First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  While still in Oslo, Clinton had another innocuous encounter that later became the subject of a joke that in turn fueled a rumor that was exaggerated down through the years. The meeting was with James Durham, an old acquaintance from Hot Springs. The false rumor was that during their meeting, Clinton broached the subject of staying in Scandinavia and renouncing his American citizenship. Apparently it was that bogus rumor that excited certain Republican officials so much during the 1992 campaign that they searched Clinton’s passport files in a State Department warehouse to see if any documents there offered clues to his alleged flirtation with apostasy.

  James Durham was another Hot Springs golden boy, a brilliant student and track star in the class ahead of Clinton’s who was studying biophysics at the University of Oslo on a Fulbright fellowship. During his time in Norway, he had gone native. He had joined the Norwegian national rowing team. He dreamt every night in Norwegian. He became enchanted with Scandinavian socialism and for a time embraced pacifism. He attempted, he said later, to become “a flaming radical—I was in Europe longer and immersed in those processes longer than Bill. I experimented in radicalism.” He told his parents he planned to marry a Norwegian and stay there. There would, of course, be a military consequence to any such decision. Durham had a low lottery number and was protected from the draft only because the Garland County Draft Board gave him even more preferential treatment than Clinton had received. He was still classified 2-S, protected by a graduate deferment for more than a year and a half after such deferments were eliminated.

  When Clinton arrived in Oslo, he had Durham’s address in his pocket, and went to see him at his closet-sized room in the student housing complex. “So Bill knocks on the door and I was surprised,” Durham later remembered. “He hadn’t called. I wasn’t expecting him.” They talked for a few hours, mostly about the draft and Vietnam. Durham said that he still had a deferment and was not sure what he would do next. Clinton said he was 1-A but had a high lottery number and was planning to return to the United States to attend law school at Yale. It seemed to Durham that Clinton was looking for support and encouragement that he was “doing the right thing by going back.” The two young men from Hot Springs agreed on most points, but got into an argument when Clinton talked about antiwar demonstrations. Durham opposed the war but did not like demonstrations. The argument did not dominate the discussion, and when Clinton left the apartment, they parted on friendly terms.

  Over the years, the argument between Durham and Clinton, which Durham had passed along to his father, a staunch Republican and Hot Springs physician, ballooned into an impassioned exchange during which Clinton said he was about to renounce his citizenship and Durham talked him out of it. That version became more popular in the 1980s when Clinton was governor of Arkansas and Durham jokingly evoked the Oslo meeting to members of his family who were complaining about Clinton’s actions in Little Rock. “Well,” Durham told them sarcastically, “I did what you wanted—I sent Billy home!” By 1992, the rumor spread through the GOP gossip circuit that Clinton had once tried to renounce his American citizenship and someone had a letter to prove it. And Jim Durham, who had once talked of staying in Norway and marrying a Norwegian, which he never did, was now Colonel James Durham of the United States Marine Corps, with an office at the Pentagon, and quietly bewildered by it all.

  Clinton’s grand tour moved on from Oslo to Helsinki. Again he had no schedule or place to stay, only the name of a friend’s family and a telephone number. The friend was Richard Shullaw, a classmate from Georgetown whose father was deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in the Finnish capital. Richard happened to be visiting his family for Christmas when Clinton called and announced that he had just arrived in town after running into Father McSorley in Oslo. It was, Shullaw thought, as though Clinton “was just dropping out of the sky.” He was taken aback when Clinton arrived at the family’s small apartment down the hill from the elegant Georgian-style embassy. He had not seen Clinton since the summer after their senior year in college. This was a new counterculture version of his old friend standing at the doorstep in Helsinki. “He had a beard and curly long hair. He looked quite different from Mr. Cleancut America.” The Shullaws did not have room for Clinton so they made arrangements for him to stay at a youth hostel downtown. But he ate most of his meals, including a quiet Christmas dinner, at the Shullaw apartment, and Shullaw’s father paid his hostel bill, about five dollars a day.

  Finland was freezing, dark and wet. “I have found the world’s winter,” Clinton wrote Denise Hyland on a postcard depicting an icy Helsinki scene. But the tourist from Oxford was bundled up for the weather, warmed by his healthy beard, heavy boots, and a thick, oversized coat, and he and Shullaw spent several days touring the city. “We did not meet with a lot of people. We did not meet with peace groups,” Shullaw recalled later. “Bill was very much the tourist. We talked a lot about his experiences at Oxford and about our mutual friends. Bill always adjusted himself to the person he was dealing with. We had a pleasant, relaxed time.” Clinton said that he was going on to law school. He charmed the Shullaw family, especially Mari, the little sister, who suffered from a heart murmur, but met his match in Pelle, the Shullaws’ beagle. “Pelle did not care for Bill. He took one look at Bill and set off the most ungodly racket,” Shullaw later remembered. “The beagle wouldn’t shut up. Bill tried to make friends with the dog, but Pelle would have none of it. We have a picture of Bill sitting on a sofa at the house talking to us and reaching out a tentative hand to pet the dog on the head, and the dog making a move as if to say, ‘I’ll have none of this fellow!’ Mother was quite embarrassed about it. Pelle was one friend Bill could not make.”

  Two men who decades later would run against each other for president of the United States were trying, separately, to enter the Soviet Union on December 31, 1969, the final day of the sixties decade. One was H. Ross Perot, then a thirty-nine-year-old Texas industrialist, who had spent most of December attempting to fly twenty-five tons of supplies to American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. Perot had been rebuffed in South-east Asia and now sat in Copenhagen, his chartered Boeing 707 loaded and ready to go, waiting to hear whether the Soviets would grant him a visa so that he could carry out his alternative plan—to fly to Moscow and have the supplies delivered to the POWs by Soviet postal authorities. On the evening of the 31st, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union passed the word: no visa for Perot. That same day, Bill Clinton reached the Soviet border on the train from Helsinki. He already had a visa, easily obtained in London, where the Soviet Union was advertising for tourists. In the year since Strobe Talbott had visited Moscow, nearly a dozen Rhodes Scholars had made the trip, and more would follow in the spring and summer, making Moscow, even in the deep freeze of the Cold War, one of the most popular stops on the grand tour.

  Not that the Soviet government received the Oxford boys graciously. As Clinton later told the story, Soviet authorities searched the bearded young American at the border, perhaps suspecting that he was smuggling dope. “Upon entering Russia, he was requested to strip down to the bare skin,” one American who was in Moscow then recalls Clinton telling him. “The seams of his clothing were examined, and every single item of his personal effects was searched. They even examined his teeth.”

  Clinton was less sophisticated than Talbott in his understanding of Soviet communism, and of Russian literature and history, but he was not naive. He had read under the tutelage of Zbigniew Pelczynski, the Pembroke College don, and more recently undergone a cram course with Talbott and David Satter, the other Rhodes Scholar Sovietologist. Talbott and Satter engaged in a running commentary on Soviet affairs that tended to go over the heads of their classmates, but Clinton jumped into the discussions in the weeks before his trip and absorbed as much as he could. Their view of the Soviet Union hardened in later years, but even then it could not have been described as “soft.” “There was still a kind of residual leftism at Oxford at the time that viewed the Soviet
Union benignly, but Americans on the whole did not have a benign view,” Talbott said later. “My own view was that the Soviet Union was a monstrosity made up of an extraordinary number of fine people.” Clinton approached the Soviet Union with much the same perspective as he had Vietnam, as a place that was diverting America’s attention from solving its domestic problems, as “this giant country which was so completely absorbing all of America’s energy.”

  Moscow was dark when Clinton arrived, bitterly cold and drearily gray. He told his friends later that he was struck as much as anything by all the gray—gray skies and gray military uniforms everywhere he looked. He had one friend of a friend in Moscow, Anik (Nicki) Alexis, a young West Indian woman who had studied at Oxford and was close to Tom Williamson. Alexis was an intriguing international character. Born in Martinique, the daughter of a diplomat working in Paris, she was fluent in several languages, including Russian, and was studying at Moscow University. Clinton called on her at her university dormitory, got her to take him around the city, and saw her several times during his time in Moscow. Alexis complained to him that the Soviets discriminated against her and other black students, mostly Africans, at Moscow University, more than any other people she had encountered in her life.

  The National Hotel off Red Square was host to a colorful menagerie of Americans in the opening days of 1970. Late one night Clinton went into the hotel bar and encountered Charlie Daniels, a plumbing contractor from Norton, a small town in southwestern Virginia. Daniels was in Moscow seeking information on American servicemen missing in action in North Vietnam and Laos. He invited Clinton to have a drink with him and one of his associates, Henry Fors, a chicken farmer and the father of a missing pilot. Daniels later wrote in his diary: “We were joined at our table by Bill Clinton, a young giant of a man sporting a full beard, who introduced himself as a Rhodes scholar whose home was in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Bill was majoring in political science at Oxford, and had decided to visit Russia to get first-hand knowledge of Communism. Bill’s knowledge and ability to explain the inner workings of Communism kept Henry and I avid listeners until the bar closed at 2:00 A.M. Our ‘one for the road’ turned into a whole bevy. I’m sure glad we had only a few stairs to climb to reach our rooms and a spinning bed.”

  Before they fell asleep, Daniels and Fors spent a minute talking about Clinton. “We thought he might be a spy—this big fellow, friendly, constantly jabbering,” Daniels says. “I’m just a dumb plumber. Henry’s a chicken farmer. Bill could talk about anything. When we left him and were alone in our room, I said, ‘Henry, this guy, I don’t know what to think of him, do you?’ He fascinated all of us.”

  They were equally interesting to Clinton, with their down-home folksy ways and fantastic stories of international derringdo. It turned out that Norton was the home town of the famed CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down while flying his U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in May 1960. Powers’s father ran a shoe store in Norton in the same building that housed the offices of attorney Carl McAfee. “I got a son flying over Russia,” Powers told McAfee while sizing up a foot. “Hell, nobody flies over Russia but Russians,” McAfee responded. But when the U-2 plane was shot down and Francis Gary Powers was paraded in front of the world by the Soviets, McAfee flew to Moscow and helped defend him and arrange his release in a prisoner exchange. Daniels, the self-described dumb plumber, sponsored a grand parade for Powers when he came back to Norton. From then on, McAfee and Daniels were up for missions of intrigue together. McAfee was with Daniels and Henry Fors now in Moscow in the effort to track down some MIAs. They had planned the trip for a year, working through their contacts in Lions International and gaining support from the State Department. They had met with H. Ross Perot in Dallas earlier in the fall, and now found it ironic that they were in Moscow with their visas and Perot was stuck in Copenhagen with no way in.

  Clinton attached himself to the Daniels entourage. This bushy, bearded antiwar protester, this adaptable character who could make himself at home anywhere from the porter’s lodge at Oxford to his stepfather’s beauty parlor in Hot Springs, was now just one of the gang with the plumber and the chicken farmer and the small-town attorney looking for miracles in Moscow. “You wonder why Bill gravitated to us? He’s twenty-three and we’re on top of the best story in the world,” Daniels said later. “We’re driving the Russians crazy, the North Vietnamese crazy. So when he finds us, he stays with us. He’s found a home.” He also found a setting at the table. As far as Daniels could tell, Clinton had no money and was hungry. When Daniels, Fors, and a Parisian couple assisting them, Jean and Pelly Sureau, returned from the French Embassy at noon on January 5, according to Daniels’s diary, they found Clinton back at their hotel room, chatting with McAfee, ready and waiting to join them for lunch. For the next two days he was sure to appear whenever it was time to eat or when he knew the group would gather to discuss the day’s events. There were, said Daniels, “no big secrets, we let it all hang out. We knew our vehicle was bugged. We knew our rooms were bugged. So when someone wanted to say something private, we’d give a signal and go for a walk outside. Bill was part of the action. If I went out, most of the time when I came back, Bill would be there. If we went outside to eat, he went with us.”

  The only thing Clinton had to offer the group was his understanding of the Soviet system. As limited as his knowledge was, he was not reluctant to share it. On the second day of their time together, Daniels again wrote in his diary about Clinton’s lectures. “Henry and I led Bill into another interesting account of his study of Communism,” Daniels wrote. “He talked of his studies of Marxism, the revolution engineered by Lenin, and the Purge by Stalin which led to his downfall. Henry and I listened with the avid interest of children hearing the fantasy of Walt Disney.” That conversation, according to Daniels’s diary, was followed by a hearty lunch. Soon Clinton brought his friend Anik Alexis into the entourage, and she proved to be of more practical help, serving as an interpreter in French, English, and Russian. The group arranged a meeting with North Vietnamese officials in Moscow, but failed to learn anything about Henry Fors’s son or twenty-nine other missing servicemen on their list.

  Senator Eugene McCarthy arrived at the National Hotel on January 6, another intriguing fellow on this curious stage. The antiwar senator from Minnesota, only two years removed from his campaign against Lyndon Johnson, was entertaining thoughts of running for president again, and joked about his ambitions with some Americans he met during an impromptu lunch on his first day in the Soviet Union. “I have to be careful what I say so that it’s not publicized that I’m starting a campaign in Moscow,” he said. His daughter Mary, a senior at Radcliffe, had accompanied McCarthy to Moscow. He said he hoped to meet with Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin to talk about trade issues. Kosygin left the senator cooling his heels, but McCarthy did get to meet Charlie Daniels and his gang. He came to their room in the hotel, listened for hours to their story, and agreed to try to help them by meeting again with North Vietnamese Embassy officials. Not much came of that meeting either, although the North Vietnamese were said to have received McCarthy more cordially than they did Henry Fors the chicken farmer. “That figures,” Fors said later that day, when told of McCarthy’s reception. “McCarthy has the reputation of being the biggest Goddamn peacenik in the United States!”

  Clinton bade farewell to his newfound friends the next day and boarded the train for Prague. He entered the elegant capital city of Czechoslovakia less than fifteen months after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact tanks had crushed the Communist reform movement led by Alexander Dubček, who had been seeking to create “socialism with a human face.” Clinton’s college at Oxford, University College, had a special connection to the freedom movement in Prague. Univ’s administration protected two Czech students who had been traveling in England and did not want to return to their country after the Soviet invasion. “We were all very moved by the Prague Spring,” noted John Albery, a distinguished professor of chemistry who
later became the college master. “I was particularly moved because my field is strong in Prague and I knew a lot of Czech scientists. It was happening in a beautiful European city. It was appalling—the sight of those tanks. We wanted to do something, so we set up a fund to raise money to bring in the two students to Univ College as the Russians were moving in. We raised money in the Junior Common Room and the Senior Common Room. The response was remarkable.” Tom Lampl and Jan Kopold started their studies at Univ the same fall that Clinton arrived. Kopold and Clinton became friends. Before Clinton left for his trip to Moscow, Kopold had written his parents in Prague to advise them that a friend would be stopping there in early January. “My friend Bill Clinton will come to Prague,” Kopold wrote. “If he cannot find an affordable hotel, he may stay with you. He has a wide knowledge of political systems and will come from Moscow.”

  Clinton stayed with the Kopolds for several days, saving whatever money he had to buy trinkets and glass jewelry for friends back in England. His hosts lived in a glass, chrome, and glazed white brick building in the Dejvice neighborhood. Their five-room apartment on the sixth story had high ceilings and a parquet floor and was filled with books. A balcony ran across the front of the building. Clinton had a room to himself with a window facing Freedom Square. He ate breakfast in the breakfast nook just inside the front door with Jan’s grandmother, Marie Smermova, and dinner with Jan’s parents, Bedrich Kopold and Jirina Kopoldova. Jirina served him pork, cabbage, and bread dumplings. He drank plenty of beer, as they all did. He toured the city during the day, according to Jirina Kopoldova, and stayed home with the family in the evenings. Bedrich Kopold took Clinton up to the roof to look out on the city. He also took a memorable stroll with the young American. “One time we were coming back from the Old Town and we passed by the U.S. ambassador’s residence and we walked and talked about the political situation of 1968, and he was very interested in it, and when we walked past the embassy residence I said, ‘It would be very nice if you came back as cultural attaché,’ and he said, ‘Why not?’” It would have been impolite for Clinton to say that he had far greater ambitions than that. Jirina Kopoldova raised the stakes and got a different response. “We told Bill Clinton one day he would be a senator and he laughed very much.”