First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Aller was in Oxford on the day that he was supposed to report for induction in Spokane. His friends held a party for him that night at Isaacson’s place at Univ. Willy Fletcher, who had shared that moment of joy with Aller when they got off the Greyhound bus and stood in the drizzle in western Washington, freshly anointed Rhodes Scholars, the whole world in front of them, felt awkward at the party. He was as opposed to the war as his buddy, yet he had slipped around it by joining the Navy, and Aller had met it headon and was resisting. Fletcher was experiencing “not only great admiration and love for Frank” but a feeling of doubt about himself and the course he had chosen. Aller was quiet throughout the night. Reich, who kept making toasts, later wrote that the evening was one of his most vivid memories of the Oxford years:

  I remember it was drizzling…. John Isaacson’s room was bedecked with flowers and champagne. We played Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen albums late into the night. At midnight we toasted Frank. He said a few words in response, something about the war, and friends, and America. By one o’clock most of us were slightly tipsy or beyond. I can vaguely see Strobe and John, gently guiding Frank out the door toward the bathroom. Hannah Achtenberg was in the corner, a bemused expression crossing her face. There was a sense of triumph, somehow. America and the war seemed sinister at that moment, and so foreign, and we so helpless to do anything about it, that Frank’s decision seemed to fortify us against it. Within that tiny room … amidst the pillows and champagne, I felt that we all had triumphed.

  Aller was the first one out of the foxhole. “We all knew how to work the system,” recalled Daniel Singer. “We knew what to do in the foxhole—to keep our heads down. We were going for a lot of ludicrous 4-Fs.” One American at Oxford was trying to eat his way out of military service. A former Yale classmate of Singer and Talbott’s had starved himself into a 4-F. It was not uncommon for Americans at Oxford to check into the Warneford Hospital in pursuit of psychiatric deferments. Sara Maitland, then the girlfriend of Paul Parish, noted that “there was very much the feeling that no one was going to go and anything you could do was legitimate. But there was also the feeling at bottom that Frank was right and everybody else was cheating.” Fletcher thought Aller was idolized because he had done something the others had only talked about. “All of us in some form talked literally or metaphorically about resisting—‘What if I go to Canada or Sweden,’ that type of thing, the options. And yet we knew at the time that Frank was one of the few who would really do it.”

  Aller’s resistance marked a turning point for the Rhodes crew. Perhaps the change was under way in any case, but it became more ominous around then. Richard Nixon had campaigned on the promise of a secret plan that would bring the war to an end, but now he was president and his presence in the White House brought no prospect of peace. The hope that the war would be over in 1969, the year of greatest vulnerability for the scholars, appeared dim. The war was going on. There were more than a half-million American troops in Vietnam. The quotas of fresh inductees filled by local draft boards were rising month by month. Among the young men who had sailed away on the S.S. United States four months ago, the war and the draft were wiping out earlier sensations of awe and escape.

  Not long after Clinton took his preinduction physical, Paul Parish went to the military base at South Ruislip outside London for the same examination. Parish was so frail that many of his friends thought he would flunk the physical. But, he “failed to fail.” He returned to Oxford and began a grueling process seeking a conscientious objector exemption on the grounds that serving in the military violated his moral beliefs. One other member of their Rhodes class, George Butte, had applied for conscientious objector status even before he left for Oxford the previous summer and was granted it with virtually no challenge from his Phoenix draft board. Butte even got permission from a draft board in Maine, where he was scheduled to perform his alternative service by teaching at a school, to go off to Oxford instead and fulfill his conscientious objector responsibilities upon his return. But every local board operated differently, using wide discretion within the same national rules. One of the top draft officials in Mississippi seemed a difficult obstacle for Parish to get around. He had declared that no Mississippi boy was going to disgrace the state and that where conscientious objectors belonged was on the front line.

  As soon as Parish decided to apply for the exemption, he found himself struggling to maintain his equilibrium. He needed someone to talk to, and the person he found most available was Bill Clinton. It was not just that Clinton was sympathetic and enjoyed helping other people with their burdens; he was also the easiest one to impose on because he never seemed to sleep. Late at night, Parish would slip out the back gate of Christ Church, across the alley to the back of Univ on Helen’s Court, and up the almshouse steps to confer with his southern compatriot. Once, when they talked all night, Parish got locked out of Christ Church and crashed on Clinton’s floor. Their talks were filled with self-doubt. Clinton, according to Parish, would express his concerns that the draft system was unfair, “that poor people didn’t have the same access to networks of people who knew the ropes, to help them make the cases they needed or to pull strings for them.” Parish’s qualms were on a less political level, that he “might just be shimmying out of it.” Each of them wondered whether they would be able to live with themselves whatever happened.

  Parish covered his insecurities, the chill of Oxford, and the heat of the war, by transforming his exterior. He was the first in his class of scholars to affect a British accent and English mannerisms. With his wit and refined artistic sensibilities, Parish charmed the ruling-class Oxford set that circled around Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House. He fell in love with Sara Maitland, a delightful young woman who was four years younger, in her first year at St. Anne’s College, one of the handful of women’s schools at Oxford. Maitland had grown up in a generous mansion in southwest Scotland, but at Oxford she began rebelling against her aristocratic roots and found Americans refreshing. She immediately took to Paul and Bill, Frank and Rick and Strobe, and their friends, and began inviting them over to her rooms at St. Anne’s for Tuesday afternoon tea parties.

  If it is possible that a bigfisted, southern-accented, politically ambitious American was nonetheless born for a British tea party, that unlikely person would be Bill Clinton. His first tea party, with “young men and women talking about this and that, just being clever about something,” left him greatly impressed “by how well they all spoke and what an emphasis there was on it.” Maitland was equally charmed by the talkative chap from Arkansas. She considered Clinton “quite easily the most gregarious human being” she had ever encountered.

  Maitland lived in the attic of a Georgian terrace house at No. 9 Park Town, with a sloped-ceiling parlor where a dozen students might gather for tea. The sessions organized by “The Lady Sara,” as Aller and Clinton called her, and her college roommate, Katherine Vereker, were especially popular with the Rhodes boys. “It was a very good way to meet English people and especially English women,” according to Maitland. “The Rhodes guys kind of missed the sociability of women: Oxford was such a male-dominated society. But here it was free house. It was tea in the afternoon. It was talk. Lots of politics. Lots of literature. Bits of philosophy. How ghastly our parents were. Who was sleeping with whom.” They often discussed books. Clinton introduced Maitland and the others to the southern writers William Faulkner, Reynolds Price, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. And they were all reading Montaigne and Rousseau—looking for what Maitland called “the modern lessons in those essays.” Clinton took an immediate interest in Vereker, a stunningly goodlooking student of politics whose father was a senior professor of philosophy. They were a couple on and off, though never together for very long stretches of time. Vereker was not as taken with Clinton as he was with her. What people remember most about them is that they loved to dance together. Maitland remembered Clinton as “a very enthusiastic dancer.”

  Th
is was hardly a wild crowd, considering what wild implied in 1969. There was some casual sex, quite a bit of drinking, and the sweet smell of marijuana and hashish clung to their clothing as they gathered in cloistered rooms for late night parties. Cherwell declared that year that students were smoking more pot than ever. Cannabis was “incredibly easy to lay your hands on,” according to the report, which said that most pot was smoked by small groups of friends gathering in their flats. It cost between four and six pounds per half-ounce. Maitland places the Rhodes circle on the tame edge of the drug culture. “Nothing beyond dope, nobody using acid. Somebody may have tried mescaline. Some pot and hash in the evenings.”

  Martin Walker, the Balliol College journalist who was dating one of Maitland’s friends, said that hashish was even more readily available than marijuana. “We would scramble it into tobacco cigarettes. We’d take out the tobacco from a standard English cigarette, hold a match up to a lump of hashish, put it in, and smoke that.” Clinton was at many of the parties. He was with a group that went to a rock concert in London and smoked marijuana beforehand at a London apartment. Paul Parish, experimenting with dope for the first time, blacked out on the way down the steps, and Clinton carried him back inside. Decades later, Clinton would be ridiculed for grudgingly acknowledging that he had smoked marijuana overseas and then quickly adding the caveat that he did not inhale. Was it true? “We spent enormous amounts of time trying to teach him to inhale,” Maitland recalled. “He absolutely could not inhale.” The problem with Clinton was that he did not know how to smoke and could not take the tobacco, according to Walker, whose lasting image of Clinton at those parties is of the big southerner leaning his head out an open window gasping for fresh air. “He was technically correct to say that he did not inhale.”

  ONE day that winter, Charlene Prickett got a call from “this delightful, cheery young man who announced himself as Bill Clinton.” He had never met or talked to Prickett before, but told her that he had compiled a list of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every Arkansan studying in England. She was on his list. She had grown up in Batesville and graduated from the Presbyterian-sponsored liberal arts school there, Arkansas College, before heading off to Europe on a one-year Rotary International scholarship to study at Leicester University. Not surprisingly, Clinton and Prickett had a few friends in common. One was Sharon Ann Evans, the former Miss Arkansas, one of Clinton’s downhome girlfriends. Prickett had been Miss Batesville and had become friendly with Evans on the Arkansas beauty pageant circuit. Their other mutual acquaintance was Cliff Jackson, who was studying at St. John’s at Oxford on a Fulbright fellowship and before that had attended Arkansas College with Prickett. Jackson was now dating Prickett’s best friend at Leicester and had in turn introduced Prickett to her boyfriend and future husband, a Canadian Rhodes Scholar named Jim Waugh who was also studying at St. John’s. Jackson knew Clinton because they were teammates on Oxford’s subvarsity basketball squad, although no doubt Clinton would have hunted him down anyway in his pursuit of every young Arkansan in the British Isles.

  Clinton told Prickett that he wanted to visit that weekend. Fine, Prickett said, but she would not be there because she was heading in the opposite direction, down to Oxford, to see her boyfriend. Arrangements were made for Clinton to take the train to Leicester and sleep in Prickett’s bed. “I was toddling to the train station with my suitcase and here came this tall, gorgeous man with his suitcase the other way,” Prickett later recalled. “We met on the street between my place and the train station. He said, ‘You must be Charlene,’ and I said ‘You must be Bill.’” Her flatmates, three British women, were expecting the Rhodes Scholar. He charmed them all and started dating one of them, an undergraduate from the Midlands. All three British women, according to Prickett “kind of went ga-ga” over Clinton. “There was a little tension in the household. I wanted to stay right out of that. I wasn’t about to play favorites. I was aware that Bill had lots of friends.”

  As a way of returning the generosity, Clinton encouraged Prickett to stay at his place at the old almshouse whenever she traveled to Oxford to see Jim Waugh. Oxford rules then still prohibited overnight stays by members of the opposite sex, but the rules did not seem to apply to Clinton. Douglas the porter did not simply look the other way when it came to Clinton’s friends; he looked out for them and provided them with extra pillows and blankets and keys if necessary, such was the bond in the Douglas-and-Bill club. Prickett visited frequently as her romance with Waugh intensified.

  Waugh was in a singular position to witness the birth of an Arkansas rivalry that reverberated down through the decades, a onesided rivalry, in truth, that existed virtually without Clinton’s awareness yet in some ways became among the most revealing of his career—his relationship with Cliff Jackson.

  Jackson had sailed to England on the S.S. United States with the Fulbright fellows in September, one month before Clinton and the Rhodes crew made the same voyage. He suffered from seasickness on the way over and spent most of the first term at St. John’s College at Oxford cold and lonely, taking some small comfort in hot soup he cooked up in a crock every afternoon, unsettled by the darkness of the medieval atmosphere compared with bright Arkansas. He met Clinton in October when they joined the same universitywide subvarsity basketball team. They were both on the clumsy side, glued to the ground, yet as twin towers over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds, they brought some height and bulk to the lineup. As aspiring young Arkansas pols, they were opposite sides of the same coin. At college, they had each been class president, Clinton at Georgetown, Jackson at Arkansas College. In the summers they had worked in Arkansas political campaigns. Clinton was a Democrat, whose heroes were Fulbright and the Kennedys. Jackson was a Republican, who admired Winthrop Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater. They shared a yearning for accomplishment and a do-good urge of the sort that can grow in bright and hungry children from modest homes in middle America. “I am an ambitious person, wanting to reach the heights of success, and yet wanting to do something meaningful with my life,” Jackson wrote to a college mentor during his year at Oxford.

  There is no evidence that Clinton thought more of Jackson at the time than that he was one among scores of new acquaintances. But to Jackson, Clinton loomed larger. The more he saw of Clinton, the more he brooded. He realized that he and Clinton both wanted to go the same places in Arkansas and in the world. Clinton seemed so ambitious, so eager to please, so elusive to Jackson. When he watched Clinton in action, was he seeing a bolder image of himself, or what he would have to become if he wanted to make it? Did Clinton have something that he lacked? Did he want whatever it was that Clinton had? Those were the questions Jackson later said he was contemplating after a dinner party in Leicester that both he and Clinton had attended. After Clinton left, a few Brits at the table took out their verbal swords and began slicing him to pieces as a gladhanding phony.

  When Jackson got back to Oxford, he wrote his American girlfriend a letter ruminating on the dinner and the struggle between keeping one’s integrity and aggressively pursuing one’s political ambitions. His girlfriend offered the opinion that Clinton’s extroverted personality might be an attempt “to overcome fears of rejection and of insecurity.” The number of girls Clinton had dated while at Oxford led her to the conclusion that he needed constant reinforcement from the opposite sex. “Maybe he is indeed a ‘politico.’ That is something that he must needs ponder about,” she said. “You must find the happy medium, Cliff, where control of a crowd is through sincere attention and not cold manipulation. Won’t be at all easy.”

  Jim Waugh, who took neither side in the rivalry, looked at those same Clinton character traits and interpreted them differently. He found Clinton not so much manipulative as flexible, while Jackson was rigid. “Cliff had a personality that didn’t deal well with adversity, and I knew it well because it was similar to mine; where the people side of things is going wrong, the tendency is to pull back and wonder why people don’
t like me. Cliff responded that way. Bill didn’t. Bill came forward, and if he saw something wrong, he tried harder. Cliff pulled back when things were not working out in a human sense. He was a control freak. There was a sense that if there weren’t people involved, he would be the one at the top of the totem pole. But he had trouble dealing with the multitudes of variety of people. Not everyone is going to like you, so what do you do about that? Treat it as though someone shot you in the heart or as an opportunity to learn more about people? Clinton used it as an opportunity to broaden himself. Cliff tended to narrow down, and ultimately that led to wanting to get even.”

  For all their sharp differences, Clinton and Jackson shared one preoccupation: the war in Vietnam. Jackson supported President Nixon and hoped that he could fulfill his promise of peace with honor. But his intellectual endorsement of the war was not different in one respect from Clinton’s opposition. Neither young man was eager to fight. Waugh spent many evenings with Jackson in the Junior Common Room at St. John’s watching reports from the war on television. Jackson was always quiet and somber on those occasions, according to Waugh. “He didn’t say a lot when he watched the war. He was imagining: ‘What if that were me?’ rather than a Canadian like me saying, ‘Shit, what are they doing there? Why not get out?’ He was torn between his rightwing views and the fact that he could be the next guy shipped off, a concern not atypical of most other Americans at Oxford.” Jackson talked to Waugh about the draft. “It certainly was a big issue with him. He was scared of it. My sense was that he was doing everything possible with his connections back home to avoid it. It was something that would come up in our conversation almost every time we met. He would say he called so-and-so or had written so-and-so.”

  Jackson later denied that he had tried to pull any strings on his own behalf, but acknowledged that he was preoccupied and anxious about the draft—even though he was in less jeopardy than many of his American classmates. Unlike Clinton, Jackson had gone to Oxford with some protection from being ordered back to Arkansas for induction. He was classified 1 -Y, a physical deferment that meant he would be called up only in times of national emergency. He had received the deferment after presenting officials with letters from his doctors attesting to his allergies and vascular headaches. But he was a self-described worrier who constantly fretted that his draft board would reclassify him or that the war would escalate to the point where I-Y’s became vulnerable. “I was scared and anxious, yes, like most young men of that period,” Jackson recalled later.