THE GRAND TOUR
IT WAS TRADITIONAL in the eighteenth century for young English noblemen to embark on grand tours of Europe before they got on with their futures. Sir Edgar Williams, the longtime warden of Rhodes House, a man of traditional tastes, thought of the Rhodes mission as “a modern version of the old Grand Tour” for the American scholars under his supervision at Oxford. During long breaks between terms, the scholars were expected to explore the continent on their Rhodes stipend. Whatever academic skills they acquired at Oxford seemed almost secondary to this notion of introducing the best men for the world’s fight to the Old World for which they would do intellectual battle. Clinton had traveled to Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, and Austria during previous breaks and long weekends; but now, for the Christmas holiday of his second year, he was ready to undertake one of the full-length grand tours, to Russia and back—five weeks by train moving in a circle north, east, and then west, with extended stops in Oslo, Helsinki, Moscow, Prague, and Munich.
Clinton’s was not a nobleman’s holiday. There were no servants at his command, he slept at youth hostels more often than hotels, and he lacked the trunkful of formal attire, instead lugging a bag that held denim jeans and cigarettes to sell, trade, or give away as thank-you presents. He traveled solo, which was rare for him, though part of the Rhodes tradition—most scholars went off by themselves at least once during their Oxford years. But he was never alone for long: he rode the chuckwagon line, to use an idiom of the American West, finding friends, relatives of friends, or friends of friends at every stop along the route.
The first stop on his forty-day journey was in Oslo. As he was ambling down the stairs of the Oslo train station, Clinton noticed that Father McSorley was in the crowd directly ahead of him. Clinton’s strides carried him abreast of McSorley and he caught the priest’s eye. They had met only one month earlier at the antiwar prayer service at St. Mark’s Church in London. “‘What are you doing here?’” McSorley remembers that Clinton asked him, to which he answered that he was there to visit several peace groups in the Norwegian capital. Clinton, with no immediate plans, asked if he could come along. McSorley was delighted to have a companion. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and off we went.” In place of a tourist guidebook, McSorley carried a calendar from the War Resisters League listing the important peace groups in each European community. He had annotated his copy with advice from Quaker peace activists in London. Their first stop was an old Victorian mansion near the University of Oslo that housed the Institute for Peace Research, where they met several young Norwegians who were conscientious objectors opposed to Norway’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
McSorley and Clinton strolled through the university, lunched with a professor teaching the New Testament, visited another peace center founded by two actors, and drank tea at a chalet near the train station before parting. “‘This is a great way to see a country!’” Clinton said as they sipped tea. “‘You see as much as a tourist, you have an important subject to talk about with the people you meet, and you learn something of the process of working toward peace.’” Clinton’s comment stuck in McSorley’s mind so firmly that he considered using ‘A Great Way to See a Country’ as the title for a book he would later write about his peace travels around the world. That book, which McSorley published himself under the title Peace Eyes, offers a brief account of his afternoon with Clinton in Oslo. It was from McSorley’s account that Republican partisans during the 1992 presidential campaign began painting a distorted picture of Clinton’s trip to Moscow. Was it an accident, they asked, that McSorley and Clinton toured the peace institutes of Oslo, or were they in fact traveling together across the continent on what was called “the Peace Train”? The answer is that Clinton and McSorley were not traveling together. They met by coincidence. Clinton tagged along with McSorley because he was an insatiably curious fellow who liked companionship. From Oslo, McSorley traveled south and west, through Sweden to Copenhagen. Clinton headed the other direction, toward Finland.
While still in Oslo, Clinton had another innocuous encounter that later became the subject of a joke that in turn fueled a rumor that was exaggerated down through the years. The meeting was with James Durham, an old acquaintance from Hot Springs. The false rumor was that during their meeting, Clinton broached the subject of staying in Scandinavia and renouncing his American citizenship. Apparently it was that bogus rumor that excited certain Republican officials so much during the 1992 campaign that they searched Clinton’s passport files in a State Department warehouse to see if any documents there offered clues to his alleged flirtation with apostasy.
James Durham was another Hot Springs golden boy, a brilliant student and track star in the class ahead of Clinton’s who was studying biophysics at the University of Oslo on a Fulbright fellowship. During his time in Norway, he had gone native. He had joined the Norwegian national rowing team. He dreamt every night in Norwegian. He became enchanted with Scandinavian socialism and for a time embraced pacifism. He attempted, he said later, to become “a flaming radical—I was in Europe longer and immersed in those processes longer than Bill. I experimented in radicalism.” He told his parents he planned to marry a Norwegian and stay there. There would, of course, be a military consequence to any such decision. Durham had a low lottery number and was protected from the draft only because the Garland County Draft Board gave him even more preferential treatment than Clinton had received. He was still classified 2-S, protected by a graduate deferment for more than a year and a half after such deferments were eliminated.
When Clinton arrived in Oslo, he had Durham’s address in his pocket, and went to see him at his closet-sized room in the student housing complex. “So Bill knocks on the door and I was surprised,” Durham later remembered. “He hadn’t called. I wasn’t expecting him.” They talked for a few hours, mostly about the draft and Vietnam. Durham said that he still had a deferment and was not sure what he would do next. Clinton said he was 1-A but had a high lottery number and was planning to return to the United States to attend law school at Yale. It seemed to Durham that Clinton was looking for support and encouragement that he was “doing the right thing by going back.” The two young men from Hot Springs agreed on most points, but got into an argument when Clinton talked about antiwar demonstrations. Durham opposed the war but did not like demonstrations. The argument did not dominate the discussion, and when Clinton left the apartment, they parted on friendly terms.
Over the years, the argument between Durham and Clinton, which Durham had passed along to his father, a staunch Republican and Hot Springs physician, ballooned into an impassioned exchange during which Clinton said he was about to renounce his citizenship and Durham talked him out of it. That version became more popular in the 1980s when Clinton was governor of Arkansas and Durham jokingly evoked the Oslo meeting to members of his family who were complaining about Clinton’s actions in Little Rock. “Well,” Durham told them sarcastically, “I did what you wanted—I sent Billy home!” By 1992, the rumor spread through the GOP gossip circuit that Clinton had once tried to renounce his American citizenship and someone had a letter to prove it. And Jim Durham, who had once talked of staying in Norway and marrying a Norwegian, which he never did, was now Colonel James Durham of the United States Marine Corps, with an office at the Pentagon, and quietly bewildered by it all.
Clinton’s grand tour moved on from Oslo to Helsinki. Again he had no schedule or place to stay, only the name of a friend’s family and a telephone number. The friend was Richard Shullaw, a classmate from Georgetown whose father was deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in the Finnish capital. Richard happened to be visiting his family for Christmas when Clinton called and announced that he had just arrived in town after running into Father McSorley in Oslo. It was, Shullaw thought, as though Clinton “was just dropping out of the sky.” He was taken aback when Clinton arrived at the family’s small apartment down the hill from the elegant Georgian-style embassy. He had not seen Clinton since the summer after their senior year in college. This was a new counterculture version of his old friend standing at the doorstep in Helsinki. “He had a beard and curly long hair. He looked quite different from Mr. Cleancut America.” The Shullaws did not have room for Clinton so they made arrangements for him to stay at a youth hostel downtown. But he ate most of his meals, including a quiet Christmas dinner, at the Shullaw apartment, and Shullaw’s father paid his hostel bill, about five dollars a day.
Finland was freezing, dark and wet. “I have found the world’s winter,” Clinton wrote Denise Hyland on a postcard depicting an icy Helsinki scene. But the tourist from Oxford was bundled up for the weather, warmed by his healthy beard, heavy boots, and a thick, oversized coat, and he and Shullaw spent several days touring the city. “We did not meet with a lot of people. We did not meet with peace groups,” Shullaw recalled later. “Bill was very much the tourist. We talked a lot about his experiences at Oxford and about our mutual friends. Bill always adjusted himself to the person he was dealing with. We had a pleasant, relaxed time.” Clinton said that he was going on to law school. He charmed the Shullaw family, especially Mari, the little sister, who suffered from a heart murmur, but met his match in Pelle, the Shullaws’ beagle. “Pelle did not care for Bill. He took one look at Bill and set off the most ungodly racket,” Shullaw later remembered. “The beagle wouldn’t shut up. Bill tried to make friends with the dog, but Pelle would have none of it. We have a picture of Bill sitting on a sofa at the house talking to us and reaching out a tentative hand to pet the dog on the head, and the dog making a move as if to say, ‘I’ll have none of this fellow!’ Mother was quite embarrassed about it. Pelle was one friend Bill could not make.”
Two men who decades later would run against each other for president of the United States were trying, separately, to enter the Soviet Union on December 31, 1969, the final day of the sixties decade. One was H. Ross Perot, then a thirty-nine-year-old Texas industrialist, who had spent most of December attempting to fly twenty-five tons of supplies to American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. Perot had been rebuffed in South-east Asia and now sat in Copenhagen, his chartered Boeing 707 loaded and ready to go, waiting to hear whether the Soviets would grant him a visa so that he could carry out his alternative plan—to fly to Moscow and have the supplies delivered to the POWs by Soviet postal authorities. On the evening of the 31st, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union passed the word: no visa for Perot. That same day, Bill Clinton reached the Soviet border on the train from Helsinki. He already had a visa, easily obtained in London, where the Soviet Union was advertising for tourists. In the year since Strobe Talbott had visited Moscow, nearly a dozen Rhodes Scholars had made the trip, and more would follow in the spring and summer, making Moscow, even in the deep freeze of the Cold War, one of the most popular stops on the grand tour.
Not that the Soviet government received the Oxford boys graciously. As Clinton later told the story, Soviet authorities searched the bearded young American at the border, perhaps suspecting that he was smuggling dope. “Upon entering Russia, he was requested to strip down to the bare skin,” one American who was in Moscow then recalls Clinton telling him. “The seams of his clothing were examined, and every single item of his personal effects was searched. They even examined his teeth.”
Clinton was less sophisticated than Talbott in his understanding of Soviet communism, and of Russian literature and history, but he was not naive. He had read under the tutelage of Zbigniew Pelczynski, the Pembroke College don, and more recently undergone a cram course with Talbott and David Satter, the other Rhodes Scholar Sovietologist. Talbott and Satter engaged in a running commentary on Soviet affairs that tended to go over the heads of their classmates, but Clinton jumped into the discussions in the weeks before his trip and absorbed as much as he could. Their view of the Soviet Union hardened in later years, but even then it could not have been described as “soft.” “There was still a kind of residual leftism at Oxford at the time that viewed the Soviet Union benignly, but Americans on the whole did not have a benign view,” Talbott said later. “My own view was that the Soviet Union was a monstrosity made up of an extraordinary number of fine people.” Clinton approached the Soviet Union with much the same perspective as he had Vietnam, as a place that was diverting America’s attention from solving its domestic problems, as “this giant country which was so completely absorbing all of America’s energy.”
Moscow was dark when Clinton arrived, bitterly cold and drearily gray. He told his friends later that he was struck as much as anything by all the gray—gray skies and gray military uniforms everywhere he looked. He had one friend of a friend in Moscow, Anik (Nicki) Alexis, a young West Indian woman who had studied at Oxford and was close to Tom Williamson. Alexis was an intriguing international character. Born in Martinique, the daughter of a diplomat working in Paris, she was fluent in several languages, including Russian, and was studying at Moscow University. Clinton called on her at her university dormitory, got her to take him around the city, and saw her several times during his time in Moscow. Alexis complained to him that the Soviets discriminated against her and other black students, mostly Africans, at Moscow University, more than any other people she had encountered in her life.
The National Hotel off Red Square was host to a colorful menagerie of Americans in the opening days of 1970. Late one night Clinton went into the hotel bar and encountered Charlie Daniels, a plumbing contractor from Norton, a small town in southwestern Virginia. Daniels was in Moscow seeking information on American servicemen missing in action in North Vietnam and Laos. He invited Clinton to have a drink with him and one of his associates, Henry Fors, a chicken farmer and the father of a missing pilot. Daniels later wrote in his diary: “We were joined at our table by Bill Clinton, a young giant of a man sporting a full beard, who introduced himself as a Rhodes scholar whose home was in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Bill was majoring in political science at Oxford, and had decided to visit Russia to get first-hand knowledge of Communism. Bill’s knowledge and ability to explain the inner workings of Communism kept Henry and I avid listeners until the bar closed at 2:00 A.M. Our ‘one for the road’ turned into a whole bevy. I’m sure glad we had only a few stairs to climb to reach our rooms and a spinning bed.”
Before they fell asleep, Daniels and Fors spent a minute talking about Clinton. “We thought he might be a spy—this big fellow, friendly, constantly jabbering,” Daniels says. “I’m just a dumb plumber. Henry’s a chicken farmer. Bill could talk about anything. When we left him and were alone in our room, I said, ‘Henry, this guy, I don’t know what to think of him, do you?’ He fascinated all of us.”
They were equally interesting to Clinton, with their down-home folksy ways and fantastic stories of international derringdo. It turned out that Norton was the home town of the famed CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down while flying his U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in May 1960. Powers’s father ran a shoe store in Norton in the same building that housed the offices of attorney Carl McAfee. “I got a son flying over Russia,” Powers told McAfee while sizing up a foot. “Hell, nobody flies over Russia but Russians,” McAfee responded. But when the U-2 plane was shot down and Francis Gary Powers was paraded in front of the world by the Soviets, McAfee flew to Moscow and helped defend him and arrange his release in a prisoner exchange. Daniels, the self-described dumb plumber, sponsored a grand parade for Powers when he came back to Norton. From then on, McAfee and Daniels were up for missions of intrigue together. McAfee was with Daniels and Henry Fors now in Moscow in the effort to track down some MIAs. They had planned the trip for a year, working through their contacts in Lions International and gaining support from the State Department. They had met with H. Ross Perot in Dallas earlier in the fall, and now found it ironic that they were in Moscow with their visas and Perot was stuck in Copenhagen with no way in.
Clinton attached himself to the Daniels entourage. This bushy, bearded antiwar protester, this adaptable character who could make himself at home anywhere from the porter’s lodge at Oxford to his stepfather’s beauty parlor in Hot Springs, was now just one of the gang with the plumber and the chicken farmer and the small-town attorney looking for miracles in Moscow. “You wonder why Bill gravitated to us? He’s twenty-three and we’re on top of the best story in the world,” Daniels said later. “We’re driving the Russians crazy, the North Vietnamese crazy. So when he finds us, he stays with us. He’s found a home.” He also found a setting at the table. As far as Daniels could tell, Clinton had no money and was hungry. When Daniels, Fors, and a Parisian couple assisting them, Jean and Pelly Sureau, returned from the French Embassy at noon on January 5, according to Daniels’s diary, they found Clinton back at their hotel room, chatting with McAfee, ready and waiting to join them for lunch. For the next two days he was sure to appear whenever it was time to eat or when he knew the group would gather to discuss the day’s events. There were, said Daniels, “no big secrets, we let it all hang out. We knew our vehicle was bugged. We knew our rooms were bugged. So when someone wanted to say something private, we’d give a signal and go for a walk outside. Bill was part of the action. If I went out, most of the time when I came back, Bill would be there. If we went outside to eat, he went with us.”
The only thing Clinton had to offer the group was his understanding of the Soviet system. As limited as his knowledge was, he was not reluctant to share it. On the second day of their time together, Daniels again wrote in his diary about Clinton’s lectures. “Henry and I led Bill into another interesting account of his study of Communism,” Daniels wrote. “He talked of his studies of Marxism, the revolution engineered by Lenin, and the Purge by Stalin which led to his downfall. Henry and I listened with the avid interest of children hearing the fantasy of Walt Disney.” That conversation, according to Daniels’s diary, was followed by a hearty lunch. Soon Clinton brought his friend Anik Alexis into the entourage, and she proved to be of more practical help, serving as an interpreter in French, English, and Russian. The group arranged a meeting with North Vietnamese officials in Moscow, but failed to learn anything about Henry Fors’s son or twenty-nine other missing servicemen on their list.
Senator Eugene McCarthy arrived at the National Hotel on January 6, another intriguing fellow on this curious stage. The antiwar senator from Minnesota, only two years removed from his campaign against Lyndon Johnson, was entertaining thoughts of running for president again, and joked about his ambitions with some Americans he met during an impromptu lunch on his first day in the Soviet Union. “I have to be careful what I say so that it’s not publicized that I’m starting a campaign in Moscow,” he said. His daughter Mary, a senior at Radcliffe, had accompanied McCarthy to Moscow. He said he hoped to meet with Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin to talk about trade issues. Kosygin left the senator cooling his heels, but McCarthy did get to meet Charlie Daniels and his gang. He came to their room in the hotel, listened for hours to their story, and agreed to try to help them by meeting again with North Vietnamese Embassy officials. Not much came of that meeting either, although the North Vietnamese were said to have received McCarthy more cordially than they did Henry Fors the chicken farmer. “That figures,” Fors said later that day, when told of McCarthy’s reception. “McCarthy has the reputation of being the biggest Goddamn peacenik in the United States!”
Clinton bade farewell to his newfound friends the next day and boarded the train for Prague. He entered the elegant capital city of Czechoslovakia less than fifteen months after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact tanks had crushed the Communist reform movement led by Alexander Dubček, who had been seeking to create “socialism with a human face.” Clinton’s college at Oxford, University College, had a special connection to the freedom movement in Prague. Univ’s administration protected two Czech students who had been traveling in England and did not want to return to their country after the Soviet invasion. “We were all very moved by the Prague Spring,” noted John Albery, a distinguished professor of chemistry who later became the college master. “I was particularly moved because my field is strong in Prague and I knew a lot of Czech scientists. It was happening in a beautiful European city. It was appalling—the sight of those tanks. We wanted to do something, so we set up a fund to raise money to bring in the two students to Univ College as the Russians were moving in. We raised money in the Junior Common Room and the Senior Common Room. The response was remarkable.” Tom Lampl and Jan Kopold started their studies at Univ the same fall that Clinton arrived. Kopold and Clinton became friends. Before Clinton left for his trip to Moscow, Kopold had written his parents in Prague to advise them that a friend would be stopping there in early January. “My friend Bill Clinton will come to Prague,” Kopold wrote. “If he cannot find an affordable hotel, he may stay with you. He has a wide knowledge of political systems and will come from Moscow.”
Clinton stayed with the Kopolds for several days, saving whatever money he had to buy trinkets and glass jewelry for friends back in England. His hosts lived in a glass, chrome, and glazed white brick building in the Dejvice neighborhood. Their five-room apartment on the sixth story had high ceilings and a parquet floor and was filled with books. A balcony ran across the front of the building. Clinton had a room to himself with a window facing Freedom Square. He ate breakfast in the breakfast nook just inside the front door with Jan’s grandmother, Marie Smermova, and dinner with Jan’s parents, Bedrich Kopold and Jirina Kopoldova. Jirina served him pork, cabbage, and bread dumplings. He drank plenty of beer, as they all did. He toured the city during the day, according to Jirina Kopoldova, and stayed home with the family in the evenings. Bedrich Kopold took Clinton up to the roof to look out on the city. He also took a memorable stroll with the young American. “One time we were coming back from the Old Town and we passed by the U.S. ambassador’s residence and we walked and talked about the political situation of 1968, and he was very interested in it, and when we walked past the embassy residence I said, ‘It would be very nice if you came back as cultural attaché,’ and he said, ‘Why not?’” It would have been impolite for Clinton to say that he had far greater ambitions than that. Jirina Kopoldova raised the stakes and got a different response. “We told Bill Clinton one day he would be a senator and he laughed very much.”
The stories of what happened in Prague in 1968 captivated Clinton. One of the Czech heroes in the face of the Soviet invasion lived in the same building, across the landing. He was General Bohumir Lomsky, a Czech general who had faced down the Russians by ordering them, in perfect Russian, to leave the Czechoslovak Parliament building. Apparently they thought he was Russian, and obeyed. Clinton’s hosts were well known in Czech political circles, and their story reflected the tragedy and intrigue of their nation’s Communist era. Jan Sverma, Jan Kopold’s grandfather, had been the editor-in-chief of the Communist party daily Rude Pravo. He died fighting as a partisan in World War II and had a bridge named for him in Prague at the bottom of Revolucni Street. Marie Svermova, the grandmother, was a member of the Politburo of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1951. She was purged from the party in the 1950s and spent six years in Communist prisons. Her brother, Karel Svab, once headed the secret police and refused to come to her aid when she was on trial. Jan’s father, Bedrich Kopold, was also purged, tried and imprisoned in the 1950s, and forced to work in the uranium mines. While he was in jail his wife Jirina says she was forced to sign papers for the Communist secret police, which later left the false impression that she was an informer. By 1968, all three—Marie Smermova, her daughter Jirina Kopoldova, and Bedrich Kopold—were strong supporters of Dubcek and what came to be known as the Prague Spring.
When Clinton paid his visit, Jirina was working as a chemical researcher at the Academy of Sciences and Bedrich taught sociology at a technical university. The grandmother was home and had more time to spend with their guest. On Clinton’s final day in Prague, she took him on a long stroll through the old city, chatting as they made their way along the cobbled streets. She later wrote in her calendar: “I went with Bill to the Strahov Library and the Loretta [monastery].” Marie Smermova knew no English, so she and Clinton communicated as best they could in German, the language he had studied at Georgetown. Not long after he left, she was interrogated by the state security agents.
Clinton’s final stop before returning to London was Munich, where he stayed again with Rudi Lowe and his family. There was more partying than politics as the grand tour neared an end. Munich’s six-week carnival had begun, and Lowe remembered taking Clinton to several masquerade parties and balls. “I still have a picture of Bill in his mask,” Lowe says. “What we mostly did was drink beer and have a good time.”
THE trip to Moscow revealed nothing about Clinton’s loyalty, or alleged disloyalty, to his country, but it did reveal his loyalty to his mother, and hers to him. They were an effective political team, even then. The first telephone call Charlie Daniels made when he arrived back home in Norton was to Hot Springs. Clinton had asked Daniels to call his mother to tell her that her boy was all right. And within ten days of Clinton’s visit to Prague, the Kopolds received a handwritten thank-you letter from his mother. “My dear Mr. and Mrs. Kopold,” she wrote:
—Sincerely, Virginia Dwire.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your many kindnesses to my son, Bill Clinton. You made his stay in Czechoslovakia such a pleasure. I’m so appreciative. I guess children no matter how old or what size they are never outgrow their parents fret and concern for them when they are traveling in a foreign country. Bill is safely back at Oxford. We spoke with him Sunday. He had a most enjoyable journey but was tired from it and ready to settle down academically. If ever you are in the United States please favor us with a visit. We would be delighted to have you. Thank you again for your hospitality to one that is so dear to me
· · ·
THE cast of Rhodes Scholars housemates and friends whose lives revolved around 46 Leckford Road early in 1970 was as eccentric in its way as the National Hotel crew to which Clinton had attached himself in Moscow. Here was Strobe Talbott, the studious Yalie, with his baggy tweed jackets and frayed collars and his thick black mustache, looking a little like a young Sean Connery, holed up in his room with an old typewriter, a Russian-English dictionary, and piles of transcripts that had been delivered to him in London by Time magazine, for which he had been an intern in Moscow the previous summer. Time wanted Talbott to study the transcripts, translate them, and write a preface for a book it was preparing. This was hardly the typical graduate student enterprise. There was an air of mystery around the papers, which had great historical weight—the private recollections of ousted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. To assist with the translation, Talbott brought in Yasha Zaguskin, who was part of Oxford’s small but vibrant Russian émigré community that included Boris Pasternak’s sisters. Clinton was in the tight circle of friends who kept Talbott’s secret.
If Talbott threatened to transform the Leckford Road apartment into a Russia House, Frank Aller counterbalanced that with his fascination for all things Chinese. Aller was researching a thesis on the Long March of 1934-35 in which Mao and thousands of Communist revolutionaries undertook a year-long survival trek north across the vast Chinese countryside to escape Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist forces and establish a stronghold in northern Shensi. In search of intellectual mentors, Aller had developed a correspondence with Edgar Snow, then living in Europe, who was the first Western journalist to interview Mao and his comrades after the Long March and to tell their story in Red Star Over China Aller, angular and red-bearded, had a manner that was part West Coast hippie, part Asian mystic: the way he padded around without shoes, the way he sipped tea, the way he sat on the floor leaning against a pillow, smoking a cigarette or marijuana in the darkness, listening to Pink Floyd with his girlfriend. He seemed to merge his gentle orientalism with the intense moral demeanor of a draft register. Visitors occasionally encountered Aller sitting on the floor, using an ancient Chinese art of reading sticks to divine his future.
Then there was the third Rhodes man in the house, Clinton, who “looked like a lumberjack” to Brooke Shearer, Talbott’s girlfriend. “He was big and burly and had wonderfully thick curly hair and a beard. But it became him. His appearance suggested that he was rougher than he was.” Shearer described him as a nocturnal creature who would read late into the night. Mandy Merck, another friend, thought Clinton’s face appeared older then than it would a decade later when he was again fresh-scrubbed. At Leckford Road, he “looked old and heavy-lidded, kind of tired and seedy. And he had problems. I took him to have a plantar wart removed from his foot and he threw up on me on the way home. He was not exactly Mister Suave.”
Nor was he on the rhythm of someone studying hard, according to Merck. “You didn’t get the feeling that he was pushing himself to prepare for a course. He was reading and tootling the sax.” With his draft crisis behind him because of his lucky lottery number, Clinton was slowly easing his way back into the B. Phil. program he had been reading for sporadically since his days with Zbigniew Pelczynski. But there are no indications that he worked with a tutor during the middle term of his second year, and his attitude toward receiving a degree from Oxford seemed unchanged since November, when he had written to Denise Hyland that it was unlikely he would ever “pick up a parchment.”
Perhaps Clinton’s field of study, unlike Talbott’s Russia or Aller’s China, was not one that Oxford could help him with very much. He was interested in political science primarily as he could apply it to his future. Throughout his two years at Oxford he maintained and honed his excellent political instincts, which alternately impressed and amused his friends. Sara Maitland, who later became a feminist writer, credited Clinton with helping her shed her political naivete. It happened one night when she sat in a pub near Leckford Road with Clinton and Aller and talked about Vietnam. “Frank was describing the effect that napalm had on people and I burst into tears. And Bill turned to me and said, ‘Bursting into tears is being liberal. Doing something about it is being political!’ I remember that as something profoundly instrumental in my life.”
It was taken for granted among Clinton’s Oxford friends that his political style had a larger purpose. They teased him about his future much as his Georgetown roommates had done years earlier. When the Khrushchev transcripts were published in the United States as a book entitled Khrushchev Remembers, Talbott sent a copy to Clinton’s old Georgetown room-mate, Tom Campbell, in which he joked about his Arkansas friend’s covert role in the enterprise. “As you know there is some mystery about the origin of these memoirs,” Talbott wrote. “In point of fact they were dictated to me by William Clinton, hence the tone and spirit of two shrewd peasants. The editors decided I should change all references to Orval Faubus into Stalin and disguise the real narrator Clinton into Khrushchev. The reason for this I promise was commercial and in no way political. Keep the secret.” The reason the joke worked was that even then, when they were all in their early twenties, Talbott from the Oxford years and Campbell from the Georgetown years both imagined a future in which their friend Bill Clinton would be as well known on the world stage as a former leader of the Soviet Union. The least they expected for him was a seat in the U.S. Senate. During a holiday visit to Italy, Merck sent Clinton a postcard depicting a bulbous, naked Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, astride a giant tortoise. “Senator Clinton will see you now,” she wrote on the back.
The postcard, in a lighthearted but fitting manner, connected politics to sex. Did a hunger for the former correspond to an insatiable appetite for the latter? One night at Leckford Road, Clinton and Merck delved into a long discussion on that topic. The conversation at first focused on the tragedy of the previous summer involving Ted Kennedy and a young campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne, who had drowned after a car in which she was a passenger, driven by the Massachusetts senator, veered off a narrow bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and plunged into the water. Clinton said he had been around Capitol Hill and had studied that culture. “Politics gives guys so much power and such big egos they tend to behave badly toward women,” he told Merck. “And I hope I never get into that.”
There was more to the shaping of Clinton’s sexual persona than his irrepressible political ambition. He had been reared by a mother who loved to flirt, who walked around in a tube top and short shorts and spent considerable time each day trying to make herself sexually alluring, and he left home just as the country was entering a new age of sexual freedom. All of this went into the making of the unbashful young Clinton. The cherub-faced, saxophone-playing boy of sixteen who had jokingly jangled his hotel room key at girl clarinetists he encountered at a band contest in Little Rock was now the lumberjack-bearded scholar of twenty-three playing strip poker in Oxford one night with four friends, three of them women. “Five of us were in the game and I knew that whoever didn’t win the game could be staying the night,” Mandy Merck later recalled. Merck won, but before she left, the other four players, Clinton included, were undressed. “I don’t know if the others were purposely losing hands or what,” she said. “But there was a sexual atmosphere to it.”
In the sexual realm, as in most other aspects of life, Clinton was adept at employing self-deprecating humor and easygoing charm to take the edge off situations that might have turned disastrous for a clumsier fellow. One night he invited Merck and Sara Maitland to accompany him to a lecture at Ruskin Hall by Germaine Greer, the flamboyant feminist author who was writing The Female Eunuch. He told Maitland that he wanted to see Greer because he had heard that “she had great legs,” but that he would not go without women escorts. They came late and sat in the back of the cavernous hall. Greer arrived, tall and glamorous with a mane of long hair, wearing a close-fitting rawhide midiskirt.
The highlight of her lecture was her contention that intellectual men were hapless as sexual partners and that women should go to bed with working-class men. Her thesis on class and sex “left everybody a bit jaw-dropped,” as Maitland recalled. Everybody except Clinton, apparently, who in the spirit of the moment asked Greer if he could have her telephone number in case she ever changed her mind about intellectual men. Maitland and Merck later disagreed on when and how Clinton offered this tantalizing proposition. Maitland thought it was in front of the entire audience during a question and answer period; Merck thought it was after-wards, when Greer had left the podium. But they agreed on the classic Clinton moment. “It was very Bill-like, that exuberance of what a good time he was having, and it was so much what every man was feeling at the meeting, and Bill was so unembarrassed about it,” Maitland recalled. “Mandy and Bill and I were all very pleased with ourselves walking home that night.”
Merck felt so comfortable around Clinton that she turned to him when she was having trouble with her love life. He was, she later said, the first man to whom she came out as a lesbian. She had fallen in love with another woman but was devastated when the relationship started to fall apart. “I thought I was going to lose this person. The woman involved wasn’t in town, so I went over to see Bill and in the course of talking to him I said, ‘I’m involved with this woman and I’m afraid it’s not going to work and I’m feeling rather wretched.’ I was tearful, and Bill was all, There, there—I didn’t know you were….ߣ” Clinton soothed her. He was neither disapproving nor shocked.
David Mixner, one of the moratorium leaders in Washington, visited Leckford Road early in 1970 and almost went through a similar confessional with Clinton. Mixner was gay but keeping his sexual orientation deep in the closet. He was fearful that if his homosexuality became public it would embarrass his family and get him “quickly shunted to the side” of the antiwar movement. Once when he thought he was being blackmailed, he went on a three-day binge of drinking and drugs. He contemplated killing himself. His friends, thinking that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, sent him to Europe on a speaking tour. During that trip, he stayed for several days at Leckford Road at Clinton’s invitation. He rarely saw Talbott, who spent most of his time behind his locked door. Aller was in and out. But Clinton was always around and spoke to Mixner for hours each day.
They talked about dating women. Mixner told Clinton about his first lover at Arizona State University, who had died in an auto accident. It was a male lover, but Mixner feminized him when talking to Clinton. Clinton, whose father had died in an auto accident, wanted to know everything about the accident: how it happened, how Mixner felt, what it was like to see someone killed, what Mixner felt happened to people after they died. Clinton, Mixner recalled, “had a way of making you feel you were the most important friend in his life and what happened to you was the most important thing that ever happened.” At one point, talking to Clinton, Mixner felt tempted to reveal his homosexuality, to tell the whole story. He wanted to tell Clinton, Mixner said later, but was “afraid I’d lose him as a friend.”
Clinton’s final months at Oxford offered him more than enough opportunity to play the role of comforting friend. The breakup of the relationship between Paul Parish and Sara Maitland was so tumultuous and life-changing that it sent first Maitland and then Parish to psychiatric wards. Parish was dealing with several tensions in his life: his relationship with his mother, his latent homosexuality, his efforts to become a conscientious objector, his loneliness in the solitary academic corridors of Oxford. One of the unfortunate manifestations of his illness was that he could not stand to be in the same room with Maitland. The Parish-Maitland drama received mixed reviews at Leckford Road. Talbott, in the midst of his Khrushchev project, showed little patience with the couple. As Maitland later put it, “He didn’t want roving nutcases around, and I can’t blame him.” Aller and Clinton were more tolerant. Maitland was treated at a hospital on the edge of Oxford, and Aller and Clinton rode the No. 1 bus out to see her several times. With each visit, they brought the Lady Sara, hostess of the most popular tea parties in town, a small pot of exotic tea. After Maitland was released from the hospital, Clinton decided that a visit to a hair salon would help calm her nerves. He arranged the appointment without consulting Maitland, who had gorgeous long hair which she really did not want cut. Although the visit did nothing to help her relax, she was heartened by Clinton’s concern.
WHEN the Hilary term ended in April, Clinton and Rick Stearns rode the train to Spain, the final leg of their grand tour of the European continent. Stearns, ever earnest, had compiled a reading list and suggested that he and Clinton study the Spanish Civil War as they traveled. They shared copies of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, André Malraux’s Man’s Hope, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit, and Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War. The journey invigorated Clinton intellectually much as the trip to Moscow had done months before. But there was another purpose. Waiting to see them in Madrid were two young women, Lyda Holt and Jill Thrift, both of whom had recently graduated from Southern Methodist University and were studying art at the Prado. Lyda and Clinton had remained friends since they had met in her father’s campaign for governor in 1966. Now they were trying to fix each other up with their friends: Lyda with Stearns, Clinton with Thrift.
Lyda had not seen Clinton recently and gasped at the sight of him, with his sloppy work clothes, scruffy beard, and bushy brown hairdo. His side-kick Stearns was equally grubby, sporting stringy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache that he hoped gave him the flair of Pancho Villa. Not that Clinton had lost his Arkansas charm. One night in Madrid the four had dinner with Lyda’s aunt and uncle, who were visiting their daughter, Peggy Freeman, who was also living there that season. Jack Holt, known as Poppa Jack, was the political operator in the Holt family, and Clinton spent hours after dinner debriefing him on events back home. Clinton thoroughly delighted Lyda’s Aunt Marge Holt as well, though not enough to make her overlook his appearance. When he left, she turned to her daughter and sighed, “My goodness, I just don’t know, Lyda dating someone with that long hair and beard!” Lyda Holt thought her aunt “was of a mind to grab some scissors and cut that beard off!”
The quartet spent hours touring the Prado, the world-class art museum that so enthralled Lyda that she visited it every day. She was surprised by Clinton’s taste in artists. “I thought he would go for Velázquez, who was humanistic and painted his subjects so craftily they didn’t realize they were being psychoanalyzed for history. Wrong. He loved El Greco. Then I took him to the Goya room and he loved that. El Greco I thought would be too contemporary for him, but he wasn’t. And he was enthralled with Goya. Goya didn’t pull any punches. He was graphic about how the world was ripping apart.” Clinton also liked the work of Hieronymus Bosch and spent several minutes analyzing Bosch’s Table Top with the Seven Deadly Sins.
When they went off to tour the rest of Spain, the matchmaking effort devolved into a picaresque farce. Stearns thought the women were too clothes-conscious. “The girls had a preposterous amount of clothes—one suitcase was just full of shoes!” Stearns recalls. And Lyda found Stearns deadly earnest and uptight. The lessons Clinton had tried to give him on how to make friends and woo women were not paying dividends here. “I was trying to get poor Rick to loosen up. Relax. This is Spain,” Lyda said later. “He very seriously asked me what I intended to do with my life. I said I would like to go into retail, run a gift shop someday. That might have horrified him. It seemed like the harder he tried, the worse it got.” And try Stearns did. When they reached Seville, he felt so guilty about the way he and Clinton looked compared with their dates—“they were showing up at dinner every night like fashion plates!”—that he shaved off his mustache. But he sensed that by that time all was lost. While Holt and Thrift went shopping, he and Clinton traipsed off to the Mexican pavilion at Seville’s fair and started drinking what looked like orangeade at five centavos a cup. It was a sweltering day on the Spanish plain, and the beverage seemed especially refreshing to the American lads. They assumed that it could not have much alcohol. Soon enough they were tipsy. They were sitting on a curb, giggling, when the young women found them—one of the few times in Clinton’s life when he appeared drunk.
SOON after he returned to Oxford, Clinton again assumed one of his favorite roles, playing tour guide for an Arkansas friend visiting England. David Leopoulos, mourning the recent murder of his mother, who had been stabbed to death at her antique shop in Hot Springs, rode the train north from Camp Darby near Pisa with his Army buddy Steve Gorman. Clinton hoped that the holiday in England might ease the grief of his closest friend from his childhood. They had not seen each other for more than a year, the longest they had been apart since they were eight years old. Leopoulos was always hungering to spend time with Clinton, who represented to him not only the sweet memories of their childhood in Hot Springs but also an imagined future of unlimited promise. He boasted to Gorman of the Rhodes Scholar they were traveling to Oxford to see: “This guy’s going to be president someday.”
But the trip to England proved anything but relaxing. The thumping, screeching, rumbling, and lurching of the train as it twisted through the Alps kept them up all night. When the clean-cut Army computer specialists, sleepless and exhausted, dragged their heavy canvas bags through the station in London, Gorman turned to Leopoulos and muttered, “Where the hell is he?”
Leopoulos looked down the corridor and saw “this guy with long hair, a bushy beard, blue jeans” walking toward them, accompanied by a young woman. “There’s Bill,” he said.
“He’s going to be president?” Gorman asked, incredulous.
“Yeah,” said Leopoulos. “He’ll clean up okay.”
Throughout the visit, Leopoulos’s mother’s death was never mentioned, a polite avoidance that David not only appreciated but thought was typical of Clinton. “Bill will not talk about awful, negative things with his old friends,” Leopoulos said later. “He would rather avoid them. Shut them out. But I knew that the feeling was there.”
IN the final term of his second year at Oxford, Clinton showed signs of becoming a serious student. He attended special cram courses, known as revision courses, that were intended to prepare students for degree examinations. Alan Ryan, a politics don at New College, ran the revision courses in politics. “It was a sort of two-year polishing-up session so that people could come and revise like mad for the actual examinations—a sort of thirty-three things you need to know in thirty-five minutes type thing.” Though Ryan could not remember Clinton being in his class, university records indicate that he was. Univ politics don Maurice Shock, who had returned from a leave, became Clinton’s supervisor for his final term. Shock filed a report stating that Clinton was working hard but that his effort to fulfill the B. Phil. requirements was a race against time which he would most likely lose. In the month before the June examinations, Shock suggested that Clinton was not ready and should instead return for a third year, switching from a two-year B. Phil. to a three-year D. Phil., which required a dissertation of as much as 100,000 words.
Most Rhodes Scholars stayed at Oxford for two years, though there was money available for a third year for students who needed the extra time. Clinton considered the third-year option, which several of his friends, including Talbott, were taking, but decided that getting the Oxford degree was not worth the delay it would cause in his long-range plans to run for public office. He had already been accepted into Yale Law School, as had several other Oxford friends, including Bob Reich and Doug Eakeley. Yale Law seemed like the place to be—both an important establishment credential and a gathering place for many of the most politically astute members of his generation.
When Clinton appeared at Shock’s rooms at Univ College one day that spring, accompanied by Reich, and announced that he would not be staying for a third year, the don was neither surprised nor disappointed. “I didn’t take any kind of dim view that he decided not to take a degree,” Shock recalled. “It was clear that he had gotten a lot out of it.” Although Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House, took pride in the academic accomplishments of his foreign charges at Oxford, he nonetheless had a subtle appreciation for what the scholarship really meant to the Americans. “If you were an American and entirely on the make, you would do well in college, try for the Rhodes, get your name in the newspapers for winning one, and then resign it and go to Harvard or Yale Law School,” Williams noted. “The motivation is to get it. What you do here doesn’t really matter so long as you enjoy yourself. Don’t fail to take notice that it’s a free trip to Europe. Make friends. And, we hope, don’t grow to dislike the English.”
In the end, nine out of the thirty-two members of the American Rhodes class of 1968 never received Oxford degrees, the highest percentage in the post-World War II period. Among Clinton’s closest friends, only Reich and Eakeley took their Oxford degrees in two years. Although each scholar had his own story, the larger trend seems obviously related to the times. To some extent it had to do with a cultural shift in which the new generation was challenging traditional totems of academic achievement. But the complications arising from the war and the draft were more important in their thinking. Many of those who eventually left without degrees, including Clinton, later expressed regret and wished that they could go back and complete that unfinished period of their lives. Although later in his career Clinton never spoke bitterly about his Oxford experience, he rarely ex-tolled those years, either. One reason was a touch of embarrassment: Oxford represented unfinished business. Perhaps that sense of mild regret and ambiguity served as the fitting metaphor for an extraordinary, unrepeatable era.
When the Trinity term ended, Frank Aller headed for Spain to work on an autobiographical novel. Strobe Talbott traveled to Boston, where he continued his translation of the Khrushchev memoirs before returning to Oxford, where he and several members of the class, including Paul Parish and Frank Aller, would study for a third year. And Clinton flew to Washington, where he would spend the summer as a low-level organizer in Project Pursestrings, an effort to persuade Congress to cut off funding for the Vietnam War. In mid-July, he drove to Springfield, Massachusetts, for the wedding of college roommate Kit Ashby, who was then a Marine Corps officer on his way to Vietnam. Clinton, who had no money, slept in the basement at the house of the parents of the bride. Early on the wedding morning, the prospective bride tiptoed down to the basement where the ironing board was stored, to iron the train of her wedding gown. “I was trying to hold the dress so it wouldn’t fall on the floor; doing it quietly but with great difficulty,” Amy Ashby later recalled. “All of a sudden this voice says, ‘Why don’t you let me hold it.’ Bill had taken the white sheet he had slept on and wrapped it around himself. I was shocked. He looked like Jesus. I said, ‘God, Bill, you look like Jesus Christ!’ He helped me hold down the train.”
The wedding at Sacred Heart Church reflected the crosscurrents of the era. The six ushers were Marines in dress uniform. The six groomsmen included the brothers of the bride and groom as well as the Potomac Avenue housemates from Georgetown, except for Tom Campbell, who was flying Navy planes in Japan. Ashby and many of his Marine buddies were on their way to Vietnam. The lasting memory that Amy Ashby had of the wedding reception in her parents’ backyard was of Clinton, bearded and shaggy, standing face to face with a crewcut soldier, arguing one more time about the war that defined their generation.