First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  When he had surveyed Oxford to his satisfaction, Clinton began taking road trips with his friends. They called themselves the “Roads Scholars.” Clinton was known for his wanderlust: anyone who wanted to leave could call him and be fairly sure of landing a traveling companion. They hitchhiked everywhere, and used their college ties—or scarves, literally—to help them along. Each school at Oxford had a tie and a scarf, with the college colors. According to Mike Shea, “You’d put your scarf around your neck and get some interesting rides and conversations. It worked better during the daylight, when the striped scarves were clearly visible. One weekend Shea and Clinton hitchhiked to Nottingham for the weekend and headed back later than they had intended on Sunday night. It was raining and miserable and they stood by the side of the darkened road for hours before anyone stopped. Looming in the gloom in his long coat late at night, Clinton was not too inviting to pick up.” At the time, Shea thought he might be “a lot better off out there with Bob Reich.”

  Clinton’s frequent companion on the road was Tom Williamson, with whom he hitchhiked to London and back several times, and all across the United Kingdom, including a trip to Dublin to see the woman Williamson had been romancing since they met on The Big U crossing the Atlantic. The picturesqueness of the blossoming friendship between Williamson and Clinton, the only black Rhodes Scholar and the aspiring Arkansas pol, was not lost on them. At Clinton’s suggestion one day, to break up the tedium on the road, they reversed roles of the worst black and white stereotypes. When cars stopped to pick them up, Williamson sat in the front with the driver and ordered Clinton to the back, Williamson assuming the haughty airs of a southern master, Clinton the shuffling humility of a servant-slave. They enjoyed each other’s sense of humor. Williamson would poke fun at Clinton, saying, “You know, Bill, it’s really nice that you are progressive and openminded here in England, but if you want to go back to Arkansas and make a political career, you’ll have to make compromises. You’ll have to be a Dixiecrat.”

  Thoughts of Arkansas and his political future were never far from Clinton’s mind. That fall a large group of Rhodes Scholars took a bus up to Stratford from Oxford to see a production of King Lear. Darryl Gless, the Shakespeare student, sat next to Clinton on the ride back. Clinton talked to him about the play all the way back, relating it to his life in different ways. He told Gless that he was moved by the scene in Act III when Lear is turned out of Gloucester Castle onto the heath and takes shelter in a hovel where he encounters the poor for the first time. “That scene,” Gless recalled later, “prompted Bill to talk about his eagerness to go back to Arkansas—to give something back to the place that gave him opportunities that his family could not have bought. As we were riding home that night, Bill talked about his mother, a nurse like mine. He told me about his father and his stepfather, who had died, like mine. We were both from small towns in rural states. We talked a lot about our lives, but he kept coming back to his aspirations and the play. He was struck that Lear had been on the throne for decades before he learned the first thing about how his subjects lived.”

  Clinton had a fascination with how other people lived. Curiosity about the people around him was one of his strongest traits, the main intersection of his gregarious, empathetic personality and his political ambition. Some people watched Clinton in action and marveled at his big heart. Paul Parish could see it “any time you were with him and you met a third person, a friend of yours who Bill did not know. That friend would end up telling Bill things about himself. The kinds of things Bill brought out in people were the kinds of things you wanted to be around. People’s souls shined in their faces when they were talking to Bill.” There was another dimension to it. Clinton had already heard the stories about how Lyndon Johnson could tell whether someone was for him or against him with one look into the person’s eyes.

  He was always searching out more eyes to practice on. After watching him operate that fall at Oxford, John Isaacson, the Dartmouth debater who had political dreams of his own, was intrigued by Clinton’s political aptitude in artful conversation. Isaacson concluded that Clinton “had two moves, the Sponge move and the Radar move. The Sponge move was to soak information and give it back. The Radar move was Clintonesque. He was not so much a talker as a bouncer. He would try out different versions of what he thought and bounce them off you while looking at your eyes. That was his radar system. When the radar hit the eyes, he knew it. I remember feeling like he was throwing stuff at you and you had to react to it. It was charming and yet slightly annoying, like, what is this? People would say he was a great listener, and he was in a way, but you were on Bill’s topics when you were with Bill. Not that he didn’t have a lot of topics, but you were working in Bill’s territory. Big territory, but his territory. He was capable of keeping it that way. I was frustrated and awed by it. I was aware of it as a source of power. He was smart and morally earnest, and also a bullshitter who told stories.”

  How long could this leisurely life of nonstop bull sessions last? Clinton pondered that question one night in December, at the end of the Michaelmas term, as he walked the streets of London. He had listened to the symphony that night at “the majestically royal Festival Hall on the Thames,” he wrote in a letter to Denise Hyland in New York. Then he had crossed the river and followed the lights of the city to Westminster. He stopped, he said, “for a brief conversation with Abe Lincoln, who stands in the square,” then walked on to Trafalgar Square, then to the tube station and back to the Chelsea apartment of a friend. “It was a beautiful night,” Clinton wrote. “One good for putting the pieces of life together and threading the past through today to tomorrow.” Too soon, he feared, the Oxford idyll would be his past and the U.S. armed forces would be his present and perhaps Vietnam his future. He told Denise that the Selective Service System wanted him to take his draft physical in London in January. He expected to be called for the draft by March 1, 1969.

  FOR two months at Oxford it had been damp and cold, and it seemed to the Rhodes Scholars that it was as chilly inside as out. A forty-degree temperature there felt to them like twenty degrees back in the States. Even U.K. students from the north felt colder in Oxford than in their native realms. Wilf Stevenson, who had grown up in Glasgow, thought Oxford was worse than Scotland. “There’s a cold edge that comes off the Thames and hits Oxford, making it at times enormously cold and wet and horrid and dark.” Oxford was a fine place from which to flee when term ended and a six-week break began. The Rhodes Scholars scrambled across the continent looking for sun. Darryl Gless headed for Italy, “descending from the Alps out of the mist and fog and rain and snow and ending up in this sunny land where the people were sunny, too.” Daniel Singer went “ass-running … to Alicante in search of the warmest spot on the European continent, ruminating on consciousness all the while.”

  Strobe Talbott ventured the other way, to where it was colder still. He was the first of his Rhodes group to visit Moscow. The forty-eight-hour train ride began in Holland and carried him across the continent into Russia. He spent almost a month there, living at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. At Yale, Talbott had concentrated on nineteenth-century Russian literature and poetry. He was so earnest about it that in his first-year Russian literature class he bought two copies of the textbook on the Russian short story and cut and pasted them into large notebooks so that he could annotate every page. But his prep school literalness concealed a poet’s soul. He loved to read Russian poetry and tried to write his own.

  At Oxford, Talbott took an interest in the modern Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a lyric writer who became known as the poet of the Revolution, the Bolshevik darling who had a falling out with Stalin and shot himself in 1930. Talbott was in Moscow to learn more about Mayakovsky, and while there was granted an audience with the poet’s mistress, Lillia Brik. He also connected with some passive dissidents, who quietly shared their sense of despair with him. They took him to a Polish Catholic church and to a synagogue. “It was the depths of the Brezhnev period, w
ith the intelligentsia on trial, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had occurred earlier in the year, the depths of the Cold War with really bad cultural politics,” Talbott recalled later. “Moscow was grim, grim, grim.” In the midst of the grimness, Talbott started a tradition that all his friends who followed him there over the next two years continued. He bought as much Stolichnaya vodka as he could afford and brought it back to Oxford.

  Clinton made the longest journey during that school break. He went home to Arkansas. He had not planned to go, but Virginia was getting married again, to her third husband, Jeff Dwire, and Dwire had contacted him at Oxford and made arrangements for Bill to come back to surprise his mother. “Mother’s marrying a man who runs a beauty parlor,” is how Hannah Achtenberg recalled Clinton breaking the news to his Oxford friends. Achtenberg was touched by Clinton’s utter lack of self-consciousness about it. He did not say businessman or entrepreneur—“he just said the man ran a beauty parlor.”

  Dwire, in fact, had once run the most popular beauty parlor in Hot Springs, where he charmed Virginia and scores of devoted clients and traded gossip with them. He was responsible for creating Virginia’s trademark coiffure, persuading her to keep the white racing-stripe streak in her hair by dyeing the hair around it. Dwire was a divorced handyman with a decidedly checkered past. In the early 1960s, he had been convicted in a stock-swindling case and served nine months in prison. Some of Virginia’s friends were shocked and disappointed that she would consider marrying an excon. Many of Dwire’s former clients were surprised that he would choose Virginia from among the many women he had charmed. With his sweptback slick hair, long sideburns, and soft, charming demeanor, Dwire embodied the contradictions of Hot Springs, the town of secrets and vapors and ancient corruption, and the two sides of Virginia, who worshiped her high-achieving son, yet was attracted to horse racing, gambling, and fast-talking men.

  In a letter to Denise Hyland, Clinton said his mother had never seemed so happy as when she walked in her front door and saw him. “The surprise came off,” he wrote. “She cried and cried.” Virginia had thought it would be her first Christmas without her son. “I had no earthly idea he was coming back. Jeff had arranged it. I walked in the door and dropped the mail, and stooped down to pick it up, and there were these two big feet by the door. It was Bill. They were lucky I didn’t die!”

  There were plenty of friends eager to see Clinton when he got home, including Carolyn Yeldell, who was back from Indiana University for the holidays. Since she had inadvertently seen Clinton kissing Miss Arkansas the previous summer, Yeldell had tried to quell her longtime affection for him. Now that Bill was home, she decided to give it one last try. Clinton invited her to a reception for his mother and new stepfather at the lakefront home of Marge Mitchell, Virginia’s close friend. As they were driving along, Yeldell turned to him and said, “Bill, you are still really interested in Sharon, aren’t you? You really do care about Sharon, don’t you?” Clinton said nothing. He would not look at Yeldell. He was not only interested in Sharon Evans but also in Ann Markesun from Georgetown and several other young women he had met overseas. “There was no answer there,” Yeldell says. “So I had to read the silence.”

  That night, back at her bedroom in the parsonage across the shrubs from the Clinton home on Scully Street, Yeldell sought out one final counsel. She fell to her knees and asked, “God, am I supposed to marry Bill Clinton?” The answer that screamed inside her was a resounding: “‘No! He’ll never be faithful!ߣ”

  TO young Bill Clinton, friends were links in an everexpanding network. Sharon Ann Evans, for instance, had introduced Clinton to Governor Winthrop Rockefeller the previous summer, and now, on a Saturday during his winter break, he managed to get himself invited up to Winrock, the Rockefeller estate. Although Rockefeller was a Republican, Clinton admired his progressive views on race. If Clinton broached the subject of his precarious draft situation with Rockefeller, there is no documentation of it. He does not mention the subject in a thankyou letter that he wrote to the governor a few days later. He was thinking farther into the future, past the draft and the Vietnam War to a time when he might have Rockefeller’s job. “Thank you for having me at Winrock last Saturday and for taking the time to talk with me about your work,” Clinton wrote. “Now I have a better understanding of where we are in Arkansas and what we should be doing. Now I have more sympathy for you. But I have envy too, because your hard won chair, for all its frustrations, is full of possibilities.”

  Few of the boys Clinton grew up with were in Arkansas that winter. Two of his oldest friends, David Leopoulos and Ronnie Cecil, had gone through the ROTC program at Henderson College in Arkadelphia and were now serving in the Army overseas—Leopoulos near Pisa, Italy, and Cecil in Korea. Phil Jamison was completing his training at the U.S. Naval Academy, none too excited by the prospect of flying helicopters in Vietnam but ready to go when the time came. Jim French, die handsome high school quarterback whose father was a respected physician in Hot Springs, was at the Marine Corps officer training school at Quantico. French’s neighbor and friend, little Mike Thomas, a kid who kept getting cut from the high school football team but never gave up, had just arrived in Vietnam to lead a long-range reconnaissance platoon for the 1st Cavalry after being trained in jungle warfare in Panama. Bert Jeffries, the son of Clinton’s Sunday school teacher at Park Place Baptist Church, was up near the demilitarized zone with a Marine Corps recoilless rifle platoon. Duke Watts and Ira Stone were also with the Marines near the DMZ.

  Two soldiers from the Hot Springs High School class of 1964 were already back from Vietnam. Tony Fuller and Tommy Young had come home in caskets.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FEELING THE DRAFT

  THE DAY WHEN Bill Clinton would have to confront his military obligation was looming. Sometimes it appeared close at hand, sometimes further away. Almost every month his expectations shifted. During his surprise trip home to Hot Springs for Christmas, he must have had contact with the Garland County Draft Board or picked up a hint of inside information from his new stepfather, Jeff Dwire, who was in frequent contact with the board secretary, because he would return to Oxford believing that his induction might be delayed several more months. “Time to get back to my other newer life for whatever time I have left,” he wrote to Denise Hyland after watching the New Year’s Day bowl games on television at his mother’s house. “Looks like I will finish the year now.”

  But not long after he arrived back at Oxford for the second eight-week term, it seemed less likely that he would finish the year. On January 13, 1969, eight months after his draft board first reclassified him 1-A, Clinton finally took his preinduction armed forces physical examination at a U.S. air base near London. In a letter to Hyland, he noted that he had passed the physical and now “qualified as one of the healthiest men in the western world.” The order to take the preinduction physical was a signal that his draft board considered Clinton’s induction imminent. Draft regulations allowed graduate students who received induction notices to finish the term they were in, but there was some confusion as to how that would be interpreted at Oxford, which worked on a three-term system. It remained unclear what Clinton would do. If only, he told one friend, the draft system had been reformed in the way he once proposed in a paper written at Georgetown, so that young men could seek alternative service in the Peace Corps or Vista rather than fight in wars that they did not believe in. There was no such choice for him now if and when the draft board called his name.

  Still, the decision was not yet upon him. For Frank Aller, the Rhodes Scholar from Washington State, the time for action had arrived. Aller, an aspiring journalist, had received a notice from his hometown draft board in Spokane ordering him to report for induction into the Army. He could not claim to be a conscientious objector, Aller told friends, because he believed that some wars were worth fighting, though not the war in Vietnam. His friends sensed Aller’s turmoil. They stayed up late at night with him and took long walks through the M
agdalen deer park talking about the options of resisting and maybe going to Sweden or Canada. Aller chose to stay in Oxford and fight the U.S. Selective Service System. On January 20, he mailed a letter to his draft board saying that he could not in good conscience report for military service. “I believe there are times,” Aller wrote, “when concerned men can no longer remain obedient.” He later explained his motivations in a letter to Brooke Shearer, Derek Shearer’s sister and Strobe Talbott’s girlfriend and future wife:

  When I decided to refuse induction … there were really two considerations which were foremost in my mind. One was the hope, expressed by the resistance movement on the west coast and elsewhere, that the spectacle of young men refusing to fight in a war they opposed would “move the conscience of America” and have some kind of tangible impact on American politics. The other consideration was more personal: an expression of the horror and revulsion we have all felt about the war, and the belief that a person should try to take action in accordance with his convictions.

  Of all the Americans at Oxford, Aller presented the most interesting juxtaposition with Clinton. They seemed alike in some ways: two bright young men out of the middle class, tall and engaging, gentle and empathetic, consumed by politics and world affairs, readers, talkers, listeners, always at the center of things. All of this they had in common, yet they were very different. Aller was thin, resolute, and fragileseeming; Clinton was lumpy and unbreakable. Aller was sweet and ironic, shaped by the reserve and skepticism of Pacific Northwest Presbyterianism, prone to quiet mood shifts. Clinton was warm, temperamental, and sappy, shaped by the gregariousness and face-value Baptist piety of his Arkansas roots and freewheeling Hot Springs. For Aller, every moment presented a moral choice. Clinton confronted life as an optimist: each moment offered an opportunity.