First In His Class (37 page)

If Clinton did not mail the letter while he was in Hot Springs or enlist while he was there because at the time, even though he was feeling guilty about the deferment, he did not really want to be in the Army or go to Vietnam, what compelled him finally to give up his deferment once he reached Oxford? The preponderance of evidence leads in one direction: to the notion that with each passing week there were more signs that he might not get drafted even if he abandoned the deferment. If Clinton, acting through his stepfather, arranged to have the local draft board reclassify him 1-A after October 1 (as seems most probable based on Randall Scott's recollections), he would have known that it was largely a symbolic act providing him the best of both worlds—the ability to say that he had given up a deferment, and the knowledge that even though he was 1-A again, he would not be drafted that year.
This became
possible because on October 1, President Nixon, seeking to defuse the antiwar clamor on campuses, ordered the Selective Service System to change its policy for graduate students. From that day on, graduate students who received draft notices would be allowed to finish the entire school year rather than just the term they were in. Clinton was safe at least until the following July.

In the
weeks before the October 1 policy change for graduate students, the Nixon administration had taken several other actions that eased the pressure on students facing the draft. On September 14, newspapers in New York, Washington, and Arkansas carried articles quoting sources as saying that the Nixon administration would soon withdraw 35,000 troops from Vietnam and suspend the draft temporarily later that fall. The stories also said that there was a possibility that once the draft was resumed, only nineteen-year-olds would be called, and that the Army would send to Vietnam “only … those draftees who volunteered for service there.” On September 17, Nixon confirmed the troop cuts in Vietnam and said that he would soon announce a major policy change concerning the draft. On September 19, the president announced that the October draft call of 29,000 men would be spread out over three months—essentially canceling the call for November and December—while the administration pushed for a draft lottery system. Nixon said he would impose draft reform by executive order if Congress did not act on its own. Under the lottery
system discussed in stories that day, young men would be vulnerable to the draft for only one year. Their vulnerability would be determined by a random selection of numbers from 1 to 365. Each day of the year would get a number, which would be the number for all young men born on that day. The lower your number, the more likely you were to get drafted. Those with high numbers would probably get through the year and never have to worry about the draft again.

In his December 1991 interview with the
Post
, Clinton said, “
I didn't
know anything about any lottery and I sure as hell didn't know what my number was” at the time that he was reclassified 1-A. The second half of that statement is true. There was no way he could have known his lottery number in October because the lottery had not yet been implemented. The first half of the statement, however, seems unlikely. Clinton and his contemporaries had a consuming interest in the draft and followed every nuance of draft policy. Studying the draft was as important to them as any graduate school course. The possibility of a lottery was a major story around the time Clinton made his decision to drop the deferment. It was not even a new idea: the lottery had been part of the public debate about draft reform since the previous May.

It was, in summary, a mixed bag of certainties, probabilities, and unknowns that Clinton was dealing with that October. He had to be aware that the revised graduate student policy protected him from induction that school year. He knew that the Selective Service System was cutting back on draft calls. The word was out that a lottery was coming. The Nixon administration had already announced two troop withdrawals starting what came to be known as the Vietnamization of the war. All of those signs were encouraging for a young man who did not want a deferment yet was not eager to fight in Vietnam. But it was not clear that Clinton had avoided the draft completely. He had, whatever his motivations, exposed himself to some degree of risk by asking to be reclassified. If the lottery came, his draft fate would depend on a number. Luck would help determine the fate of a gambling town's favorite son.

O
NE
Friday afternoon, Clinton and Stearns got into a discussion about poetry and discovered that
they both
loved Dylan Thomas, the lyrical Welsh poet. As a lark, they decided that they should make a pilgrimage to his birthplace. They grabbed their coats and Stearns's orange-covered edition of Thomas's poems and walked down to the rotary on the edge of Oxford and started hitch-hiking west. The weather was rainy and bitterly cold. They made it to Cardiff on the first day, and then caught a ride from a spelunker who was scrambling off to a cave exploration near a little
village in the middle of Wales where no one had heard of Dylan Thomas. They sensed that they should be heading west, toward Swansea, but found it much easier to hitch rides north and south, and never got within range of Thomas's birthplace. They finally retreated to Bristol, back across the border in England, where they walked into a pub just as Tom Jones's “Green, Green Grass of Home” was playing on the jukebox. Any friend who had ever been with Clinton during the playing of that sentimental melody was left with the same memory: Clinton overtaken by feelings of homesickness. And so it was on that rainy night in Bristol. The song brought tears to his eyes.

They spent another miserable night in a bone-cold tourist lodge with “thin little blankets and a heater that only worked ten minutes at a time.” By Sunday morning they were ready to concede defeat and began walking toward the motorway back to Oxford. On the way they passed a grocery where fresh bread, still steaming hot, had just been delivered. They bought a big loaf and a quart of milk with the money they had left and went out and sat on the curb and devoured it. The grocerywoman saw the two Americans through the store window. Concerned that they might get indigestion, she provided them butter to go along with the bread. Clinton charmed her, leaving Stearns once again in awe of his friend's adaptability. “The woman was so taken with Bill that she and her husband shut their store and invited us upstairs to the living quarters for their English Sunday dinner. After dinner they showed us sites in Bristol and took us to the bus station and bought our tickets back to Oxford. The grocers had two small children, and when we got back to Oxford, Clinton bought them gifts and sent them notes,” Stearns recalled decades later. “He probably still does.”

The makeshift living arrangements at Holywell Manor did not seem to bother Clinton or Stearns, but they were not acceptable to one and all. Having the big Arkansan over there on the other side of the room put a crimp in Stearns's romantic life, and tenants in the room directly below complained about the noise. At one point they delivered a note under the door which said that it seemed “a reasonable request” that the occupants should not shift furniture or hammer nails after midnight. “If this is not heeded,” the threatening note went on, they might feel compelled to “tell the landlord why a bed is wheeled out every night, which would have serious repercussions.” Clinton took the note in good humor, and joked to Stearns that the complainants did not know “
that you
and I are queer.” He also said that “if I weren't your guest, and basically nonviolent and a little chicken, I'd go down and wipe [the note writer's] body over the floor.” Those comments reflected a risqué, macho, satirical side to Clinton's humor, well known only to his close male friends.

In the third week of November, Stearns, who had finished his readings
for the term, traveled back to Washington to continue his work on the McGovern Commission. It was also a chance for him to pursue a woman Clinton had introduced him to the previous summer—a former classmate of Clinton's at Georgetown who was working on the staff of Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut. Stearns was infatuated with the young woman, but he was having little success with her. Clinton tried to explain the problem. “
He basically
said that she hated my guts,” Stearns later noted in his deadpan style. “Bill tried to explain to me why he was successful with girls and I was not. He said, ‘Have you ever thought about listening to someone else?' I tried to impress girls by telling them everything I knew. Bill said, ‘If you let them do the talking, they'll be far more interested in you. To have someone listening to you is flattering.'” In his letter to Stearns, Clinton said that he was having a hard time working at night because he could not keep his mind off Peggy. Stearns had never heard of Peggy. Clinton had flattered so many women that his friends could not keep up with them.

In another letter, Clinton thanked Stearns for “taking me in and making the time bearable and then happy when I was so low down.” His uncertain existence in Oxford seemed to be stabilizing.
He had
been invited to share a flat at 46 Leckford Road with two other Rhodes friends, Strobe Talbott, the Russia scholar, and Frank Aller, the China scholar and draft resister. A room at the Leckford Road house became available when another American student left and they needed someone to pick up the share of the rent. The cost per housemate was three pounds a week plus a share of utility bills, easily affordable for even the poorest Rhodes Scholars, who along with free tuition were provided with $1,700 a year by the Rhodes trust. The narrow brick townhouse on the northern edge of the university had three floors, with a bedroom on each floor. There was a toilet on the first, a full bath on the third, and a telephone on the second.

Sara Maitland, a frequent visitor, thought of the house as being “particularly shambolic—an absolute slum.” Her characterization of Leckford Road rings true. It was, she thought, “a bit of a joke because it was poshed up years later, but back then it was a mess. It belonged to a college and was rented by someone who sublet it illegally. No one paid much rent and no repairs were done. It was sort of a standoff. No one ever scrubbed the kitchen floor.” The kitchen, with its peeled green linoleum flooring, was the largest room in the drafty house, warmed by a gasfire heater beneath a wooden mantelpiece, and it served as the common room. There were usually a few people in there clustered around the fire, chatting and brewing tea on the nearby stove. Talbott considered the atmosphere “
graduate student
bohemian,” meaning it was serious though sloppy and free form. There was no lock on the front door, and friends constantly came calling.
Visitors from London and Cambridge often spent the night. “It was rather hippieish. People were kind of in and out of it a lot,” said Maitland. “You never knew who was going to sleep quite where. All the mattresses were on the floor and there were books everywhere.”

Brooke Shearer, then a sophomore at Stanford, came to Oxford that Thanksgiving and stayed at the Leckford Road house with Talbott. Jan Brenning, Aller's girlfriend, was also there, leaving Clinton as the only one without a live-in mate. Shearer, a California dynamo, was taken aback by the easygoing house style, and quickly organized the holiday activities.
She and
Talbott rode bicycles to the covered market in downtown Oxford, bought a fresh turkey and hauled it back the mile and a half to the house, the fowl's head still on and its legs dangling from the basket. Shearer cut off the head and organized a cooking routine in which the friends would baste in fifteen-minute shifts while she read
Mrs. Dalloway
, Virginia Woolf s novel about an English society woman reflecting on her life as she prepares for a dinner party.

“
Frank and
Bill shared what was supposed to be the first shift and ended up so deep in conversation that they did the whole job,” Talbott later wrote. “Perhaps because it was such an American holiday and they felt so far from home in so many ways, they talked on and on about whether real patriotism required submitting to the draft or resisting it.” Their turkey-basting conversation came in the context of what had happened the day before. On November 26, President Nixon had signed H.R. 14001 enacting a draft lottery, which was to be held the following week, on December 1. The dinner conversation veered in a different direction, toward Russia and literature. Yasha Zaguskin, a Russian émigré and translator living in Oxford, was among the guests at the makeshift banquet table.

That night, Clinton wrote to Denise Hyland. He was reflective and a little blue. He suggested that he could send her a flight schedule and she should come over for a visit—an unlikely prospect now that she had fallen in love with someone else and was thinking of marriage. In earlier letters to Hyland, Clinton had made it seem as though he were studying hard even when he was not. No more. “
I may
never pick up a parchment,” he wrote. “Of course that's not the value of the place for me, but a degree would be nice to have and Mother would love it.” He said he had just talked to his family over the telephone, and he gave Denise his usual update on his little brother Roger, now thirteen. “Roger is selling magazines through a school project and has sold twice as many as anyone else. He won a Polaroid camera, a turkey and is sure to get the grand prize of a TV or stereo. At least one of us has practical ability.”

•  •  •

T
HE
first draft lottery since World War II began at 8:02
P.M.
on
the first
day of the final month of 1969 in a small conference room at the Selective Service System headquarters in Washington. Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey presided over the event, which was witnessed by a pack of camera-men and reporters and fifty-six youth representatives. In the middle of the room, resting on a stool, sat a big glass bowl containing 366 plastic blue capsules that looked like the containers for charms sold in candy-store machines. Each capsule contained a gummed sticker with a date on it. One by one, the capsules were plucked from the bowl and opened, and the stickers were posted on a light blue tote board. Representative Alexander Pirnie from Utica, New York, ranking Republican on the House subcommittee overseeing the draft, was asked to pick the first capsule. He fished around in the bowl and emerged with September 14—a date with chilling symbolic meaning to Bill Clinton. September 14 was the day on which his high school classmate Mike Thomas had died in Vietnam.