THE DREAMING SPIRES
THE FIRST ROOMS that Bill Clinton occupied at Oxford were on the second floor of an old stone almshouse, ornamented with honeysuckle, which faced Helen’s Court in the right rear corner of University College. He had a sitting room and a bedroom. Doug Eakeley lived across the opposite stairwell in similar quarters. There was a toilet on the first floor and a cold-running shower on the second. The only warmth came from coin-operated electric heaters. No shillings in the pocket, no heat at night. The Americans at Helen’s Court were cared for by a “scout” named Arch, a chubby-cheeked servant who according to college lore once waited upon Feliks Yusupov, the Russian prince who had assassinated Rasputin. Bob Reich and John Isaacson, the other two Rhodes Scholars at Univ, were housed on the far side of the college in a modern red brick building with central heating that disappointed them with its featureless twentieth-century efficiency.
Even in the gray gloom of that Oxford autumn, University College was a museum of enchanting colors. The gold-yellow stone walls streaked with black-brown dirt from ages past. The green Front Quad, different somehow from the green of Arkansas and other verdant plots in the New World: richer, sublime, as though every blade of grass had been hand-colored in deep green day after day, century after century. The white marble statue of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Muse of Poetry, a Univ man himself once, long ago, before he was sent down, expelled in 1811 for publishing an atheist tract, but now honored in his own mausoleum, a drowned romantic figure in Carrara marble the white of white chocolate. The soft reds and greens of portraits in the Hall above red-brown oak paneling and below a warm brown hammer-beam roof. The luminous blues and yellows of painted glass in the chapel depicting the Fall and expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.
Every morning during his first week, Clinton bounded down the cold stairwell of the almshouse out onto the brick courtyard, weaved through the Gothic maze of Univ past the porter’s lodge, and stepped out into the mist of the High Street to explore his new surroundings. He visited most of the nearly thirty colleges that comprised Oxford University, separate academic fortresses with their own personalities and traditions, walled off and imposing from the street, entered through heavy oak doors opening onto brilliant lawns framed by ancient stone buildings. He loped across the street to inspect the classic beauty of Queens College and the new digs of Frank Aller, the tall, brilliant Asia scholar from Washington. He traipsed past the Bodleian Library and under the Bridge of Sighs along dark and narrow Catte Street, and turned left on Broad to Blackwell’s bookshop, a bibliophile’s paradise that he would revisit countless times, then on to Balliol College, new home of eight Rhodes Scholars, including Rick Stearns and Tom Williamson. He made his way north to Rhodes House with its squared rubble front, where Sir Edgar resided and occasionally invited his Rhodes charges to dinner. He ventured east to the slender, meandering River Cherwell and the deer park in the forest grove of Magdalen College, where Strobe Talbott was staying. To the west he absorbed the bustle of the covered market and the hustle of shops along Cornmarket. South down St. Aldate’s he found Pembroke College, where J. William Fulbright learned to smoke a pipe and wear tweed knickers.
He walked fourteen hours a day that first week or so, returning in the dark to his room to plop down “sore and exhilarated.” Reich was his frequent companion and fellow explorer. They talked nonstop, gesticulating as they roamed the ancient streets. “We were suddenly within ruins! We were in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century ruins! I can’t describe the feelings we shared,” Reich said later. “The architecture, the customs, the manners, the strange ways the English talked. We were constantly comparing notes.” For centuries, their college, affectionately known as Univ, had laid claim to being the first of the Oxford colleges, going back to King Alfred in the year 872. It turned out that this boast was spurious and that the founding of Univ was more accurately placed in the thirteenth century, slightly after Merton and Balliol. Such ancient quibbles were of some importance in a place where an institution called New College was indeed new in 1379.
Clinton was so excited by his daily excursions through Oxford that he could not sleep much at night. In an October 14 letter to Denise Hyland, he reflected on how beautiful he found it all, even with the miserable weather. “I am happy if lonely,” he wrote. “And I’m convinced I was right to come even if I’m drafted out soon.”
America seemed very far away. In the Weir Common Room, he and Reich, Eakeley, and Isaacson sipped tea, ate Cadbury biscuits, and read the London newspapers for political news from home. Through a foreign lens, the United States often appeared chaotic, a land troubled by assassinations and wars. Londoners complained of the Americanization of their city every time another cement slab rose on the skyline. The Sunday Times ran articles on the obesity and violence of Americans, quoting one as saying, “We are the most terrifying people on earth.” Oxford, in contrast, seemed insular and quaint, if not irrelevant, to many of the Americans. Perhaps that was always the case—Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “the wind that blows in Oxford blows out of the past”—but it seemed especially so that year. Tom Williamson, removed from a country where “our cities were burning and our campuses were in turmoil,” found life in Oxford “like being put in a crypt and awakened one hundred years before.” There were no telephones in their rooms. The scholars communicated through notes or by showing up at one another’s quarters and hoping someone was there. They ate at fixed times, dining in college halls wearing fashionably shabby black waist-length academic gowns, listening to fellows recite grace in Latin and Greek in dialogues that were part prayer, part witty repartee with the college master.
At times it seemed that Clinton stood out like a multicolored plaid sports coat in this atmosphere of subdued tweeds. He was, thought Doug Paschal, a scholar at Christ Church, “always the character who wanted to do one more thing, go one more place, stay up one more hour, have one more drink. He came across as somebody with a great appetite for life … a bit clumsy physically and verbally, making waves.” To Paschal, Clinton seemed unguarded. “He would say things others might have said if they weren’t so worried about it. The Oxford of that time was a very complicated place, and we could not escape the sense of the brash and loutish and insensitive American presence, always slightly aware of not fitting in exactly. On the other hand, there were lots of people who responded quickly to the robustness and good nature of people like Bill, though there would always be some class-conscious Englishmen who would bristle at someone like him crashing around in the china shop.”
The cultural gap led to some measure of tension in the relationship between the Americans and certain Oxford dons. George Butte, studying literature at New College, encountered one tutor who, while gazing out his office window as he sipped his sherry, said with a chuckle that he was amazed to read Faulkner and discover that he was a good novelist. Tom Williamson’s dons gave a cool reception to his proposal to write about slavery, dismissing the topic as too American and parochial, but were far more enthusiastic when he switched his interest to Ethiopian politics. John Isaacson found his philosophy dons disdainful of the attempts by American students to relate philosophy to the ethical dilemmas of the age.
That is not to say that the ancient town of dreaming spires was devoid of the confrontational politics of the sixties. Emboldened by the student uprisings that had swept through the capitals of Europe, the young men and women of Oxford were pushing up against the walls of tradition. “People were starting to question all kinds of assumptions about how the place should be run, the extent students should be involved,” recalled Nick Browne, an Englishman in his third year at Univ when Clinton arrived. “It was a time when the Rolling Stones were extolling the street fighting man and you could hear The Who on campus. The revolution in dress had reached Oxford: hair down to your shoulders, bright yellow satin shirts, an affected scruffiness.” Wilf Stevenson, a Scottish undergraduate at Univ, noted that students then were catching a wave of generational energy from the street revolt in Paris the previous spring and were looking for ways to ride it. “We knew about the barricades of Paris. But we were absolutely naive and hopeless. We didn’t know how to turn into action everything we were feeling. It was evanescent, with nothing at the end of the day to show for it.”
The protests at Oxford did not match the bold student actions in Paris, but they did offer a decidedly British satiric touch. Dozens of agitated junior fellows disrupted the matriculation ceremony outside the Sheldonian Theatre, complaining that the formal rite accepting new students to Oxford was anachronistic. The protest gave birth to a memorable picket sign: “Matriculation Makes You Blind.” Another satirical protest was launched against the stuffiest college, All Souls, which had no undergraduate or graduate students, only fellows for life, and was derided as a haven for reactionaries. Of an All Souls master by the name of Sparrow, one sign proclaimed: “Sparrow Is a Tit.” Humorous radicals led by Christopher Hitchens of Balliol College, who went on to become a rambunctious British journalist, seemed to enjoy nothing more than lampooning Master Sparrow. They adopted the albatross as their logo of the left, a sarcastic symbol of intimidation. “Albatross Eats Sparrow” was one of their signs.
On broader issues, the student body leaned leftward. The most ferocious Oxford Union debate of the term addressed the question of whether American democracy had failed. Arguing the negative, Clive Stitt declared that “had it not been for one major boob in Vietnam, the Johnson-Humphrey administration would have gone down as one of America’s greatest” Arguing the affirmative, a purple-shirted young aristocrat named Viscount Lewisham “poured scorn” on the American presidential candidates, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Republican Richard M. Nixon. The motion that American democracy had failed carried 266 to 233. All this denunciation of America unsettled the Rhodes Scholars during their first term at Oxford. Many of them were harshly critical of American foreign policy and disappointed in the choice offered in the 1968 presidential election, but they were not ready to give up on American democracy, and certainly not to hear it blasted by class-conscious Englishmen. Darryl Gless was often angry with the Brits. “They assumed that because we were Rhodes Scholars we were prowar and rich. They were so critical of America, I often found myself defending my country.”
Clinton’s reaction was similar. Martin Walker, a British student at Oxford, sat near Clinton at a party that year where the dissolution of the United States was the primary topic of discussion. “One guy was going on about how democracy had failed and the country was in a prerevolutionary situation, and Clinton countered that. He said, no, the system was able to work. And he cited civil rights. At the time that was not a fashionable position to take. Everyone else in the room was taking the fashionable position that America was hopeless.”
In early November, the Americans stayed up all night at the Rhodes House watching the stateside elections, and returned gloomily to their rooms the next morning after learning that Nixon had won the presidency. One of the few bright moments of the long night was when word came that Senator Fulbright had won reelection. The next day Clinton sent a telegram to Fulbright in Little Rock:
BILL
GOT RESULTS AT RHODES HOUSE ELECTION PARTY YOU RECEIVED A GREAT CHEER EVERYTHING FINE HERE HAPPY FOR YOU AND MRS FULBRIGHT CONGRATULATIONS
Fulbright sent back a short note.
Dear Bill: I appreciate so much your warm telegram. It was thoughtful of you to wire me at such a busy time. I am looking forward to seeing you on your return. Merry Christmas.
With all good wishes, I am sincerely yours,
J. W. Fulbright.
Fulbright seemed to have a soft spot for Clinton, despite the disastrous driving episodes of the previous summer and his disdain for Clinton’s ever curlier locks. Long hair was selfish and counterproductive in the fight against the war, Fulbright would constantly tell his young charges.
The Vietnam War was another point of contrast between the Americans and the British. Most of the Rhodes Scholars opposed the war; yet during their first months overseas, they were slow to immerse themselves in the antiwar movement. Many of them did not want to jeopardize their scholarships. There had been reports from back home that Lieutenant General Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, was attempting to punish dissenters by ordering the drafting of known war protesters. Others were still relishing the sense of escape that had overwhelmed them as they sailed away from America. None took roles in the large antiwar march in London on October 27 where there was a confrontation at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. British students at Oxford, some marching under the banner of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Society, had gone to London proclaiming that the protest was “a rehearsal for the Revolution,” and returned frustrated that they had not stirred up more of a fuss. Chris Hitchens, who was also a prominent Oxford Union debater, one of those who argued that American democracy had failed, said the student socialists were “building up an important mass Marxist movement in the country,” but that the legion that went to London was somewhat thin because “nobody wants to get sent to jail at this stage of term.”
At times the fire was aimed at Rhodes Scholars, which frustrated them. They thought their British counterparts were grandstanding. “It was easy for us to say all these things,” recalled Martin Walker, then a correspondent for Chenvell. “But the Americans were the ones who really had to deal with it. For them, it was a deeply private grief. They had this threat of conscription hanging over them. They faced the draft. We did not.”
Walker’s college, Balliol, which housed the most Rhodes Scholars, was the intellectual center of Oxford radicalism, the walls of its Junior Common Room lined with posters of black power leaders and burning inner cities. “People there were always shouting, ‘Enough talk, it’s time for action!ߣ” recalled Daniel Singer. “It was an effete, supercilious characteristic of the Brits, when only the Americans faced a real problem.”
LATER in his life, when recounting his academic efforts at Oxford, Clinton would say that during his first year there he read for a degree in PPE—politics, philosophy, and economics—an undergraduate program requiring a series of tutorials and examinations in the three broad subjects. PPE was a popular choice at Oxford among Rhodes Scholars, including Bob Reich. But the archival records show that Clinton was never in the program. Uncertain about what he wanted to pursue at first, he began in what was called B. Litt, politics probational. The probational meant it was a tentative choice, the B. Litt, denoted a research degree program that required no tutorials or lectures but a massive fifty-thousand-word dissertation at the end of two years. The politics don at Univ was on sabbatical that term, so Clinton was assigned a supervisor from Balliol. Such cross-college moves occurred frequently as students discovered that their college did not specialize in their field or that the dons in that subject were not available. Clinton was supervised by the Balliol don only in the loosest sense. The topic he chose for his dissertation was Imperialism. He checked out dozens of books on the subject from the college library and the larger Bodleian Library and read them in late October and early November.
In the middle of that first eight-week term, Clinton changed his mind and transferred to a B. Phil. program in politics, which called for more interaction with college dons: weekly tutorials, fortnightly essays, a shorter dissertation at the end of the two years, and examinations in four subjects—political theory, comparative government, and two electives. He also changed supervisors, switching to Zbigniew Pelczynski at Pembroke College, Senator Fulbright’s old haunt. Students in the Oxford system are not necessarily supervised and tutored by the same don, but Pelczynski took on both tasks with Clinton. He was a soft-spoken intellectual of forty-three whose genteel life as an Oxford don was not something that had come to him as a birthright. Pelczynski grew up in Grodzisk, Poland, and as a teenager during World War II joined the Polish resistance. He was captured by the Germans but liberated by the British, and finished the war fighting in the Polish armed forces under British command. He came to Oxford in 1946 at age twenty-one to study political theory and never left.
During the fall and early winter of 1968, Pelczynski was lecturing on Soviet politics. He was an anti-Communist with leftist tendencies that were diminishing year by year. Although radical students regularly attended his lectures, they had begun to strain his patience. He thought that they “were always posing. They weren’t genuine. They were always painting America as the bad guy, the bogey, and they gave me hell on political theory. They would get up and quote Marx. Once I’d had enough and I said, ‘Well, you’re not going to give me this Marxist shit again!ߣ” During his lectures on the Soviet Union, Pelczynski explored the totalitarian model and questioned whether it was still valid. Splits in the Soviet ruling elite suggested to him that it was no longer the totalitarian monolith of Stalin’s day.
For his weekly tutorials, Clinton visited the Polish don in his old bachelor rooms in the North Quad at Pembroke. Pelczynski swiveled pensively in “the Egg,” his tomato red modernistic chair, as Clinton discussed readings and essays with him. They went through a mix of political theory and comparative government subjects: the presidential versus cabinet systems of government in the United States and Britain, the separation of powers, notions of democracy, and totalitarianism and pluralism in Eastern Europe. The tutor found his young Rhodes pupil engaging and sharp if not academically brilliant. Clinton was not the ablest American graduate Pelczynski taught at Oxford, “at least not in a purely academic sense,” he would note later. “But he had a sharp analytical mind and an impressive power to master and synthesize complex material.” It was clear to Pelczynski that Clinton “had the mind of a politician, trying to figure things out, rather than the patience of an academic.” He was also “a rather effective arguer, on paper and verbally.”
Clinton wrote a number of essays for Pelczynski. He struggled somewhat with the short subjective essay form at which British students excelled. “What suited Clinton was the longer form, laying out all the different lines of thought and synthesizing them rather than independently developing his own line of thought,” according to Pelczynski. The essay that most impressed Pelczynski was entitled “Political Pluralism in the USSR.” Clinton had been given two weeks to write it, during which he read or looked through some thirty books and articles on the subject. Pelczynski considered Clinton’s eighteen-page essay a model of clarity. He kept it in his files and used it later as a teaching tool.
In an essay that was virtually all synthesis, Clinton divided the writings on Soviet pluralism into three schools. First was the Totalitarian school, which came into prominence before Stalin’s death. “This group does not accept the viability of factional disputes over policy issues or vested interests of long standing,” Clinton wrote. “Any divisions within the leadership are attributed to personal struggles for power, which inevitably will end in the triumph of one man, who, by his victory, returns absolutism and stability to the system.”
Then came the Kremlinology school, whose proponents argued that the Soviet system featured a continual power struggle among various factions who, if they could not achieve absolute power for themselves, sought to make sure that no other faction gained a dominant position. This theory was applied to the troubles Khrushchev had with his opponents in the Presidium in the early 1960s and his eventual ouster. “Kremlinologists go beyond the Totalitarian school in acknowledging a very limited but persistent kind of political pluralism in the existence of factions within the party leadership, factions which, in turn, are related to divisions within the bureaucracy and society as a whole,” Clinton wrote. But this theory was not without its weaknesses, he said, and was especially vulnerable to the charge that it was bogged down in micro-history.
Clinton gave no name to a third school of Soviet scholarship, which, he said, “begins with the assumption that industrialization and urbanization lead to the differentiation of society and the multiplication of interest groups. In short, a pluralistic society emerges, and with it, the demand and the necessity for more political pluralism.” In this theory, the Soviet Union might be compared to “a large Western corporation, with all the inbred resistance of bureaucracies to change, plus the additional albatross of a past marked by the use of terror and the dominance of ideology, a past which lingers on into the present and could reemerge full blown in the future.” There were both optimists and pessimists in this third school. Some believed the Soviet Union would evolve into a parliamentary democracy; others predicted that it would either move gradually to more pluralistic politics or disintegrate.
In his summary, Clinton stayed on moderate ground, agreeing with Pelczynski that political pluralism did exist in the Soviet Union to a certain degree, and that many social forces—the intelligentsia, the youth, the peasants, the churches, the consumers, the nationalities, and the bureaucrats—had developed agendas “more or less independent of the priorities of the rulers.” This could lead to any one of six futures for the Soviet Union: oscillation between liberalization and repression as the dictators deem necessary; immobilism and degeneration; continued domination by conservative bureaucrats seeking to maintain their positions within the system; rule by a coalition of elites; evolution toward pluralism within a one-party system; or evolution to a multiparty parliamentary democracy. Although Clinton did not pick his favorite among the six alternatives, he implied by listing his favorite authors on the subject that he inclined toward the theory that the Soviet Union would either move toward parliamentary democracy or collapse.
“One final warning in closing,” Clinton wrote. “Any conclusions herein must be hypothetical and no more. Certainty is precluded by the volatility of Soviet politics, fragmentary evidence, questionable reliability and variety of plausible interpretations of available evidence, and this writer’s very limited background and competence in this field.”
THE scholar’s life at Oxford was unlike anything the Americans had experienced. They had oceans of time and virtually no responsibilities that first year beyond the tutorials and occasional papers. The lectures were not tied to the courses and did not have to be attended. Even some British students were disoriented by this freedom. Martin Amis thought it could lead to feelings of isolation. Oxford, he later wrote, “is for the most part a collection of people sitting alone in their rooms, one of which turns out to be you.”
But for Clinton, who hated to be alone, there were plenty of diversions. Here he was, after all, surrounded by people who loved to talk as much as he did. Doug Eakeley’s strongest memory of Clinton at Univ is a lunchtime scene: Clinton lingering at the long table in the Hall, surrounded by undergraduates long after the noontime meal is finished, chatting away. The younger English students, Eakeley noticed, “were in constant fascination with Bill and he with them. They were so verbally facile. It was expected that you would not just eat and run but eat and talk and debate the great issues of the day until you were thrown out of the dining hall. Bill was always in the thick of it.” Clinton also joined a dining club run by George Calkwell, a Greek history don at Univ. The informal club consisted of six dons and fourteen junior fellows. They met in the Senior Common Room to eat, drink, and talk away the night.
There was another club that met more often, a floating seminar that gathered late at night in Clinton’s rooms on Helen’s Court, or over at Reich’s on the other side of Univ in the modern Goodhart Building, or across the street at Frank Aller’s place at Queen’s College, or over at the Taj Mahal, a cheap Indian restaurant near Balliol College favored by Rick Stearns, who challenged the cooks to find a dish too hot for his palate. This club had no name and a flexible membership of Rhodes Scholars and friends. They would sit in the corner of the restaurant or in the shadows of their rooms, slumped on the floor, leaning against beds, warmed by a heater and some wine, and talk politics for hours. The floating seminar, thought Univ politics don Maurice Shock, “introduced Clinton to a central thing—that politics consists of making use of people you can trust who really are very clever.” The topics ranged widely, from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to the sorry state of American politics to the ideology of Mao Zedong to the British influence in nineteenth-century Crimea, but always, weaving in and out of the conversation, came their feelings about a war they hated and a draft they did not want to face. They were all “quite fanatically political,” thought Doug Paschal, and none more so than Clinton, who came to the discussions “with his antennae absolutely alerted and trained.”
But Clinton could never cast himself in only one role. He could play the expatriate at night with his American friends, yet move from there to an entirely different level of discourse as he befriended the ultimate source of power at Univ—Douglas, the college porter who had greeted the four Americans on arrival with such disdain. Douglas was a hardliner on the war and most everything else. He intimidated everyone, even the master and fellows at the college, whom he might order to get a haircut or tell to go to hell. Wilf Stevenson considered Douglas “a true martinet, an old-school guy. He was terrifying. His stern upbraiding shot like a bullet through you. But he was the guy who ran the college and he knew everything.” He knew, for instance, where to get formal attire or contraceptives and what rooms were available for guests. But it took some nerve to ask him about such matters. The first year, noted Nick Browne, “he might ignore you completely. The second year he might start talking to you. Douglas was a classic of his time, the old staff sergeant. He had a way of seeing through people.” John Isaacson, after experiencing Douglas’s hazing on the day they arrived, decided that befriending the porter was not on his must-do list. “I checked him out for thirty seconds and decided it was too much for me. I said the hell with it. I wasn’t capable of dealing with him.”
The porter’s lodge was a twenty-by-eight-foot room on the left side of the main gate. Two paned windows faced High Street and two tall windows looked back toward the college and the Front Quad. A small black door on the far side led into a hideaway bedroom. The T-shaped counter inside the lodge was crammed with keys, notes, mail, and card indexes. There were two telephones on the wall, and two chairs and a coin-operated heater behind the counter. This was the domain of Douglas—and, soon enough, of his buddy from Arkansas. Not long after the Rhodes Scholars arrived, Clinton entered the porter’s turf and adopted it as his own. He spent hours in the lodge, answering the phone, passing out keys, spreading and gathering gossip. Isaacson would never forget the odd image of the two of them. “They’d be sitting there, their feet up on the counter, two bull-shitters swapping stories. Douglas would tell stories about the war and Bill would tell stories about Arkansas. Anyone who entered had to pay homage to them. It reminded me of the stores up in Maine where we’d go fishing when I was a kid. You’d walk in and there’d be the proprietor and a friend, and they’d look at you like you were an alien entering their world. That was the porter and Bill.”
Several more hours of Clinton’s week were applied to another aspect of English life previously unknown to him: rugby. He was more successful at conquering the porter’s lodge than at mastering this sport, but he gained some measure of esteem from his British mates for exuberance. The Univ squad practiced on the pitch off Folly Bridge Road every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and played matches against other colleges on Wednesdays. Univ was in the first division of Oxford colleges and supported two teams. Clinton played on the second fifteen. Chris McCooey, the Univ star and club secretary who played on both teams, thought that Clinton “wasn’t very good, but it didn’t matter because what he contributed was wonderfully American enthusiasm. Actually, a bit much enthusiasm. He flattened a guy in the first lineup who didn’t have the ball. When the ref said you don’t do that I had to explain, ‘sorry, he’s from America, where you can flatten anyone.ߣ” Clinton was flattened himself more than once after getting his feet crossed while participating in the crablike formation known as a scrum. He played in the second row of the scrum, where his job was to push hard and try to make the ball go back to his side.
After the rugby matches, the players would repair to the clubhouse for beers or go down to the buttery, the wine cellar at Univ, for wine and cheese served up by the college bartender. The cellar was located under the dining hall, about fifty yards from Helen’s Court, convenient and cheaper than the nearby pubs. The pub favored by Clinton and his Rhodes friends was the Bear, whose old walls displayed the colorful ties of every school at Oxford. Clinton was a modest drinker by now. Two drinks and his face would turn bright red. He was partial to the shandy, a concoction of lemonade and beer. He and some of his pals took rather well to the uncelebrated British fare, especially steak and kidney pie and shepherd’s pie. To further clog their arteries, they spent many mornings at another favorite hangout, George’s, a sawdust-floored breakfast nook, consuming mountains of grease: eggs, bacon, and bread all fried in the same pan. Rick Stearns had a soft spot for the famously unhealthy dish known as Scotch Eggs, hard-boiled eggs wrapped in minced pork and fried in breadcrumbs. But some British food was scorned by the Americans, most notably the kippers that the scouts would occasionally bring around at breakfast. James Shellar, a Univ-based Rhodes Scholar in the class ahead of Clinton’s, would “look at that fish-eye staring up from oil and say, ‘Oh, no thank you.ߣ” He was not alone. “It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes when they came around with the kippers—six kippers could feed the whole hall. The rest of us would settle for cornflakes.”
While Clinton engaged his British mates playing rugby, Bob Reich delighted them on stage. He was an actor and director who took part in every Univ production. That fall, outside an audition room, he caught sight of a seventeen-year-old girl who took his breath away. He was “too timid to ask her name at the time,” and when she left, he feared that he would never see her again. So he decided to direct his own play, The Fantasticks, and when the girl showed up for auditions, he cast her in the leading role. Claire Dalton later became his wife. Reich was more widely known around Univ than his big southern sidekick. It was an artsy college whose master was Sir John Maud, later to be known as Lord Redcliffe-Maud, a tall and distinguished statesman, after-dinner speaker, and actor. His wife was a pianist who brought fine concerts to the college. The Mauds and all the senior fellows at Univ enjoyed Reich for his dash and wit and theatrical talent. John Albery, then a chemistry don, thought of him as “small and twinkly, and very clever, very clever indeed.”
By the undergraduates at Univ, Reich and Clinton were viewed almost as an American tag team. It seemed to Chris McCooey that they “were kind of a double act, those two—Bill was big and lumpy and overweight, and Reich I guess was kind of a certified dwarf. It was like Laurel and Hardy. And they were very good value. They added a lot of fun to the college.” Wilf Stevenson also described Clinton and Reich as a team. “They were quite a sight, swaggering around side by side. They were always deeply into some argument and you’d hear a snippet as they passed by. ‘No, you’re completely wrong about that,’ one would be saying about some political theoretician. ߣHe was saying something else in that part of the book!ߣ”
When he had surveyed Oxford to his satisfaction, Clinton began taking road trips with his friends. They called themselves the “Roads Scholars.” Clinton was known for his wanderlust: anyone who wanted to leave could call him and be fairly sure of landing a traveling companion. They hitchhiked everywhere, and used their college ties—or scarves, literally—to help them along. Each school at Oxford had a tie and a scarf, with the college colors. According to Mike Shea, “You’d put your scarf around your neck and get some interesting rides and conversations. It worked better during the daylight, when the striped scarves were clearly visible. One weekend Shea and Clinton hitchhiked to Nottingham for the weekend and headed back later than they had intended on Sunday night. It was raining and miserable and they stood by the side of the darkened road for hours before anyone stopped. Looming in the gloom in his long coat late at night, Clinton was not too inviting to pick up.” At the time, Shea thought he might be “a lot better off out there with Bob Reich.”
Clinton’s frequent companion on the road was Tom Williamson, with whom he hitchhiked to London and back several times, and all across the United Kingdom, including a trip to Dublin to see the woman Williamson had been romancing since they met on The Big U crossing the Atlantic. The picturesqueness of the blossoming friendship between Williamson and Clinton, the only black Rhodes Scholar and the aspiring Arkansas pol, was not lost on them. At Clinton’s suggestion one day, to break up the tedium on the road, they reversed roles of the worst black and white stereotypes. When cars stopped to pick them up, Williamson sat in the front with the driver and ordered Clinton to the back, Williamson assuming the haughty airs of a southern master, Clinton the shuffling humility of a servant-slave. They enjoyed each other’s sense of humor. Williamson would poke fun at Clinton, saying, “You know, Bill, it’s really nice that you are progressive and openminded here in England, but if you want to go back to Arkansas and make a political career, you’ll have to make compromises. You’ll have to be a Dixiecrat.”
Thoughts of Arkansas and his political future were never far from Clinton’s mind. That fall a large group of Rhodes Scholars took a bus up to Stratford from Oxford to see a production of King Lear. Darryl Gless, the Shakespeare student, sat next to Clinton on the ride back. Clinton talked to him about the play all the way back, relating it to his life in different ways. He told Gless that he was moved by the scene in Act III when Lear is turned out of Gloucester Castle onto the heath and takes shelter in a hovel where he encounters the poor for the first time. “That scene,” Gless recalled later, “prompted Bill to talk about his eagerness to go back to Arkansas—to give something back to the place that gave him opportunities that his family could not have bought. As we were riding home that night, Bill talked about his mother, a nurse like mine. He told me about his father and his stepfather, who had died, like mine. We were both from small towns in rural states. We talked a lot about our lives, but he kept coming back to his aspirations and the play. He was struck that Lear had been on the throne for decades before he learned the first thing about how his subjects lived.”
Clinton had a fascination with how other people lived. Curiosity about the people around him was one of his strongest traits, the main intersection of his gregarious, empathetic personality and his political ambition. Some people watched Clinton in action and marveled at his big heart. Paul Parish could see it “any time you were with him and you met a third person, a friend of yours who Bill did not know. That friend would end up telling Bill things about himself. The kinds of things Bill brought out in people were the kinds of things you wanted to be around. People’s souls shined in their faces when they were talking to Bill.” There was another dimension to it. Clinton had already heard the stories about how Lyndon Johnson could tell whether someone was for him or against him with one look into the person’s eyes.
He was always searching out more eyes to practice on. After watching him operate that fall at Oxford, John Isaacson, the Dartmouth debater who had political dreams of his own, was intrigued by Clinton’s political aptitude in artful conversation. Isaacson concluded that Clinton “had two moves, the Sponge move and the Radar move. The Sponge move was to soak information and give it back. The Radar move was Clintonesque. He was not so much a talker as a bouncer. He would try out different versions of what he thought and bounce them off you while looking at your eyes. That was his radar system. When the radar hit the eyes, he knew it. I remember feeling like he was throwing stuff at you and you had to react to it. It was charming and yet slightly annoying, like, what is this? People would say he was a great listener, and he was in a way, but you were on Bill’s topics when you were with Bill. Not that he didn’t have a lot of topics, but you were working in Bill’s territory. Big territory, but his territory. He was capable of keeping it that way. I was frustrated and awed by it. I was aware of it as a source of power. He was smart and morally earnest, and also a bullshitter who told stories.”
How long could this leisurely life of nonstop bull sessions last? Clinton pondered that question one night in December, at the end of the Michaelmas term, as he walked the streets of London. He had listened to the symphony that night at “the majestically royal Festival Hall on the Thames,” he wrote in a letter to Denise Hyland in New York. Then he had crossed the river and followed the lights of the city to Westminster. He stopped, he said, “for a brief conversation with Abe Lincoln, who stands in the square,” then walked on to Trafalgar Square, then to the tube station and back to the Chelsea apartment of a friend. “It was a beautiful night,” Clinton wrote. “One good for putting the pieces of life together and threading the past through today to tomorrow.” Too soon, he feared, the Oxford idyll would be his past and the U.S. armed forces would be his present and perhaps Vietnam his future. He told Denise that the Selective Service System wanted him to take his draft physical in London in January. He expected to be called for the draft by March 1, 1969.
FOR two months at Oxford it had been damp and cold, and it seemed to the Rhodes Scholars that it was as chilly inside as out. A forty-degree temperature there felt to them like twenty degrees back in the States. Even U.K. students from the north felt colder in Oxford than in their native realms. Wilf Stevenson, who had grown up in Glasgow, thought Oxford was worse than Scotland. “There’s a cold edge that comes off the Thames and hits Oxford, making it at times enormously cold and wet and horrid and dark.” Oxford was a fine place from which to flee when term ended and a six-week break began. The Rhodes Scholars scrambled across the continent looking for sun. Darryl Gless headed for Italy, “descending from the Alps out of the mist and fog and rain and snow and ending up in this sunny land where the people were sunny, too.” Daniel Singer went “ass-running … to Alicante in search of the warmest spot on the European continent, ruminating on consciousness all the while.”
Strobe Talbott ventured the other way, to where it was colder still. He was the first of his Rhodes group to visit Moscow. The forty-eight-hour train ride began in Holland and carried him across the continent into Russia. He spent almost a month there, living at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. At Yale, Talbott had concentrated on nineteenth-century Russian literature and poetry. He was so earnest about it that in his first-year Russian literature class he bought two copies of the textbook on the Russian short story and cut and pasted them into large notebooks so that he could annotate every page. But his prep school literalness concealed a poet’s soul. He loved to read Russian poetry and tried to write his own.
At Oxford, Talbott took an interest in the modern Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a lyric writer who became known as the poet of the Revolution, the Bolshevik darling who had a falling out with Stalin and shot himself in 1930. Talbott was in Moscow to learn more about Mayakovsky, and while there was granted an audience with the poet’s mistress, Lillia Brik. He also connected with some passive dissidents, who quietly shared their sense of despair with him. They took him to a Polish Catholic church and to a synagogue. “It was the depths of the Brezhnev period, with the intelligentsia on trial, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had occurred earlier in the year, the depths of the Cold War with really bad cultural politics,” Talbott recalled later. “Moscow was grim, grim, grim.” In the midst of the grimness, Talbott started a tradition that all his friends who followed him there over the next two years continued. He bought as much Stolichnaya vodka as he could afford and brought it back to Oxford.
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”
TO 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.