First In His Class (20 page)

Some young
men were rendered speechless, ecstatic, the moment they
learned they had been chosen as Rhodes Scholars, a prize that would rank them first in their generational class. Walter Pratt was so overwhelmed that when his plane arrived back in Jackson, “they opened the door and I was about to step out without the stairs being there. It was euphoria of that kind.” Up at the New England regional in Boston, when Dartmouth friends Robert Reich and John Isaacson were driving back to school after being selected, they were stunned silent until they got about thirty miles north of Boston and then, according to Reich, “we just howled and howled with laughter.” Willy Fletcher of Seattle and his colleague from Washington State, Frank Aller, rode a Greyhound bus back from Portland up through western Washington, shocked that they had both been selected. Fletcher would never forget the moment when they got off the bus in Centralia, where he was going to spend the night at his girlfriend's house. “Frank got off for a moment to meet her, and we were standing there next to the bus in the Northwest drizzle and I suddenly felt overwhelmed. It was the best moment of all. We had been anointed. We were awed and bewildered. It seemed that the whole world was in front of us.”

In New Orleans, after leaving the interview with the local reporter, Clinton turned to Marshall with tears in his eyes. Sobbing,
he spoke
lovingly of Roger Clinton, and said he was sorry his father had not lived long enough to see this day. Virginia Clinton had stayed home on Scully Street that Saturday. She would not leave the house until she had heard from her son.
He finally
called, and his first words to her were: “Well, Mother, how do you think I'll look in English tweeds?”

T
HE
house on Potomac Avenue was a two-story white stucco cottage with brown wood trim, nestled beside a vacant lot on a shaded slope high above the river. It had five bedrooms, one for each senior, with several bath-rooms, two upstairs sun porches, and a picture window in the living room that offered a magnificent view of the Potomac. The entrance led directly into the kitchen, which served as
the house
's gathering place. Though the five friends had hectic schedules, on many evenings they managed to get home for supper. Moore was the principal chef. He was, according to Kit Ashby, “big on pork chops and minute steak. Never got into sauces or stuffed trout.” They ate at the kitchen table, close enough to the stove so that they could reach back and grab a pan from the stove for second helpings.

Supper at
the kitchen table promised not only a well-rounded meal but often an engaging debate on civil rights or the war in Vietnam. Clinton was the house liberal on civil righfs—“a Martin Luther King man, through and through,” Jim Moore called him. He had memorized King's famous “I Have
a Dream” speech and when the mood struck he might recite whole stanzas right there during dessert.
He chided
Tom Campbell for growing up in a suburb with a covenant prohibiting Jews—as prejudiced, he would say, as anything back in Arkansas—and argued vehemently with Ashby over the federal civil rights laws, which Clinton considered historic and necessary but Ashby thought unfairly superseded the doctrine of states' rights. But the civil rights movement had shifted its attention by 1968 away from the ideal of integration and toward the concerns of poverty and black nationalism and economic power. As the larger debate grew more contentious, Clinton struggled to find his footing. Race had always been the issue with which he defined himself, as a progressive son of the New South, but now it was more complicated. The housemates talked a lot about black power and King's move toward economic power. They were difficult issues and Clinton, Moore thought, “did not seem clear in his own mind about them.”

On the
war in Vietnam, the ideological spectrum again ranged from Clinton, as a moderate dove, to Ashby, the Scoop Jackson protégé, as a moderate hawk. Moore usually sided with Clinton, while Campbell and sometimes Caplan joined in with Ashby. Their dinner conversations, perhaps mirroring debates in homes across the country, grew intense in late January and early February 1968 when the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched their heaviest attack of the war, the Tet Offensive, which started on the first day of ceasefire marking the lunar new year. By the old standards of body counts and positions lost and taken, U.S. and South Vietnamese troops prevailed during the Tet Offensive; but what the American public saw was a graphic picture of bloodshed and vulnerability, one that led a majority of people to think that the war had gone on too long at too great a cost. A Viet Cong squad attacking the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon, U.S. troops getting wiped out in the inner city of Hué, the Saigon police chief summarily executing a Viet Cong prisoner on the street, plugging a bullet into his brain—these became symbols of a faraway war spinning out of control. Public confidence in President Johnson's handling of the war dropped to a new low, with only 41 percent in a Gallup Poll saying they approved of his policies in Vietnam.

Ashby argued that Tet showed that the U.S. military was losing not to the enemy but to its own media. The media, he said, were trying to interpret Tet as negatively as possible. But to Clinton, what happened on the battlefield was in one sense beside the point. He shared the opinion of Senator Fulbright, who in a speech the month before had proclaimed that even if the United States won in Vietnam, it still would have been fighting an immoral and unnecessary war. “All that we are demonstrating in Viet-nam,” Fulbright had said, “is America's willingness to use B-52s, its napalm and all other ingenious weapons of counterinsurgency to turn a small
country into a charnelhouse.” One night they argued for hours about whether U.S. troops should be able to follow the enemy into Cambodia. “If it was me,” Ashby said, “I wouldn't stop at the border.” Clinton looked at it from a risk point of view, trying to limit the scope of the war.

Two weeks
after Tet came “Black Friday,” perhaps the single most important day of the Vietnam era for Bill Clinton and the estimated 226,000 young men who were then college seniors or in their first year of graduate school. On February 16, President Johnson and the National Security Coun-cil (NSC) abolished draft deferments for graduate students except those in various fields of medicine. The NSC declared that keeping nonmedical graduate students in school was no longer essential to the national interest. In a letter to his state directors, Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, said the graduate school deferments were being eliminated because they represented one of the obvious inequities of the draft system, allowing the educated elite to avoid military service altogether while sons of the working class fought the war. “Many of those deferments,” Hershey said, “can be pyramided into exemption from military service.”

Now, suddenly, the pyramid scheme was gone and the college seniors of 1968 stood exposed as the most vulnerable group in the draft. When a plan for eliminating graduate school deferments was first proposed by a national advisory commission on selective service, part of the concept was also to change the chronological order in which men were drafted, replacing the oldest-first policy with one in which nineteen-year-olds were drafted first and twenty-six-year-olds last. But Johnson administration officials decided not to change the oldest-first policy, meaning that not only would Clinton and his cohorts lose their possible deferments but they would be ahead of younger men who had no college plans. For those who thought that educational deferments had placed an unfair burden on poor men who did not go to college, the new policy seemed to address the inequity with a vengeance. Early reports indicated that some local draft boards had so many college-educated men becoming available that they might not have to draft any nineteen-year-olds at all. The year before, only 14,000 college graduates had been drafted. With the deferments gone, that number would rise to 150,000, officials predicted, with another 75,000 college graduates enlisting voluntarily.

For the young men in the class of 1968, the draft now became an obsession. It had been an occasional subject at the Potomac Avenue dinner table before;
now it
came up constantly. “What are you going to do?” was the essential question.

Tom Campbell had resolved it the previous year by signing up to train as a pilot for the Marines. To learn to fly, he was willing to risk being sent to Vietnam.

Tommy Caplan had been knocked out of the college ROTC program after four years because of an injury and was undraftable as a 4-F.

Kit Ashby, though supportive of the war, was determined to go to graduate school and “fight off the draft” for as long as he could. Figuring that the military would find him sooner rather than later, he applied to the University of Texas graduate business school in his home state, at least in part because it was less expensive than an Ivy League program.

Jim Moore, who had been accepted into the Foreign Service, thought the best course was to volunteer rather than take his chances with the draft. He soon signed on with an officer training program in the Army, hoping that he would never see combat: either the war would end or he would get called back for a slot in the Foreign Service.

The housemates agreed that the student deferments that had been sheltering them were inherently unfair. Clinton frequently mentioned all the boys from Hot Springs who were fighting in Vietnam already. But he also wondered whether it was right to force talented young men to fight a war they did not believe in when they would be willing to serve their country in other ways.
He often
spoke of a high school friend, a math genius who had dropped out of MIT, who was now cleaning rifles. “Is this the right way to do it?” Clinton's friends remember him asking.
In a
paper he had written for a law seminar that year, Clinton had concluded that the draft system was “illegitimate” because of its inflexibility. His paper explored the legal arguments “for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objector, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not simply to participation in war in any form.”

If there had been such a category, Clinton would have fit within it. He had devoted all his energies that year to winning the Rhodes Scholarship. Would he have to participate in a war he did not believe in rather than go to Oxford, where they were training “the best men for the world's fight”?

O
N
the first day of March the five seniors held the last grand party of their college careers. They lined the walkway and steps outside with miniature French flags for what they called The Hundred Days party, a double-theme affair honoring Napoleon's one-hundred-day return from exile
on the
isle of Elba as well as the class of 1968's final one hundred days of student life on the hilltop. There was nothing particularly rebellious at the party, yet that night somehow marked the ushering in of a new and uncertain time for the Potomac Avenue friends. Back in September when they flew up to Manhattan for Tommy Caplan's lavish birthday celebration, they were still clinging to an age of innocence. Now the sixties seemed to be coming at them hard and furious. Campbell felt a sense of doom.

Within two
weeks of the party, Senator Eugene McCarthy, carrying the antiwar banner, almost defeated President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, and four days later Senator Robert Kennedy joined the Democratic presidential contest, quickening the political pulse at Georgetown, an institution that still carried the memory of Camelot. “I run to seek new policies,” Robert Kennedy said. “Policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gap between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old in this country and around the rest of the world.” McCarthy, the laconic poet from Minnesota, reacted with hostility to this fiery new arrival on the presidential scene. He said he alone had challenged Johnson at a time when others “were willing to stay up on the mountain and light signal fires and dance in the light of the moon. But none of them came down, and I tell you it was a little lonely in New Hampshire. I walked alone.” Kennedy's move provoked another debate at the Potomac Avenue dinner table. Kit Ashby derided his announcement as opportunistic. Clinton, who preferred Kennedy to McCarthy, argued that timing is everything in politics and that Kennedy was smart to seize the moment.

When Johnson announced later that month that he would not seek or accept renomination for a second term, it seemed that change might come swiftly and peacefully. Then, on April 4, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed in Memphis, and some sectors of Washington went up in flames. From their protected place high on the hilltop above the city, Georgetown students were in no physical danger during the riots that week. Tom Campbell thought of it as “
a sort
of never-never-land up there. Everyone felt the authorities would form a skirmish line at the edge of Georgetown” if looters and arsonists ever got that far. Still, some merchants who normally catered to the Georgetown Gentlemen made absurd efforts to shield themselves from the fury. One pricey shop specializing in preppy sports jackets placed a Soul Brother sign of solidarity in its window.

There was nonetheless a wartime feel to the campus. A curfew was imposed from dusk to dawn. Hundreds of National Guard troops spent their nights sleeping on the floor of McDonough Gym. Every afternoon, students clambered up to the Gothic rooftops and watched smoke drift to the eastern horizon. Some students, including Clinton, signed up to help the Red Cross deliver food and supplies into the inner city.

One Sunday
morning, Clinton drove his white Buick convertible to National Airport to pick up Carolyn Yeldell, his friend from Hot Springs. Their relationship had changed in the past year. The girl next door used to be Clinton's musical accompanist, virtuous and naive. But that Christmas of their senior year when Clinton had flown home, Carolyn had gone to the Little Rock airport to meet him and gave him a welcome home kiss that was decidedly unsisterly. “My God, where did you learn how to kiss like
that?” he had said to her on the way home from the airport. “No wonder everyone wants to marry you.” That kiss, according to Yeldell, “put a whole new spin” on their relationship. Their letters back and forth over the next few months were more intimate, and when she flew to Washington for spring break at his suggestion, she arrived with a prospect of romance on her mind.