FEELING THE DRAFT
THE DAY WHEN Bill Clinton would have to confront his military obligation was looming. Sometimes it appeared close at hand, sometimes further away. Almost every month his expectations shifted. During his surprise trip home to Hot Springs for Christmas, he must have had contact with the Garland County Draft Board or picked up a hint of inside information from his new stepfather, Jeff Dwire, who was in frequent contact with the board secretary, because he would return to Oxford believing that his induction might be delayed several more months. “Time to get back to my other newer life for whatever time I have left,” he wrote to Denise Hyland after watching the New Year’s Day bowl games on television at his mother’s house. “Looks like I will finish the year now.”
But not long after he arrived back at Oxford for the second eight-week term, it seemed less likely that he would finish the year. On January 13, 1969, eight months after his draft board first reclassified him 1-A, Clinton finally took his preinduction armed forces physical examination at a U.S. air base near London. In a letter to Hyland, he noted that he had passed the physical and now “qualified as one of the healthiest men in the western world.” The order to take the preinduction physical was a signal that his draft board considered Clinton’s induction imminent. Draft regulations allowed graduate students who received induction notices to finish the term they were in, but there was some confusion as to how that would be interpreted at Oxford, which worked on a three-term system. It remained unclear what Clinton would do. If only, he told one friend, the draft system had been reformed in the way he once proposed in a paper written at Georgetown, so that young men could seek alternative service in the Peace Corps or Vista rather than fight in wars that they did not believe in. There was no such choice for him now if and when the draft board called his name.
Still, the decision was not yet upon him. For Frank Aller, the Rhodes Scholar from Washington State, the time for action had arrived. Aller, an aspiring journalist, had received a notice from his hometown draft board in Spokane ordering him to report for induction into the Army. He could not claim to be a conscientious objector, Aller told friends, because he believed that some wars were worth fighting, though not the war in Vietnam. His friends sensed Aller’s turmoil. They stayed up late at night with him and took long walks through the Magdalen deer park talking about the options of resisting and maybe going to Sweden or Canada. Aller chose to stay in Oxford and fight the U.S. Selective Service System. On January 20, he mailed a letter to his draft board saying that he could not in good conscience report for military service. “I believe there are times,” Aller wrote, “when concerned men can no longer remain obedient.” He later explained his motivations in a letter to Brooke Shearer, Derek Shearer’s sister and Strobe Talbott’s girlfriend and future wife:
When I decided to refuse induction … there were really two considerations which were foremost in my mind. One was the hope, expressed by the resistance movement on the west coast and elsewhere, that the spectacle of young men refusing to fight in a war they opposed would “move the conscience of America” and have some kind of tangible impact on American politics. The other consideration was more personal: an expression of the horror and revulsion we have all felt about the war, and the belief that a person should try to take action in accordance with his convictions.
Of all the Americans at Oxford, Aller presented the most interesting juxtaposition with Clinton. They seemed alike in some ways: two bright young men out of the middle class, tall and engaging, gentle and empathetic, consumed by politics and world affairs, readers, talkers, listeners, always at the center of things. All of this they had in common, yet they were very different. Aller was thin, resolute, and fragileseeming; Clinton was lumpy and unbreakable. Aller was sweet and ironic, shaped by the reserve and skepticism of Pacific Northwest Presbyterianism, prone to quiet mood shifts. Clinton was warm, temperamental, and sappy, shaped by the gregariousness and face-value Baptist piety of his Arkansas roots and freewheeling Hot Springs. For Aller, every moment presented a moral choice. Clinton confronted life as an optimist: each moment offered an opportunity.
Aller was in Oxford on the day that he was supposed to report for induction in Spokane. His friends held a party for him that night at Isaacson’s place at Univ. Willy Fletcher, who had shared that moment of joy with Aller when they got off the Greyhound bus and stood in the drizzle in western Washington, freshly anointed Rhodes Scholars, the whole world in front of them, felt awkward at the party. He was as opposed to the war as his buddy, yet he had slipped around it by joining the Navy, and Aller had met it headon and was resisting. Fletcher was experiencing “not only great admiration and love for Frank” but a feeling of doubt about himself and the course he had chosen. Aller was quiet throughout the night. Reich, who kept making toasts, later wrote that the evening was one of his most vivid memories of the Oxford years:
I remember it was drizzling…. John Isaacson’s room was bedecked with flowers and champagne. We played Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen albums late into the night. At midnight we toasted Frank. He said a few words in response, something about the war, and friends, and America. By one o’clock most of us were slightly tipsy or beyond. I can vaguely see Strobe and John, gently guiding Frank out the door toward the bathroom. Hannah Achtenberg was in the corner, a bemused expression crossing her face. There was a sense of triumph, somehow. America and the war seemed sinister at that moment, and so foreign, and we so helpless to do anything about it, that Frank’s decision seemed to fortify us against it. Within that tiny room … amidst the pillows and champagne, I felt that we all had triumphed.
Aller was the first one out of the foxhole. “We all knew how to work the system,” recalled Daniel Singer. “We knew what to do in the foxhole—to keep our heads down. We were going for a lot of ludicrous 4-Fs.” One American at Oxford was trying to eat his way out of military service. A former Yale classmate of Singer and Talbott’s had starved himself into a 4-F. It was not uncommon for Americans at Oxford to check into the Warneford Hospital in pursuit of psychiatric deferments. Sara Maitland, then the girlfriend of Paul Parish, noted that “there was very much the feeling that no one was going to go and anything you could do was legitimate. But there was also the feeling at bottom that Frank was right and everybody else was cheating.” Fletcher thought Aller was idolized because he had done something the others had only talked about. “All of us in some form talked literally or metaphorically about resisting—‘What if I go to Canada or Sweden,’ that type of thing, the options. And yet we knew at the time that Frank was one of the few who would really do it.”
Aller’s resistance marked a turning point for the Rhodes crew. Perhaps the change was under way in any case, but it became more ominous around then. Richard Nixon had campaigned on the promise of a secret plan that would bring the war to an end, but now he was president and his presence in the White House brought no prospect of peace. The hope that the war would be over in 1969, the year of greatest vulnerability for the scholars, appeared dim. The war was going on. There were more than a half-million American troops in Vietnam. The quotas of fresh inductees filled by local draft boards were rising month by month. Among the young men who had sailed away on the S.S. United States four months ago, the war and the draft were wiping out earlier sensations of awe and escape.
Not long after Clinton took his preinduction physical, Paul Parish went to the military base at South Ruislip outside London for the same examination. Parish was so frail that many of his friends thought he would flunk the physical. But, he “failed to fail.” He returned to Oxford and began a grueling process seeking a conscientious objector exemption on the grounds that serving in the military violated his moral beliefs. One other member of their Rhodes class, George Butte, had applied for conscientious objector status even before he left for Oxford the previous summer and was granted it with virtually no challenge from his Phoenix draft board. Butte even got permission from a draft board in Maine, where he was scheduled to perform his alternative service by teaching at a school, to go off to Oxford instead and fulfill his conscientious objector responsibilities upon his return. But every local board operated differently, using wide discretion within the same national rules. One of the top draft officials in Mississippi seemed a difficult obstacle for Parish to get around. He had declared that no Mississippi boy was going to disgrace the state and that where conscientious objectors belonged was on the front line.
As soon as Parish decided to apply for the exemption, he found himself struggling to maintain his equilibrium. He needed someone to talk to, and the person he found most available was Bill Clinton. It was not just that Clinton was sympathetic and enjoyed helping other people with their burdens; he was also the easiest one to impose on because he never seemed to sleep. Late at night, Parish would slip out the back gate of Christ Church, across the alley to the back of Univ on Helen’s Court, and up the almshouse steps to confer with his southern compatriot. Once, when they talked all night, Parish got locked out of Christ Church and crashed on Clinton’s floor. Their talks were filled with self-doubt. Clinton, according to Parish, would express his concerns that the draft system was unfair, “that poor people didn’t have the same access to networks of people who knew the ropes, to help them make the cases they needed or to pull strings for them.” Parish’s qualms were on a less political level, that he “might just be shimmying out of it.” Each of them wondered whether they would be able to live with themselves whatever happened.
Parish covered his insecurities, the chill of Oxford, and the heat of the war, by transforming his exterior. He was the first in his class of scholars to affect a British accent and English mannerisms. With his wit and refined artistic sensibilities, Parish charmed the ruling-class Oxford set that circled around Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House. He fell in love with Sara Maitland, a delightful young woman who was four years younger, in her first year at St. Anne’s College, one of the handful of women’s schools at Oxford. Maitland had grown up in a generous mansion in southwest Scotland, but at Oxford she began rebelling against her aristocratic roots and found Americans refreshing. She immediately took to Paul and Bill, Frank and Rick and Strobe, and their friends, and began inviting them over to her rooms at St. Anne’s for Tuesday afternoon tea parties.
If it is possible that a bigfisted, southern-accented, politically ambitious American was nonetheless born for a British tea party, that unlikely person would be Bill Clinton. His first tea party, with “young men and women talking about this and that, just being clever about something,” left him greatly impressed “by how well they all spoke and what an emphasis there was on it.” Maitland was equally charmed by the talkative chap from Arkansas. She considered Clinton “quite easily the most gregarious human being” she had ever encountered.
Maitland lived in the attic of a Georgian terrace house at No. 9 Park Town, with a sloped-ceiling parlor where a dozen students might gather for tea. The sessions organized by “The Lady Sara,” as Aller and Clinton called her, and her college roommate, Katherine Vereker, were especially popular with the Rhodes boys. “It was a very good way to meet English people and especially English women,” according to Maitland. “The Rhodes guys kind of missed the sociability of women: Oxford was such a male-dominated society. But here it was free house. It was tea in the afternoon. It was talk. Lots of politics. Lots of literature. Bits of philosophy. How ghastly our parents were. Who was sleeping with whom.” They often discussed books. Clinton introduced Maitland and the others to the southern writers William Faulkner, Reynolds Price, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. And they were all reading Montaigne and Rousseau—looking for what Maitland called “the modern lessons in those essays.” Clinton took an immediate interest in Vereker, a stunningly goodlooking student of politics whose father was a senior professor of philosophy. They were a couple on and off, though never together for very long stretches of time. Vereker was not as taken with Clinton as he was with her. What people remember most about them is that they loved to dance together. Maitland remembered Clinton as “a very enthusiastic dancer.”
This was hardly a wild crowd, considering what wild implied in 1969. There was some casual sex, quite a bit of drinking, and the sweet smell of marijuana and hashish clung to their clothing as they gathered in cloistered rooms for late night parties. Cherwell declared that year that students were smoking more pot than ever. Cannabis was “incredibly easy to lay your hands on,” according to the report, which said that most pot was smoked by small groups of friends gathering in their flats. It cost between four and six pounds per half-ounce. Maitland places the Rhodes circle on the tame edge of the drug culture. “Nothing beyond dope, nobody using acid. Somebody may have tried mescaline. Some pot and hash in the evenings.”
Martin Walker, the Balliol College journalist who was dating one of Maitland’s friends, said that hashish was even more readily available than marijuana. “We would scramble it into tobacco cigarettes. We’d take out the tobacco from a standard English cigarette, hold a match up to a lump of hashish, put it in, and smoke that.” Clinton was at many of the parties. He was with a group that went to a rock concert in London and smoked marijuana beforehand at a London apartment. Paul Parish, experimenting with dope for the first time, blacked out on the way down the steps, and Clinton carried him back inside. Decades later, Clinton would be ridiculed for grudgingly acknowledging that he had smoked marijuana overseas and then quickly adding the caveat that he did not inhale. Was it true? “We spent enormous amounts of time trying to teach him to inhale,” Maitland recalled. “He absolutely could not inhale.” The problem with Clinton was that he did not know how to smoke and could not take the tobacco, according to Walker, whose lasting image of Clinton at those parties is of the big southerner leaning his head out an open window gasping for fresh air. “He was technically correct to say that he did not inhale.”
ONE day that winter, Charlene Prickett got a call from “this delightful, cheery young man who announced himself as Bill Clinton.” He had never met or talked to Prickett before, but told her that he had compiled a list of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every Arkansan studying in England. She was on his list. She had grown up in Batesville and graduated from the Presbyterian-sponsored liberal arts school there, Arkansas College, before heading off to Europe on a one-year Rotary International scholarship to study at Leicester University. Not surprisingly, Clinton and Prickett had a few friends in common. One was Sharon Ann Evans, the former Miss Arkansas, one of Clinton’s downhome girlfriends. Prickett had been Miss Batesville and had become friendly with Evans on the Arkansas beauty pageant circuit. Their other mutual acquaintance was Cliff Jackson, who was studying at St. John’s at Oxford on a Fulbright fellowship and before that had attended Arkansas College with Prickett. Jackson was now dating Prickett’s best friend at Leicester and had in turn introduced Prickett to her boyfriend and future husband, a Canadian Rhodes Scholar named Jim Waugh who was also studying at St. John’s. Jackson knew Clinton because they were teammates on Oxford’s subvarsity basketball squad, although no doubt Clinton would have hunted him down anyway in his pursuit of every young Arkansan in the British Isles.
Clinton told Prickett that he wanted to visit that weekend. Fine, Prickett said, but she would not be there because she was heading in the opposite direction, down to Oxford, to see her boyfriend. Arrangements were made for Clinton to take the train to Leicester and sleep in Prickett’s bed. “I was toddling to the train station with my suitcase and here came this tall, gorgeous man with his suitcase the other way,” Prickett later recalled. “We met on the street between my place and the train station. He said, ‘You must be Charlene,’ and I said ‘You must be Bill.’” Her flatmates, three British women, were expecting the Rhodes Scholar. He charmed them all and started dating one of them, an undergraduate from the Midlands. All three British women, according to Prickett “kind of went ga-ga” over Clinton. “There was a little tension in the household. I wanted to stay right out of that. I wasn’t about to play favorites. I was aware that Bill had lots of friends.”
As a way of returning the generosity, Clinton encouraged Prickett to stay at his place at the old almshouse whenever she traveled to Oxford to see Jim Waugh. Oxford rules then still prohibited overnight stays by members of the opposite sex, but the rules did not seem to apply to Clinton. Douglas the porter did not simply look the other way when it came to Clinton’s friends; he looked out for them and provided them with extra pillows and blankets and keys if necessary, such was the bond in the Douglas-and-Bill club. Prickett visited frequently as her romance with Waugh intensified.
Waugh was in a singular position to witness the birth of an Arkansas rivalry that reverberated down through the decades, a onesided rivalry, in truth, that existed virtually without Clinton’s awareness yet in some ways became among the most revealing of his career—his relationship with Cliff Jackson.
Jackson had sailed to England on the S.S. United States with the Fulbright fellows in September, one month before Clinton and the Rhodes crew made the same voyage. He suffered from seasickness on the way over and spent most of the first term at St. John’s College at Oxford cold and lonely, taking some small comfort in hot soup he cooked up in a crock every afternoon, unsettled by the darkness of the medieval atmosphere compared with bright Arkansas. He met Clinton in October when they joined the same universitywide subvarsity basketball team. They were both on the clumsy side, glued to the ground, yet as twin towers over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds, they brought some height and bulk to the lineup. As aspiring young Arkansas pols, they were opposite sides of the same coin. At college, they had each been class president, Clinton at Georgetown, Jackson at Arkansas College. In the summers they had worked in Arkansas political campaigns. Clinton was a Democrat, whose heroes were Fulbright and the Kennedys. Jackson was a Republican, who admired Winthrop Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater. They shared a yearning for accomplishment and a do-good urge of the sort that can grow in bright and hungry children from modest homes in middle America. “I am an ambitious person, wanting to reach the heights of success, and yet wanting to do something meaningful with my life,” Jackson wrote to a college mentor during his year at Oxford.
There is no evidence that Clinton thought more of Jackson at the time than that he was one among scores of new acquaintances. But to Jackson, Clinton loomed larger. The more he saw of Clinton, the more he brooded. He realized that he and Clinton both wanted to go the same places in Arkansas and in the world. Clinton seemed so ambitious, so eager to please, so elusive to Jackson. When he watched Clinton in action, was he seeing a bolder image of himself, or what he would have to become if he wanted to make it? Did Clinton have something that he lacked? Did he want whatever it was that Clinton had? Those were the questions Jackson later said he was contemplating after a dinner party in Leicester that both he and Clinton had attended. After Clinton left, a few Brits at the table took out their verbal swords and began slicing him to pieces as a gladhanding phony.
When Jackson got back to Oxford, he wrote his American girlfriend a letter ruminating on the dinner and the struggle between keeping one’s integrity and aggressively pursuing one’s political ambitions. His girlfriend offered the opinion that Clinton’s extroverted personality might be an attempt “to overcome fears of rejection and of insecurity.” The number of girls Clinton had dated while at Oxford led her to the conclusion that he needed constant reinforcement from the opposite sex. “Maybe he is indeed a ‘politico.’ That is something that he must needs ponder about,” she said. “You must find the happy medium, Cliff, where control of a crowd is through sincere attention and not cold manipulation. Won’t be at all easy.”
Jim Waugh, who took neither side in the rivalry, looked at those same Clinton character traits and interpreted them differently. He found Clinton not so much manipulative as flexible, while Jackson was rigid. “Cliff had a personality that didn’t deal well with adversity, and I knew it well because it was similar to mine; where the people side of things is going wrong, the tendency is to pull back and wonder why people don’t like me. Cliff responded that way. Bill didn’t. Bill came forward, and if he saw something wrong, he tried harder. Cliff pulled back when things were not working out in a human sense. He was a control freak. There was a sense that if there weren’t people involved, he would be the one at the top of the totem pole. But he had trouble dealing with the multitudes of variety of people. Not everyone is going to like you, so what do you do about that? Treat it as though someone shot you in the heart or as an opportunity to learn more about people? Clinton used it as an opportunity to broaden himself. Cliff tended to narrow down, and ultimately that led to wanting to get even.”
For all their sharp differences, Clinton and Jackson shared one preoccupation: the war in Vietnam. Jackson supported President Nixon and hoped that he could fulfill his promise of peace with honor. But his intellectual endorsement of the war was not different in one respect from Clinton’s opposition. Neither young man was eager to fight. Waugh spent many evenings with Jackson in the Junior Common Room at St. John’s watching reports from the war on television. Jackson was always quiet and somber on those occasions, according to Waugh. “He didn’t say a lot when he watched the war. He was imagining: ‘What if that were me?’ rather than a Canadian like me saying, ‘Shit, what are they doing there? Why not get out?’ He was torn between his rightwing views and the fact that he could be the next guy shipped off, a concern not atypical of most other Americans at Oxford.” Jackson talked to Waugh about the draft. “It certainly was a big issue with him. He was scared of it. My sense was that he was doing everything possible with his connections back home to avoid it. It was something that would come up in our conversation almost every time we met. He would say he called so-and-so or had written so-and-so.”
Jackson later denied that he had tried to pull any strings on his own behalf, but acknowledged that he was preoccupied and anxious about the draft—even though he was in less jeopardy than many of his American classmates. Unlike Clinton, Jackson had gone to Oxford with some protection from being ordered back to Arkansas for induction. He was classified 1 -Y, a physical deferment that meant he would be called up only in times of national emergency. He had received the deferment after presenting officials with letters from his doctors attesting to his allergies and vascular headaches. But he was a self-described worrier who constantly fretted that his draft board would reclassify him or that the war would escalate to the point where I-Y’s became vulnerable. “I was scared and anxious, yes, like most young men of that period,” Jackson recalled later.
ALTHOUGH being in England could not rid the Rhodes Scholars of their anxieties and concerns, it did remove them from the chaos and excesses of 1969 student activism in the United States. Their histories make it probable that the most active scholars would have steered clear of violence had they been in American graduate schools that year. They were on the moderate side of the youth rebellion. But the rage of the times might have placed them in more precarious situations than they encountered in Oxford and London. It was partly a matter of numbers. According to the sociologist Todd Gitlin, the first year that Clinton and the Rhodes Scholars were in England marked a dramatic turn toward violent confrontation on American campuses, with “over a hundred politically inspired campus bombings, attempted bombings, and incidents of arson nationwide, aimed at ROTC buildings, other campus and government buildings. In the spring of 1969 alone, three hundred colleges and universities, holding a third of American students, saw sizable demonstrations, a quarter of them marked by strikes or building takeovers, a quarter more by disruption of classes and administration, a fifth accompanied by bombs, arson, or the trashing of property.”
The increasing violence of the American protest movement was a debate topic that spring at the Oxford Union when Allard Lowenstein made an appearance. Lowenstein—the demanding, charismatic leader of the “Dump Johnson” movement, the early Pied Piper of student antiwar activism—was as articulate in his opposition to the Vietnam War as ever, but had become equally vehement in his denunciation of movement violence. By the spring of 1969, his campus speeches were often attacked by student radicals who derided him for still believing in an electoral system. Everywhere he went that spring, Lowenstein encountered a sense of despair among onetime allies in the student movement that led them either to become more confrontational and sectarian or to drop out altogether. Many of the same students who earlier had shorn their hair for Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaigns had now, in the wake of the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the violence of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the election of Richard Nixon, and the continuation of the war, concluded that democracy was nothing more than a racket.
When Lowenstein spoke at Oxford, Clinton went with Darryl Gless to hear him. They were both taken by Lowenstein’s combination of passion and reason, but the intensity of their reactions differed in one significant respect. When Gless listened to Lowenstein, he heard only the ideas. When Clinton listened to him, those ideas became a part of a political calculus. “I was naive, effusive, extremely enthusiastic about Lowenstein,” Gless recalled later. “Bill brought me up short by saying, ‘Well, he’s good for the times.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? He’s good, period!’ But Bill said he was a good politician, and politicians must invariably compromise. I was making him out to be a flawless hero and Bill wanted me to rethink it.” Gless got irritated at Clinton for being less enthusiastic, but later concluded that Clinton was right. “Bill’s little lecture was: Don’t be naive in your hero worship. You must qualify such views by understanding what politicians must do. Bill several times tried to teach me to be a little less naive about the way the world works.”
The inner circle of Rhodes politicos, which included Clinton, Rick Stearns, Strobe Talbott, Bob Reich, John Isaacson, and Frank Aller, prided themselves on their sophisticated understanding of the world. They searched for historical connections, eager for the next book that might put their political and personal unease in the sharpest intellectual context. One day that term, Talbott and Isaacson were playing squash on the Univ court when Isaacson took a swing at the ball and thwacked Talbott in the right eye. Talbott was wearing protective glasses, but they were cheap ones that he had bought in New Haven the year before, and they shattered, severely cutting his cornea. His friends took him to Radcliffe Infirmary, where he underwent surgery. Clinton visited Talbott almost every day during his recovery, and since Talbott’s vision was temporarily impaired, he sat at his friend’s bedside and read to him. After passing along the Rhodes gossip of the day, Clinton would open Pax Americana by Ronald Steel, a foreign policy analyst, which explored the interventionist impulses that had led the United States into Vietnam, and argued that intervention could become “an end in itself, dragging the nation down a path it never intended to follow, toward a goal it may find repugnant.”
“What we need are fewer historical compulsions, less Manifest Destiny, more skepticism about the ideals we are promulgating, and a greater realism about the causes in which we have become involved,” was Steel’s conclusion. “Above all, we need to develop a sense of proportion about our place in the world, and particularly about ourselves as the pathfinders to the New Jerusalem. America has little to fear from the world, although perhaps a good deal to fear from herself—her obsession with an obsolete ideological struggle, her well-meaning desire to enforce her own conception of virtue upon others, her euphoria of power, and perhaps most dangerous of all, the unmet, and often unacknowledged, inadequacies of her own society…. It is now time for us to turn away from global fantasies and begin our perfection of the human race within our own frontiers.” What Clinton was reading echoed in many respects the work of his mentor, Senator Fulbright.
Another scholar at Oxford who would play a key role in developing that theme in years to come was Richard Stearns of Stanford, perhaps the most accomplished political mind in the Rhodes crowd. Stearns was a year older than most of the other scholars and had arrived in Oxford after a hectic student political career that included a year as vice president of the National Student Association and another working in the McCarthy campaign. At the time they met, Stearns was well ahead of Clinton on the national Democratic stage, though he was the insider type, more comfortable dealing with party functionaries than with constituencies. He seemed outwardly as dour and sarcastic as Clinton was irrepressibly eager. At Balliol College, the incubator of British politicians, he enjoyed leaving the impression with avid Marxists that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Where Clinton was open and obvious, Stearns moved about shrouded in mystery. But he was smart and slyly funny, and he and Clinton hit it off. Stearns later noted that they both “came from middle-class backgrounds and were not embarrassed by it.” “And we were the two most interested in electoral politics in the entire group. The fact that I had worked on a presidential campaign fascinated Bill.”
When the middle term at Oxford ended in late March, Clinton and Stearns traveled together to Germany, arriving at 9:26 on the morning of March 23, according to the records of Rudiger Lowe, who picked them up at the station. Lowe, the former Fulbright fellow from Germany who had met Clinton during a conference at Georgetown in their senior year, had by then developed a penpal relationship with Clinton that would continue through the decades. Also waiting for them in Munich were Ann Markesun, Clinton’s last Georgetown girlfriend, and a friend of Markesun’s who was already there working as an au pair. The group roamed Bavaria together, exploring Munich and the Bavarian castles. In a postcard to Denise Hyland on March 27, Clinton wrote: “Have been in Bavaria in snow for week seeing churches, castles, landmarks. Staying in a little village outside Munich. Sunday I went ice skating for the first time in my life…. In the shadow of the Alps with beautiful light snow falling.”
The brief note to Hyland left out an adventure at a rink in Garmisch, where Stearns got ordered off the ice by local authorities. He had been speed-skating around the oval in Olympic style, his arms pumping long and smooth, one fist occasionally placed with casual grace behind his back, feeling free and easy, obviously impressing the awkwardly slip-sliding Clinton and the young women, when rink officials told him to knock it off because he was digging ruts too deep in the ice for the figure skaters. It seemed always thus with Stearns and women in those days: trying too hard for his own good. His friend Clinton would have much advice for him on that subject in later months, but not now. Right now Clinton was having enough trouble of his own.
Clinton and Markesun were quarreling again, much as they had been the previous September when Markesun had visited him in Hot Springs before he left for Oxford. “She was very attractive and fiery and they were always fighting,” Stearns recalled. “If the trip was an effort to get them back together, it didn’t succeed.” They stayed together long enough to travel with Stearns to Vienna, where they spent much of their time at the opera house, standing in the rafter area to watch La Bohème and Don Giovanni. Then the tempestuous relationship exploded. Clinton and Markesun not only parted ways, but they threw Stearns into the middle of the dispute. He had been planning to travel on to Italy alone. Instead, suddenly, he was hitting the road for Graz and Venice with Ann Markesun at his side.
On March 29, traveling alone, Clinton headed north to reunite with Rudi Lowe at the family home in Bamberg. Clinton, who had been studying Eastern Europe in his work with Zbigniew Pelczynski, was eager to see the border. He and Lowe drove to the village of Blankenstein in Upper Franconia, a town that was divided east from west by a small stream and a fence guarded by East German troops. Clinton was “very taken by the physical manifestation of repression and animosity,” Lowe recalled, and asked his host to take pictures of him at the border. He stepped two meters across the line to pose. “I told him to be careful, they are watching,” Lowe recalled later. “He said they wouldn’t shoot an American.”
NO sooner had Clinton arrived back in England than he went off to meet Sharon Ann Evans. She landed at Heathrow for a whirlwind ten-day tour in which Clinton served as her escort, host, and tour guide. That Clinton could move in such quick succession from the brilliant, assertive Markesun to the beauty queen Evans showed that his tastes were as eclectic in women as in everything else.
Evans felt that she was “running with the herd” in England. That was how it always seemed with Clinton, she thought. Back in Arkansas the previous summer, they were together amid a larger crowd of friends. Now it was the same with this new herd: Paul Parish and his girlfriend; Frank Aller and his; Strobe Talbott, Bob Reich, Tom Williamson, Rick Stearns, sometimes Jim Waugh and Charlene Prickett—there was always some combination of interesting new people with them wherever they went. They spent the first five days in London, according to a record of the trip that Clinton kept and later gave to Evans. On Friday the 4th of April they saw Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Lincoln Statue, No. 10 Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Piccadilly Circus, the parade of the Horse Guards, and London Bridge. The following day they toured the Houses of Parliament and watched a national band festival at the Royal Festival Hall. On Easter Sunday, they went to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and listened to black power advocates from the West Indies, observed an Irish Republican Army rally in Trafalgar Square, and returned to Westminster Abbey for evensong services.
The next day they toured the National Gallery. When they came outside, they noticed a peace demonstration in Trafalgar Square. The speaker’s platform was set up near the statue of Lord Nelson; banners proclaiming “Americans Go Home” were draped across the dais. Evans and Clinton and that day’s herd of friends watched the scene for an hour or so from the steps of the gallery. It was the first antiwar demonstration Clinton had witnessed during his time overseas. His presence there could not have been more innocuous, although decades later Republican operatives would attempt to give it a sinister meaning. Later that day Clinton wrote a note to Denise Hyland, relating that he had gone to the antiwar rally and “sat for hours” watching it. “Times are getting tough,” he said, referring to the way he and his friends were struggling with the draft and the war. Although he had been playing tourist and tour guide for nearly three weeks and had given hardly a glance at his studies, he felt compelled to give Hyland a report on his academic progress at Oxford. “My work is going well,” he wrote. “I might even become an educated man here.”
He also gave an optimistic draft update in the April 7 letter. “For now,” he wrote, “I hope to finish two years here before being drafted.” Why he would write this remains a mystery. Perhaps he had received an inside report from his uncle Raymond Clinton or his stepfather Jeff Dwire. Or perhaps he was just acting out of his innate need to please and to avoid unpleasant thoughts. In any case, it is difficult to imagine why Clinton, three months after passing his preinduction physical and classified 1-A, would think he could avert the draft for more than another year.
One moment when they were alone, Clinton talked to Evans about the draft and the war. In that conversation, he told Evans that he sometimes felt misplaced among the cynical expatriates at Oxford. “My friends,” he said, “just don’t understand my need to serve.”
BERT Jeffries was killed in Vietnam. The word from his mother reached Clinton the day after he and Evans got back to Oxford. James Herbert Jeffries was one of Clinton’s oldest friends in Hot Springs, a neighborhood pal from the carefree preadolescent days up on Park Avenue, the son of A. B. (Sonny) Jeffries, Clinton’s favorite Sunday school teacher at Park Place Baptist Church. They had stayed in touch through the years with letters and occasional visits home on holidays. Clinton kept up with Jeffries even in Vietnam, and had received a letter from him the previous December. On the morning after hearing of his friend’s death, Clinton wrote a note to Jeffries’s parents:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jeffries,
I heard about Bert just yesterday when I returned to Oxford. Since then I have thought of him so much, remembering backyard football and dreaded band rehearsals and throwing knives in the floor in Sunday school. I remember too that we were baptized on the same night and playfully argued over who would be the last one into the water …
Bert had lived a different life from his friend Bill in the years since high school. While Clinton was at Georgetown, Jeffries struggled to find himself. He attended the University of Arkansas for a few years, but never felt comfortable there and dropped out. He fell in love, got married, fell out of love, and got divorced. He moved to Dallas and worked for a printing company. He learned that two of his high school friends had been killed in Vietnam, and decided with two buddies, Duke Watts and Ira Stone, to join the Marines and go over to Vietnam, at least in part to avenge their deaths. “I didn’t want him to go,” his father said later. “He was only twenty-one, and I was worried about him.” But Jeffries signed up and was sent to Vietnam in the summer of 1968—at the time Clinton was hoping he could delay being drafted long enough to sail for England and Oxford.
On March 20, 1969, Jeffries and his squad in the 106th recoilless rifle platoon of the 9th Marines went out on routine patrol ten miles north of Khe Sanh in Quang Tri Province near the demilitarized zone. At just after ten that morning, a member of his squad stepped on an enemy land mine. Jeffries was only a few feet away. The explosion sent shrapnel into his body, his face, head, neck, chest, abdomen, back, right leg and both arms, amputating his left hand. He died instantly. A. B. Jeffries was working out of town when the Marine Corps officers came to his house to break the news. His wife answered the door and knew that her son was dead. The Western Union telegram arrived the next day: “Please accept on behalf of the United States Marine Corps our continued sympathy in your bereavement.” More than four hundred friends mourned Bert Jeffries’s death at the funeral services at Gross Mortuary on the morning of April 4. He was buried in a graveyard on the edge of town. Duke Watts and Ira Stone came back from Vietnam to serve as honorary pallbearers.
“The thing about Vietnam was that either you wanted to go or you did not want to go,” Watts reflected decades later. Jeffries wanted to go. So did he. Watts was proud of the fact that he went to Vietnam, even though he later decided that he hadn’t accomplished anything there and he left feeling that “it never amounted to a hill of beans.” But he would never want to say that to Mr. Jeffries.
THE final term of the Oxford school year started out a mess and deteriorated from there. The tutor Clinton thought so much of, Zbigniew Pelczynski, took an academic leave to work on a book on Polish communism in a palazzo on Lake Varese in Lombardy. Clinton’s supervision was transferred to a sociologist at Hertford College, but it was never the same. He stopped attending tutorials, and though he continued reading a lot, he essentially stopped working toward his degree. Most of the books he read had nothing to do with his studies. One week his reading list included True Grit, a western written by Charles Portis, a native Arkansan; The Moon Is Down, by John Steinbeck; Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver; and Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, by Andrey Sakharov. He also reread North Toward Home by Willie Morris, the autobiographical account of a Mississippi-bred writer dealing with his roots and the disorientation he felt when he left the South. Senator Fulbright had helped Clinton meet Morris in New York City back in October on the day before Clinton sailed for England. They had toured Manhattan in a taxi, lunched at Elaine’s, a writers’ hangout, and talked about the South and watermelons and Oxford, where Morris had been a Rhodes Scholar twelve years earlier.
In letters to friends back home, Clinton talked constantly about how much he was hurting and how “heavy” the situation was for him and his friends at Oxford. He said that he could not shake the feeling that he should return to America and fulfill his military obligation. But he hated the war and did not want to fight in it. The war was all around him. Bert Jeffries was dead. Frank Aller was resisting. Paul Parish was going for a conscientious objector exemption; he had asked five people to write letters to the Claiborne County Draft Board in Mississippi attesting to his character. Bill Clinton; his mother and father; Lucy Turnbull, his professor of classics at Ole Miss; and Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House.
Sir Edgar Williams might seem like an unlikely ally, given his military bearing and his distinguished wartime service, but he had taken to this Rhodes class in all of its intense and anxious brilliance. When Strobe Talbott had injured his eye in the squash match, the Williams family invited him to their house to convalesce after his release from the infirmary. Sir Edgar took delight in the practical jokes that his wife and daughter played on young Talbott, who was, he said, “utterly soberminded.” Parish was an even more frequent guest at the Williams manse. That spring he came by most days for an hour or so at teatime. “I needed company and they gave it to me.”
The Rhodes boys called Sir Edgar “The Rhodent,” though never to his face. Some were so intimidated by his presence and his circumlocutions that they never tried to get to know him. But those who did, like Parish and Talbott, appreciated his dry, amusing soul. He would sit in his leather chair and smoke his pipe and soon disappear in a cloud of smoke. He was not much for dispensing wisdom to Parish or any of the other troubled scholars, and when he did talk, he was not always reassuring. “He was such a prig about the war,” recalled Willy Fletcher, who opposed the war despite his status as a Navy ensign during his Rhodes years. “He once said to me, ‘Could you look yourself in the mirror in the morning if you didn’t fight in it?’” Yet Williams willingly wrote letters to draft boards in the United States “explaining what it was they were doing at Oxford.”
Clinton spent days drafting his letter for Parish, using it as a means of bringing coherence to his own thoughts. He had thoroughly researched the issue, and cited several Supreme Court cases that he argued had broadened the scope of the conscientious objection statute. He later said that he thought it was the best paper he had written all of his first year at Oxford. Parish agreed. He said it made his case.
On April 30, 1969, the number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam reached its all-time peak of 534,000. The next day, May morning, was a holiday in Oxford. Parish and Sara Maitland, Clinton and several friends went down to the Cherwell for a breakfast picnic, cooking eggs and sausages on a little outdoor stove. It was a glorious spring morning, and the Rhodes group watched with delight as the daughters of Oxford townsfolk, following an ancient tradition, covered themselves in daffodils, jonquils, and hyacinths, and got tossed into the slender river—clothes, hats, flowers, and all. The Lady Sara covered her pink corduroys and flowing silk shirt in flowers and got thrown in with the rest. The choir sang madrigals at 6:00 A.M. from Magdalen Tower and the church bells rang with joy. The days before and after might be clouded by anxiety, but here, briefly, was one perfect day.
Clinton’s own May Day of a very different sort had arrived that week in the form of a letter from the Garland County Draft Board. It was the five-page SSS Form 252, the Order to Report for Induction. Decades later, when recounting his dealings with the draft, Clinton would fail to mention that he had received this draft notice. He would claim that in the midst of everything else that happened in the months before and after, the draft notice slipped his mind. But it did not seem insignificant at the time. He called his mother and stepfather right away to tell them the news and to see what could be done. Somehow the letter had been sent by surface mail and had arrived in Oxford after the assigned reporting date. By the time the induction notice arrived, Clinton had begun another school term, and according to draft regulations that meant he was allowed to finish out the term before reporting. He was by no means alone in that regard. A study by the Scientific Manpower Commission released that spring indicated that between 16,000 and 25,000 young men received their draft notices while in graduate school that year and had their induction dates postponed until the end of the term. But there was no getting around the fact that Clinton had been drafted. He wrote letters to many friends back in the United States telling them the news. “You may have heard that I’ve been drafted,” he said in the letter to Hyland.
Clinton talked about the induction notice with Cliff Jackson, who was heading home May 22 to work for the Arkansas Republican party in Little Rock. Jackson wrote letters to his mother and his college mentor in which he mentioned his classmate’s plight. “I really hate to come back to Arkansas and start paying those expensive prices for everything,” he wrote his mother. “But I’m glad I’m coming back like I am and not like Bill Clinton from Hot Springs, who is a Rhodes Scholar here at Oxford. Bill has been drafted and will have to enter the Army probably in July. It is such a shame!”
Some of his closer friends at Oxford said later that they could not recall Clinton receiving a draft notice, although they remembered him under great duress during his final days in Oxford that spring. Paul Parish carried one image with him, but when he called it up in his mind’s eye he could not say for certain whether it happened in real life or in a dream. The memory was that one night Clinton knocked on his door at Christ Church. Parish and Sara Maitland “were really involved in something” at that moment, so Parish did not answer. The knocking persisted for a long time before it stopped. The next day Clinton found Parish and said that he had gone to his room the night before to tell him that he had been drafted. When no one answered, Clinton said, he sat on the steps leading down from the fourth floor of the hall, alone in the dark, put his head in his hands, and cried.