loved by all—‘Oh, okay, I'll go to Fort Benning and learn how to shoot flamethrowers.' My decision was viewed as being an expedient gesture devoid of any moral input at all—which it was.”

Shea's casual attitude led to a casual conclusion. He developed bad knees, got a medical discharge, and returned to Oxford after one year in the States.

Tom Ward, in the Rhodes class ahead of Clinton's, also received an induction notice near the end of the 1969 spring term and returned to Meridian, Mississippi, looking for a way out. His position on the Vietnam War was that it was a faraway conflict and that he would just as soon
it stayed that way. He acknowledged that his opposition was “
in direct
proportion” to the closeness of his draft notice. The contrast between his life in England and his upbringing in Mississippi confused Ward even more. The Rhodes crowd had been the most political group he had ever associated with in his life. Now he was trying to find his roots again, to figure out what had happened to him in England. He had been thinking about staying in England, he said later, or “whether to go to Sweden, Canada. Or go to jail. All of that was part of the context of the conversation. I was overwhelmed, frankly. I knew I was in over my head. I had a hard time distinguishing in my own life how much craziness I was going through and how much was just the growing political reality.”

His father, an influential Republican lawyer in Meridian, told Ward that he would be making a grave mistake if he went to jail or sought a conscientious objector exemption. He convinced his son that he had only been talking to alienated Americans. But although Ward's father supported President Nixon, he did not want his son getting shipped off to Vietnam as a drafted private. They found a slot in a National Guard unit where he could also coach basketball at a junior college. “It was easy for me to get help. Mississippi is like Arkansas—with the good ole boy network.” But Ward, who eventually became an Episcopalian minister in Nashville, felt empty and distressed by the ease with which he escaped the draft. The realization that young men who lacked his connections were fighting a war that he could so easily avoid haunted Ward for years. Yet he also came to believe that even the limited vulnerability that Rhodes Scholars faced in that summer of 1969 hastened the end of the war. “I just think historically the war broke down when we started drafting the Bill Clintons and the Tom Wards. People like my father were not going to have their sons dying in that war and were politically influential enough to stop it. That is the moral ambiguity of the situation.”

I
T
was not until Clinton had offered himself to the military establishment, not until he had signed up for the University of Arkansas ROTC, that he started to become actively involved in the antiwar movement.
In mid-August
he traveled to Washington and spent several days with Rick Stearns at the McGovern rules staff and visited the Vietnam Moratorium Committee headquarters on Vermont Avenue, where activists were planning a one-day nationwide protest against the war, scheduled for October 15. Clinton had a few friends who were well connected in the movement, including Stearns, but
he was
virtually unknown himself. He was on the outer edge of the antiwar subculture, according to David Mixner, one of the principal organizers. With his affable manner and expressions of guilt about avoiding the draft, Clinton was regarded as “somewhat of a suspicious character.”
But he was not without value. No one in the movement had better connections to Fulbright and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The brief visit to Washington restored Clinton's spirits, but it also reminded him how out of place he now felt in Arkansas. In an August 20 letter, he thanked Stearns for a “wonderful week” that he said was “
therapy for
a sick man.” Stearns, who was more circumspect, took Clinton's anxieties seriously, but not too seriously. “
Bill was
a lot more revealing about himself and more willing to talk in that vocabulary than I would be. Some of it was a bit tongue in cheek. Some of it was florid expression.” The August 20 letter went on to display both of those qualities. “
I am
home now, still full of the life that your friends and my friends and the city pumped into me. Before I forget, let me tell you how grateful I am to you for introducing me to all those people. Arkansas is barren of that kind, or at least I've found few of them. Maybe they have better sense than to traffic with such a naive, sloppy minded romantic.” Clinton added that he hoped he could go with Stearns to a September gathering in Martha's Vineyard planned by young leaders of the antiwar movement. “I need and would like like hell to be doing something like that.”

On the evening of September 8,
Stearns called
Clinton from Washington and they talked about Oxford and the draft. He felt guilty and hypocritical for having the ROTC deferment, Clinton said. Stearns was among the scholars who had managed to get graduate school deferments for the first year, but he had recently been reclassified 1-A by his draft board in California and expected to be drafted any week. Still, he said he was going back to Oxford for his second year. “I told Bill that the only fair thing for me to do was to take my chances,” Stearns later recalled. “If I get drafted, I get drafted, but I wasn't going to worry about it. If the day came, it came. I felt that was more honorable than trying to connive a way of avoiding the whole thing.” The next day, Clinton wrote Stearns, saying that he had heard from Ann Markesun, who “seems far saner than I am.” The draft board in Mississippi, Clinton reported in that letter, was about to meet on Paul Parish's appeal. He had just heard from Parish's mother. “The feeling is he'll get out, but will be called home at the end of the first term to do alternative service.”

Clinton then described his own state of mind, a subject he and Stearns had been discussing on the telephone the night before. “
My mind
is every day more confused than it was before; and countless hours doing nothing save waiting for the phone to ring are driving me out of my head,” he wrote.

Nothing could be worse than this torment…. And if I cannot rid myself of it, I will just have to go into the service and begin to root out the cause. I wish I could describe to you the quandary I am in, so you could
counter with some helpful advice—I have been here all summer in a place where everyone else's children seem to be in the military, most of them in Vietnam. I look forward to going to the U of A, the thing for aspiring politicos to do, and going to ROTC to become a second lieutenant at 26—in between then and now I have this thing hanging over me like a pall. I can't justify putting it off. You see, I haven't explained it very well—the anguish is not that apparent—I am running away from something maybe for the first time in my life—and I just hope I have made the correct decision, if there is such a thing. I know one of the worst side effects of this whole thing is the way it's ravaged my own image of myself, taken my mind off the higher things, restricted my ability to become involved in good causes or with other people—I honestly feel so screwed up tight that I am incapable, I think, of giving myself, of really loving. I told you I was losing my mind. Anyway—I'm anxious to hear from you. I want so much to tell you we're going back to England.

Three days later, on September 12,
Clinton stayed
up all night writing a letter to William Armstrong, the chairman of the Garland County Draft Board, saying that he never had any real interest in ROTC and wanted to be reclassined 1-A and drafted as soon as possible. But if writing that letter was a cathartic moment for Clinton, it did not resolve his ambivalence. He carried the letter around with him every day for several weeks. But he never mailed it.

The series of events that led Clinton on a path back to Oxford are in dispute. By Clinton's account, he talked to Colonel Holmes and gained permission to return to Oxford for the second year since the basic training that he was required to attend before beginning advanced ROTC would not start until the following summer. Holmes said later that he allowed Clinton to return to Oxford for “
a month
or two,” but expected him to enroll in the law school as soon as possible. But a letter that Clinton wrote Holmes from Oxford in December 1969 in which he apologized for not writing more often—“
I know
I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month”—is the strongest evidence that Holmes was aware of and approved Clinton's plan to go back to Oxford. It may be that Holmes made a private agreement with Clinton in 1969 that he was embarrassed to acknowledge years later. But if he did, he apparently never told his subordinates about it. The rest of the ROTC staff was expecting Clinton to enroll that fall. Ed Howard, the drill sergeant, later recalled that there was great anger when word spread through the ROTC office that Clinton was not on campus. “
A lot
of people in the unit were kind of mad about it, angry that he didn't show up,” Howard said. “We did not know where he was. All we knew is that Bill Clinton did not show up. We didn't normally have people promise to do something and not do it. He was supposed to enroll come
enrollment time that fall. When he didn't show up there was some disappointment.”

Cliff Jackson
was among those angered by Clinton's decision. He said in a letter to his girlfriend that he was starting to suspect that Clinton's friendship with him was mere convenience. “Bill Clinton is still trying to wiggle his way out of the ‘disreputable' Arkansas law school,” Jackson wrote in one letter. “
P.S.
,” Jackson added in a letter on September 14, “Bill has succeeded in wiggling his way back to Oxford.”

T
HAT
was the day that Mike Thomas was killed in Vietnam. Thomas had been in Bill's class at Hot Springs High, where they had served as class officers together. He was the class mascot,
a scrappy
little fellow who “wanted to be a jock in a big way,” according to Jim French, one of his closest high school friends and the quarterback of the football team. Mike tried out for the football team every fall, and was brought into games only to hold for extra points. Defensive nose guard Bill High, the biggest, player on the team, was stunned one day during the offseason when Coach C. B. Haney ordered the boys to pair off and wrestle each other and Thomas immediately challenged High. High later described him as “a fearless little tiger.” Thomas went off to the University of Arkansas but did not finish. His father, Herman Thomas, had been a captain in World War II, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who lectured his son on the meaning of patriotism. “
Mike was
in a fraternity at the University of Arkansas,” Herman Thomas later recalled. “All the boys in it were figuring out ways to get out of service. In his second year, Mike got all teed off at those guys. He joined the Army as a buck-ass private. He enlisted, went through basic training, then was held back so he could go to officer training school. He was the smallest man in his class, but made it all right.” He went through jungle warfare training in Panama and got his orders for Vietnam. When he stopped at home on his way out, his father thought he seemed “gung-ho, ready to go.”

In Vietnam he was a platoon leader in Company E of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), performing long-range reconnaissance in free-fire zones.
His platoon
loved Mike Thomas. “He had this kind of charming way of talking, this southern drawl,” remembered one of his men, Greg Schlieve from Washington State. “I had never been around anyone like that. He was matter-of-fact—‘If this happens, here's the contingency plan.' If we'd say, ‘Mike, that's not a good trail to go down, we're hitting contact,' he had our concerns foremost. He wouldn't ask anyone to go where he wouldn't go. During battles and firefights, he was able to direct men and go around and check on your ammo, your water, and somehow by putting his hand on a
man's shoulder that was maybe terrified, he had the capacity to calm a man down, more or less say, ‘Hang in there, buddy, we're going to make it.' I despised most of the officers. They pissed me off. But Mike never forgot the number-one goal is for you all to come walking back. I just absolutely thought without a shadow of a doubt that Mike was the most courageous man I ever met. He was little—five foot five—but carried the heaviest pack in our platoon—one hundred and twenty pounds. No one could come up and say he needed a break, his pack was getting him down. Every time we took a break, Mike would scooch his pack against a tree and two of us would grab his arms and lift him up. It was too big for him to put on his back alone.”