First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Holmes did save Clinton from the draft by working out the ROTC deferment before the July 28 induction deadline. Though Clinton did not know him very well, Holmes was a straightforward, gentle father figure of the sort Clinton had long cherished, going back to his high school days with band director Virgil Spurlin. When in the presence of such men, Clinton was inclined not to say or do anything that would disappoint them.

  Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I did it for the experience and the salary but also for the opportunity, however small, of working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam. I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there was a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did.

  Clinton rewrites his own history here. When he began working in the documents room at the foreign relations committee in the fall of 1966, he had no strong feelings about the war and leaned toward support of President Johnson’s position. There is no doubt that he studied the issue while he was there and dramatically changed his position over two years, but his opposition to the war was fairly quiet. No one at Georgetown University considered him an antiwar activist. Father McSorley, the leading peace activist on campus, had never met Clinton during his undergraduate years; their first encounter was at the London demonstrations that fall.

  I have written and spoken and marched against the war. One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine. After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans here for demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16.

  Again, apparently for dramatic effect, Clinton overstates his role. He did not travel to England primarily to organize for the October and November demonstrations, but he did help organize the Americans at Oxford once he was there. The “close friend of mine” he refers to as a national organizer of the moratorium apparently was David Mixner. Clinton had met Mixner only that summer. But Rick Stearns, when asked whether that qualified Mixner as a close friend of Clinton’s, commented, “It doesn’t take more than a day for Clinton to consider someone a close friend.”

  Interlocked with the war is the draft issue, which I did not begin to consider separately until early 1968. For a law seminar at Georgetown I wrote a paper on the legal arguments for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objection, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not simply to “participation in war in any form.” From my work I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation. The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case. Nor was Korea—an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.

  This paragraph is a crystallization of countless conversations and debates Clinton had had with his Rhodes friends over the previous year. The most revealing sentence is not his explanation of why he considered the draft illegitimate then, but why it was legitimate in World War II. Clinton and his classmates could not dismiss the memories of their fathers and what was considered the last good war. In claiming their moral ground on Vietnam, it was important for them to think that they would have been eager to fight in World War II. They felt mistreated by fate that they had reached adulthood at a time when their country was fighting a war they did not believe in.

  Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong. Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is one of the bravest, best men I know. His country needs men like him more than they know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.

  (George Butte and Paul Parish in Clinton’s class had filed as conscientious objectors. Several members of the class ahead of theirs were in the process of seeking C.O. status, including one commissioned lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. The letter of recommendation was for Parish. Aller, the roommate resister, was both a source of inspiration and guilt for Clinton.)

  The decision not to be a resister and related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system. For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead. I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years. The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway.

  When Clinton says he decided to accept the draft, he means accepting it in the sense of not being a resister. Some critics have focused on his desire to maintain his political viability as a sign of overbearing ambition. In the context of Clinton’s life to that point, it seems less raw, rather an honest reflection of who he was and where he was going. The final sentence reads more like Aller than Clinton, and was no doubt influenced by their long discussions during the week before Clinton wrote the letter.

  When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted you. ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance. Going on with my education, even coming back to England, played no part in my decision to join ROTC. I am back here, and would have been at Arkansas Law School because there is nothing else I can do. In fact, I would like to have been able to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.

  The first line here is a basic admission that he had been drafted in the spring of 1969, a line that somehow was ignored decades later when the letter surfaced at a time when Clinton was not acknowledging that he had received a draft notice. The rest of the paragraph seems somewhat disingenuous. When Clinton met with his Georgetown housemates the previous July, he left the impression with them that he wanted nothing more than to return to Oxford for his second year. His September 9 letter to Stearns underscored that notion as well, ending with the line, “I want so much to tell you we’re going back to England.”

  But the particulars of my personal life are not nearly as important to me as the principles involved. After I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm. Also, I began to think I had deceived you, not by lies—there were none—but by failing to tell you all the things I’m writing now. I doubt that I had the mental coherence to articulate them then.

  Clinton here reveals that he understands that deception can involve more than lies. In dealing with the draft issue over the ensuing years, he would be plagued more th
an anything else by what he did not say—omissions in his story.

  At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1-D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and loss of my self regard and self confidence really set in. I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep. Finally, on September 121 stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying to help in a case where he really couldn’t, and stating that I couldn’t do the ROTC after all and would he please draft me as soon as possible. I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it on me every day until I got on the plane to return to England. I didn’t mail the letter because I didn’t see, in the end, how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved. So I came back to England to try to make something of this second year of my Rhodes scholarship.

  This paragraph presents the basic contradiction in Clinton’s explanation of why he gave up his deferment. On the one hand, he wants the moral high ground of making himself 1-A, but on the other hand, he still does not want to be drafted or go into the Army and fight in Vietnam. It also again suggests that Clinton played the draft like a chess player and withdrew his deferment only when he thought it safe to do so.

  And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel. I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal. Forgive the length of this letter. There was much to say. There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait. Please say hello to Col. Jones for me.

  Merry Christmas

  Sincerely,

  Bill Clinton

  That same week, Clinton sent another letter to the United States. It was his application to Yale Law School.

  His lengthy writ of conscience did not find an especially receptive audience when it reached Colonel Holmes in Fayetteville. “The letter was the talk of the unit,” according to Ed Howard, the drill instructor. “We all knew about it. Lieutenant Colonel Jones advised us of the letter. He was more upset than the average instructor.” Howard, who went on to become a real estate broker in Malvern, Arkansas, in later years supported Clinton’s political endeavors in the state, but he harbored ill feelings about Clinton’s handling of the ROTC episode. The letter, he said later, only intensified the anger the ROTC staff had felt toward Clinton since he had failed to enroll at the law school. “There was anger again. Our feeling was that his conscience bothered him.” According to Howard, no one on the staff believed Clinton’s explanation that he abandoned ROTC because he wanted to be drafted. “I don’t think anybody ever took it serious. It was apparent to us that he used the dodger routine.”

  Another effect of the letter was the creation of a Bill Clinton heading in the Dissidents File at the ROTC headquarters in Fayetteville. The military during that era maintained files on anyone associated with the program who opposed the war. Howard said there was an intelligence network linking all the units around the nation. “If we had a guy from Houston or Austin demonstrating against the war, we’d clip the story and send it to Fort Sam Houston, Fifth Army Headquarters for the ROTC, and then on to the pertinent unit. A dissident file was kept on Bill Clinton after he wrote the letter to Col. Holmes.” The letter was the main document in Clinton’s file.

  As one who worked in the ROTC unit and later supported Clinton, Howard was a witness without any apparent hostile motive. Holmes’s reactions fluctuated over the years, ranging from benign to neutral and finally, near the end of the 1992 election, to openly hostile. When asked in 1978 to comment on Clinton’s behavior during the ROTC episode, he claimed that he could not remember any specifics. In 1991, his recollection was that he had treated Clinton “just like any other kid.” Early in the 1992 presidential campaign, he began to speak out, telling the Wall Street Journal that he felt that he had been manipulated by Clinton. Late in the campaign, on September 16, 1992, he issued a lengthy statement questioning Clinton’s “patriotism and his integrity,” and saying that he came to believe that Clinton deceived him to avoid the draft.

  The Holmes statement was written with the help of his daughter, Linda Burnett of Fort Smith, a Republican activist, and released with guidance from the office of the former Republican congressman from that district, John Paul Hammerschmidt. According to David Tell, a member of President Bush’s opposition research staff, he and several other Bush campaign officials reviewed the letter before it was made public. Although it might have honestly conveyed Holmes’s long-repressed antipathy toward Clinton, there was much in it that was illogical. Tell, in fact, was disappointed when he first read the letter because it was “full of rhetoric and precious few facts.” Most of the letter expressed Holmes’s outrage over Clinton’s participation in antiwar rallies. Recalling now in detail a conversation that he said he could not remember at all when he was first asked about it in 1978, Holmes said that Clinton failed to reveal his history of antiwar protest during their initial meeting in July 1969. “At no time during this long conversation about his desire to join the program did he inform me of his involvement, participation and actually organizing protests against the United States involvement in Southeast Asia,” Holmes stated. “He was shrewed [sic] enough to realize that had I been aware of his activities, he would not have been accepted into the ROTC program as a potential officer in the United States Army.”

  What Holmes failed to take into account was that Clinton’s antiwar activities came after their July meeting: Clinton could not tell him about events that had not yet occurred. Holmes certainly knew that Clinton had worked for Senator Fulbright, a staunch opponent of the war. And as drill instructor Ed Howard pointed out, Holmes’s ROTC unit was not above enrolling law students who were seeking a way around Vietnam. His unit, in fact, had grown considerably in 1969 precisely for that reason.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE GRAND TOUR

  IT WAS TRADITIONAL in the eighteenth century for young English noblemen to embark on grand tours of Europe before they got on with their futures. Sir Edgar Williams, the longtime warden of Rhodes House, a man of traditional tastes, thought of the Rhodes mission as “a modern version of the old Grand Tour” for the American scholars under his supervision at Oxford. During long breaks between terms, the scholars were expected to explore the continent on their Rhodes stipend. Whatever academic skills they acquired at Oxford seemed almost secondary to this notion of introducing the best men for the world’s fight to the Old World for which they would do intellectual battle. Clinton had traveled to Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, and Austria during previous breaks and long weekends; but now, for the Christmas holiday of his second year, he was ready to undertake one of the full-length grand tours, to Russia and back—five weeks by train moving in a circle north, east, and then west, with extended stops in Oslo, Helsinki, Moscow, Prague, and Munich.

  Clinton’s was not a nobleman’s holiday. There were no servants at his command, he slept at youth hostels more often than hotels, and he lacked the trunkful of formal attire, instead lugging a bag that held denim jeans and cigarettes to sell, trade, or give away as thank-you presents. He traveled solo, which was rare for him, though part of the Rhodes tradition—most scholars went off by themselves at least once during their Oxford years. But he was never alone for long: he rode the chuckwagon line, to use an idiom of the American West, finding friends, relatives of friends, or friends of friends at every stop along the route.

  The first stop on his forty-day journey was in Oslo. As he was ambling down the st
airs of the Oslo train station, Clinton noticed that Father McSorley was in the crowd directly ahead of him. Clinton’s strides carried him abreast of McSorley and he caught the priest’s eye. They had met only one month earlier at the antiwar prayer service at St. Mark’s Church in London. “‘What are you doing here?’” McSorley remembers that Clinton asked him, to which he answered that he was there to visit several peace groups in the Norwegian capital. Clinton, with no immediate plans, asked if he could come along. McSorley was delighted to have a companion. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and off we went.” In place of a tourist guidebook, McSorley carried a calendar from the War Resisters League listing the important peace groups in each European community. He had annotated his copy with advice from Quaker peace activists in London. Their first stop was an old Victorian mansion near the University of Oslo that housed the Institute for Peace Research, where they met several young Norwegians who were conscientious objectors opposed to Norway’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  McSorley and Clinton strolled through the university, lunched with a professor teaching the New Testament, visited another peace center founded by two actors, and drank tea at a chalet near the train station before parting. “‘This is a great way to see a country!’” Clinton said as they sipped tea. “‘You see as much as a tourist, you have an important subject to talk about with the people you meet, and you learn something of the process of working toward peace.’” Clinton’s comment stuck in McSorley’s mind so firmly that he considered using ‘A Great Way to See a Country’ as the title for a book he would later write about his peace travels around the world. That book, which McSorley published himself under the title Peace Eyes, offers a brief account of his afternoon with Clinton in Oslo. It was from McSorley’s account that Republican partisans during the 1992 presidential campaign began painting a distorted picture of Clinton’s trip to Moscow. Was it an accident, they asked, that McSorley and Clinton toured the peace institutes of Oslo, or were they in fact traveling together across the continent on what was called “the Peace Train”? The answer is that Clinton and McSorley were not traveling together. They met by coincidence. Clinton tagged along with McSorley because he was an insatiably curious fellow who liked companionship. From Oslo, McSorley traveled south and west, through Sweden to Copenhagen. Clinton headed the other direction, toward Finland.