First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  The housemates agreed that the student deferments that had been sheltering them were inherently unfair. Clinton frequently mentioned all the boys from Hot Springs who were fighting in Vietnam already. But he also wondered whether it was right to force talented young men to fight a war they did not believe in when they would be willing to serve their country in other ways. He often spoke of a high school friend, a math genius who had dropped out of MIT, who was now cleaning rifles. “Is this the right way to do it?” Clinton’s friends remember him asking. In a paper he had written for a law seminar that year, Clinton had concluded that the draft system was “illegitimate” because of its inflexibility. His paper explored the legal arguments “for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objector, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not simply to participation in war in any form.”

  If there had been such a category, Clinton would have fit within it. He had devoted all his energies that year to winning the Rhodes Scholarship. Would he have to participate in a war he did not believe in rather than go to Oxford, where they were training “the best men for the world’s fight”?

  ON the first day of March the five seniors held the last grand party of their college careers. They lined the walkway and steps outside with miniature French flags for what they called The Hundred Days party, a double-theme affair honoring Napoleon’s one-hundred-day return from exile on the isle of Elba as well as the class of 1968’s final one hundred days of student life on the hilltop. There was nothing particularly rebellious at the party, yet that night somehow marked the ushering in of a new and uncertain time for the Potomac Avenue friends. Back in September when they flew up to Manhattan for Tommy Caplan’s lavish birthday celebration, they were still clinging to an age of innocence. Now the sixties seemed to be coming at them hard and furious. Campbell felt a sense of doom.

  Within two weeks of the party, Senator Eugene McCarthy, carrying the antiwar banner, almost defeated President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, and four days later Senator Robert Kennedy joined the Democratic presidential contest, quickening the political pulse at Georgetown, an institution that still carried the memory of Camelot. “I run to seek new policies,” Robert Kennedy said. “Policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gap between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old in this country and around the rest of the world.” McCarthy, the laconic poet from Minnesota, reacted with hostility to this fiery new arrival on the presidential scene. He said he alone had challenged Johnson at a time when others “were willing to stay up on the mountain and light signal fires and dance in the light of the moon. But none of them came down, and I tell you it was a little lonely in New Hampshire. I walked alone.” Kennedy’s move provoked another debate at the Potomac Avenue dinner table. Kit Ashby derided his announcement as opportunistic. Clinton, who preferred Kennedy to McCarthy, argued that timing is everything in politics and that Kennedy was smart to seize the moment.

  When Johnson announced later that month that he would not seek or accept renomination for a second term, it seemed that change might come swiftly and peacefully. Then, on April 4, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed in Memphis, and some sectors of Washington went up in flames. From their protected place high on the hilltop above the city, Georgetown students were in no physical danger during the riots that week. Tom Campbell thought of it as “a sort of never-never-land up there. Everyone felt the authorities would form a skirmish line at the edge of Georgetown” if looters and arsonists ever got that far. Still, some merchants who normally catered to the Georgetown Gentlemen made absurd efforts to shield themselves from the fury. One pricey shop specializing in preppy sports jackets placed a Soul Brother sign of solidarity in its window.

  There was nonetheless a wartime feel to the campus. A curfew was imposed from dusk to dawn. Hundreds of National Guard troops spent their nights sleeping on the floor of McDonough Gym. Every afternoon, students clambered up to the Gothic rooftops and watched smoke drift to the eastern horizon. Some students, including Clinton, signed up to help the Red Cross deliver food and supplies into the inner city.

  One Sunday morning, Clinton drove his white Buick convertible to National Airport to pick up Carolyn Yeldell, his friend from Hot Springs. Their relationship had changed in the past year. The girl next door used to be Clinton’s musical accompanist, virtuous and naive. But that Christmas of their senior year when Clinton had flown home, Carolyn had gone to the Little Rock airport to meet him and gave him a welcome home kiss that was decidedly unsisterly. “My God, where did you learn how to kiss like that?” he had said to her on the way home from the airport. “No wonder everyone wants to marry you.” That kiss, according to Yeldell, “put a whole new spin” on their relationship. Their letters back and forth over the next few months were more intimate, and when she flew to Washington for spring break at his suggestion, she arrived with a prospect of romance on her mind.

  As she looked out her airplane window on the approach to Washington, she saw a city smoldering in flames and smoke.

  “I’ve signed us up for some volunteer work,” Clinton said as they walked to his car in the airport lot. She said okay, not knowing quite what he meant but nervous about the possibilities. They drove to a relief agency, loaded the trunk and back seat of his car with food and first aid equipment, and pasted a Red Cross insignia on the door. Their mission was to drive the goods to an inner-city church where people who had been burned out of their homes were living in the basement. Imagine the rush of adrenaline that the classmates from Hot Springs High felt as they sped through Washington in Clinton’s white convertible, both trying to mask their whiteness by pulling porkpie hats over their foreheads, Clinton chanting, “Go! Go! Yes! Yes!” as they rolled through red lights, never stopping until the delivery point was reached. And this was on Sunday morning, when the streets were empty and calm.

  After they had delivered the first aid supplies and food without incident, Clinton did not want to go back to the Potomac Avenue house yet. “Let’s go downtown and take a better look,” he said. They drove past blocks of charred storefronts and parked on a side street near the 14th Street corri-dor. They got out of the car and walked down the street, looking at the rubble and broken glass.

  “I wish I had a camera,” Carolyn said.

  Clinton turned to her with a look of reproval and said, “You will never forget this as long as you live.”

  As they rounded a corner on the way back to the car, they saw six black men walking abreast, moving slowly toward them from a half-block away. The college seniors from Hot Springs scurried back to their white Buick and drove away.

  The scene at Potomac Avenue was unforgettable, too, in a less momentous way. Clinton had another girlfriend at Georgetown by then, a bold, brainy senior named Ann Markesun. He had not told Carolyn about her. It was quite a balancing act, talking on the phone with Markesun while Yeldell was in the house. Yeldell knew that something was up because “the guys at the house were furious with Bill for not being honest. I would be in the house and he was on the phone with Ann. He seemed kind of distant.”

  A few days later Clinton took Yeldell over to Annapolis to visit their high school friend Phil Jamison at the Naval Academy. Jamison remembers the trio watching the Wednesday parade on the academy grounds as well as a ceremony honoring veterans who had returned from Vietnam. They did not discuss the war, but if they had, Clinton and Jamison would have found that their views were not so far apart. Jamison and his classmates at the Naval Academy “weren’t so thrilled about the war, either,” Jamison said later. “We had a picture memorial in our rotunda with yearbook pictures of grads killed in Vietnam. And by then it was starting to stretch all the way around the rotunda. Vietnam was not looking all that good to any of us.”

  The great unraveling reached surrealistic levels as the school year neared its end. Early on the morning of June 5, two
Marine Corps officers were killed and two companions injured when a man pulled out a gun and fired, after a racially tinged incident at the Little Tavern hamburger joint on M Street near Key Bridge. The assailant, who said he had been called racist names, had come to Washington to participate in the Poor People’s Campaign’s Resurrection City, the economic empowerment protest organized by followers of the slain Martin Luther King. After the shooting, he fled in a car up Prospect Street toward the Georgetown campus and passed a group of fraternity brothers. Another senior, who had just learned that he had flunked a course and would not graduate on time, was drunk in the street and got hit by the escape car. His friends took him to Georgetown University Hospital.

  John Dagnon, one of the friends, went to the emergency room. He was checking on his injured buddy when the door opened and in came the dead and wounded from the Little Tavern shooting. Dagnon looked over to the television set in the waiting room. Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated following his victory in the California primary. There was, it seemed, blood and death everywhere.

  The Potomac Avenue housemates were asleep by then. They had turned off the television set moments after Kennedy had been declared the victor—and before he was shot. It was not until early the next morning that Tommy Caplan learned the news in a telephone call from his friend John Lacey. He went downstairs and shook Clinton awake, and they sat on the edge of Clinton’s bed in shock. Two Kennedys dead: one killed during their senior year in high school, another at the end of their senior year in college.

  Caplan was invited to New York for the memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the long funeral train ride down to Washington. He arrived at the church an hour early and ended up taking a twenty-block walk around Manhattan with Walt Rostow, a member of JFK’s East Coast brain trust who helped Lyndon Johnson prosecute the Vietnam War that Robert Kennedy had entered the presidential race to try to stop. The funeral train moved slowly from New York to Washington. Every few miles it slowed as throngs of onlookers saluted the coffin. Tommy Caplan, rarely at a loss for words, rode in silence much of the route, staring out the window, engulfed by a sense of “how lost our country seemed.” He had operated on the assumption that Robert Kennedy would win. Like Clinton, he had harbored an image of the future in which Robert Kennedy would be president. That made the assassination more shattering. “One’s vision had to be radically revised. It made me despair. It seemed the triumph of hopelessness.”

  The following day was graduation day. Nobody was up for it. All the normal parties had been canceled that week, including the luau and senior dance with rock and roller Chuck Berry, and many students thought even the commencement itself should be shelved. As parents and relatives walked through the Main Gate, they were encountered by a group of seniors holding signs protesting the business-as-usual approach. But the morning had dawned clear and bright. It was a beautiful day as they walked onto the lawn at Healy and took their seats and a swing camera took a grand panoramic shot of the class. As the program began, clouds started to roll in and the scene was enveloped in darkness. Just as Mayor Walter Washington was about to give his commencement address, a hard rain-storm began and the Georgetown graduates of 1968, as Ashby later put it, “ran for our lives.”

  So much for ceremony. The thunderstorm did what the administration would not do. It forced the cancelation of graduation exercises. Mayor Washington’s unspoken address was instead mailed to every senior. The trauma of the riot, the deaths of King and Kennedy, the bloody war and the gathering storm of the draft, the terrible rain—it was all part of the same mess. The black dye from their commencement gowns had stained the white shirts the boys were required to wear beneath, leaving dark splotches that seemed all too appropriate. Their generation had been inflated with possibilities, Tommy Caplan lamented, and now for most people it all became impossible. Some members of the class of 1968 would spend decades trying to shake that despair.

  But one member of the class was indomitable and ready for more action. Bill Clinton had a plan. He had persuaded Jim Moore, who had some free time before basic training started at Fort Benning, to travel back to Arkansas with him to work on the reelection campaign of Senator Fulbright. Their job for a week or so would be to return cars that had been loaned to the campaign by auto dealers around the state. “This is going to be great,” Clinton said to Moore. “We’ll drive around the most beautiful state on the planet and talk to judges during the day and date their daughters at night. You’ll be this great guy from Washington I’m importing. We’ll say you were a youth coordinator for Robert Kennedy or something, and people will just die to have you as their house guest and you’ll be able to go out with all these good-looking girls.”

  “I can deal with that,” Moore said.

  WHAT should be said in summary about Clinton’s first four-year experience in Washington? It is clear that these were not years of rebellion for him. If the overwhelmingly white, bourgeois Hilltop milieu was too narrow and homogeneous, it also protected him from the excesses of his generation. It allowed him to follow a moderate course during an increasingly immoderate period. Although one of the slogans of the day warned that no one over thirty should be trusted, Clinton drew heavily from four old-fashioned liberal mentors: Carroll Quigley, who emphasized the philosophy of future preference; Joseph Sebes, who offered an empathetic way of looking at other cultures and points of view; Walter Giles, with his reverence for the Constitution as a living document; and J. William Fulbright, who preached the limitations of power and laid out the intellectual arguments against the war in Vietnam.

  Clinton began college as a grind, studying diligently and comparing his grades with classmates. By his senior year he had developed a different style, in which he could find twenty things to do other than study, until the final moment, when he would somehow absorb weeks’ worth of material in a few hours of intense cramming. Perhaps that is the metaphor for a politician’s life, and in Washington as an undergraduate he began to master it. His two years on Capitol Hill gave him an invaluable lesson in practical politics: from his unobtrusive, almost invisible station as one of Fulbright’s back room boys, he observed the real world of the Senate, examining the vanities and foibles of supposedly great men and learning how public policy turns on personal relationships as well as substance. His experience as a student politician at Georgetown was noteworthy not because it transformed him in any significant way but because it set a pattern for the rest of his career. The Georgetown years established that Clinton was first in his class in terms of political will and skill, and yet people could sometimes tire of him. Still, even losing would not derail him from his political course. Nothing could.

  CLINTON and Moore used Little Rock as their hub, driving out from the capital city to every corner of the state. To Moore, Bill Clinton’s homeland seemed dense and exotic. One night they stayed at a plantation house along the Mississippi Delta, a place straight out of Gone With the Wind, Moore thought, with magnolia trees shading the mansion and black servants offering iced tea to visitors—and pretty southern belles, literally the judge’s daughters, ready to be taken out at night to the local drive-in movie. Another day they drove down to Hope, Clinton’s birthplace in southwest Arkansas, a world away from the Delta, where everyone seemed different degrees of poor. Then they headed north to Fayetteville and spent the night with a university official who was as enlightened as anyone in Washington.

  The trip became a political science class for Moore, with Clinton as the professor. Clinton told him that to win an election in Arkansas and at the same time bring about social change, you first had to win over the courthouse crowd. You had to be able to walk into any courthouse in Arkansas and know the county clerk, know the whole power structure and what was important to those people. Moore realized that “that was part of the reason Clinton was driving the cars around and dating the judges’ daugh-ters.” As they drove through the Arkansas river valleys, Clinton told Moore that the power job in Arkansas, the one he coveted, was govern
or. It was the place where you could really do things to change people’s lives, he said. And the surest stepping stone for that was the attorney general’s office because that job gave you the access you needed to those county courthouses. Moore was impressed by how familiar and comfortable Clinton seemed with that courthouse network when he was only twenty-one and had spent most of the past four years far away in Washington. His friend was no carpetbagger.

  Clinton talked about the ways he would try to emulate Senator Fulbright and the ways he would have to break from him. Fulbright had two radically different personas, he told Moore. In Washington, the senator was the patrician intellectual and internationalist. He was J. William Fulbright. For a long time this style worked well for Fulbright back home, especially in the rural areas. It made the backwoods people feel better about themselves to see this nattily dressed, professorial statesman who would address them without condescension, using big words and talking about global issues. But it only worked as long as Fulbright came home often enough to sustain the connection with the folks and to show an interest in their workaday concerns. Once that connection was lost, nothing could restore it. Fulbright could start wearing red flannel shirts and suspenders and go by just plain Bill Fulbright, but that might not be enough. It is the burden of a good politician, Clinton said, to learn how to reconcile these seeming contradictions. In Fulbright they were becoming too stark, leaving him vulnerable. The people in Arkansas were starting to feel distant from J. William and leery of just plain Bill.

  On the issue closest to Clinton’s heart, civil rights, he saw Fulbright as a relic from another era. He told Moore that he respected the senator enormously but felt that he had compartmentalized international and local morality. His unwillingness to step out on the race issue was something that Clinton could not justify. He told Moore that the time for that style of southern politician was over. When he got elected, he would do so without forfeiting his personal moral views. The central question Clinton was dealing with, Moore concluded, was “how you move into the new world and hold on to power at the same time.”