First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  The stories of what happened in Prague in 1968 captivated Clinton. One of the Czech heroes in the face of the Soviet invasion lived in the same building, across the landing. He was General Bohumir Lomsky, a Czech general who had faced down the Russians by ordering them, in perfect Russian, to leave the Czechoslovak Parliament building. Apparently they thought he was Russian, and obeyed. Clinton’s hosts were well known in Czech political circles, and their story reflected the tragedy and intrigue of their nation’s Communist era. Jan Sverma, Jan Kopold’s grandfather, had been the editor-in-chief of the Communist party daily Rude Pravo. He died fighting as a partisan in World War II and had a bridge named for him in Prague at the bottom of Revolucni Street. Marie Svermova, the grandmother, was a member of the Politburo of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1951. She was purged from the party in the 1950s and spent six years in Communist prisons. Her brother, Karel Svab, once headed the secret police and refused to come to her aid when she was on trial. Jan’s father, Bedrich Kopold, was also purged, tried and imprisoned in the 1950s, and forced to work in the uranium mines. While he was in jail his wife Jirina says she was forced to sign papers for the Communist secret police, which later left the false impression that she was an informer. By 1968, all three—Marie Smermova, her daughter Jirina Kopoldova, and Bedrich Kopold—were strong supporters of Dubcek and what came to be known as the Prague Spring.

  When Clinton paid his visit, Jirina was working as a chemical researcher at the Academy of Sciences and Bedrich taught sociology at a technical university. The grandmother was home and had more time to spend with their guest. On Clinton’s final day in Prague, she took him on a long stroll through the old city, chatting as they made their way along the cobbled streets. She later wrote in her calendar: “I went with Bill to the Strahov Library and the Loretta [monastery].” Marie Smermova knew no English, so she and Clinton communicated as best they could in German, the language he had studied at Georgetown. Not long after he left, she was interrogated by the state security agents.

  Clinton’s final stop before returning to London was Munich, where he stayed again with Rudi Lowe and his family. There was more partying than politics as the grand tour neared an end. Munich’s six-week carnival had begun, and Lowe remembered taking Clinton to several masquerade parties and balls. “I still have a picture of Bill in his mask,” Lowe says. “What we mostly did was drink beer and have a good time.”

  THE trip to Moscow revealed nothing about Clinton’s loyalty, or alleged disloyalty, to his country, but it did reveal his loyalty to his mother, and hers to him. They were an effective political team, even then. The first telephone call Charlie Daniels made when he arrived back home in Norton was to Hot Springs. Clinton had asked Daniels to call his mother to tell her that her boy was all right. And within ten days of Clinton’s visit to Prague, the Kopolds received a handwritten thank-you letter from his mother. “My dear Mr. and Mrs. Kopold,” she wrote:

  —Sincerely, Virginia Dwire.

  I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your many kindnesses to my son, Bill Clinton. You made his stay in Czechoslovakia such a pleasure. I’m so appreciative. I guess children no matter how old or what size they are never outgrow their parents fret and concern for them when they are traveling in a foreign country. Bill is safely back at Oxford. We spoke with him Sunday. He had a most enjoyable journey but was tired from it and ready to settle down academically. If ever you are in the United States please favor us with a visit. We would be delighted to have you. Thank you again for your hospitality to one that is so dear to me

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  THE cast of Rhodes Scholars housemates and friends whose lives revolved around 46 Leckford Road early in 1970 was as eccentric in its way as the National Hotel crew to which Clinton had attached himself in Moscow. Here was Strobe Talbott, the studious Yalie, with his baggy tweed jackets and frayed collars and his thick black mustache, looking a little like a young Sean Connery, holed up in his room with an old typewriter, a Russian-English dictionary, and piles of transcripts that had been delivered to him in London by Time magazine, for which he had been an intern in Moscow the previous summer. Time wanted Talbott to study the transcripts, translate them, and write a preface for a book it was preparing. This was hardly the typical graduate student enterprise. There was an air of mystery around the papers, which had great historical weight—the private recollections of ousted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. To assist with the translation, Talbott brought in Yasha Zaguskin, who was part of Oxford’s small but vibrant Russian émigré community that included Boris Pasternak’s sisters. Clinton was in the tight circle of friends who kept Talbott’s secret.

  If Talbott threatened to transform the Leckford Road apartment into a Russia House, Frank Aller counterbalanced that with his fascination for all things Chinese. Aller was researching a thesis on the Long March of 1934-35 in which Mao and thousands of Communist revolutionaries undertook a year-long survival trek north across the vast Chinese countryside to escape Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist forces and establish a stronghold in northern Shensi. In search of intellectual mentors, Aller had developed a correspondence with Edgar Snow, then living in Europe, who was the first Western journalist to interview Mao and his comrades after the Long March and to tell their story in Red Star Over China Aller, angular and red-bearded, had a manner that was part West Coast hippie, part Asian mystic: the way he padded around without shoes, the way he sipped tea, the way he sat on the floor leaning against a pillow, smoking a cigarette or marijuana in the darkness, listening to Pink Floyd with his girlfriend. He seemed to merge his gentle orientalism with the intense moral demeanor of a draft register. Visitors occasionally encountered Aller sitting on the floor, using an ancient Chinese art of reading sticks to divine his future.

  Then there was the third Rhodes man in the house, Clinton, who “looked like a lumberjack” to Brooke Shearer, Talbott’s girlfriend. “He was big and burly and had wonderfully thick curly hair and a beard. But it became him. His appearance suggested that he was rougher than he was.” Shearer described him as a nocturnal creature who would read late into the night. Mandy Merck, another friend, thought Clinton’s face appeared older then than it would a decade later when he was again fresh-scrubbed. At Leckford Road, he “looked old and heavy-lidded, kind of tired and seedy. And he had problems. I took him to have a plantar wart removed from his foot and he threw up on me on the way home. He was not exactly Mister Suave.”

  Nor was he on the rhythm of someone studying hard, according to Merck. “You didn’t get the feeling that he was pushing himself to prepare for a course. He was reading and tootling the sax.” With his draft crisis behind him because of his lucky lottery number, Clinton was slowly easing his way back into the B. Phil. program he had been reading for sporadically since his days with Zbigniew Pelczynski. But there are no indications that he worked with a tutor during the middle term of his second year, and his attitude toward receiving a degree from Oxford seemed unchanged since November, when he had written to Denise Hyland that it was unlikely he would ever “pick up a parchment.”

  Perhaps Clinton’s field of study, unlike Talbott’s Russia or Aller’s China, was not one that Oxford could help him with very much. He was interested in political science primarily as he could apply it to his future. Throughout his two years at Oxford he maintained and honed his excellent political instincts, which alternately impressed and amused his friends. Sara Maitland, who later became a feminist writer, credited Clinton with helping her shed her political naivete. It happened one night when she sat in a pub near Leckford Road with Clinton and Aller and talked about Vietnam. “Frank was describing the effect that napalm had on people and I burst into tears. And Bill turned to me and said, ‘Bursting into tears is being liberal. Doing something about it is being political!’ I remember that as something profoundly instrumental in my life.”

  It was taken for granted among Clinton’s Oxford friends that his political style had a larger purpose. T
hey teased him about his future much as his Georgetown roommates had done years earlier. When the Khrushchev transcripts were published in the United States as a book entitled Khrushchev Remembers, Talbott sent a copy to Clinton’s old Georgetown room-mate, Tom Campbell, in which he joked about his Arkansas friend’s covert role in the enterprise. “As you know there is some mystery about the origin of these memoirs,” Talbott wrote. “In point of fact they were dictated to me by William Clinton, hence the tone and spirit of two shrewd peasants. The editors decided I should change all references to Orval Faubus into Stalin and disguise the real narrator Clinton into Khrushchev. The reason for this I promise was commercial and in no way political. Keep the secret.” The reason the joke worked was that even then, when they were all in their early twenties, Talbott from the Oxford years and Campbell from the Georgetown years both imagined a future in which their friend Bill Clinton would be as well known on the world stage as a former leader of the Soviet Union. The least they expected for him was a seat in the U.S. Senate. During a holiday visit to Italy, Merck sent Clinton a postcard depicting a bulbous, naked Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, astride a giant tortoise. “Senator Clinton will see you now,” she wrote on the back.

  The postcard, in a lighthearted but fitting manner, connected politics to sex. Did a hunger for the former correspond to an insatiable appetite for the latter? One night at Leckford Road, Clinton and Merck delved into a long discussion on that topic. The conversation at first focused on the tragedy of the previous summer involving Ted Kennedy and a young campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne, who had drowned after a car in which she was a passenger, driven by the Massachusetts senator, veered off a narrow bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and plunged into the water. Clinton said he had been around Capitol Hill and had studied that culture. “Politics gives guys so much power and such big egos they tend to behave badly toward women,” he told Merck. “And I hope I never get into that.”

  There was more to the shaping of Clinton’s sexual persona than his irrepressible political ambition. He had been reared by a mother who loved to flirt, who walked around in a tube top and short shorts and spent considerable time each day trying to make herself sexually alluring, and he left home just as the country was entering a new age of sexual freedom. All of this went into the making of the unbashful young Clinton. The cherub-faced, saxophone-playing boy of sixteen who had jokingly jangled his hotel room key at girl clarinetists he encountered at a band contest in Little Rock was now the lumberjack-bearded scholar of twenty-three playing strip poker in Oxford one night with four friends, three of them women. “Five of us were in the game and I knew that whoever didn’t win the game could be staying the night,” Mandy Merck later recalled. Merck won, but before she left, the other four players, Clinton included, were undressed. “I don’t know if the others were purposely losing hands or what,” she said. “But there was a sexual atmosphere to it.”

  In the sexual realm, as in most other aspects of life, Clinton was adept at employing self-deprecating humor and easygoing charm to take the edge off situations that might have turned disastrous for a clumsier fellow. One night he invited Merck and Sara Maitland to accompany him to a lecture at Ruskin Hall by Germaine Greer, the flamboyant feminist author who was writing The Female Eunuch. He told Maitland that he wanted to see Greer because he had heard that “she had great legs,” but that he would not go without women escorts. They came late and sat in the back of the cavernous hall. Greer arrived, tall and glamorous with a mane of long hair, wearing a close-fitting rawhide midiskirt.

  The highlight of her lecture was her contention that intellectual men were hapless as sexual partners and that women should go to bed with working-class men. Her thesis on class and sex “left everybody a bit jaw-dropped,” as Maitland recalled. Everybody except Clinton, apparently, who in the spirit of the moment asked Greer if he could have her telephone number in case she ever changed her mind about intellectual men. Maitland and Merck later disagreed on when and how Clinton offered this tantalizing proposition. Maitland thought it was in front of the entire audience during a question and answer period; Merck thought it was after-wards, when Greer had left the podium. But they agreed on the classic Clinton moment. “It was very Bill-like, that exuberance of what a good time he was having, and it was so much what every man was feeling at the meeting, and Bill was so unembarrassed about it,” Maitland recalled. “Mandy and Bill and I were all very pleased with ourselves walking home that night.”

  Merck felt so comfortable around Clinton that she turned to him when she was having trouble with her love life. He was, she later said, the first man to whom she came out as a lesbian. She had fallen in love with another woman but was devastated when the relationship started to fall apart. “I thought I was going to lose this person. The woman involved wasn’t in town, so I went over to see Bill and in the course of talking to him I said, ‘I’m involved with this woman and I’m afraid it’s not going to work and I’m feeling rather wretched.’ I was tearful, and Bill was all, There, there—I didn’t know you were….ߣ” Clinton soothed her. He was neither disapproving nor shocked.

  David Mixner, one of the moratorium leaders in Washington, visited Leckford Road early in 1970 and almost went through a similar confessional with Clinton. Mixner was gay but keeping his sexual orientation deep in the closet. He was fearful that if his homosexuality became public it would embarrass his family and get him “quickly shunted to the side” of the antiwar movement. Once when he thought he was being blackmailed, he went on a three-day binge of drinking and drugs. He contemplated killing himself. His friends, thinking that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, sent him to Europe on a speaking tour. During that trip, he stayed for several days at Leckford Road at Clinton’s invitation. He rarely saw Talbott, who spent most of his time behind his locked door. Aller was in and out. But Clinton was always around and spoke to Mixner for hours each day.

  They talked about dating women. Mixner told Clinton about his first lover at Arizona State University, who had died in an auto accident. It was a male lover, but Mixner feminized him when talking to Clinton. Clinton, whose father had died in an auto accident, wanted to know everything about the accident: how it happened, how Mixner felt, what it was like to see someone killed, what Mixner felt happened to people after they died. Clinton, Mixner recalled, “had a way of making you feel you were the most important friend in his life and what happened to you was the most important thing that ever happened.” At one point, talking to Clinton, Mixner felt tempted to reveal his homosexuality, to tell the whole story. He wanted to tell Clinton, Mixner said later, but was “afraid I’d lose him as a friend.”

  Clinton’s final months at Oxford offered him more than enough opportunity to play the role of comforting friend. The breakup of the relationship between Paul Parish and Sara Maitland was so tumultuous and life-changing that it sent first Maitland and then Parish to psychiatric wards. Parish was dealing with several tensions in his life: his relationship with his mother, his latent homosexuality, his efforts to become a conscientious objector, his loneliness in the solitary academic corridors of Oxford. One of the unfortunate manifestations of his illness was that he could not stand to be in the same room with Maitland. The Parish-Maitland drama received mixed reviews at Leckford Road. Talbott, in the midst of his Khrushchev project, showed little patience with the couple. As Maitland later put it, “He didn’t want roving nutcases around, and I can’t blame him.” Aller and Clinton were more tolerant. Maitland was treated at a hospital on the edge of Oxford, and Aller and Clinton rode the No. 1 bus out to see her several times. With each visit, they brought the Lady Sara, hostess of the most popular tea parties in town, a small pot of exotic tea. After Maitland was released from the hospital, Clinton decided that a visit to a hair salon would help calm her nerves. He arranged the appointment without consulting Maitland, who had gorgeous long hair which she really did not want cut. Although the visit did nothing to help her relax, she was heartened by Clinton’s concern.
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  WHEN the Hilary term ended in April, Clinton and Rick Stearns rode the train to Spain, the final leg of their grand tour of the European continent. Stearns, ever earnest, had compiled a reading list and suggested that he and Clinton study the Spanish Civil War as they traveled. They shared copies of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, André Malraux’s Man’s Hope, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit, and Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War. The journey invigorated Clinton intellectually much as the trip to Moscow had done months before. But there was another purpose. Waiting to see them in Madrid were two young women, Lyda Holt and Jill Thrift, both of whom had recently graduated from Southern Methodist University and were studying art at the Prado. Lyda and Clinton had remained friends since they had met in her father’s campaign for governor in 1966. Now they were trying to fix each other up with their friends: Lyda with Stearns, Clinton with Thrift.