First In His Class (42 page)

Merck felt so comfortable around Clinton that she turned to him when she was having trouble with her love life. He was, she later said, the first man to whom she came out as a lesbian. She had fallen in love with another woman but was devastated when the relationship started to fall apart. “
I thought
I was going to lose this person. The woman involved wasn't in town, so I went over to see Bill and in the course of talking to him I said, ‘I'm involved with this woman and I'm afraid it's not going to work and I'm feeling rather wretched.' I was tearful, and Bill was all, There, there—I didn't know you were….ߣ” Clinton soothed her. He was neither disapproving nor shocked.

David Mixner, one of the moratorium leaders in Washington, visited Leckford Road early in 1970 and almost went through a similar confessional with Clinton.
Mixner was
gay but keeping his sexual orientation deep in the closet. He was fearful that if his homosexuality became public it would embarrass his family and get him “quickly shunted to the side” of the antiwar movement. Once when he thought he was being blackmailed, he went on a three-day binge of drinking and drugs. He contemplated killing himself. His friends, thinking that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, sent him to Europe on a speaking tour. During that trip, he stayed for several days at Leckford Road at Clinton's invitation. He rarely saw Talbott, who spent most of his time behind his locked door. Aller was in and out. But Clinton was always around and spoke to Mixner for hours each day.

They talked about dating women. Mixner told Clinton about his first lover at Arizona State University, who had died in an auto accident. It was a male lover, but Mixner feminized him when talking to Clinton. Clinton, whose father had died in an auto accident, wanted to know everything about the accident: how it happened, how Mixner felt, what it was like to see someone killed, what Mixner felt happened to people after they died.
Clinton, Mixner recalled, “had a way of making you feel you were the most important friend in his life and what happened to you was the most important thing that ever happened.” At one point, talking to Clinton, Mixner felt tempted to reveal his homosexuality, to tell the whole story. He wanted to tell Clinton, Mixner said later, but was “afraid I'd lose him as a friend.”

Clinton's final months at Oxford offered him more than enough opportunity to play the role of comforting friend.
The breakup
of the relationship between Paul Parish and Sara Maitland was so tumultuous and life-changing that it sent first Maitland and then Parish to psychiatric wards. Parish was dealing with several tensions in his life: his relationship with his mother, his latent homosexuality, his efforts to become a conscientious objector, his loneliness in the solitary academic corridors of Oxford. One of the unfortunate manifestations of his illness was that he could not stand to be in the same room with Maitland. The Parish-Maitland drama received mixed reviews at Leckford Road. Talbott, in the midst of his Khrushchev project, showed little patience with the couple. As Maitland later put it, “He didn't want roving nutcases around, and I can't blame him.” Aller and Clinton were more tolerant. Maitland was treated at a hospital on the edge of Oxford, and Aller and Clinton rode the No. 1 bus out to see her several times. With each visit, they brought the Lady Sara, hostess of the most popular tea parties in town, a small pot of exotic tea. After Maitland was released from the hospital, Clinton decided that a visit to a hair salon would help calm her nerves. He arranged the appointment without consulting Maitland, who had gorgeous long hair which she really did not want cut. Although the visit did nothing to help her relax, she was heartened by Clinton's concern.

W
HEN
the Hilary term ended
in April, Clinton and Rick Stearns rode the train to Spain, the final leg of their grand tour of the European continent. Stearns, ever earnest, had compiled a reading list and suggested that he and Clinton study the Spanish Civil War as they traveled. They shared copies of George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia
, André Malraux's
Man's Hope
, Ernest Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
, Franz Borkenau's
The Spanish Cockpit
, and Hugh Thomas's
The Spanish Civil War
. The journey invigorated Clinton intellectually much as the trip to Moscow had done months before. But there was another purpose.
Waiting to
see them in Madrid were two young women, Lyda Holt and Jill Thrift, both of whom had recently graduated from Southern Methodist University and were studying art at the Prado. Lyda and Clinton had remained friends since they had met in her father's campaign for governor in 1966. Now they were trying to fix each other up with their friends: Lyda with Stearns, Clinton with Thrift.

Lyda had not seen Clinton recently and gasped at the sight of him, with his sloppy work clothes, scruffy beard, and bushy brown hairdo. His side-kick Stearns was equally grubby, sporting stringy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache that he hoped gave him the flair of Pancho Villa. Not that Clinton had lost his Arkansas charm. One night in Madrid the four had dinner with Lyda's aunt and uncle, who were visiting their daughter, Peggy Freeman, who was also living there that season. Jack Holt, known as Poppa Jack, was the political operator in the Holt family, and Clinton spent hours after dinner debriefing him on events back home. Clinton thoroughly delighted Lyda's Aunt Marge Holt as well, though not enough to make her overlook his appearance. When he left, she turned to her daughter and sighed, “My goodness, I just don't know, Lyda dating someone with that long hair and beard!” Lyda Holt thought her aunt “was of a mind to grab some scissors and cut that beard off!”

The quartet spent hours touring the Prado, the world-class art museum that so enthralled Lyda that she visited it every day. She was surprised by Clinton's taste in artists. “I thought he would go for Velázquez, who was humanistic and painted his subjects so craftily they didn't realize they were being psychoanalyzed for history. Wrong. He loved El Greco. Then I took him to the Goya room and he loved that. El Greco I thought would be too contemporary for him, but he wasn't. And he was enthralled with Goya. Goya didn't pull any punches. He was graphic about how the world was ripping apart.” Clinton also liked the work of Hieronymus Bosch and spent several minutes analyzing Bosch's
Table Top with the Seven Deadly Sins
.

When they went off to tour the rest of Spain, the matchmaking effort devolved into a picaresque farce. Stearns thought the women were too clothes-conscious. “The girls had a preposterous amount of clothes—one suitcase was just full of shoes!” Stearns recalls. And Lyda found Stearns deadly earnest and uptight. The lessons Clinton had tried to give him on how to make friends and woo women were not paying dividends here. “I was trying to get poor Rick to loosen up. Relax. This is Spain,” Lyda said later. “He very seriously asked me what I intended to do with my life. I said I would like to go into retail, run a gift shop someday. That might have horrified him. It seemed like the harder he tried, the worse it got.” And try Stearns did. When they reached Seville, he felt so guilty about the way he and Clinton looked compared with their dates—“they were showing up at dinner every night like fashion plates!”—that he shaved off his mustache. But he sensed that by that time all was lost. While Holt and Thrift went shopping, he and Clinton traipsed off to the Mexican pavilion at Seville's fair and started drinking what looked like orangeade at five centavos a cup. It was a sweltering day on the Spanish plain, and the beverage seemed especially refreshing to the American lads. They assumed that it could not have much alcohol. Soon enough they were tipsy. They were sitting on a
curb, giggling, when the young women found them—one of the few times in Clinton's life when he appeared drunk.

S
OON
after he returned to Oxford, Clinton again assumed one of his favorite roles, playing tour guide for an Arkansas friend visiting England. David Leopoulos, mourning the recent murder of his mother, who had been stabbed to death at her antique shop in Hot Springs, rode the train north from Camp Darby near Pisa with his Army buddy Steve Gorman. Clinton hoped that the holiday in England might ease the grief of his closest friend from his childhood. They had not seen each other for more than a year, the longest they had been apart since they were eight years old.
Leopoulos was
always hungering to spend time with Clinton, who represented to him not only the sweet memories of their childhood in Hot Springs but also an imagined future of unlimited promise. He boasted to Gorman of the Rhodes Scholar they were traveling to Oxford to see: “This guy's going to be president someday.”

But the trip to England proved anything but relaxing. The thumping, screeching, rumbling, and lurching of the train as it twisted through the Alps kept them up all night. When the clean-cut Army computer specialists, sleepless and exhausted, dragged their heavy canvas bags through the station in London, Gorman turned to Leopoulos and muttered, “Where the hell is he?”

Leopoulos looked down the corridor and saw “this guy with long hair, a bushy beard, blue jeans” walking toward them, accompanied by a young woman. “There's Bill,” he said.

“He's going to be president?” Gorman asked, incredulous.

“Yeah,” said Leopoulos. “He'll clean up okay.”

Throughout the visit, Leopoulos's mother's death was never mentioned, a polite avoidance that David not only appreciated but thought was typical of Clinton. “Bill will not talk about awful, negative things with his old friends,” Leopoulos said later. “He would rather avoid them. Shut them out. But I knew that the feeling was there.”

I
N
the final term of his second year at Oxford, Clinton showed signs of becoming a serious student.
He attended
special cram courses, known as revision courses, that were intended to prepare students for degree examinations. Alan Ryan, a politics don at New College, ran the revision courses in politics. “It was a sort of two-year polishing-up session so that people could come and revise like mad for the actual examinations—a sort of thirty-three things you need to know in thirty-five minutes type
thing.” Though Ryan could not remember Clinton being in his class, university records indicate that he was. Univ politics don Maurice Shock, who had returned from a leave, became Clinton's supervisor for his final term. Shock filed a report stating that Clinton was working hard but that his effort to fulfill the B. Phil. requirements was a race against time which he would most likely lose. In the month before the June examinations, Shock suggested that Clinton was not ready and should instead return for a third year, switching from a two-year B. Phil. to a three-year D. Phil., which required a dissertation of as much as 100,000 words.

Most Rhodes Scholars stayed at Oxford for two years, though there was money available for a third year for students who needed the extra time. Clinton considered the third-year option, which several of his friends, including Talbott, were taking, but decided that getting the Oxford degree was not worth the delay it would cause in his long-range plans to run for public office. He had already been accepted into Yale Law School, as had several other Oxford friends, including Bob Reich and Doug Eakeley. Yale Law seemed like the place to be—both an important establishment credential and a gathering place for many of the most politically astute members of his generation.

When Clinton appeared at Shock's rooms at Univ College one day that spring, accompanied by Reich, and announced that he would not be staying for a third year, the don was neither surprised nor disappointed. “
I didn't
take any kind of dim view that he decided not to take a degree,” Shock recalled. “It was clear that he had gotten a lot out of it.” Although Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House, took pride in the academic accomplishments of his foreign charges at Oxford, he nonetheless had a subtle appreciation for what the scholarship really meant to the Americans. “
If you
were an American and entirely on the make, you would do well in college, try for the Rhodes, get your name
in the
newspapers for winning one, and then resign it and go to Harvard or Yale Law School,” Williams noted. “The motivation is to get it. What you do here doesn't really matter so long as you enjoy yourself. Don't fail to take notice that it's a free trip to Europe. Make friends. And, we hope, don't grow to dislike the English.”

In the end, nine out of the thirty-two members of the American Rhodes class of 1968 never received Oxford degrees, the highest percentage in the post-World War II period. Among Clinton's closest friends, only Reich and Eakeley took their Oxford degrees in two years. Although each scholar had his own story, the larger trend seems obviously related to the times. To some extent it had to do with a cultural shift in which the new generation was challenging traditional totems of academic achievement. But the complications arising from the war and the draft were more important in their thinking. Many of those who eventually left without degrees, including
Clinton, later expressed regret and wished that they could go back and complete that unfinished period of their lives. Although later in his career Clinton never spoke bitterly about his Oxford experience, he rarely ex-tolled those years, either. One reason was a touch of embarrassment: Oxford represented unfinished business. Perhaps that sense of mild regret and ambiguity served as the fitting metaphor for an extraordinary, unrepeatable era.

When the Trinity term ended, Frank Aller headed for Spain to work on an autobiographical novel. Strobe Talbott traveled to Boston, where he continued his translation of the Khrushchev memoirs before returning to Oxford, where he and several members of the class, including Paul Parish and Frank Aller, would study for a third year. And Clinton flew to Washington, where he would spend the summer as a low-level organizer in Project Pursestrings, an effort to persuade Congress to cut off funding for the Vietnam War. In mid-July,
he drove
to Springfield, Massachusetts, for the wedding of college roommate Kit Ashby, who was then a Marine Corps officer on his way to Vietnam. Clinton, who had no money, slept in the basement at the house of the parents of the bride. Early on the wedding morning, the prospective bride tiptoed down to the basement where the ironing board was stored, to iron the train of her wedding gown. “I was trying to hold the dress so it wouldn't fall on the floor; doing it quietly but with great difficulty,” Amy Ashby later recalled. “All of a sudden this voice says, ‘Why don't you let me hold it.' Bill had taken the white sheet he had slept on and wrapped it around himself. I was shocked. He looked like Jesus. I said, ‘God, Bill, you look like Jesus Christ!' He helped me hold down the train.”