THE TORMENT
CLINTON STRETCHED HIS elastic personality almost to the snapping point during his final month at Oxford in the spring of 1969. An erratic sleeper, he slept less. A voracious eater, he ate more. A frenetic chatterer and letterwriter, his communications grew more intense. He spent much of his time alone jotting down his thoughts in a leatherbound diary that Denise Hyland had given him the year before. “The diary you gave me has become one of my most valued possessions,” he wrote her. “It is both an escape and an outlet, a staff to lean on and a mountain that defies conquest. I have written on almost all the pages.” An accumulator of friends, he found more time to cultivate young women who would listen patiently and with grave concern as he struggled with his conscience. He internalized the fragility of his friend Paul Parish, the conscientious objector, and the moral anguish of the soulful Rhodes resister, Frank Aller. In those ways he had become an exaggerated version of his own flexible character. Yet in spirit he was diminished. His lifelong sense of optimism had reached an all-time low. There seemed to be no larger purpose to his self-absorption. If only, he told his friends, the war would go away so that he could get back to thinking on a nobler plane.
“I do hope you are finding some purpose to living,” he lamented in one letter to Hyland. “Peace of mind is not always necessary, perhaps not even beneficial at this time.”
The tardy induction notice did not save Clinton from the draft, but only gave him a pocket of time. His future seemed limited to three options. He could submit to the draft and enter the Army that summer as a private. He could join Frank Aller as a resister. Or he could find a way to void the induction notice in exchange for enlistment in a military alternative—the National Guard or a Reserve Officer Training Corps program—that might allow him to continue his education and shield him. The discussions he had with friends about those options were the most difficult of his life, Clinton said later. But his friends knew that he had invested too much time, hope, and ambition in his political future to abandon it by resisting. “Maintaining viability within the system was very important to him. Right from the start we all took his aspirations with real proper seriousness,” recalled Sara Maitland. “His wish to be viable within the system was never treated as him copping out. It was clear Bill had a job to do within the system.” Resisting, according to Strobe Talbott, was “completely inconsistent in Bill’s case with what everybody knew to be Bill’s ambition. Bill was going back to the United States to go into public service. There was never any doubt.” Their classmates considered Talbott and Clinton the two members of their crowd most sympathetic to the establishment against which they were mildly rebelling. Daniel Singer thought that “Clinton and Talbott wanted to solve problems by established solutions. This whole choice of whether to play by the rules or overthrow the system was not difficult for Clinton. He believed in the rules and he succeeded with them.”
Of the options which remained, then, the one Clinton said he wanted to take or expected to take fluctuated depending on the people he was with and the circumstances of the encounter, but most of his effort went into finding a military alternative.
In telephone conversations with his stepfather, Jeff Dwire, Clinton compiled a list of officials he should talk to when he got back to Hot Springs who might help him get into a National Guard or ROTC program. He contacted John Spotila, the friend from Georgetown who was attending Yale Law School, and asked what it would take for him to get into that school and enroll in the graduate ROTC program there. He telephoned Paul Fray, his political ally from the Holt Generation days. According to Fray, Clinton called collect and asked him for help getting into the Air National Guard. Fray, who was studying law in Little Rock and serving in the Arkansas National Guard, came from a politically connected family and had several contacts in the state’s military establishment. He arranged for Clinton to take an Air Force physical when he got back to the States.
Clinton also had a conversation in Oxford with Cliff Jackson, who was now about to depart for Little Rock to work for the state Republican party. As Jackson later recollected their meeting, Clinton told him that he had researched his situation and determined that since he had already received an induction notice, the only way he could enlist in an ROTC program or the National Guard was with the approval of the state Selective Service System director in Little Rock, an appointee of Republican Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. “He wanted my assistance getting the draft notice killed,” Jackson said later. On May 26, four days after Jackson, back in Little Rock, began work for the state GOP, he received a letter from Clinton. “I got a letter from Bill Clinton on Monday, indicating that he is coming home around July 1 to join the National Guard,” Jackson wrote to his girlfriend at Leicester University. “Although quite frankly, it was, I thought, somewhat excessive and politically oriented in that I’m a good person to be on amiable grounds with. Methinks he could have waited awhile in writing.”
Why would Jackson act as though he were Clinton’s ally and make himself available for assistance if he was as ill-disposed to Clinton as he appeared to be in his letters? “I was ambivalent,” Jackson said later. “But he was my friend. He was leaning on me.” An alternative explanation is that Cliff Jackson in 1969 was as torn as Clinton, and as manipulative, ready to trade favors with his Arkansas rival. Although there is little documented evidence other than Jackson’s letters that Clinton turned to him for help, there is also no evidence to the contrary. Jackson’s version of events demands caution but not outright rejection. The broad outline of his story matches a reasonable reconstruction of Clinton’s actions, except that he seems to have exaggerated his own role. His recollections possibly are colored by the competitive jealousy he felt toward Clinton during their Oxford days, an animosity that would become inflamed over the years in proportion to Clinton’s fame.
If Clinton was scheming with Jackson to void his draft notice, he gave little hint of that to some friends. One of his newfound British girlfriends that spring, Tamara Kennerley, later noted that in their conversations about the war, Clinton always “thought he was going to Vietnam.” The way that different people interpreted Clinton’s intentions so differently during this period can be explained at two levels. To a certain extent, the contrasting views of outsiders mirrored Clinton’s internal ambivalence. At a deeper level, though, it was an indication of his habit of adapting to the people around him and trying to present to them the version of himself he thought each would most admire.
In any case, Clinton’s friends bade farewell to him assuming that he would not be coming back. The party lasted three days. It began in the Univ courtyard with Arch the scout serving as bartender, offering the guests Black Velvets—Guinness and champagne. Eakeley presented Clinton with a walking stick and a two-way touring cap, with brims facing both directions. The stick and cap, he joked, were to help Clinton find his way through the jungles of Vietnam. At times the party winnowed down to a few stragglers. Darryl Gless sat in the candlelight with Clinton, “reflecting gloomily over the state of the world.” At other times it erupted into a noisy, convivial, let-your-hair-down affair. Rudiger Lowe, Clinton’s German friend, who was visiting Oxford, remembered it as the longest party he had ever attended. The highlights were a barbecue picnic on the roof of Univ and a punting adventure on the Cherwell with a less-than-steady Clinton working the pole and Lowe certain that “any second we would be taking an unwelcome bath.” To Sara Maitland, the party was another occasion in which every college rule was flouted without consequence. “Bill had this room at Univ that was easily accessible and the college porter adored him. All was waived for Bill at Univ. It was just, ‘Oh, yes, go on in!’” It was all sort of looking the other way. Bill was to have all the rules broken. It was dead impressive.”
On June 26, the farewell party moved to London’s Heathrow Airport, where Clinton boarded a plane for New York. Maitland drove to the airport in her sports car with Paul Parish. It was, she said later, “just a mess…. We had this tearful departure at the airport. It had all become an enormous sort of emotional drama. Bill had decided to go. Was it the right thing to do? The wrong thing to do? It was all very stressful, going back to Arkansas.”
When Clinton arrived in America, it all seemed very different. He stayed for two nights at Denise Hyland’s home in Upper Montclair. His relationship with Denise was changing again. When he appeared at the front door, Clinton found a suitor already there, Denise’s future husband, who was gracious if perplexed about sharing space with this fellow who was so burly and full of hugs. Clinton encountered another change when he ventured into Manhattan for a reunion with Willie Morris, the editor of Harper’s magazine and former Rhodes Scholar from Mississippi. Morris had impressed Clinton with his charm and wit the first time they met, eight months earlier, on the afternoon before Clinton sailed for England. But their meeting this time left him disillusioned. Morris did not seem the same man. “All the light is out of his eyes,” Clinton later wrote. “All the life is out of his stories.”
On his way to Arkansas, Clinton stopped in Washington. Rick Stearns, who was there that summer helping the McGovern Commission reform the Democratic party, introduced him to the network of political activists who still believed in the system and were trying to end the war through public pressure. And on Capitol Hill he visited the offices of Senator Fulbright. Lee Williams, the Senate aide who had hired Clinton to work in Fulbright’s shop three years earlier, was now one of the busiest unofficial draft counselors in Washington, advising hundreds of young men who sought alternatives to fighting in Vietnam. Clinton was by no means alone when at last he turned to the office of the influential committee chairman for guidance and help.
“They came to us in droves. I had so many young people to see, I couldn’t do my job. We talked about the alternatives. What could one do? I tried to help every young person who came to me do what their conscience dictated,” Williams said later. “You would never hear us, Fulbright or me, advocate violation of the law. That was not the way to go. But other than that we would offer to help them any way we could. We would call and find out where they were looking for people in the National Guard, where there might be an ROTC slot.” Williams, a proud veteran of World War II, thought the immorality of the war in Vietnam justified any effort within the law to avoid participating in it. He often said that he would not have gone to fight in Vietnam himself, but would have found some other way to serve. Williams later could not recall much about his discussions with Clinton beyond the sense that Clinton was going through “a terrible emotional struggle”—tugged in different directions by his hunger for public service and his disdain for the war and the draft. Williams offered to help him search for alternatives. If Clinton learned anything in Washington that made him optimistic about finding an alternative, he did not share it with friends. In a thank-you note to Denise Hyland that he sent from Washington, he wrote merely: “No new developments in the service.”
WHEN his airplane touched down in Little Rock, Clinton’s mother was in the lobby, radiating excitement and concern. Standing nearby was Sharon Ann Evans’s mother, Honey Evans. Sharon had planned to greet Clinton at the airport but could not make it because Clinton had changed flights. She had sent her mother out to apologize. Virginia ignored Honey Evans. She had had a falling out with Sharon Ann earlier that summer when word got back to her that Miss Arkansas had delivered a speech in Hot Springs in which she implied that she might make her home in Hot Springs as Mrs. Bill Clinton some day. Evans had not really said that, though she did mention her friendship with Clinton in a lighthearted fashion; but whatever she said was too much for Virginia, who rarely found any of her son’s girlfriends satisfactory. This talkative beauty queen was not good enough for her boy, she thought.
Jeff and Virginia Dwire and thirteen-year-old Roger Clinton now lived in the house on Scully Street. Even though Clinton always talked fondly of home when he was away from it, he now seemed out of place. David Leopoulos was with the Army in Italy. Carolyn Yeldell was spending the summer away and would not be home for a few weeks. It seemed that hardly anyone his age was in town. His mother thought he seemed to have an emotional wall around him: “Bill and Jeff had a lot of conversations about the draft. But I didn’t really know the agony that he was going through. I just knew he played a lot of basketball in the driveway. He shot baskets hour after hour. Shooting off the frustration.” Clinton wrote letters of anguish to his Rhodes friend Paul Parish, who was spending the summer at Sara Maitland’s country mansion in Scotland and working on his appeal for conscientious objector status. The letters, Parish later recalled, “were all, ‘I could do this or I could do that.’ The tenor was: It is almost impossible to see anything that appeals to the moral sensibility. If good has a taste to it, didn’t any of his options have it. All the choices he saw were corrupt.”
In his first days home it appears that Clinton saw no choice but to submit to the draft. There was little time left. In a letter he wrote to Denise Hyland, he revealed that he had been given a new induction date: July 28. The local National Guard and Reserve units, which had been checked out by his stepfather, Jeff Dwire, and his uncle, Raymond Clinton, were full. “I am home now and every day it becomes clearer the draft is the only way,” he wrote to Hyland on July 8. Later in the same letter he was more emphatic: “I’m going to be drafted. There isn’t much else to say. I am not happy, but neither was anyone else who was called before me, I guess.”
But the mood of resignation Clinton expressed in that letter was swiftly replaced by a determination to beat the July 28 deadline and find a military alternative. Sometime during that period he tried to take the first step toward enlisting in officer candidate school by taking physicals for the Air Force and Navy officer programs, but he failed them both. “I was just under the maximum size, so I could have got in,” Clinton later said of the Air Force examination. “But I didn’t have fusion vision so I couldn’t live in a plane.” He apparently failed the Navy officer examination because of faulty hearing.
On July 10, he drove to Little Rock and met with Cliff Jackson. A letter Jackson wrote to his girlfriend in England the next day described the meeting. “Bill Clinton visited with me most of yesterday and night,” Jackson wrote.
He is feverishly trying to find a way to avoid entering the army as a drafted private. At this moment, though he is still pursuing several leads, all avenues seem closed to him. The Army Reserve and National Guard units are seemingly full completely, and there is a law prohibiting a draftee from enlisting in one of those anyway. The director of the state selective service is willing to ignore this law, but there are simply no vacancies. I have had several of my friends in influential positions trying to pull strings on Bill’s behalf, but we don’t have any results yet. I have also arranged for Bill to be admitted to U of A law school at Fayetteville, where there is a ROTC unit which is affiliated with the law school. But Bill is too late to enter this year’s class unit and would have to wait until next April. Possibly Colonel Holmes, the commander, will grant Bill a special ROTC “deferment” which would commit him to the program next April, but the draft board would have to approve such an arrangement. They have already refused to permit him to teach, join the Peace Corps or Vista etc., so Bill has only until July 28 to find some alternative military service. I feel so sorry for him in this predicament—it could have easily been me!
Jackson asked his boss, Van Rush, who was then head of the Arkansas Republican party, to arrange a meeting for Jackson and Clinton with Willard A. (Lefty) Hawkins, the head of the state Selective Service System, who had been appointed to that post by Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. It would take Hawkins’s approval to kill the draft notice in exchange for alternative military service, a common practice during that era. Rush made the call, urging Hawkins to meet with Jackson and an unidentified friend who was having a draft problem.
Jackson’s claim that he “arranged for Bill to be admitted to the U of A law school” was an exaggeration, but it correctly focused on Clinton’s ultimate course of action. The advanced ROTC program at the University of Arkansas did not have quotas and was open to law students. It had grown rapidly in size in the year since graduate deferments were eliminated, becoming a safe haven for students looking for a way around the draft. “We were used to guys with long hair and beards enrolling,” recalled Ed Howard, then the master sergeant and drill instructor for the Arkansas program. “I remember one law student saying to me, ‘I’m doing it because I don’t want to be drafted, but I’ll do my best while I’m in.’ Another law student in ROTC marched in peace marches. The marches would come by our building and I would look out my second-floor window and see him waving up at me.” Fayetteville, then, seemed the best available option for Clinton.
Lee Williams, Fulbright’s chief aide, a graduate of the University of Arkansas Law School, had several contacts there and worked the telephone from his Capitol Hill office trying to arrange Clinton’s enrollment. His papers indicate that he contacted the director of the ROTC program, Colonel Eugene J. Holmes, on July 16, after discussing the specifics of Clinton’s situation earlier with one of Holmes’s assistants. A page of notes Williams took while talking by telephone with the ROTC staff indicates that Clinton was hoping to delay his enrollment in the program until he finished his second year at Oxford. The precise though abbreviated notation relating to that call reads: “Must have first year ROTC def[erred].” Another abbreviated notation indicates that Clinton would not undertake the required basic training for the program until the following summer: “Comb[ine] Basic—6 weeks, Fort Benning, Ga. Summer [197O].”
At about the time Williams made his phone call, at least one inquiry came from the office of Governor Rockefeller, according to Holmes’s top assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Clint Jones. Jones later recalled that both Fulbright’s office and Rockefeller’s office asked him essentially the same question—“Could we do anything to help young Bill Clinton?” His reply was: “Probably, have him come in and see us.” Clinton, his hair now trimmed, traveled up to Fayetteville that week to make his case. He met with Colonel Holmes at his home and with Lieutenant Colonel Jones at the ROTC headquarters on campus in the old business administration building. Holmes later said that his meeting with Clinton involved “an extensive, approximately two-hour interview.” Clinton did not tell Holmes during that interview that he was an opponent of the Vietnam War and of the draft. The next day, according to Holmes, he took several calls from members of the Garland County Draft Board telling him that Senator Fulbright’s office was putting pressure on them and that they needed the colonel to relieve it by enrolling Clinton in the program.
Whether Holmes felt unduly pressured is a question that he answered in widely different ways in later years when Clinton’s draft history became of political interest. In any case, he enrolled Clinton in the program and the July 28 induction notice was nullified. His draft board soon granted Clinton a 1-D deferment as a reservist.
“On the 17th, eleven days before my induction date, I was admitted to a two-year, two-summer camp ROTC program at the University of Arkansas for graduates and junior college transfers,” Clinton wrote to Denise Hyland on July 20. “I will have a two-year obligation just as if I’ve been drafted, but I’ll go in as an officer three years from now. It’s all too good to be true, I think. There is still the doubt that maybe I should have said to hell with it, done this thing and been free!” Clinton’s sense of being out of place in Arkansas permeated the letter. “It seemed really strange going back to Fayetteville, like going back to my boyhood,” referring to the few weeks he had spent at band camp in Fayetteville during the summers of his adolescence. Of Hot Springs he said: “At least I have my hair cut a little … and will not be run out of the hometown on appearance. But I will have a month in which I will try to get involved with some interesting and fairly forthright activities of the local blacks and kids of both races…. If this letter is a bit disjointed and rambling,” he concluded, “it is because I am not yet fully adjusted to the new circumstances and my apparent future.”
The letter leaves the clear impression that Clinton thought he would be going to the University of Arkansas Law School that fall, even if he could not begin the ROTC program until he completed the basic training camp the following summer. One clue is the line “… but I’ll go in as an officer three years from now.” If he were to return to Oxford for a year and then attend law school, which takes three years to complete, he would not finish until four years later. Another clue is the line in which he says that he will “have a month” in Hot Springs to work with children. Law school began in a month. Oxford’s first term was not until October.
Before working out the ROTC deal, Clinton had vacillated between being resigned to going into the Army and working to prevent it. Now that he was protected from the draft, he seemed as troubled as before. In a letter to Tamara Kennerley in England, Clinton said that the idea “of not being in the Army now and going to Arkansas law school is almost more than I can handle—just having a hard time adjusting.” But in that same letter, he also emphasized the antiwar sentiments that had driven him to fight the draft notice in the first place. Looking ahead to the time when he would be done with law school and enter the service as a commissioned officer, he wrote, “Hopefully, there will be no Vietnam then.”
One weekend during that period, Clinton drove to Houston for a reunion with three of his Georgetown housemates. Kit Ashby had just finished a year of graduate business school at the University of Texas at Austin. He, too, had been drafted the previous spring and had tried to find an alternative that would allow him to complete his schooling. He had finally struck a deal to sign up with the Marines if they allowed him to finish his program at Texas. It was a deal much like Clinton’s agreement in Arkansas, with one major difference: Ashby had a time certain for reporting to active duty and knew that he might end up in Vietnam. The other two housemates at the Houston reunion, Tom Campbell and Jim Moore, were already in the service. Campbell, a Marine Corps pilot, was stationed at Beeville, Texas, and Moore, an Army intelligence officer, was between points on a path that would take him to Vietnam. Although Clinton did not dwell on his own circumstances, his buddies came away with the impression that soon enough he, too, would be in the military. But they also found him having a hard time accepting the likelihood that he would not be going back to Oxford. “His basic desire,” according to Ashby, “was to be able to go back.”
Strobe Talbott traveled to Arkansas in early August and stayed at the Clinton house in Hot Springs for several days. Attempting to recollect that visit decades later, Talbott remembered hanging out at Jeff Dwire’s beauty parlor, playing basketball in the driveway with Bill and his little brother Roger, and waiting for what seemed like an hour or more for Virginia Dwire to put on her makeup in the bathroom. He also recalled taking a tour of graveyards, one where Roger Clinton was buried in Hot Springs, and another where William Jefferson Blythe rested in Hope. He was certain that he and Clinton talked about the war and draft deferments, but he could remember no specifics. Cliff Jackson later claimed that Talbott was “one of the chief architects of Bill Clinton’s scheme to void his draft notice” and avoid reporting for the scheduled July 28 induction. Jackson said he had a “crystal-clear recollection” of Talbott and Clinton visiting him at Republican party headquarters in Little Rock and discussing their plan of action. His memory in this is counter to the facts. It places Talbott in two places at once. Talbott was in the Soviet Union in July when Clinton got his deferment. It is possible that Clinton and Talbott, during their time together in August, talked about whether Clinton could find a way to go back to Oxford and delay his enrollment at law school in Fayetteville; but whether any discussions of that sort were held in front of Jackson is based on Jackson’s testimony alone. Talbott could not remember meeting Jackson.
WHEN he visited Clinton in Hot Springs in August, Talbott already knew that he could return unfettered to Oxford for a second year. He had obtained a 1-Y physical deferment for a lateral cartilage injury he had suffered while playing football at the Hotchkiss School as a teenager. His “gimpy knee,” Talbott later wrote, “was enough to keep me out of the Mekong Delta but not off the squash courts and playing fields of Oxford.”
And so it was with many Rhodes Scholars. Boisfeuillet (Bo) Jones, studying at Exeter College, received his induction notice at about the same time that Clinton did and went home that summer resigned to the fact that he would soon be in the Army. He reported to the Atlanta induction center on Ponce de Leon Street at eight o’clock one morning carrying a bag of paperback books and clean underwear, expecting to be a soldier before the day was out, but failed the physical because of high blood pressure and by two that afternoon was free to continue his life of academics and top-flight tennis. In the University College quartet alone, all but Clinton were saved by their own bodies. When Bob Reich took his Army physical, he was greeted by a sergeant who barked out, “Hallelujah! We got ourselves a tunnel rat.” Reich gave him a puzzled look. “What’d you say?” he asked. “A tunnel rat,” repeated the sergeant. “We need short guys like you to flush the VC out of tunnels with hand grenades.” As Reich later remembered the scene, his life flashed before his eyes. Then, in the physical, when he reached the height-measuring station, another sergeant put his hand on Reich’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, son.” Sorry about what? Reich wondered to himself. Sorry I’m going or sorry I’m not going? But the sergeant relieved him with the words, “You’re just too short.” Reich was an inch and a half under the five-foot minimum. The other roommates had less dramatic draft adventures. John Isaacson, another squash player, suffered migraines, and Doug Eakeley had a shoulder that dislocated enough to get him out of the Army but not enough to keep him off the Univ tennis team.
And so it was with millions of privileged and lucky young men. The student deferment, the gimpy knee, the bad back—most of those who did not want to be in the military found a way out. Of the 26.8 million men of draft age during the Vietnam era, 8.7 million enlisted and 2.2 million were drafted. The ranks were filled with the poor and undereducated. High school graduates were twice as likely to serve as college graduates. The great majority of young men, nearly 16 million, avoided military service altogether through deferment, exemption, disqualification, or resistance. Those like Frank Aller were by far the smallest group: 209,000 were accused of resisting or dodging the draft; of whom 8,750 were convicted.
Many young men who could not get physical exemptions sought refuge in the National Guard or ROTC. The extent to which these were viewed as last-ditch choices for potential draftees was documented by a Department of Defense study, which found that nearly half of all officers who came up through ROTC programs said they would not have enlisted had they not faced the draft. Clinton was one of several Rhodes Scholars who received an induction notice during the spring term at Oxford and came home looking for a way out through the Reserves or the National Guard. The manner in which two of those scholars, Mike Shea and Tom Ward, handled their situations lends perspective to Clinton’s behavior.
Mike Shea spent his first year at Balliol College at Oxford protected by a graduate deferment that was no longer supposed to exist. Finally, near the end of the spring term, his draft board in Iowa realized that it had made a classification error and sent him a notice of induction. Shea was not the sort to spend his time “pondering the true correctness and morality” of the war and how best to respond. “I did not have a serious conscience about this. I was not at the same level of introspection and analysis that Aller and Clinton were at. I merely thought this is a really stupid war and I don’t think I can stop it but I have no desire to cooperate.” So he went home and enrolled in the ROTC program at the University of Iowa Law School. “I did exactly what Clinton almost did. But Clinton had all these conscience problems.” Shea went off to basic training at Fort Benning without worrying about whether he had sold out to the military even though he opposed the war. “My feeling was the system was totally fucked. It was just a thousand clowns. I was not making a grand political statement, loved by all—‘Oh, okay, I’ll go to Fort Benning and learn how to shoot flamethrowers.’ My decision was viewed as being an expedient gesture devoid of any moral input at all—which it was.”
Shea’s casual attitude led to a casual conclusion. He developed bad knees, got a medical discharge, and returned to Oxford after one year in the States.
Tom Ward, in the Rhodes class ahead of Clinton’s, also received an induction notice near the end of the 1969 spring term and returned to Meridian, Mississippi, looking for a way out. His position on the Vietnam War was that it was a faraway conflict and that he would just as soon it stayed that way. He acknowledged that his opposition was “in direct proportion” to the closeness of his draft notice. The contrast between his life in England and his upbringing in Mississippi confused Ward even more. The Rhodes crowd had been the most political group he had ever associated with in his life. Now he was trying to find his roots again, to figure out what had happened to him in England. He had been thinking about staying in England, he said later, or “whether to go to Sweden, Canada. Or go to jail. All of that was part of the context of the conversation. I was overwhelmed, frankly. I knew I was in over my head. I had a hard time distinguishing in my own life how much craziness I was going through and how much was just the growing political reality.”
His father, an influential Republican lawyer in Meridian, told Ward that he would be making a grave mistake if he went to jail or sought a conscientious objector exemption. He convinced his son that he had only been talking to alienated Americans. But although Ward’s father supported President Nixon, he did not want his son getting shipped off to Vietnam as a drafted private. They found a slot in a National Guard unit where he could also coach basketball at a junior college. “It was easy for me to get help. Mississippi is like Arkansas—with the good ole boy network.” But Ward, who eventually became an Episcopalian minister in Nashville, felt empty and distressed by the ease with which he escaped the draft. The realization that young men who lacked his connections were fighting a war that he could so easily avoid haunted Ward for years. Yet he also came to believe that even the limited vulnerability that Rhodes Scholars faced in that summer of 1969 hastened the end of the war. “I just think historically the war broke down when we started drafting the Bill Clintons and the Tom Wards. People like my father were not going to have their sons dying in that war and were politically influential enough to stop it. That is the moral ambiguity of the situation.”
IT was not until Clinton had offered himself to the military establishment, not until he had signed up for the University of Arkansas ROTC, that he started to become actively involved in the antiwar movement. In mid-August he traveled to Washington and spent several days with Rick Stearns at the McGovern rules staff and visited the Vietnam Moratorium Committee headquarters on Vermont Avenue, where activists were planning a one-day nationwide protest against the war, scheduled for October 15. Clinton had a few friends who were well connected in the movement, including Stearns, but he was virtually unknown himself. He was on the outer edge of the antiwar subculture, according to David Mixner, one of the principal organizers. With his affable manner and expressions of guilt about avoiding the draft, Clinton was regarded as “somewhat of a suspicious character.” But he was not without value. No one in the movement had better connections to Fulbright and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The brief visit to Washington restored Clinton’s spirits, but it also reminded him how out of place he now felt in Arkansas. In an August 20 letter, he thanked Stearns for a “wonderful week” that he said was “therapy for a sick man.” Stearns, who was more circumspect, took Clinton’s anxieties seriously, but not too seriously. “Bill was a lot more revealing about himself and more willing to talk in that vocabulary than I would be. Some of it was a bit tongue in cheek. Some of it was florid expression.” The August 20 letter went on to display both of those qualities. “I am home now, still full of the life that your friends and my friends and the city pumped into me. Before I forget, let me tell you how grateful I am to you for introducing me to all those people. Arkansas is barren of that kind, or at least I’ve found few of them. Maybe they have better sense than to traffic with such a naive, sloppy minded romantic.” Clinton added that he hoped he could go with Stearns to a September gathering in Martha’s Vineyard planned by young leaders of the antiwar movement. “I need and would like like hell to be doing something like that.”
On the evening of September 8, Stearns called Clinton from Washington and they talked about Oxford and the draft. He felt guilty and hypocritical for having the ROTC deferment, Clinton said. Stearns was among the scholars who had managed to get graduate school deferments for the first year, but he had recently been reclassified 1-A by his draft board in California and expected to be drafted any week. Still, he said he was going back to Oxford for his second year. “I told Bill that the only fair thing for me to do was to take my chances,” Stearns later recalled. “If I get drafted, I get drafted, but I wasn’t going to worry about it. If the day came, it came. I felt that was more honorable than trying to connive a way of avoiding the whole thing.” The next day, Clinton wrote Stearns, saying that he had heard from Ann Markesun, who “seems far saner than I am.” The draft board in Mississippi, Clinton reported in that letter, was about to meet on Paul Parish’s appeal. He had just heard from Parish’s mother. “The feeling is he’ll get out, but will be called home at the end of the first term to do alternative service.”
Clinton then described his own state of mind, a subject he and Stearns had been discussing on the telephone the night before. “My mind is every day more confused than it was before; and countless hours doing nothing save waiting for the phone to ring are driving me out of my head,” he wrote.
Nothing could be worse than this torment…. And if I cannot rid myself of it, I will just have to go into the service and begin to root out the cause. I wish I could describe to you the quandary I am in, so you could counter with some helpful advice—I have been here all summer in a place where everyone else’s children seem to be in the military, most of them in Vietnam. I look forward to going to the U of A, the thing for aspiring politicos to do, and going to ROTC to become a second lieutenant at 26—in between then and now I have this thing hanging over me like a pall. I can’t justify putting it off. You see, I haven’t explained it very well—the anguish is not that apparent—I am running away from something maybe for the first time in my life—and I just hope I have made the correct decision, if there is such a thing. I know one of the worst side effects of this whole thing is the way it’s ravaged my own image of myself, taken my mind off the higher things, restricted my ability to become involved in good causes or with other people—I honestly feel so screwed up tight that I am incapable, I think, of giving myself, of really loving. I told you I was losing my mind. Anyway—I’m anxious to hear from you. I want so much to tell you we’re going back to England.
Three days later, on September 12, Clinton stayed up all night writing a letter to William Armstrong, the chairman of the Garland County Draft Board, saying that he never had any real interest in ROTC and wanted to be reclassined 1-A and drafted as soon as possible. But if writing that letter was a cathartic moment for Clinton, it did not resolve his ambivalence. He carried the letter around with him every day for several weeks. But he never mailed it.
The series of events that led Clinton on a path back to Oxford are in dispute. By Clinton’s account, he talked to Colonel Holmes and gained permission to return to Oxford for the second year since the basic training that he was required to attend before beginning advanced ROTC would not start until the following summer. Holmes said later that he allowed Clinton to return to Oxford for “a month or two,” but expected him to enroll in the law school as soon as possible. But a letter that Clinton wrote Holmes from Oxford in December 1969 in which he apologized for not writing more often—“I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month”—is the strongest evidence that Holmes was aware of and approved Clinton’s plan to go back to Oxford. It may be that Holmes made a private agreement with Clinton in 1969 that he was embarrassed to acknowledge years later. But if he did, he apparently never told his subordinates about it. The rest of the ROTC staff was expecting Clinton to enroll that fall. Ed Howard, the drill sergeant, later recalled that there was great anger when word spread through the ROTC office that Clinton was not on campus. “A lot of people in the unit were kind of mad about it, angry that he didn’t show up,” Howard said. “We did not know where he was. All we knew is that Bill Clinton did not show up. We didn’t normally have people promise to do something and not do it. He was supposed to enroll come enrollment time that fall. When he didn’t show up there was some disappointment.”
Cliff Jackson was among those angered by Clinton’s decision. He said in a letter to his girlfriend that he was starting to suspect that Clinton’s friendship with him was mere convenience. “Bill Clinton is still trying to wiggle his way out of the ‘disreputable’ Arkansas law school,” Jackson wrote in one letter. “P.S.,” Jackson added in a letter on September 14, “Bill has succeeded in wiggling his way back to Oxford.”
THAT was the day that Mike Thomas was killed in Vietnam. Thomas had been in Bill’s class at Hot Springs High, where they had served as class officers together. He was the class mascot, a scrappy little fellow who “wanted to be a jock in a big way,” according to Jim French, one of his closest high school friends and the quarterback of the football team. Mike tried out for the football team every fall, and was brought into games only to hold for extra points. Defensive nose guard Bill High, the biggest, player on the team, was stunned one day during the offseason when Coach C. B. Haney ordered the boys to pair off and wrestle each other and Thomas immediately challenged High. High later described him as “a fearless little tiger.” Thomas went off to the University of Arkansas but did not finish. His father, Herman Thomas, had been a captain in World War II, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who lectured his son on the meaning of patriotism. “Mike was in a fraternity at the University of Arkansas,” Herman Thomas later recalled. “All the boys in it were figuring out ways to get out of service. In his second year, Mike got all teed off at those guys. He joined the Army as a buck-ass private. He enlisted, went through basic training, then was held back so he could go to officer training school. He was the smallest man in his class, but made it all right.” He went through jungle warfare training in Panama and got his orders for Vietnam. When he stopped at home on his way out, his father thought he seemed “gung-ho, ready to go.”
In Vietnam he was a platoon leader in Company E of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), performing long-range reconnaissance in free-fire zones. His platoon loved Mike Thomas. “He had this kind of charming way of talking, this southern drawl,” remembered one of his men, Greg Schlieve from Washington State. “I had never been around anyone like that. He was matter-of-fact—‘If this happens, here’s the contingency plan.’ If we’d say, ‘Mike, that’s not a good trail to go down, we’re hitting contact,’ he had our concerns foremost. He wouldn’t ask anyone to go where he wouldn’t go. During battles and firefights, he was able to direct men and go around and check on your ammo, your water, and somehow by putting his hand on a man’s shoulder that was maybe terrified, he had the capacity to calm a man down, more or less say, ‘Hang in there, buddy, we’re going to make it.’ I despised most of the officers. They pissed me off. But Mike never forgot the number-one goal is for you all to come walking back. I just absolutely thought without a shadow of a doubt that Mike was the most courageous man I ever met. He was little—five foot five—but carried the heaviest pack in our platoon—one hundred and twenty pounds. No one could come up and say he needed a break, his pack was getting him down. Every time we took a break, Mike would scooch his pack against a tree and two of us would grab his arms and lift him up. It was too big for him to put on his back alone.”
The war was undergoing a subtle transformation on September 14, the day Mike Thomas died. In Saigon that morning, General Creighton W. Abrams, the United States commander in Vietnam, paid an unusual visit to the residence of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to discuss President Nixon’s intention to withdraw 35,000 troops from Vietnam and to revise the military draft system back home. Some sixty-five miles from Saigon in the Vietnamese countryside, Lieutenant Thomas put on his pack and led his troops back from a mountain peak they had been guarding. A relief platoon had just arrived. Thomas was driving through a jungle trail in the second vehicle on the way back, with his radio operator at his side, when they were ambushed by Viet Cong. Everyone jumped for cover. The radio operator, who was overweight, got caught in his wires. Thomas crawled back from the brush and was untangling him when a mortar shell hit the hood and killed them both.
Their deaths brought the American toll in Vietnam to 38,953. The Army posthumously awarded Thomas a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Good Conduct Medal. The mortar shell that killed Mike Thomas took other casualties as well. For a long time his father grieved that perhaps he had spent too much time glorifying war by talking so much about his own exploits in World War II. Greg Schlieve went through decades of psychological distress after returning from Vietnam. “I have always thought that I should have died, and not Mike. I am the one who was an asshole,” Schlieve said later. “I did not like God’s plan to take Mike and leave me.”
Schlieve eventually came to believe that Vietnam led his entire generation into denial—soldiers and nonsoldiers alike. No one wanted to talk about the real reasons why he and Mike Thomas went to war or the reasons why Bill Clinton and his Rhodes friends did not. “I believe it is hard for a soldier to admit that he went to Vietnam and killed human beings just for the glory of it, or because he had nothing better to do,” Schlieve concluded. “But I also believe there is another truth to be told by the students, that they were protesting the war because they were deathly afraid of dying, which is what they should have felt if they were human. Approval and acceptance are of such importance to human beings. Antiwar protesters had smokescreens. They would get enormous approval from peers to be against it. And vets had their own smokescreens. We couldn’t see the truth about ourselves, either. We would say we were patriotic, responsible young men. That’s bullshit. Maybe ten percent of the true story. For a lot of us who went, we were going after the same thing—approval. We were trying to get it from our peers, from our father who had been in World War II. We were striving to get our father’s love. It’s hard to see the truth, and many will deny the truth before accepting it. And it doesn’t matter if you were a soldier fighting the war or a student fighting against it. We all had our reasons for taking up our battle cries, and I believe our battle cries very cleverly fooled us all.”
BATTLE cries. They could be heard one weekend that September at the fashionable Martha’s Vineyard estate of John O’Sullivan, the antiwar son of an investment lawyer. Clinton and Stearns were there along with a few dozen former student leaders in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. The Vineyard conclave was a reunion one year after the chaos of Chicago. It was a long weekend of touch football, antiwar rhetoric, congressional vote counting, and posturing among a fraternity of ambitious young politicos. Like the teenagers who traveled to Washington for Boys Nation in 1963, like the Rhodes Scholars who sailed across the Atlantic in 1968, many in the crowd at O’Sullivan’s estate thought of themselves as future leaders of the free world. One of those in attendance, Taylor Branch, who had just arrived from Georgia where he had worked on a voter registration project, referred to the group as “The Executive Committee of the Future.” He said it with a touch of irony.
In Georgia, Branch had seen an old black man dip inside his overalls and show him a hernia the size of a squash. Now he was surrounded by earnest young men in their early twenties sitting around calling senators by their first names. There was Frank (Church) and Harold (Hughes) and Gene (McCarthy) and George (McGovern). “The whole antiwar scene seemed inflated, unreal, compared with the experience in Georgia,” Branch recalled. “It was my first realization that people you thought were on the inside really are not so much inside or superior. There is a real nervousness for political people who feel important to get together and be together. This intense awareness of who was there and who had done what. It was the end of the sixties up there, but all those people had their tickets punched for the future.”
Clinton took a long walk along the beach with David Mixner that weekend. They talked about their common roots from small-town America. Mixner had grown up in Elmer, New Jersey, a place not unlike Hot Springs in its patriotic fervor. Behind his tough facade as a movement leader whose name was constantly in the papers, Mixner confided to Clinton, he was just a rural kid who felt inadequate in this high-powered intellectual crowd and torn between his hatred for the war and his sense of duty. He felt more comfortable at a picnic in Elmer than at a dinner party hosted by a wealthy liberal. He did not even know how to eat an artichoke. Clinton reassured Mixner by telling stories about his life in Arkansas and how he felt torn between two worlds as well.
“Are you embarrassed,” Clinton asked Mixner, “when you go home and meet someone who’s in the service?”