THE LUCKY NUMBER
RHODES SCHOLARS WERE provided rooms at their colleges only during their first year at Oxford. For the second year, they were expected to find their own digs. Rick Stearns rented a spacious, rectangular second-floor room at Holywell Manor overlooking a twelfth-century church and graveyard. The apartment had two appliances of note: a short-wave radio from which Stearns learned French and listened to the music of Berlioz, Schubert, and Mahler; and a space heater that created a warm comfort zone of perhaps ten feet. Anything on the far end of the room was apt to freeze. That included the tapwater in the sink as well as Stearns’s unanticipated lodger for the first month, his worried pal from Arkansas, Bill Clinton.
No one had expected Clinton back for a second year. He slept on a rollaway bed. He was rootless, moving through Oxford with scruffy hair and a grubby Army coat, the preferred cold-weather garb of the student set. He seemed less connected to the establishment than at any other time in his life.
When the American Oxonian, official journal of the Rhodes Association in the United States, published its list of scholars studying at Oxford in the fall of 1969, Clinton’s name was not on the roll. He was, in fact, in school that year, but his unexpected last-minute arrival had kept him off the Oxonian list. Whether he was a scholar in spirit as well as fact is an altogether different question. The Michaelmas term of his second year was much like the Trinity term of his first—he had little or no interaction with Oxford dons. Zbigniew Pelczynski, who had struck up a harmonious relationship with him the first year before taking a sabbatical, returned to Oxford that fall unaware that Clinton was there. “I was under the impression that Clinton had left and been drafted,” Pelczynski recalled. “It was extraordinary and tragic. I might have been able to help him in a difficult time. I have a feeling he felt his future was so uncertain, his Oxford life was so hanging on a thread, that he simply stopped attending tutorials regularly.” Pelczynski later examined Clinton’s file to determine what had happened to him, and found that during the first term of the second year, Clinton’s relationship with another tutor was “very, very tenuous.” Or perhaps it was nonexistent. One contemporaneous account indicated that the politics don who was supposed to oversee Clinton was on sabbatical that fall.
So Clinton was freeloading at Holywell Manor and paying little attention to his studies. But he was, finally, something that he had never been before, not at Georgetown during his Fulbright days, not at Oxford in his first year. He was now, briefly, a fullblown antiwar organizer. Through his work with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, Clinton became a key contact for American students who wanted to lend overseas support to the October 15 protest. Randall Scott, an American student attending the London School of Economics that fall, called moratorium headquarters in Washington before leaving for England to see if there would be a London version of the U.S. demonstrations. He was told to contact Bill Clinton at Oxford. Once he reached London, Scott called Oxford and after some difficulty found Clinton, who said the Rhodes Scholars might take some action related to the moratorium. “Many of us are quite concerned,” he later remembered Clinton telling him. Scott talked with Clinton again during the second week of October and was told that dozens of Americans at Oxford planned to travel to London to join a teach in at the London School of Economics and march to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where they would present officials with a petition against the war signed by Rhodes Scholars.
The American Oxonians held several meetings to plan their London actions. Steve Engstrom, a Little Rock native spending his college junior year abroad, was in Oxford then visiting friends and was taken to an anti-war meeting where, he was told in advance, he would meet a future governor of Arkansas. “My friend said the guy’s name was Bill Clinton, and I laughed because I thought I knew all the up-and-comers in Arkansas. I had been a student politician. I knew Mack McLarty. But I had never heard of Clinton.” He found that many of the Rhodes Scholars were stridently anti-war and furious with the American government. Clinton, who ran the meeting, struck Engstrom as a voice of relative moderation. “I noticed that Clinton had already gathered the respect of the people in the room. He played the role of moderator. He was standing there listening to people asking questions and people making comments, and he facilitated the dialogue. I was amazed by how he handled an intense situation so calmly. I told my friend later, ‘You’re right, the guy probably will be governor some day.’”
That Engstrom could look at an antiwar organizer and see a future governor of Arkansas says as much about the time as it does about Clinton. Opposition to the war was a mainstream sentiment that fall. A Gallup Poll conducted in late September showed that “disillusionment over the Vietnam war” had reached a new peak, “with six persons in ten now of the opinion that the U.S. made a mistake getting involved in Vietnam.” The moratorium, though organized by student leaders, was drawing a broad range of support from moderate politicians. The presidents of seventy-nine colleges and universities endorsed the moratorium. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird’s son announced that he would participate in the protest at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Students at President Nixon’s alma mater, Whittier College, said they would light an antiwar “flame of life” and keep it burning until the war ended.
Amid the panoply of protest on Moratorium Day, the London demonstrators barely gained notice. In a letter to his parents in Wisconsin, Randall Scott described the scene: “And I can express the feelings of several hundred happy Americans standing in front of their embassy at night with candles blazing—each one concerned for and not against their country. This was not a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. To give some indication, nearly all of the Rhodes scholars currently at Oxford signed a petition which was presented that afternoon.” Another peace petition, signed by forty Labour members of Parliament and presented to embassy officials by six MPs who attended the demonstration, was the only petition that made press accounts. The largest headline in the British newspapers about the protest was in The Guardian. “Mr. Newman Supports Students,” it announced, over a story revealing that the actors Paul Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, vacationing in London, had joined the students outside the embassy. It was a solemn, peaceful demonstration by all accounts. No one there was shouting for the defeat of the U.S. armed forces or victory for the NLF, the National Liberation Front of Vietnamese Communists and Nationalists often adopted as the home team in football-style chants. Clinton led a teach in discussion and served as a marshal outside the embassy. Tom Williamson, who traveled to London with Clinton and was also a marshal, thought they were “soulmates in opposition to the war,” and felt strongly about what they were doing, but noted that they were also typical young men who had other things on their minds. “If you were a marshal you got to stand in one place and watch a lot of people walk by. A lot of girls. That was one of the fringe benefits.”
The fall of 1969 was an odd, rushed, condensed time back in America. The antiwar movement was constantly splintering, one faction trying to outdo another. By November, the movement was larger but more fractious than ever. Another protest was held in Washington one month after the moratorium, this one organized by the more confrontational but still peaceful wing of the antiwar movement, known as the New Mobilization Committee, or Mobe. On the eve of the demonstration, William Ayers, a leader of the Weathermen, the most provocative of several radical groups, tried to blackmail the organizers by saying that for $20,000 his band of predominantly upper-middle-class suburban white revolutionary nihilists would not trash the November 15 event. Ayers said the Weathermen needed the money to pay for legal bills they had piled up after their arrests for a violent demonstration in Chicago. The organizers refused to pay. A Mobe leader asked Ayers what the ultimate goal of the Weathermen was. “To kill all rich people,” came the response. When it was noted that Ayers’s father was a wealthy financier, he replied, “You know what Abbie Hoffman says, ‘Bring the war home. Kill your parents.’”
The day of the Mobe brought the biggest demonstration in the history of Washington. A crowd estimated by police at 250,000 and by organizers as more than half a million marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and assembled at the Washington Monument. As the event ended, a few thousand young militants scrambled across to the Justice Department and incited a rocks-and-bottles versus tear-gas melee with police. Attorney General John N. Mitchell and his top deputy, Richard G. Kleindienst, looked down on the confrontation from their offices on the fifth floor and seized on the opportunity to portray the antiwar movement as anarchistic, even though all but a fraction of the demonstrators were peaceful and the organizers had fielded more than two thousand marshals to try to keep matters under control.
In London that day the same drama was played out on a miniature scale. Clinton and his American friends at Oxford attended the protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. This demonstration was larger than the October 15 event, drawing more than five hundred American and British protesters who gathered at midafternoon and spent several hours marching around the square four abreast. Each marcher wore a black armband and carried a card bearing the name of an American soldier killed in Vietnam. One at a time, hour after hour, marchers stepped before a microphone and read the name of a dead soldier before placing the card in a small coffin. Late in the afternoon, a small band of young Communists came marching down the street, chanting anti-imperialist slogans and taunting the police. Father Richard McSorley, a Georgetown University professor active in the world peace movement, happened to be in London that day, taking part in the peaceful protest. He encountered a young Communist who was yelling “Down with imperialism!” through a bullhorn. “You know, peace activists organized this event and people came to act peacefully. If you had tried to organize it on the theme of down with imperialism, no one would have come,” McSorley told him. “You have no right to interrupt what we’re doing.” Rick Stearns and Clinton “ended up on the sidelines watching various Trotskyites pitching coins at horses” in Grosvenor Square. “There was an ugly mood in that crowd,” Stearns said later, adding that he and Clinton “were both offended by anti-American taunts and the aura of violence the groups projected.”
At the end of the evening, they announced over a loudspeaker that they would hold a prayer service at St. Mark’s Church across from the embassy the following day. Clinton arrived in a suit and tie. He recognized Father McSorley from his Georgetown days and asked the priest to open the prayers. McSorley recited St. Francis’s prayer for peace. “After my prayer we had hymns, peace songs led by two women with guitars, and the reading of poetry by a native white South American woman,” McSorley later wrote. Stearns recited John Donne’s sermon—“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” McSorley wrote that he found all the poems moving. “Mixed with the reading were more peace songs. All the readers were young people. Although it was a sad day, it was encouraging and comforting to see the determination of these young people who would stand against the evils of war.” And, McSorley noted, he was “glad to see a Georgetown student leading in the religious service of peace.”
After the service, Clinton introduced McSorley to Stearns and his other friends, and they again marched over to Grosvenor Square, this time carrying small white crosses, which they placed on the steps of the embassy. There were no confrontations with police.
Decades later, Republican partisans would attempt to portray Clinton as an unpatriotic if not seditious radical for helping to organize the London protests and criticizing his government while overseas. Weighed in the context of the times, the charge loses gravity. Opposition to the war was so strong in Clinton’s age group that among the Rhodes Scholars who came to London to protest that fall were Willy Fletcher, who was an ensign in the Navy, and two graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy, J. Michael Kirchberg and Robert Earl. (Earl was nervous about getting his picture taken.) Kirchberg eventually became a conscientious objector; Earl later ended up in the White House during the Reagan years serving as a top assistant to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. Another American student at the London School of Economics was more prominently mentioned than Clinton in the local press accounts of the October 15 demonstration. Michael Boskin, identified as a student from Berkeley, California, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that the demonstrators had asked the American Embassy to close for the day so that employees could join the protest. This same Michael Boskin would later serve as chairman of Republican President George Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.
ALONGSIDE Clinton’s role in the London antiwar protests was another story—his decision to give up the 1-D deferment, scrap the University of Arkansas Law School and ROTC altogether, and resubmit himself to the draft. It is a difficult episode to sort out, muddled by Clinton’s various accounts, which tend to be incomplete or contradictory, and by a scarcity of documentary evidence. The essential question is not so much what Clinton did as why he did it. Was it a decision driven by guilt and honor that should be accepted at face value? Or was it the end-game maneuver of a draft-wise young man playing every angle to avoid military service without appearing unpatriotic or duplicitous? Was Clinton unaware of all the draft news coming out during the time he made his decision? Or was he aware at the time he relinquished the ROTC deferment that actions taken during that period by the Nixon administration had considerably narrowed the odds of his getting drafted again? There is a temptation to choose one or the other explanation, yes or no, rule out anything in between. But with Clinton it is rarely that simple. A civil war raged inside him between his conscience and his political will to survive. It seems that he tried to appease both impulses. At times he might have been guided by virtue. Other times he deceived the world, if not himself.
The question of when Clinton decided to give up the deferment is important as it relates to his truthfulness in later accounts and to what he would have known about his vulnerability to the draft on the day he made the decision. His draft records show that he held the 1-D deferment from August 7 to October 30, 1969. Those two dates mark the days when the Garland County Draft Board met, considered Clinton’s case, and reclassified him, first from 1-A to 1-D, then back from 1-D to 1-A. They are not the dates, however, when Clinton took the actions that led to the reclassifications. According to a letter he wrote to Denise Hyland, Clinton struck his ROTC deal with Colonel Holmes on July 17—three weeks before the draft board officially reclassified him. Similarly, it seems certain that Clinton notified the draft board that he wanted to give up his deferment and be reclassified 1-A some time before the official October 30 draft board action. There are no documents substantiating this. The draft official with whom Clinton and his family dealt in giving up the deferment, William S. Armstrong, then the chairman, died before anyone had reason to ask him.
Clinton’s first public response to questions surrounding the deferment came nine years later, in 1978, when he was back in Arkansas running for office. His answer was largely accepted as reasonable at the time, though in retrospect it does not hold up. According to the Arkansas Gazette edition of October 28, 1978, Clinton, responding to a charge that he had used the ROTC to dodge the draft, stated that “the accusation was baseless because he never received a draft deferment.” The central paragraph in that article reads:
Clinton explained Friday that while at Oxford he had decided to take advantage of the ROTC opportunity and had made the agreement in the summer of 1969. The ROTC unit was to mail the agreement to Washington at the end of the year and the deferment would start in 1970. On returning to Oxford, however, he decided against the deferment and wrote to Col. Holmes, the ROTC commander, saying he would prefer to go ahead and subject himself to the draft and get it over with although he would proceed with the ROTC training if Holmes desired. A relative of Clinton’s talked to Holmes and was told the agreement would be cancelled, Clinton said.
The most obvious problem with Clinton’s 1978 response is his claim that he never received the deferment. It was later established that he had been deferred and that it was the deferment that saved him from being inducted on July 28. His induction deadline was not part of the dispute in 1978 because neither his accusers nor the press were aware that he had been drafted and Clinton did not volunteer that fact. As to the concluding thought in the paragraph, that Clinton said he told Colonel Holmes he would go ahead with the ROTC training anyway if Holmes so desired, there is no mention of this in the only letter Clinton wrote Holmes later, and Clinton never raised the matter again in his subsequent statements on the issue.
Clinton offered a different narrative thirteen years later, during a December 1991 interview with Dan Balz, a political reporter for The Washington Post. In that interview, he again failed to mention that he had been drafted in the spring of 1969, and in fact left the impression that he had never received a draft notice. “… I expected to be called while I was over there the first year,” Clinton said, “but they never did.” He then told how he had arranged to get into law school and the ROTC but decided at the end of the summer that “that was not a good thing to do, you know?” He went on: “I’d already had one good year at Oxford, but by then four of my classmates had died in Vietnam, including a boy that was one of my closest friends when I was a child. And so I asked to be put back in the draft…. And the guy that was head of the ROTC unit really tried to talk me out of it. He said, ‘You don’t need to do this.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I just can’t put it off. Call me. Let’s go.’ I told my draft board. They said okay, if that’s what you want, we’ll do it. The guy at the draft board then said they were going to call me in January.”
There is no evidence that either of the conversations Clinton related to the Post in that account took place in the manner he described. Months after the interview, in fact, Clinton acknowledged that he did not directly make the arrangements to be placed back in the draft, since he was already in Oxford by then, but rather used an intermediary in Arkansas, his stepfather Jeff Dwire. Another important revelation came after Clinton’s interview with the Post—the letter Clinton wrote to Colonel Holmes in December 1969 explaining why he had given up his deferment. The text of that letter, which will be examined in detail later, leaves the impression that Clinton was explaining his actions to Holmes for the first time, making it less plausible that the student and the colonel had an earlier conversation of the sort Clinton related to the Post.
The best estimate of when Clinton gave up his deferment can be deduced from statements made by Randall Scott, the graduate student at the London School of Economics who dealt with Clinton while organizing the October 15 teach-in and protest at the American Embassy. According to Scott, when he first called Clinton at the end of September or beginning of October to find out whether the Rhodes Scholars would participate on Moratorium Day, Clinton told him that he was “very uncomfortable being involved in the moratorium with [my] 1-D.” Clinton indicated that some of his high school friends had been killed in Vietnam and that he did not feel right protesting while he remained in what might be viewed as a safe haven. He told Scott that he “intended to drop it.” On the day of the protest, according to Scott, he met Clinton and told him that carrying the petition to the U.S. Embassy was a courageous act by the Rhodes Scholars. Clinton’s response was, “And I told my draft board to make me 1-A.”
From Scott’s reconstruction of his conversations with Clinton, then, it seems that Clinton, acting through his stepfather, asked the draft board to drop his deferment and reclassify him 1-A sometime between October 1 and October 15.
The fact that Clinton felt uneasy about his deferment and thought about giving it up is documented in the July 20 letter to Denise Hyland and the September 10 letter to Rick Stearns. “There is still the doubt that maybe I should have said to hell with it, done this thing [submit to the draft] and been free!” Clinton wrote in the Hyland letter. To Stearns, 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 root out the cause.” If Clinton sincerely wanted to ease his torment by entering the service, however, he could have given his draft board chairman the letter he said he stayed up all night on September 12 writing—the one revealing that he did not have his heart in the ROTC program and wanted to be drafted as soon as possible—instead of keeping it in his back pocket for weeks and leaving for Oxford without mailing it. Or, surer yet, he could have simply enlisted. The reason he took neither of those routes is explained in the letter he wrote to Colonel Holmes a few months later, in December 1969, in which he said, “… I didn’t see, in the end, how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved.”
If Clinton did not mail the letter while he was in Hot Springs or enlist while he was there because at the time, even though he was feeling guilty about the deferment, he did not really want to be in the Army or go to Vietnam, what compelled him finally to give up his deferment once he reached Oxford? The preponderance of evidence leads in one direction: to the notion that with each passing week there were more signs that he might not get drafted even if he abandoned the deferment. If Clinton, acting through his stepfather, arranged to have the local draft board reclassify him 1-A after October 1 (as seems most probable based on Randall Scott’s recollections), he would have known that it was largely a symbolic act providing him the best of both worlds—the ability to say that he had given up a deferment, and the knowledge that even though he was 1-A again, he would not be drafted that year. This became possible because on October 1, President Nixon, seeking to defuse the antiwar clamor on campuses, ordered the Selective Service System to change its policy for graduate students. From that day on, graduate students who received draft notices would be allowed to finish the entire school year rather than just the term they were in. Clinton was safe at least until the following July.
In the weeks before the October 1 policy change for graduate students, the Nixon administration had taken several other actions that eased the pressure on students facing the draft. On September 14, newspapers in New York, Washington, and Arkansas carried articles quoting sources as saying that the Nixon administration would soon withdraw 35,000 troops from Vietnam and suspend the draft temporarily later that fall. The stories also said that there was a possibility that once the draft was resumed, only nineteen-year-olds would be called, and that the Army would send to Vietnam “only … those draftees who volunteered for service there.” On September 17, Nixon confirmed the troop cuts in Vietnam and said that he would soon announce a major policy change concerning the draft. On September 19, the president announced that the October draft call of 29,000 men would be spread out over three months—essentially canceling the call for November and December—while the administration pushed for a draft lottery system. Nixon said he would impose draft reform by executive order if Congress did not act on its own. Under the lottery system discussed in stories that day, young men would be vulnerable to the draft for only one year. Their vulnerability would be determined by a random selection of numbers from 1 to 365. Each day of the year would get a number, which would be the number for all young men born on that day. The lower your number, the more likely you were to get drafted. Those with high numbers would probably get through the year and never have to worry about the draft again.
In his December 1991 interview with the Post, Clinton said, “I didn’t know anything about any lottery and I sure as hell didn’t know what my number was” at the time that he was reclassified 1-A. The second half of that statement is true. There was no way he could have known his lottery number in October because the lottery had not yet been implemented. The first half of the statement, however, seems unlikely. Clinton and his contemporaries had a consuming interest in the draft and followed every nuance of draft policy. Studying the draft was as important to them as any graduate school course. The possibility of a lottery was a major story around the time Clinton made his decision to drop the deferment. It was not even a new idea: the lottery had been part of the public debate about draft reform since the previous May.
It was, in summary, a mixed bag of certainties, probabilities, and unknowns that Clinton was dealing with that October. He had to be aware that the revised graduate student policy protected him from induction that school year. He knew that the Selective Service System was cutting back on draft calls. The word was out that a lottery was coming. The Nixon administration had already announced two troop withdrawals starting what came to be known as the Vietnamization of the war. All of those signs were encouraging for a young man who did not want a deferment yet was not eager to fight in Vietnam. But it was not clear that Clinton had avoided the draft completely. He had, whatever his motivations, exposed himself to some degree of risk by asking to be reclassified. If the lottery came, his draft fate would depend on a number. Luck would help determine the fate of a gambling town’s favorite son.
ONE Friday afternoon, Clinton and Stearns got into a discussion about poetry and discovered that they both loved Dylan Thomas, the lyrical Welsh poet. As a lark, they decided that they should make a pilgrimage to his birthplace. They grabbed their coats and Stearns’s orange-covered edition of Thomas’s poems and walked down to the rotary on the edge of Oxford and started hitch-hiking west. The weather was rainy and bitterly cold. They made it to Cardiff on the first day, and then caught a ride from a spelunker who was scrambling off to a cave exploration near a little village in the middle of Wales where no one had heard of Dylan Thomas. They sensed that they should be heading west, toward Swansea, but found it much easier to hitch rides north and south, and never got within range of Thomas’s birthplace. They finally retreated to Bristol, back across the border in England, where they walked into a pub just as Tom Jones’s “Green, Green Grass of Home” was playing on the jukebox. Any friend who had ever been with Clinton during the playing of that sentimental melody was left with the same memory: Clinton overtaken by feelings of homesickness. And so it was on that rainy night in Bristol. The song brought tears to his eyes.
They spent another miserable night in a bone-cold tourist lodge with “thin little blankets and a heater that only worked ten minutes at a time.” By Sunday morning they were ready to concede defeat and began walking toward the motorway back to Oxford. On the way they passed a grocery where fresh bread, still steaming hot, had just been delivered. They bought a big loaf and a quart of milk with the money they had left and went out and sat on the curb and devoured it. The grocerywoman saw the two Americans through the store window. Concerned that they might get indigestion, she provided them butter to go along with the bread. Clinton charmed her, leaving Stearns once again in awe of his friend’s adaptability. “The woman was so taken with Bill that she and her husband shut their store and invited us upstairs to the living quarters for their English Sunday dinner. After dinner they showed us sites in Bristol and took us to the bus station and bought our tickets back to Oxford. The grocers had two small children, and when we got back to Oxford, Clinton bought them gifts and sent them notes,” Stearns recalled decades later. “He probably still does.”
The makeshift living arrangements at Holywell Manor did not seem to bother Clinton or Stearns, but they were not acceptable to one and all. Having the big Arkansan over there on the other side of the room put a crimp in Stearns’s romantic life, and tenants in the room directly below complained about the noise. At one point they delivered a note under the door which said that it seemed “a reasonable request” that the occupants should not shift furniture or hammer nails after midnight. “If this is not heeded,” the threatening note went on, they might feel compelled to “tell the landlord why a bed is wheeled out every night, which would have serious repercussions.” Clinton took the note in good humor, and joked to Stearns that the complainants did not know “that you and I are queer.” He also said that “if I weren’t your guest, and basically nonviolent and a little chicken, I’d go down and wipe [the note writer’s] body over the floor.” Those comments reflected a risqué, macho, satirical side to Clinton’s humor, well known only to his close male friends.
In the third week of November, Stearns, who had finished his readings for the term, traveled back to Washington to continue his work on the McGovern Commission. It was also a chance for him to pursue a woman Clinton had introduced him to the previous summer—a former classmate of Clinton’s at Georgetown who was working on the staff of Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut. Stearns was infatuated with the young woman, but he was having little success with her. Clinton tried to explain the problem. “He basically said that she hated my guts,” Stearns later noted in his deadpan style. “Bill tried to explain to me why he was successful with girls and I was not. He said, ‘Have you ever thought about listening to someone else?’ I tried to impress girls by telling them everything I knew. Bill said, ‘If you let them do the talking, they’ll be far more interested in you. To have someone listening to you is flattering.’” In his letter to Stearns, Clinton said that he was having a hard time working at night because he could not keep his mind off Peggy. Stearns had never heard of Peggy. Clinton had flattered so many women that his friends could not keep up with them.
In another letter, Clinton thanked Stearns for “taking me in and making the time bearable and then happy when I was so low down.” His uncertain existence in Oxford seemed to be stabilizing. He had been invited to share a flat at 46 Leckford Road with two other Rhodes friends, Strobe Talbott, the Russia scholar, and Frank Aller, the China scholar and draft resister. A room at the Leckford Road house became available when another American student left and they needed someone to pick up the share of the rent. The cost per housemate was three pounds a week plus a share of utility bills, easily affordable for even the poorest Rhodes Scholars, who along with free tuition were provided with $1,700 a year by the Rhodes trust. The narrow brick townhouse on the northern edge of the university had three floors, with a bedroom on each floor. There was a toilet on the first, a full bath on the third, and a telephone on the second.
Sara Maitland, a frequent visitor, thought of the house as being “particularly shambolic—an absolute slum.” Her characterization of Leckford Road rings true. It was, she thought, “a bit of a joke because it was poshed up years later, but back then it was a mess. It belonged to a college and was rented by someone who sublet it illegally. No one paid much rent and no repairs were done. It was sort of a standoff. No one ever scrubbed the kitchen floor.” The kitchen, with its peeled green linoleum flooring, was the largest room in the drafty house, warmed by a gasfire heater beneath a wooden mantelpiece, and it served as the common room. There were usually a few people in there clustered around the fire, chatting and brewing tea on the nearby stove. Talbott considered the atmosphere “graduate student bohemian,” meaning it was serious though sloppy and free form. There was no lock on the front door, and friends constantly came calling. Visitors from London and Cambridge often spent the night. “It was rather hippieish. People were kind of in and out of it a lot,” said Maitland. “You never knew who was going to sleep quite where. All the mattresses were on the floor and there were books everywhere.”
Brooke Shearer, then a sophomore at Stanford, came to Oxford that Thanksgiving and stayed at the Leckford Road house with Talbott. Jan Brenning, Aller’s girlfriend, was also there, leaving Clinton as the only one without a live-in mate. Shearer, a California dynamo, was taken aback by the easygoing house style, and quickly organized the holiday activities. She and Talbott rode bicycles to the covered market in downtown Oxford, bought a fresh turkey and hauled it back the mile and a half to the house, the fowl’s head still on and its legs dangling from the basket. Shearer cut off the head and organized a cooking routine in which the friends would baste in fifteen-minute shifts while she read Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf s novel about an English society woman reflecting on her life as she prepares for a dinner party.
“Frank and Bill shared what was supposed to be the first shift and ended up so deep in conversation that they did the whole job,” Talbott later wrote. “Perhaps because it was such an American holiday and they felt so far from home in so many ways, they talked on and on about whether real patriotism required submitting to the draft or resisting it.” Their turkey-basting conversation came in the context of what had happened the day before. On November 26, President Nixon had signed H.R. 14001 enacting a draft lottery, which was to be held the following week, on December 1. The dinner conversation veered in a different direction, toward Russia and literature. Yasha Zaguskin, a Russian émigré and translator living in Oxford, was among the guests at the makeshift banquet table.
That night, Clinton wrote to Denise Hyland. He was reflective and a little blue. He suggested that he could send her a flight schedule and she should come over for a visit—an unlikely prospect now that she had fallen in love with someone else and was thinking of marriage. In earlier letters to Hyland, Clinton had made it seem as though he were studying hard even when he was not. No more. “I may never pick up a parchment,” he wrote. “Of course that’s not the value of the place for me, but a degree would be nice to have and Mother would love it.” He said he had just talked to his family over the telephone, and he gave Denise his usual update on his little brother Roger, now thirteen. “Roger is selling magazines through a school project and has sold twice as many as anyone else. He won a Polaroid camera, a turkey and is sure to get the grand prize of a TV or stereo. At least one of us has practical ability.”
THE first draft lottery since World War II began at 8:02 P.M. on the first day of the final month of 1969 in a small conference room at the Selective Service System headquarters in Washington. Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey presided over the event, which was witnessed by a pack of camera-men and reporters and fifty-six youth representatives. In the middle of the room, resting on a stool, sat a big glass bowl containing 366 plastic blue capsules that looked like the containers for charms sold in candy-store machines. Each capsule contained a gummed sticker with a date on it. One by one, the capsules were plucked from the bowl and opened, and the stickers were posted on a light blue tote board. Representative Alexander Pirnie from Utica, New York, ranking Republican on the House subcommittee overseeing the draft, was asked to pick the first capsule. He fished around in the bowl and emerged with September 14—a date with chilling symbolic meaning to Bill Clinton. September 14 was the day on which his high school classmate Mike Thomas had died in Vietnam.
Clinton’s birthday brought him luck that night. August 19 was the 311th day picked.
When details of the lottery drawing reached Oxford the next day, it seemed as though Clinton’s apparent draft gambit had worked. The lottery that year was the largest it would ever be, with a pool of 850,000 young men—400,000 nineteen-year-olds and 450,000 others of ages ranging from twenty to twenty-six who previously had held deferments. Clinton now rested near the bottom of an enormous pool. The last big monthly draft, in September, had taken 29,000 men. It was highly unlikely, given the administration’s Vietnamization policy, and the staged withdrawals of troops from Vietnam, that the monthly numbers would reach that magnitude again. Even if they did, the yearly quota for 1970 would be about 350,000 men, which would be filled at least one hundred numbers short of Clinton’s No. 311. Although he was theoretically draftable for another year, and at times he told friends that his draft board still thought it might get to him, he was, in reality, free.
In a situation where Clinton once thought all his options were bad, he had avoided everything he did not want to do. He did not want to resist the draft, and thereby imperil his political dreams. He did not want to get drafted and fight in Vietnam. He did not want to spend three years in the safe haven of ROTC, and two years after that as a commissioned lieutenant, even if the war had ended long before then. He did not want to go to the University of Arkansas Law School, when so many of his Rhodes friends were heading to Yale. And he did not want to feel guilty about his deferment. “It was just a fluke,” Clinton would say decades later, when first asked how he had made it through this period without serving in the military. But of course it was not a fluke. A fluke is a wholly accidental stroke of good luck. What happened to Clinton during that fateful year did not happen by accident. He fretted and planned every move, he got help from others when needed, he resorted to some deception or manipulation when necessary, and he was ultimately lucky. In the end, by not serving in the military, he did what 16 million other young American men did during that tumultuous era.
All that was left for Clinton after he won No. 311 in the draft lottery was to explain his actions to one of the men who had helped him at a crucial moment, Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas ROTC. On December 3, Clinton belatedly wrote Holmes a letter explaining why he had decided not to enroll in the ROTC after all. This letter would later emerge as the best known essay of Bill Clinton’s life, the testament of a bright, troubled, manipulative young man struggling with his conscience and his ambition. It is a remarkable letter, classic Bill Clinton, sincere and deceptive at the same time, requiring a careful reading between the lines, paragraph by paragraph.
Dear Col. Holmes,
I am sorry to be so long in writing. I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month, and from now on you will, but I have had to have some time to think about this first letter. Almost daily since my return to England I have thought about writing, about what I want to and ought to say.
(It was, in fact, the only such letter. Clinton wrote no more to the colonel. He had every reason to know that Holmes would have little interest in hearing from him after this.)
First, I want to thank you, not just for saving me from the draft, but for being so kind and decent to me last summer, when I was as low as I have ever been. One thing which made the bond we struck in good faith somewhat palatable to me was my high regard for you personally. In retrospect, it seems that the admiration might not have been mutual had you known a little more about me, about my political beliefs and activities. At least you might have thought me more fit for the draft than for the ROTC.
Holmes did save Clinton from the draft by working out the ROTC deferment before the July 28 induction deadline. Though Clinton did not know him very well, Holmes was a straightforward, gentle father figure of the sort Clinton had long cherished, going back to his high school days with band director Virgil Spurlin. When in the presence of such men, Clinton was inclined not to say or do anything that would disappoint them.
Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I did it for the experience and the salary but also for the opportunity, however small, of working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam. I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there was a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did.
Clinton rewrites his own history here. When he began working in the documents room at the foreign relations committee in the fall of 1966, he had no strong feelings about the war and leaned toward support of President Johnson’s position. There is no doubt that he studied the issue while he was there and dramatically changed his position over two years, but his opposition to the war was fairly quiet. No one at Georgetown University considered him an antiwar activist. Father McSorley, the leading peace activist on campus, had never met Clinton during his undergraduate years; their first encounter was at the London demonstrations that fall.
I have written and spoken and marched against the war. One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine. After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans here for demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16.
Again, apparently for dramatic effect, Clinton overstates his role. He did not travel to England primarily to organize for the October and November demonstrations, but he did help organize the Americans at Oxford once he was there. The “close friend of mine” he refers to as a national organizer of the moratorium apparently was David Mixner. Clinton had met Mixner only that summer. But Rick Stearns, when asked whether that qualified Mixner as a close friend of Clinton’s, commented, “It doesn’t take more than a day for Clinton to consider someone a close friend.”
Interlocked with the war is the draft issue, which I did not begin to consider separately until early 1968. For a law seminar at Georgetown I wrote a paper on the legal arguments for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objection, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not simply to “participation in war in any form.” From my work I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation. The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case. Nor was Korea—an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.
This paragraph is a crystallization of countless conversations and debates Clinton had had with his Rhodes friends over the previous year. The most revealing sentence is not his explanation of why he considered the draft illegitimate then, but why it was legitimate in World War II. Clinton and his classmates could not dismiss the memories of their fathers and what was considered the last good war. In claiming their moral ground on Vietnam, it was important for them to think that they would have been eager to fight in World War II. They felt mistreated by fate that they had reached adulthood at a time when their country was fighting a war they did not believe in.
Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong. Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is one of the bravest, best men I know. His country needs men like him more than they know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.
(George Butte and Paul Parish in Clinton’s class had filed as conscientious objectors. Several members of the class ahead of theirs were in the process of seeking C.O. status, including one commissioned lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. The letter of recommendation was for Parish. Aller, the roommate resister, was both a source of inspiration and guilt for Clinton.)
The decision not to be a resister and related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system. For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead. I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years. The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway.
When Clinton says he decided to accept the draft, he means accepting it in the sense of not being a resister. Some critics have focused on his desire to maintain his political viability as a sign of overbearing ambition. In the context of Clinton’s life to that point, it seems less raw, rather an honest reflection of who he was and where he was going. The final sentence reads more like Aller than Clinton, and was no doubt influenced by their long discussions during the week before Clinton wrote the letter.
When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted you. ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance. Going on with my education, even coming back to England, played no part in my decision to join ROTC. I am back here, and would have been at Arkansas Law School because there is nothing else I can do. In fact, I would like to have been able to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.
The first line here is a basic admission that he had been drafted in the spring of 1969, a line that somehow was ignored decades later when the letter surfaced at a time when Clinton was not acknowledging that he had received a draft notice. The rest of the paragraph seems somewhat disingenuous. When Clinton met with his Georgetown housemates the previous July, he left the impression with them that he wanted nothing more than to return to Oxford for his second year. His September 9 letter to Stearns underscored that notion as well, ending with the line, “I want so much to tell you we’re going back to England.”
But the particulars of my personal life are not nearly as important to me as the principles involved. After I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm. Also, I began to think I had deceived you, not by lies—there were none—but by failing to tell you all the things I’m writing now. I doubt that I had the mental coherence to articulate them then.
Clinton here reveals that he understands that deception can involve more than lies. In dealing with the draft issue over the ensuing years, he would be plagued more than anything else by what he did not say—omissions in his story.
At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1-D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and loss of my self regard and self confidence really set in. I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep. Finally, on September 121 stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying to help in a case where he really couldn’t, and stating that I couldn’t do the ROTC after all and would he please draft me as soon as possible. I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it on me every day until I got on the plane to return to England. I didn’t mail the letter because I didn’t see, in the end, how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved. So I came back to England to try to make something of this second year of my Rhodes scholarship.
This paragraph presents the basic contradiction in Clinton’s explanation of why he gave up his deferment. On the one hand, he wants the moral high ground of making himself 1-A, but on the other hand, he still does not want to be drafted or go into the Army and fight in Vietnam. It also again suggests that Clinton played the draft like a chess player and withdrew his deferment only when he thought it safe to do so.
And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel. I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal. Forgive the length of this letter. There was much to say. There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait. Please say hello to Col. Jones for me.
Merry Christmas
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
That same week, Clinton sent another letter to the United States. It was his application to Yale Law School.
His lengthy writ of conscience did not find an especially receptive audience when it reached Colonel Holmes in Fayetteville. “The letter was the talk of the unit,” according to Ed Howard, the drill instructor. “We all knew about it. Lieutenant Colonel Jones advised us of the letter. He was more upset than the average instructor.” Howard, who went on to become a real estate broker in Malvern, Arkansas, in later years supported Clinton’s political endeavors in the state, but he harbored ill feelings about Clinton’s handling of the ROTC episode. The letter, he said later, only intensified the anger the ROTC staff had felt toward Clinton since he had failed to enroll at the law school. “There was anger again. Our feeling was that his conscience bothered him.” According to Howard, no one on the staff believed Clinton’s explanation that he abandoned ROTC because he wanted to be drafted. “I don’t think anybody ever took it serious. It was apparent to us that he used the dodger routine.”
Another effect of the letter was the creation of a Bill Clinton heading in the Dissidents File at the ROTC headquarters in Fayetteville. The military during that era maintained files on anyone associated with the program who opposed the war. Howard said there was an intelligence network linking all the units around the nation. “If we had a guy from Houston or Austin demonstrating against the war, we’d clip the story and send it to Fort Sam Houston, Fifth Army Headquarters for the ROTC, and then on to the pertinent unit. A dissident file was kept on Bill Clinton after he wrote the letter to Col. Holmes.” The letter was the main document in Clinton’s file.
As one who worked in the ROTC unit and later supported Clinton, Howard was a witness without any apparent hostile motive. Holmes’s reactions fluctuated over the years, ranging from benign to neutral and finally, near the end of the 1992 election, to openly hostile. When asked in 1978 to comment on Clinton’s behavior during the ROTC episode, he claimed that he could not remember any specifics. In 1991, his recollection was that he had treated Clinton “just like any other kid.” Early in the 1992 presidential campaign, he began to speak out, telling the Wall Street Journal that he felt that he had been manipulated by Clinton. Late in the campaign, on September 16, 1992, he issued a lengthy statement questioning Clinton’s “patriotism and his integrity,” and saying that he came to believe that Clinton deceived him to avoid the draft.
The Holmes statement was written with the help of his daughter, Linda Burnett of Fort Smith, a Republican activist, and released with guidance from the office of the former Republican congressman from that district, John Paul Hammerschmidt. According to David Tell, a member of President Bush’s opposition research staff, he and several other Bush campaign officials reviewed the letter before it was made public. Although it might have honestly conveyed Holmes’s long-repressed antipathy toward Clinton, there was much in it that was illogical. Tell, in fact, was disappointed when he first read the letter because it was “full of rhetoric and precious few facts.” Most of the letter expressed Holmes’s outrage over Clinton’s participation in antiwar rallies. Recalling now in detail a conversation that he said he could not remember at all when he was first asked about it in 1978, Holmes said that Clinton failed to reveal his history of antiwar protest during their initial meeting in July 1969. “At no time during this long conversation about his desire to join the program did he inform me of his involvement, participation and actually organizing protests against the United States involvement in Southeast Asia,” Holmes stated. “He was shrewed [sic] enough to realize that had I been aware of his activities, he would not have been accepted into the ROTC program as a potential officer in the United States Army.”
What Holmes failed to take into account was that Clinton’s antiwar activities came after their July meeting: Clinton could not tell him about events that had not yet occurred. Holmes certainly knew that Clinton had worked for Senator Fulbright, a staunch opponent of the war. And as drill instructor Ed Howard pointed out, Holmes’s ROTC unit was not above enrolling law students who were seeking a way around Vietnam. His unit, in fact, had grown considerably in 1969 precisely for that reason.