There it was, in the summer of his twenty-first year—an essential question of Bill Clinton’s career for all the decades to come.
Fulbright’s toughest primary opponent that year was someone all too familiar to Clinton, “Justice Jim” Johnson. Two years earlier Johnson had defeated Clinton’s candidate, Judge Frank Holt, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, but then lost to Republican Winthrop Rockefeller in the general election. Johnson was a fiery racist in the George Wallace mold, and now he was running side by side with the Alabama governor, who was campaigning for president and “moving through the South faster than Sherman did,” as Clinton once put it. Johnson attacked Fulbright for his opposition to the war, calling the senator the “pinup boy of Hanoi.” Had Fulbright not spent more time than usual the year before traveling around Arkansas trying to explain his position on the war, he might have been more vulnerable to Johnson’s overheated challenge.
After Moore left, Clinton went to work full time for Fulbright’s reelection campaign. It operated out of familiar territory, the old Marion Hotel, which had served as headquarters for Frank Holt two years earlier. Lee Williams, Fulbright’s top aide, was down from Washington to run the campaign, with help from several other Fulbright aides, including James McDougal, the director of his Little Rock office. Though only twenty-eight, McDougal was a colorful veteran of Arkansas and Washington politics. He had been elected to the Democratic state central committee as a teenage political prodigy from Bradford in rural White County, and at age twenty helped run John Kennedy’s state presidential campaign. Senator McClellan rewarded McDougal with a patronage job on Capitol Hill, where he worked as the assistant bill clerk in the Secretary of the Senate’s office before Fulbright hired him to run his home office. By the time Clinton met him that sum-mer, McDougal was a reformed alcoholic and an unreconstructed populist hustler and storyteller. They hit it off, trading notes on women and regaling each other with stories from the backwoods of Arkansas and the back rooms of Congress.
When Lee Williams asked Clinton what he wanted to do for the campaign that summer, he said he wanted to be as close to the candidate as possible. He was made Fulbright’s driver—not the easiest assignment. Fulbright was an odd mixture: shy and aloof, scholarly and formal in ap-pearance, yet jocklike and profane in private. When being driven around Arkansas, he preferred to talk rather than listen. The time that Clinton and Fulbright spent on the road was brief and calamitous. One afternoon shortly after the candidate and his young disciple drove off together, McDougal and Williams were sitting in the office back in Little Rock and took a phone call from the road. It was Fulbright calling from southwest Arkansas, utterly perplexed, saying that the floorboard of their light blue Ford Torino was ankle deep in water. After asking a few questions, McDougal determined that Clinton had caused the crisis by running the air conditioner constantly with the vents closed. “Two goddamn Rhodes Scholars in one car out there and they can’t figure out why they’re making rain!” McDougal said to Williams. That was only the beginning. Another day Clinton drove one hundred miles in the wrong direction before Fulbright realized the mistake and ordered him to turn around. Another day he left the car for valet parking at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, but took the keys with him, creating a traffic jam in the garage for a half-hour until he was found inside embroiled in a debate over the Vietnam War with a local veteran.
They exasperated each other. Fulbright exasperated Clinton because he could never win an argument with the old man. Clinton exasperated Fulbright because the young buck would never shut up. Finally, they came off the road and Fulbright stormed into the office at the Marion Hotel and announced, “Jim will be going out with me Monday!” McDougal had never seen Fulbright so distraught. McDougal thought he was “out of control. He couldn’t bear any more. He couldn’t bear another minute of it.” Williams still wanted McDougal in the office, and ignored the senator’s request to change drivers. Early the next Monday morning, Fulbright chose the only course of action left to him. He took the wheel himself and drove quietly out of town alone.
Clinton put the best face on his adventure. If he ended up doing other things, he said in a letter to Denise Hyland, it was because he had more important matters on his mind. “Lately I have returned to my speech-making,” he wrote. “And I’ve attacked more fiercely than ever before the distorted ideas which find their fruition in Wallace’s candidacy but linger in varying degrees in the minds of so many here and throughout the country.”
Clinton split his time between his mother’s house in Hot Springs and apartment 9-G at Quapaw Towers in Little Rock, which belonged to Paul Fray and his wife Mary Lee Saunders Fray. The Frays had known Clinton since 1966 when Paul and Bill were part of the Holt Generation team. Mary Lee, who grew up in a conservative Baptist military family from northern Virginia, had been the president of the Young Republicans at Ouachita Baptist in Arkadelphia, where she knew many of Clinton’s girl-friends, including Sharon Ann Evans, the reigning Miss Arkansas, and Carolyn Yeldell, the girl next door on Scully Street. Mary Lee had worked on Republican Winthrop Rockefeller’s campaigns, but switched parties after marrying Paul, and now was employed in Fulbright’s Little Rock office. Clinton paid no rent at the Frays’ apartment, but there, as in so many other cases during his life, he found ways to fit in as part of the family, and earned his keep by making life interesting for his hosts and vacuuming the rugs and washing the dishes. Fray had no second thoughts about letting him stay in the apartment alone with his wife. Clinton, he believed, “knew how to keep his private life separate.”
Late in the summer, Tom Campbell drove up from Navy flight school in Pensacola, Florida, on a weekend leave to visit his college roommate. They met halfway, on the square of a small town in Louisiana. Clinton had persuaded Sharon Ann Evans to accompany him down to the meeting point. She drove back alone in his car while Clinton rode with Campbell. As Miss Arkansas, Evans was a celebrity in Little Rock that year, far better known than Clinton. She knew the governor and took Clinton and Campbell to meet Winthrop Rockefeller. It was the first time Clinton had stepped inside the Governor’s Mansion. The deepest impression Campbell took from the visit came when Clinton drove him to a rural village to watch Justice Jim speak to a crowd of farmers wearing bib overalls. Clinton, fuming, waited in line after the speech, shook Johnson’s hand, then said to him, “You make me ashamed to be from Arkansas.” Johnson reacted calmly to his young critic, saying, “Well, son, if you disagree with me, put it in a letter.” Clinton told Campbell that even though he despised Justice Jim, he learned something from the way Johnson had responded without getting angry. Campbell could see Clinton “filing that away.”
Clinton was a cool customer himself in other respects, especially when it came to women. He was writing letters to his first Georgetown girlfriend, Denise Hyland, and to a later Georgetown girlfriend, Ann Markesun. In Hot Springs, Carolyn Yeldell thought she and Bill had something special going, and in Little Rock he was spending considerable time with beauty queen Sharon Ann Evans. Clinton had friends everywhere, it seemed, male and female, and he loved and cared about them all. Evans was especially curious about Markesun—“the blond-headed girl from Georgetown”—and would often ask Clinton’s friends about her. “I don’t know if I thought of us as an item,” Evans recalled later. “If I did, it was fleeting. There were so many other people in Bill’s life. Maybe deep down I had a sense that I knew where his life was headed.”
Carolyn Yeldell could see only too well how Clinton’s friendship with Evans had developed. Evans was bridesmaid that summer at the wedding of Carolyn’s little sister and Clinton had attended the wedding. “From then on Sharon picked up in Bill’s eye. That was hard. All of a sudden her Volkswagen was in his driveway all the time.” Still, Yeldell did not want to think that her own relationship with Clinton was on the skids. Then, one Sunday morning, “it hit me over the head and I came to my senses. It was a question of what to do after church. I walked out my back door and up the front
walk to Bill’s front door—and saw Bill and Sharon through the window. They were standing embraced in a major kiss near the table. It was that classic moment, right before I was going to ring the bell. I turned around and went back home.” Her dreams of being the politician’s wife started to fade. “I needed honesty. He hadn’t ever said to me, ‘I’m going to start dating Sharon now, so you’re not my girlfriend anymore.’ He would sort of play the field.”
If Clinton never directly addressed their own situation, he felt free to share with Carolyn his thoughts about his future. One day after that inci dent they were standing in his kitchen and he blurted out, “Carolyn, did you ever think about who you’re going to marry?” Once she had thought it could be someone just like Bill Clinton. But she would never say that now. It was a rhetorical question anyway. He wanted to tell her the type of woman he would marry. “The woman I marry is going to be very independent,” he said. “She’s going to work outside the house. She needs to have her own interests and her own life and not be wrapped up entirely in my life.”
Ann Markesun might have fit those requirements. She was attractive, more forceful and aggressive than Hyland, Yeldell, or Evans—and hipper than Clinton, certainly not the type to be wrapped up in his life. Markesun came out to visit him near the end of the summer, around Labor Day, accompanied by Richard Shullaw, one of Clinton’s fraternity friends, who was on his way to Texas. When they reached Hot Springs, they stayed at the house at 213 Scully Street. They went water-skiing on Lake Hamilton, with Markesun, tan and muscular, tacking a sailboat around the lake while sporting a bikini that later became the stuff of local legend.
Shullaw caught a fever in the Arkansas sun and was bedridden at the Clinton house the next day. Virginia Clinton, he said, “took very sweet care” of him. The next day the three Georgetown friends went rambling about the countryside in Clinton’s convertible. Shullaw was in the back seat, only partially protected from the sparks that were flying around up front. “Bill and Ann got in all these heated arguments, these political dis-putes. She was on her way to becoming a real radical and had been totally turned off to mainstream politics after the Democratic Convention in Chi-cago. As I recall, she was deeply against the war and was to the left of Bill, who was trying to be pragmatic and explain why he would support Hubert Humphrey.” Clinton and Markesun also spent a few days at the Frays’ apartment in Little Rock. Paul Fray enjoyed watching Markesun “getting in Clinton’s face” during a dispute over monetary policy.
BILL was the pride of Hot Springs that summer. They were sending their brightest son off to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar—unless, that is, he got drafted and shipped to Vietnam. The Rhodes Scholarship provided Clinton no legal protection from Garland County Draft Board No. 26, which had reclassified him 1-A, eminently draftable, back on March 20, one month after graduate school deferments were abolished. Most draftable young men were being called for preinduction physicals within two months of getting classified 1-A. The draft board was inducting Hot Springs boys by date of birth at a rate that would reach Clinton’s August 19 number before he finished his first term overseas.
Raymond Clinton took it upon himself to find his nephew some time. Even when Roger Clinton was alive, Raymond, the older brother with money and influence as a successful car agency owner, was paternalistic in his handling of family matters. “Manipulative” is the word Virginia chose to describe him. He would help his family and maintain his grip over it at the same time. “That was Raymond’s method of operation,” Henry Britt, a Hot Springs lawyer and former judge, said later. “He would assist relatives whether they wanted help or not.”
Although he was not a military man, Raymond Clinton had important connections to the military power structure in Hot Springs, including the Garland County Draft Board. He belonged to the local chapter of the U.S. Navy League, a social club that met once a month in different area restaurants for a night of food, drink, and conversation. Henry Britt was also in the Navy League, as were Trice Ellis, commanding officer of the local Naval Reserve unit, and William S. Armstrong, who ran a bulk oil plant in town and served as chairman of the draft board.
Britt had performed legal work for Raymond Clinton over the years, once bailing out another Clinton relative who had been jailed for nonsupport after a divorce. At Raymond’s request, he had also written a number of letters of recommendation for Bill Clinton’s college and Rhodes Scholar applications. He would draft the letters and other prominent citizens in town would sign them. They were unlikely associates: Britt was a conservative Republican and noted opponent of the gambling rackets, while Raymond Clinton had longstanding ties to the Democratic party and did business with the gamblers. But Raymond Clinton was known around town for his ability to ingratiate himself with powerful people of all sorts. Ray Smith, Jr., a lawyer and populist Democrat who represented Hot Springs in the Arkansas House for three decades, knew that “Raymond and Britt were extremely close,” and always suspected that Raymond Clinton took pains to let people know that he was close to Judge Britt as a means of lending himself more authority in the community.
One day that summer, as Britt remembered it later, Raymond paid a visit to his Central Avenue storefront office and said, “Well, we’ve got to keep Bill out of the draft so he can take advantage of his schooling.” Britt undertook two efforts to delay Clinton’s induction so that he could go to Oxford for at least one year. There is no clear and documented evidence that Clinton knew about the lobbying that his uncle and the lawyer were doing on his behalf. Britt thought that “Bill must have known.” Clinton has said that he did not. Given Raymond Clinton’s history of meddling in other people’s affairs without asking, and given Bill Clinton’s propensity to be acutely aware of everything going on around him in his home town, either conclusion seems possible. But later letters that Clinton wrote to friends in which he seemed to have a measure of inside knowledge of his draft fate make it more probable that the nephew did know what his uncle and others were doing for him.
The first relief Raymond Clinton and Britt found for Bill was a naval billet. This would not only give him more time—he would not have to fill it until after the school year ended in June—but it also would more likely keep him out of harm’s way in the war. Trice Ellis, the local naval com-mander, said he was only too happy to accommodate the request, which he did not consider out of the ordinary, and was “impressed by the chance to enlist someone with a college education.” He called the Navy command in New Orleans and secured a two-year active duty billet for young Clinton. Ellis assumed that Clinton would stop by that summer for an interview, but Clinton never did. When he asked Raymond Clinton what happened, Raymond told him not to worry, Bill would not be coming, he had been taken care of in another way.
That other way was more direct, providing Clinton with only temporary relief but not obligating him to military service. Britt called draft board chairman Armstrong, his close friend, and asked him, as he later recalled, to “put Bill Clinton’s draft notice in a drawer someplace and leave it for a while. Give the boy a chance.” This is apparently what Armstrong did for several months. Another member of the Garland County Draft Board, Robert Corrado, later remembered Armstrong holding back Clinton’s file and saying that they had to give him time to go to Oxford. According to Opal Ellis, the board secretary, the board “kind of leaned over backwards to let him go to Oxford.”
Special consideration for Rhodes Scholars was not unusual around the country. The draft board in Alameda County, California, was so impressed by the achievements of the only black Rhodes winner that year, Tom Williamson of Harvard, that they granted him a graduate school deferment even though such deferments supposedly no longer existed. Darryl Gless, whose small home town in Nebraska was so proud of him that they strung a banner across the Main Street bank welcoming him back from his successful Rhodes interview, also was given a special deferment. Dartmouth scholar John Isaacson visited his draft board in Lewiston, Maine, and pleaded with them to let him go to Oxford, which t
hey did. University of Iowa scholar Mike Shea went to England “happily but erroneously 2-S” for the first year. Paul Parish’s mother in Port Gibson, Mississippi, received a letter from the governor telling her that Paul should go to England because they were trying to get an exemption for Rhodes Scholars. For virtually every member of the Rhodes class of 1968 there was a similar story.
Willie Fletcher, a Harvard graduate from Washington State, was a year older than most of his classmates and feared that he would be drafted immediately. He cut a deal with the Navy, signing up for a four-month officer candidate school that summer on the condition that when he finished in October they would defer his commission for two years and let him go to Oxford. The only reason he enlisted was to avoid service during the time when the war was being fought. He considered the war “deeply immoral,” did not want to fight in it, and hoped that by the time he earned his commission it would all be over.
Vanderbilt’s Walter Pratt had won one of the four Rhodes slots from the South region with Clinton and was so awed by his accomplishment at the time that he seemed ready to fly home without an airplane. Members of his draft board in Jackson were equally proud of their native son and left him with the impression that they would let him go to Oxford without drafting him, even after the deferments for graduate students were abol-ished. Many of the scholars, including Clinton, had acknowledged during their undergraduate years that the draft system gave unfair protection to the wealthy and educated. Pratt was the first one to act on that sense of guilt. As he got closer to going to England, he felt that he could not “in good conscience claim a deferment that nobody else was going to get.” He had friends who were graduating and not receiving deferments. Subcon-sciously, he said later, he was comparing himself to them. “I did not see myself as special. So I went to the local Army recruiter and signed up for officer training school.” While his colleagues prepared to set sail for the British Isles, Pratt reported for basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana.
First In His Class Page 16
