American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  But four grams of coke a day is a lot, a whole lot, a hellacious lot, and Roger’s hunger started making him take big risks. He was a dealer now . . . at the same time that Bill Clinton’s friends saw a strange listlessness, an unexplainable anomie ravage the governor, who was spending much of his time in the mansion’s basement, playing his pinball machine.

  Roger was flying up to New York with cocaine strapped to his body, accompanied on one trip by an allegedly unaware Big Brother. Roger was dealing coke on consignment from big-muthah dealers, and his convertible got ripped off one night with the coke inside. His suppliers wanted twenty grand pronto and threatened to kill him.

  A later FBI investigation showed that Big Brother went to a business associate, himself later convicted of drug trafficking, and asked him to stash Roger for a while at his Florida farm. The feds were onto Roger by then, though, and he got two years at a federal prison in Texas (prosecuted by a man named Asa Hutchison, who would turn up many years later as a firebrand member of the House Judiciary Committee, calling for Big Brother’s impeachment).

  Big Brother sat in the courtroom as his little brother was sentenced, his nose red and a little runny. Afterward, on the courthouse steps, the governor of Arkansas, still emotional, said, “I feel more deeply committed than ever before to do everything I can to fight illegal drugs in our state.”

  Well . . . okay . . . what the hell . . . so what? He wasn’t doing smack, was he? He wasn’t using a needle, was he? He wasn’t nodding out down in the filth of some crack house, was he? (Although that business about sliding down a wall and propping himself against the trash can was a little disturbing.)

  Cocaine that was snorted wasn’t a slum drug; it was definitely white-collar, and maybe even still chic, the drug of choice for the hip and for Hollywood elite, the fabled drug of Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes. Cocaine was our drug, the baby-boomer drug. (The Xers could keep Ecstasy, which put some of us, getting older, into the hospital.)

  . . .

  As I listened to Ross Perot rant on, I remembered my own fling with cocaine in the seventies, while I was at Rolling Stone, which was a buzzing little beehive of cocaine activity. Whenever the dealers in town liked a story in the magazine, especially the stories I wrote exposing corrupt narcotics agents, they showed their appreciation by dropping off a few grams in the office.

  I loved the freeing exhilaration cocaine provided, the unself-conscious babbling, and I found it to be the only effective aphrodisiac I’d ever tried. JFK’s priapism was allegedly partly caused by the cortisone used to treat his Addison’s disease (Bill Clinton took cortisone, too, for his sinuses and knees), but as far as I was concerned, cocaine was the greatest gift to men since the condom. My sexual partners mostly felt the same way—it caused the kind of fireworks that went on explosively and orgasmically for eight hours.

  I discovered, though, that not everyone was affected this way. Hunter Thompson, whose breakfast those days consisted of two Bloody Marys, four lines of coke, and half a pack of cigarettes, told me it made him want to write. Jann Wenner told me cocaine made him able to edit Hunter’s prose. I concluded that it seemed to energize us for whatever we most liked doing: David Felton, another editor at Rolling Stone, liked to talk . . . Hunter liked to write . . . Jann liked to edit . . . and I liked to have sex.

  No doubt cocaine was dangerous: It could really mess you up. I watched another of our editors, Grover Lewis, in a bar one night, trying for fifteen minutes to get cigarettes out of a jukebox. Out one night with one of the Rolling Stone sweetmeats in a motel, I found myself unable to speak. I could form thoughts, I could perform sexually, but I couldn’t form words for about ten hours (a doctor told me later that I’d suffered, at age twenty-eight, a ministroke).

  Over the years, most of us who’d abused ourselves with coke stopped doing it. In my case, I was ministroked into it. In other cases, the daily toll of aging did it. But in most cases, the reason was our kids. We didn’t want our kids to risk their own health and lives the way we’d risked ours. Some of us adopted Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No!” Others, perhaps knowing more realistically that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, gave our kids, as they became teenagers, the benefit of our experience: Grass is okay; just make sure it isn’t laced with anything, especially angel dust. Coke will burn your sinuses out and put you on Claritin forever. Smack is the monkey you’ll never get off your back. Crack is as bad as smack; you’ll wind up dead or in jail. Speed kills. Ecstasy can stop your heart. One tab of acid can lobotomize you forever.

  And now here was Ross Perot telling us that the president of the United States, whose sinuses were screwed up and who was on Claritin, had a drug problem . . . in addition to his others. Bill Clinton, I was sure, was now as drug-free as I was, and I was immaculate (excepting, like Clinton, nicotine).

  But as I listened to the Tin Soldier constantly hammer away at Bill Clinton as “our commander in chief,” I thought I knew what was really up Perot’s craw: It wasn’t the blow job or the cigar or the lying. It was the damned draft. Bill Clinton (and I) had successfully and sneakily dodged the damned draft. To the Tin Soldier, that was a hanging offense!

  [4]

  Bubba and the Burrheads

  “I thought I heard he got two hearing aids,” Linda Tripp said. “It’s very unusual because high-frequency loss of hearing you generally hear about in soldiers who are around ordnance or weapons.”

  “Well, he’s around bands and rallies,” Monica said. “I mean, rock and roll!”

  What Ross Perot didn’t understand was that most men of my generation had dodged the draft or tried to. We didn’t think going over into those bug-infested rice paddies was cool. We didn’t understand—nor would we ever—the reason this war was being fought.

  Communists? What sense did it make to fight minor-league Vietnamese Communists while, at the same time, America was playing kissy face with superstar major-league Commies in Moscow and Beijing? As far as going to war because we were being told to go . . . because it was an order . . . because the cornpone or amoral commander in chief had so decided . . . that didn’t cut any ice with us.

  We didn’t believe or respect Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. We didn’t want to carry guns; we wanted to carry roach clips. We didn’t want to get killed; we wanted to get high and get laid.

  And now they were going to kidnap us from our Beatle bootleg albums and incense-scented pads and cut our hair . . . and we’d get reamed by some moronic inbred burrhead in basic training? And then they were going to put guns in our hands and tell us to kill “gooks,” whom we sympathized with as fellow freaks shit on by the burrheads of the world? Bull! Shit! Hell no, we wouldn’t go!

  Some of us shot our toes or pinkie fingers off. Some of us stayed in school as long as we could, adjusting career goals to necessitate grad school. Some of us ate pasta ten times a day, turning ourselves into grotesques, hoping to be disqualified for being too fat. Some of us stopped eating, turning ourselves into geeks, hoping to be disqualified for being too thin. Some of us shoved objects in our rectum, hoping to damage ourselves so we’d be disqualified for engaging in anal intercourse. Some of us engaged in anal intercourse. Some of us went to Canada.

  The burrheads of the world could talk all they wanted about the dishonor of being a draft dodger. We felt no dishonor and no shame. We felt the burrheads were dishonorable and shameful automatons, good Nazis taking orders from higher-up burrheads who were dishonoring the new, loving, peaceful America we were trying to create.

  We felt that anybody who didn’t do everything to get himself out of this unjust and senseless war was stupid or unprincipled or cowardly. We insisted that those in favor of this scurrilous war had been poisoned by listening to Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr., or Eddy Arnold, or the gay-hating Anita Bryant.

  When Bill Clinton, a graduate student at Oxford, a Rhodes scholar, got his notice to report for induction on May 3, 1969, he literally ran, panicked, to a friend. He was hysterical and hyperventil
ating. He beat on his friend’s door, but his friend wasn’t there. He slumped to the floor and sobbed.

  He knew, by then, that he was going into politics, and he knew American voters wouldn’t elect even a dog catcher who’d gone to Canada or shot his pinkie off or shoved objects into his rectum to avoid the draft. His options were limited by his own ambitions and by his own instinctive understanding of American realpolitik: The burrheads would be electing their “public servants” for a long time . . . until our generation was old enough to instill our values in our young and change America at the ballot box.

  Bill Clinton hated this war the way most of us did and knew that he somehow—somehow!—had to quash his induction notice. He called his mother and stepfather to ask them if they knew of any strings that could be pulled. He asked his stepfather to see if he could get him into a National Guard or Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit.

  Desperate, he flew back from England to Washington to see the most powerful man he knew, Senator J. William Fulbright, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bill Fulbright, who was becoming a public opponent of the war, was a friend and his old boss. As a young man, Bill Clinton had worked in the senator’s Arkansas campaign, driving him at high, reckless speeds around the state, and later, he’d also worked in Fulbright’s Washington office. He begged the senator to help him get into a National Guard or ROTC unit immediately so he could avoid induction. The senator said he’d make some calls.

  At the end of his wits, scrambled, Bill Clinton went to Little Rock to see another friend, who was working for the executive director of Arkansas’s Republican party. Here he was, a young and very liberal Democrat, turning for help to the Republicans, a party even then captive to the forces of segregationist and racist interests, in order to avoid his induction date. Thanks to his friend, the Republican party’s director in Arkansas made a trip to see the head of the state of Arkansas’s Selective Service, who went to the head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, Col. Eugene Holmes.

  Bill Clinton cut his beard and his long hair before he went to see Colonel Holmes, a veteran of World War II POW camps and the Bataan death march. Bill Clinton was a dyed-in-the-wool peacenik, meeting a decorated war hero. Colonel Holmes had two sons who were in Vietnam. Bill Clinton sat with Colonel Holmes for two hours, trying to convince him that he shouldn’t be drafted; that he, who loathed the war and everything the burrheads stood for, would make ideal burrhead officer material. He swore that he didn’t oppose America’s war in Vietnam. The burrheaded Colonel Holmes said he’d think about it. The next day, he was bombarded with phone calls from powerful state and local politicians, who urged him to admit Bill Clinton into the ROTC program. “The general message conveyed to me,” Colonel Holmes said later, “was that Senator Fulbright was putting pressure on them and they needed my help.”

  Colonel Holmes gave them the help they needed and quashed Bill Clinton’s notice to report for the induction, which was now only days away. He admitted Bill Clinton into the University of Arkansas ROTC program. But he didn’t just admit him into the program; he got him out of the war. Colonel Holmes decided to allow Bill Clinton to finish his year at Oxford and to finish two years of law school before he’d have to report. And in three years, everyone knew, this painfully unpopular war would be over.

  Back at Oxford, free from the war, Bill Clinton went out on the street for the first time to protest it. He became one of the leaders of Oxford’s antiwar movement. He marched on the American embassy in Grosvenor Square with five hundred other protesters. He wore a black armband and carried a placard on which he’d written in Magic Marker the name of a serviceman who’d been killed in Vietnam. He led an antiwar prayer service at a nearby church. Then he marched on the American embassy again, a foot-high wooden cross in his arms. He symbolically placed the cross against the embassy gate.

  The newspapers were reporting, meanwhile, that Richard Nixon was withdrawing 35,000 troops from Vietnam. Other reports said the draft would be temporarily suspended shortly—and that when it was resumed, only nineteen-year-olds would be called and “only those draftees who volunteered for service in Vietnam.” Nixon was pushing for a lottery system, other accounts said, whereby you’d be eligible for the draft for only one year. Numbers from one to 365 would be randomly selected. If your birthday was picked as a high number, you’d still only be vulnerable for one year. If your birthday was picked as a low number, you’d never be drafted.

  When the first draft lottery was held, shortly after the stories appeared, Bill Clinton’s birth date was number 311 out of 365. He knew now that if he wasn’t a member of the ROTC program, he’d never have to serve in the military at all. Colonel Holmes and the ROTC had been necessary to quash his induction notice, but they were baggage now. He knew that with his low lottery number, he’d never be drafted.

  He wrote Colonel Holmes a letter, asking to be reclassified 1-A (for immediate induction), knowing he’d never be inducted because of his low lottery number. He knew, too, that this gesture could be made to look good when he ran for future public office. It could be viewed as a patriotic gesture. A young man who had a deferment giving it up and seemingly making himself, on paper, look like he was willing to risk combat. The burrheads would love it.

  Knowing that he was off the hook now, he let Colonel Holmes have it with both barrels, as though he couldn’t restrain himself. He wrote him a letter. He told Colonel Holmes, almost gleefully, that he’d lied to him. While he had sworn in his meeting with Colonel Holmes that he wasn’t against the war in Vietnam, he now wrote that “the admiration [between them] might not have been mutual had you known a little more about me, about my political beliefs and activities.” He wrote 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 have written and spoken and marched against the war.” He wrote that he “had no interest in the ROTC program itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself against physical harm.”

  Bill Clinton thanked the burrhead for “saving me from the draft.” “No government,” he wrote, “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.”

  His letter, in many ways, was an eloquent presentation of how many of us felt about the war. The way he pulled the whole scam off had rock and roll aspects many of us who’d dodged the draft admired. He hated the war and got inducted. He beat the draft notice by conning a war hero and by squeezing him with political muscle. Then he hit the streets to protest the war he’d already gotten out of. Then he got out of . . . what he’d gotten into, the reserves . . . to get out of the draft. Then he told the war hero the details of how he’d conned him. Then he lectured the war hero about war.

  It almost caught up with him six years later, when he ran for Congress in Arkansas against a Republican World War II veteran who started asking questions about how Bill Clinton had gotten out of the draft. Bill Clinton knew that his letter to Colonel Holmes might prove especially embarrassing to him. He wanted it back.

  He’d squeezed Colonel Holmes once before through his friend Senator Fulbright, and now he squeezed him again through friends who were administrators at the University of Arkansas. The war hero called an aide to say “he wanted the Clinton letter out of the files.” The aide sent the letter to Colonel Holmes, who sent it back to Bill Clinton.

  Sixteen years later, in 1991, that same aide, Ed Howard, started getting questions from reporters about a letter that Bill Clinton had allegedly once written to Colonel Holmes. Ed Howard ran into Bill Clinton in Little Rock and told him a
bout the reporters’ questions.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Bill Clinton said. “I’ve put that one to bed.”

  No one knew that another copy of the letter existed, allegedly made by another aide to Colonel Holmes. It was leaked to the press during the New Hampshire primary in 1992, and for a few days Bill Clinton and his advisers went into shock. There were those who saw it as that conned and lectured old war hero’s perfectly timed revenge. What would America think about a letter from a presidential candidate that was a flat-out admission of dodging the draft?

  As it turned out, America thought nothing much at all. My generation had grown up now. We had taught our values to our young. The burrheads were dead or dying or certainly out of touch, like Ross Perot. Without a doubt, they were outnumbered.

  In the America we had created, dodging the draft was no reason not to vote for a man . . . no more reason not to vote for a man than a blow job or a good-tasting cigar. In both instances, Bill Clinton thought there was no evidence of what he had done. He denied everything. One lie was exposed by a letter, the other by a blue dress.

  [5]

  Mark Fuhrman and the Navy Blue Dress

  “Can I ask you a question?” Linda Tripp said. “I have a lot of fear. Do you? I mean I have a lot of fear!”

  “Do you want the honest truth?” Monica said. “Do you want me to tell you the honest truth? I have fear about one thing, and that’s you saying something.”

  It was a navy blue dress without décolletage—buttons to the top—that cost $49.95 at the Gap. It was not, as one of Kenneth W. Starr’s prosecutors referred to it, “a cocktail dress.” It was a dress whose color and style made Monica, always paranoid about her weight, look slimmer.