First In His Class (26 page)

Fulbright sent back a short note.

Dear Bill: I appreciate so much your warm telegram. It was thoughtful of you to wire me at such a busy time. I am looking forward to seeing you on your return. Merry Christmas.

With all good wishes, I am sincerely yours,

J. W. Fulbright.

Fulbright seemed to have a soft spot for Clinton, despite the disastrous driving episodes of the previous summer and his disdain for Clinton's ever curlier locks. Long hair was selfish and counterproductive in the fight against the war, Fulbright would constantly tell his young charges.

The Vietnam War was another point of contrast between the Americans and the British. Most of the Rhodes Scholars opposed the war; yet during
their first months overseas, they were slow to immerse themselves in the antiwar movement. Many of them did not want to jeopardize their scholarships. There had been reports from back home that Lieutenant General Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, was attempting to punish dissenters by ordering the drafting of known war protesters. Others were still relishing the sense of escape that had overwhelmed them as they sailed away from America. None took roles in the large antiwar march in London on October 27 where there was a confrontation at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
British students
at Oxford, some marching under the banner of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Society, had gone to London proclaiming that the protest was “a rehearsal for the Revolution,” and returned frustrated that they had not stirred up more of a fuss. Chris Hitchens, who was also a prominent Oxford Union debater, one of those who argued that American democracy had failed, said the student socialists were “building up an important mass Marxist movement in the country,” but that the legion that went to London was somewhat thin because “nobody wants to get sent to jail at this stage of term.”

At times the fire was aimed at Rhodes Scholars, which frustrated them. They thought their British counterparts were grandstanding. “
It was
easy for us to say all these things,” recalled Martin Walker, then a correspondent for
Chenvell
. “But the Americans were the ones who really had to deal with it. For them, it was a deeply private grief. They had this threat of conscription hanging over them. They faced the draft. We did not.”

Walker's college, Balliol, which housed the most Rhodes Scholars, was the intellectual center of Oxford radicalism, the walls of its Junior Common Room lined with posters of black power leaders and burning inner cities. “People there were always shouting, ‘Enough talk, it's time for action!ߣ” recalled Daniel Singer. “It was an effete, supercilious characteristic of the Brits, when only the Americans faced a real problem.”

L
ATER
in his life
, when recounting his academic efforts at Oxford, Clinton would say that during his first year there he read for a degree in PPE—politics, philosophy, and economics—an undergraduate program requiring a series of tutorials and examinations in the three broad subjects. PPE was a popular choice at Oxford among Rhodes Scholars, including Bob Reich. But the archival records show that Clinton was never in the program. Uncertain about what he wanted to pursue at first,
he began
in what was called B. Litt, politics probational. The probational meant it was a tentative choice, the B. Litt, denoted a research degree program that required no tutorials or lectures but a massive fifty-thousand-word dissertation at the end of two years. The politics don at Univ was on sabbatical that term, so
Clinton was assigned a supervisor from Balliol. Such cross-college moves occurred frequently as students discovered that their college did not specialize in their field or that the dons in that subject were not available. Clinton was supervised by the Balliol don only in the loosest sense. The topic he chose for his dissertation was Imperialism. He checked out dozens of books on the subject from the college library and the larger Bodleian Library and read them in late October and early November.

In the middle of that first eight-week term, Clinton changed his mind and transferred to a B. Phil. program in politics, which called for more interaction with college dons: weekly tutorials, fortnightly essays, a shorter dissertation at the end of the two years, and examinations in four subjects—political theory, comparative government, and two electives.
He also
changed supervisors, switching to Zbigniew Pelczynski at Pembroke College, Senator Fulbright's old haunt. Students in the Oxford system are not necessarily supervised and tutored by the same don, but Pelczynski took on both tasks with Clinton. He was a soft-spoken intellectual of forty-three whose genteel life as an Oxford don was not something that had come to him as a birthright. Pelczynski grew up in Grodzisk, Poland, and as a teenager during World War II joined the Polish resistance. He was captured by the Germans but liberated by the British, and finished the war fighting in the Polish armed forces under British command. He came to Oxford in 1946 at age twenty-one to study political theory and never left.

During the fall and early winter of 1968, Pelczynski was lecturing on Soviet politics. He was an anti-Communist with leftist tendencies that were diminishing year by year. Although radical students regularly attended his lectures, they had begun to strain his patience. He thought that they “were always posing. They weren't genuine. They were always painting America as the bad guy, the bogey, and they gave me hell on political theory. They would get up and quote Marx. Once I'd had enough and I said, ‘Well, you're not going to give me this Marxist shit again!ߣ” During his lectures on the Soviet Union, Pelczynski explored the totalitarian model and questioned whether it was still valid. Splits in the Soviet ruling elite suggested to him that it was no longer the totalitarian monolith of Stalin's day.

For his weekly tutorials, Clinton visited the Polish don in his old bachelor rooms in the North Quad at Pembroke. Pelczynski swiveled pensively in “the Egg,” his tomato red modernistic chair, as Clinton discussed readings and essays with him. They went through a mix of political theory and comparative government subjects: the presidential versus cabinet systems of government in the United States and Britain, the separation of powers, notions of democracy, and totalitarianism and pluralism in Eastern Europe. The tutor found his young Rhodes pupil engaging and sharp if not academically brilliant. Clinton was not the ablest American graduate Pelczynski
taught at Oxford, “at least not in a purely academic sense,” he would note later. “But he had a sharp analytical mind and an impressive power to master and synthesize complex material.” It was clear to Pelczynski that Clinton “had the mind of a politician, trying to figure things out, rather than the patience of an academic.” He was also “a rather effective arguer, on paper and verbally.”

Clinton wrote a number of essays for Pelczynski. He struggled somewhat with the short subjective essay form at which British students excelled. “What suited Clinton was the longer form, laying out all the different lines of thought and synthesizing them rather than independently developing his own line of thought,” according to Pelczynski. The essay that most impressed Pelczynski was entitled “Political Pluralism in the USSR.” Clinton had been given two weeks to write it, during which he read or looked through some thirty books and articles on the subject. Pelczynski considered Clinton's eighteen-page essay a model of clarity. He kept it in his files and used it later as a teaching tool.

In an essay that was virtually all synthesis, Clinton divided the writings on Soviet pluralism into three schools.
First was
the Totalitarian school, which came into prominence before Stalin's death. “This group does not accept the viability of factional disputes over policy issues or vested interests of long standing,” Clinton wrote. “Any divisions within the leadership are attributed to personal struggles for power, which inevitably will end in the triumph of one man, who, by his victory, returns absolutism and stability to the system.”

Then came the Kremlinology school, whose proponents argued that the Soviet system featured a continual power struggle among various factions who, if they could not achieve absolute power for themselves, sought to make sure that no other faction gained a dominant position. This theory was applied to the troubles Khrushchev had with his opponents in the Presidium in the early 1960s and his eventual ouster. “Kremlinologists go beyond the Totalitarian school in acknowledging a very limited but persistent kind of political pluralism in the existence of factions within the party leadership, factions which, in turn, are related to divisions within the bureaucracy and society as a whole,” Clinton wrote. But this theory was not without its weaknesses, he said, and was especially vulnerable to the charge that it was bogged down in micro-history.

Clinton gave no name to a third school of Soviet scholarship, which, he said, “begins with the assumption that industrialization and urbanization lead to the differentiation of society and the multiplication of interest groups. In short, a pluralistic society emerges, and with it, the demand and the necessity for more political pluralism.” In this theory, the Soviet Union might be compared to “a large Western corporation, with all the inbred
resistance of bureaucracies to change, plus the additional albatross of a past marked by the use of terror and the dominance of ideology, a past which lingers on into the present and could reemerge full blown in the future.” There were both optimists and pessimists in this third school. Some believed the Soviet Union would evolve into a parliamentary democracy; others predicted that it would either move gradually to more pluralistic politics or disintegrate.

In his summary, Clinton stayed on moderate ground, agreeing with Pelczynski that political pluralism did exist in the Soviet Union to a certain degree, and that many social forces—the intelligentsia, the youth, the peasants, the churches, the consumers, the nationalities, and the bureaucrats—had developed agendas “more or less independent of the priorities of the rulers.” This could lead to any one of six futures for the Soviet Union: oscillation between liberalization and repression as the dictators deem necessary; immobilism and degeneration; continued domination by conservative bureaucrats seeking to maintain their positions within the system; rule by a coalition of elites; evolution toward pluralism within a one-party system; or evolution to a multiparty parliamentary democracy. Although Clinton did not pick his favorite among the six alternatives, he implied by listing his favorite authors on the subject that he inclined toward the theory that the Soviet Union would either move toward parliamentary democracy or collapse.

“One final warning in closing,” Clinton wrote. “Any conclusions herein must be hypothetical and no more. Certainty is precluded by the volatility of Soviet politics, fragmentary evidence, questionable reliability and variety of plausible interpretations of available evidence, and this writer's very limited background and competence in this field.”

T
HE
scholar's life at Oxford was unlike anything the Americans had experienced. They had oceans of time and virtually no responsibilities that first year beyond the tutorials and occasional papers. The lectures were not tied to the courses and did not have to be attended. Even some British students were disoriented by this freedom. Martin Amis thought it could lead to feelings of isolation. Oxford,
he later
wrote, “is for the most part a collection of people sitting alone in their rooms, one of which turns out to be you.”

But for Clinton, who hated to be alone, there were plenty of diversions. Here he was, after all, surrounded by people who loved to talk as much as he did. Doug Eakeley's strongest memory of Clinton at Univ is a lunchtime scene:
Clinton lingering
at the long table in the Hall, surrounded by undergraduates long after the noontime meal is finished, chatting away. The
younger English students, Eakeley noticed, “were in constant fascination with Bill and he with them. They were so verbally facile. It was expected that you would not just eat and run but eat and talk and debate the great issues of the day until you were thrown out of the dining hall. Bill was always in the thick of it.” Clinton also joined a dining club run by George Calkwell, a Greek history don at Univ.
The informal
club consisted of six dons and fourteen junior fellows. They met in the Senior Common Room to eat, drink, and talk away the night.

There was another club that met more often, a floating seminar that gathered late at night in Clinton's rooms on Helen's Court, or over at Reich's on the other side of Univ in the modern Goodhart Building, or across the street at Frank Aller's place at Queen's College, or over at the Taj Mahal, a cheap Indian restaurant near Balliol College favored by Rick Stearns, who challenged the cooks to find a dish too hot for his palate. This club had no name and a flexible membership of Rhodes Scholars and friends. They would sit in the corner of the restaurant or in the shadows of their rooms, slumped on the floor, leaning against beds, warmed by a heater and some wine, and talk politics for hours.
The floating
seminar, thought Univ politics don Maurice Shock, “introduced Clinton to a central thing—that politics consists of making use of people you can trust who really are very clever.” The topics ranged widely, from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to the sorry state of American politics to the ideology of Mao Zedong to the British influence in nineteenth-century Crimea, but always, weaving in and out of the conversation, came their feelings about a war they hated and a draft they did not want to face. They were all “
quite fanatically
political,” thought Doug Paschal, and none more so than Clinton, who came to the discussions “with his antennae absolutely alerted and trained.”

But Clinton could never cast himself in only one role. He could play the expatriate at night with his American friends, yet move from there to an entirely different level of discourse as he befriended the ultimate source of power at Univ—Douglas, the college porter who had greeted the four Americans on arrival with such disdain. Douglas was a hardliner on the war and most everything else.
He intimidated
everyone, even the master and fellows at the college, whom he might order to get a haircut or tell to go to hell. Wilf Stevenson considered Douglas “a true martinet, an old-school guy. He was terrifying. His stern upbraiding shot like a bullet through you. But he was the guy who ran the college and he knew everything.” He knew, for instance, where to get formal attire or contraceptives and what rooms were available for guests. But it took some nerve to ask him about such matters. The first year, noted Nick Browne, “he might ignore you completely. The second year he might start talking to you.
Douglas was a classic of his time, the old staff sergeant. He had a way of seeing through people.” John Isaacson, after experiencing Douglas's hazing on the day they arrived, decided that befriending the porter was not on his must-do list. “I checked him out for thirty seconds and decided it was too much for me. I said the hell with it. I wasn't capable of dealing with him.”