Clinton was less certain about his obligations. His life seemed unsettled. He wrote Denise Hyland on September 23, ten days before he was to leave, that he had not figured out how to get his trunk to New York for the Atlantic crossing. “I still know nothing about the draft,” he added. “I am resolved to go and enjoy whatever time I have.” Denise was working that fall in the marketing research department of Chase Manhattan and was having second thoughts about the career she had chosen. She felt somewhat adrift, she wrote in a letter to Clinton. The corporate world seemed unfulfilling to her. She wanted something more. He told her he knew the feeling. It seemed as though their whole generation, their country, had lost its bearings. “To be adrift in a stormy sea is no sin,” he wrote. “Perhaps it is essential to really knowing yourself and seeking your future.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GREAT ESCAPE
ON A BRIGHT and crisp early October noon, “the best men for the world’s fight” assembled at the foot of West 46th Street in Manhattan for a most curious passage. There, at Pier 86 on the Hudson River waterfront along what once was known as “luxury liner row,” Bill Clinton embarked on a great adventure, certainly, yet one that found him advancing, retreating, escaping and searching all at once, sailing away from the fiery tumult of America in an opulent vessel from a bygone age bound for the sheltering, silent libraries of medieval England.
He arrived wearing a gray suit and was seen off by Denise Hyland, who boarded the liner with him and stood on deck for a few minutes. When she looked into his eyes one last time to bid him bon voyage, she was struck by his expression of awe—a sense of “Oh, my God, I’m the luckiest guy in the world!” The anxiety he felt about his uncertain draft status gave way to the thrill of the moment: here he was, the first from any branch of his family to graduate from college, now standing amid the academic gold medalists of his generation, headed overseas for the first time, carrying not a rifle but a sack of books and a saxophone case, graced with a mark of prestige that would brighten his résumé forever, retracing the path to Oxford and worldly sophistication that Senator Fulbright had followed nearly half a century earlier.
The S.S. United States with her razor-sharp bow and two massive funnels was an impressive sight as she edged down the river out past the Statue of Liberty to the broad ocean beyond. She was known as “The Big U,” an affectionate nickname for the biggest, sleekest American luxury liner plying the North Atlantic, a quadruple-screw turbine steamship that since her maiden voyage in 1952 had proudly retained the Blue Riband as the world’s fastest liner, averaging more than thirty-two knots and surpassing forty knots in occasional bursts of record speed. Fast and elegant she was, but also obsolete, destined for drydock within a year. The group voyage to England by sea had been a cherished Rhodes tradition, a rite of bonding, a decompression chamber of sorts from the New World to the Old, but it seemed out of date if not vulgar by now, when airplanes could reach the same destination in hours rather than days, and the world moved to a more urgent rhythm. The great ship and the elite young men sailed off together facing the same paradox. They were molded to succeed in a way of life that was vanishing.
There were dozens of other students sailing The Big U to England that month, including a sizable number of undergraduate women in junior year abroad programs whose presence greatly enlivened the trip. But as the voyage got under way, the first-year Rhodes Scholars spent much of their time among themselves, erasing and redrawing the invisible but palpable lines of highbrow versus middlebrow, Ivy League versus Land Grant, cool versus uncool. A historian among them once said of the American Rhodes Scholars that they go through several stages of self-realization. First, hearing the accomplishments of the others, they wonder, How did I get here? After spending five days together on the boat, the question becomes, How did they get here?
This might seem to be a hard crowd to intimidate. When “How Gentle Is the Rain” played over the sound system in the restaurant bar and Paul Parish blurted out assuredly, “Anybody know what this song is based on?” it seemed that the answer—“A Bach cantata!”—arrived from thirty voices at once. But beneath their surface composure many of the young men were struggling with a measure of self-doubt. George Butte, an English major from the University of Arizona, the son of Phoenix schoolteachers, looked around at the group of intellectuals and “felt like an outsider amid the mandarins.” Darryl Gless from the University of Nebraska suddenly assessed himself as “something of the provincial hick. I was really from the bushes compared to a lot of those guys.” The women on board seemed equally imposing to him. “A woman would say she was from Vassar or Barnard and I’d say, ‘Where’s that?’ and they’d look at me as if I were teasing them.”
Butte and Gless might not have realized that many of the fellows they considered mandarins were sizing up the competition and feeling deficient themselves. Robert Reich of Dartmouth, who made everyone else’s list of the most impressive figures in the brood, was “overwhelmed by the intellectual firepower and felt grossly inadequate” during the first round of mingling aboard ship. The others, to Reich, “seemed ready to launch their careers in the direction of ambassadors or presidents or university professors.” He felt that “a great mistake had been made by the selection committee in picking me.” Reich’s Dartmouth friend John Isaacson, a college debate champion, felt as unsure of himself as anyone, though he was certain that he intimidated some of the others. “At that age you don’t really know how to know about somebody, so you just try to talk your way through.”
Clinton was different. While others looked for one or two compatriots, he ignored the hierarchy that was developing and looked for friendships everywhere. He had an ability to walk into any conversation on the deck and immediately place himself at the center of it. Some of his fellow scholars took to him quickly. Darryl Gless thought that Clinton was “down to earth and altogether lacking in pretense. Aside from the self-deprecating humor, he was also an extraordinary listener. Others were good at self-presentation with a script to impress you with.” Others found him a bit too manipulative. Daniel Singer’s first impression was that Clinton “sought out everybody that he thought was informative or valuable and debriefed them. He picked brains.” Douglas Eakeley of Yale classified him as “a classic southern glad-handing politician.” Was he open about his political aspirations? Rick Stearns of Stanford certainly found him to be. “I remember meeting Clinton and him telling me within forty-five minutes that he planned to go back to Arkansas to be governor or senator and would like to be a national leader someday.” Then and always, these contradictions co-existed in Clinton—considerate and calculating, easygoing and ambitious, mediator and predator.
THE first day at sea was smooth and sunny. George Butte, virtually penniless but for the Rhodes stipend, in a burst of optimism rented a deck chair for the full five days. Bob Reich basked in the afternoon warmth, his feelings of inadequacy melting along with larger burdens. The assassinations, the war, the draft, the raging cities—they were sailing away from all that. “What a relief!” Reich sighed. After four years of college activism, he was feeling “a little burnt out,” and now, as they left America, he felt as though a weight was being lifted from his shoulders.
Reich was a formidable character, with his piercing blue eyes, his curly black hair, his quizzical, hectoring nature—“What are you saying there?” he would ask, never at a loss for words himself. He was a physical runt, only four foot ten, his growth stunted by Fairbanks Disease, a rare genetic illness in which the hip joints fail to grow fully. Yet he was an overpowering theatrical presence. Tom Williamson, like everyone else encountering Reich, discovered that “you put his size aside within minutes of meeting him. He was totally smooth in engaging you, and he did it without a chip on his shoulder.” John Isaacson, his Dartmouth classmate, was impressed by Reich’s sheer competence at everything but athletics. “He was a cartoonist, funny, quick, actor, director, academic. He could come into the newspaper office and type at eighty words per min
ute an articulate essay on something. I felt like an awkward child in comparison.”
At Dartmouth, Reich acted as though he were a peer to the administrators and sometimes as if he were their boss. John Sloane Dickey, the college president, relied on him for advice on how to accommodate the contentious forces of youth, from the antiwar radicals to the black power advocates pushing for their own studies program and union. They were quite a pair, the talkative little Reich and the six-foot-six Dickey, a graceful Dartmouth scholar who would lope across campus with his golden retriever. Isaacson thought that Dickey had “begun listening to Reich out of sheer amusement and later listened out of sheer necessity.” It might not have been entirely coincidental that Dartmouth devolved into chaos soon after Reich departed for England.
Reich made several forays into the larger world of politics during his Dartmouth days, working in Robert Kennedy’s Senate office the summer after his junior year, and returning to Washington the following October to participate in the March on the Pentagon, the one Clinton and his housemates had skipped. He served as a student coordinator for Senator McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign in five states and ended his college days by being selected from the multitudes for a Time magazine cover story on the class of 1968, placed on the cutting edge of a collection of 630,000 seniors that Time said included a fair share of draft dodgers and pot smokers but also “the most conscience-stricken, moralistic, and perhaps, the most promising graduates in U.S. academic history.”
At the time, Reich not only seemed more imposing than the six-foot-three Clinton, he also more clearly personified the agitated, rebellious mood of his comfortably born generation. Clinton brought with him the values of lower-middle-class Arkansas, not yet ready to reject an established order that he and his kinfolk were striving to become part of; not so eager to denounce American materialism when his family had never enjoyed it. Reich, who came out of the wealth and conservatism of suburban Westchester County, New York, fretted that his generation was being seduced by status and the accumulation of goods. He was rebelling against “status quoism,” he informed Time, and was promoting a new humanist ethic that allowed for self-initiative and creativity. “Destruction is the choice when creation is impossible,” he said, as a means of explaining the violence seeping into protest movements in 1968.
By the second morning aboard The Big U., a North Atlantic storm pushing twenty-foot swells sent Reich back to his cabin where he remained thereafter, immobilized by seasickness, “vomiting quietly and wondering how [my] forefathers made it across.” He was by no means the only scholar turning green. The United States was a rough-riding ship, designed with speed in mind at a time when the government thought it might be needed for troop transport. It rode light, fast, and high in the water, rather like a duck, rolling with the waves, undulating rather than chopping, its stern yawing.
Daniel Singer was also sick the rest of the trip: “It was horrible. I remember watching food slide around on the table. I spent most of my time in the hold.” George Butte never used his paid-for deck chair again. To Darryl Gless, a student of Shakespeare accustomed to losing himself in literary landscapes and castles dim and dank, the remainder of the trip evoked a familiar image, “one of extraordinary grayness.” Often penned indoors by the nasty ocean wind, the scholars and their friends set up camp in the bar and drank, smoked, and talked the days and nights away. It was in mid-ocean aboard The Big U, his stepfather dead and the memories of his abusive bouts of drunken rage buried with him, that Bill Clinton broke his long vow of alcoholic abstinence. Someone offered him a drink, and rather than automatically declining, he said to himself, “It’s wrong for me to be scared of this,” and he accepted. No longer “terrified of indulgence,” he became an occasional beer and wine drinker.
Clinton excused himself from the bar scene once and knocked on Reich’s cabin door holding a tray of crackers and ginger ale. “I thought you might be needing these—heard you weren’t feeling so well,” he said. As the story was retold and embroidered over the years, it seemed that Clinton devoted hours to nursing Reich back to health, forgoing all pleasure for the sake of a sequestered friend. In fact, Reich had several concerned visitors, and his wretched condition was one of the regular topics of discussion in the lounge, along with the draft and the war and the Democratic Convention in Chicago that August and the attractiveness of various young women aboard the ship.
Most conversations returned to each young man’s draft status and how long he expected to last at Oxford before the fateful induction notice arrived. “A lot of us whose futures were uncertain were going to Oxford by the grace of God and weren’t sure how long we would stay over,” Doug Eakeley said later. Hannah Achtenberg, a Smith College graduate on her way to St. Anne’s to study economics, spent hours chatting with the Rhodes Scholars in the ship lounge. She thought that “all the boys were scared stiff because of the draft. Some didn’t know whether they would last a month. Some were tortured about whether they should have left at all. Some were wondering whether they should ever go back. Everyone was trying to figure out how to manage the dilemma.” One scholar, Frank Aller from Washington, intimated that his inclination was to resist rather than accept induction.
Aller was at the center of the draft discussions, along with Strobe Talbott, who perhaps more than any other member of his Rhodes class captured the crosscurrents of the moment. Talbott was the cautious, correct, accomplished son of a liberal Republican investment banker from Cleveland, a straight arrow who, following in the tradition of his grandfather and father, was registered at birth for admission to Yale, and who would later become such an old blue that he would sing the Whiffenpoof song in the shower. Talbott had been trained at elite private schools for leadership by the establishment that was now unsettled because of the Vietnam War. At Yale he was Mr. Inside, close to campus officials and chairman of the Yale Daily News, at a time when the inside was in chaos, rebelling against itself. Disheveled and earnest in a prep school way, he was in the conservative wing of the antiwar movement and could never be a revolutionary. Unlike Reich, who painted his world with bold brush strokes, Talbott was precise and incremental. John Isaacson compared them by saying that “Reich saw nothing but forests, one forest after another, while Talbott saw every single tree in the forest.”
But Talbott was to Yale what Reich was to Dartmouth, a link to the administration and a student leader. He and his best friend at Yale, Derek Shearer, the son of the journalist Lloyd Shearer, met every month with Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, to talk about student social issues, including their proposal to make the institution coeducational. They also spent hours talking to Brewster about the war. Yale was one of the intellectual battlegrounds of the time. At Shearer’s invitation, James Reston of the New York Times visited the campus and, after having lunch with Talbott, wrote a column saying that the Washington establishment was in trouble if it had lost the trust of responsible young men like Talbott.
Talbott’s voice against the war in Vietnam turned out to be a surprisingly loud one. At the Yale class of 1968 commencement, he publicized a petition drive signed by four hundred of the one thousand seniors declaring that their opposition was so strong they would not accept conscription into the military. “Many of us simply could not, if ordered, pledge ourselves to kill or be killed on behalf of a policy which offends our deepest sense of what is wise and right,” Talbott said then. “We could not do so unless we were to betray our obligation to decide what is humanely permissible and morally possible for ourselves.”
Chosen to give one of two student speeches on Class Day during graduation week, Talbott directed his comments to the special circumstances of the young men in his class—the draft and the elimination of graduate school deferments. His class laced a paradox, Talbott said, for though it was “now no longer deferred and now faced with an order to report for induction, [it] is also the seat of the most intensive outrage against the war which it is being ordered to fight. This generation, after graduating
from studenthood to soldierhood, harbors the most deepseated opposition to the policies it is being ordered to defend.” Few members of his class had experience with the military, Talbott continued, but “all of us, the entire class of 1968, are in a sense already veterans of the war in Vietnam. We are certainly veterans of that dimension of the war which has brought such frustration and intellectual if not literal violence into our country, into our homes and into our lives.”
Now Vietnam reached them even in the darkest recesses of The Big U. When Talbott and his friends ducked inside the ship’s cinema to watch a movie, they found themselves confronted by John Wayne starring in the Vietnam glory film, The Green Berets.
There was another aspect to the voyage that seemed even more incongruous—in retrospect, deliciously so. Also aboard the luxury liner, making his own escape of sorts to Europe, was Bobby Baker, the ultimate Washington wheelerdealer, a longtime LBJ crony who had been convicted in a splashy 1967 corruption trial of income-tax evasion, theft, and conspiracy to defraud the federal government. Baker knew that he was bound for prison sooner or later, whenever his defense lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, emptied his ample briefcase of appeals. In the meantime he would continue living the high life. Baker’s set of first-class cabins lodged a traveling entourage that included some slick-haired sharpies in sharkskin suits and a few platinum blond escorts. “The whole scene was bizarre. Here were these bright academics slipping across the Atlantic to flee thoughts of the draft and Vietnam and The Green Berets is playing in the boat theater, and Baker and his boys are in the bar every time we go in there, trying to instruct us on the ways of the world,” recalled John Isaacson. “The whole crowd of us were appalled. They were racist and jingoistic and stupid. Here we were heading off as idealists and they persuasively convinced us that there was something sleazy and corrupt in the government.”
First In His Class Page 17
