Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502220003
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID MARANISS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The fallen Marine was now memorialized as a local hero. Clinton had been regarded in near heroic terms himself only a year before, when he had sailed to England as his home town's first Rhodes scholar, but now he was tormented about Vietnam. His mother noticed an emotional wall around him. She would gaze out the window of their brick rambler on Scully Street and see him shooting baskets in the driveway, hour after hour. At night he stayed up with his stepfather, Jeff Dwire, and talked about what he could do about the source of his turmoil: SSS Form 352, the Order to Report for Induction into the military. He had received the draft notice two months earlier during his spring term at Oxford.
Clinton felt conflicted. He would confide to Arkansas friends about his ``need to serve,'' an impulse, he would say, that some of his Rhodes colleagues could not understand. Yet he also felt a countervailing determination not to fight in Vietnam. His antiwar feelings went back to his junior year at Georgetown, when he had worked as a clerk for one of the centers of congressional dissent, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by his home-state role model, Sen. J.W. Fulbright. Clinton shared Fulbright's view that even if the United States could win in Vietnam, it still was fighting an immoral and unnecessary war.
Clinton's crisis of conscience spilled out in letters to friends, including Paul Parish, a Rhodes colleague from Mississippi who was spending the summer in Scotland and working on an appeal for conscientious objector status. The letters, Parish recalled, ``were all, `I could do this or I could do that.' The tenor was: It is almost impossible to see anything that appeals to the moral sensibility. ... All the choices he saw were corrupt.''
While still at Oxford, Clinton had begun exploring alternatives to submitting to the draft. He had contacted a friend at Yale Law School to find out what it would take to enroll in the graduate Reserve Officers' Training Corps program there. He had called friends back home for help arranging physicals for the state National Guard. And he had met with Cliff Jackson, a fellow Arkansan studying at Oxford, as conservative as Clinton was liberal, but seemingly friendly enough, a teammate on the Oxford subvarsity basketball team. As Jackson later recollected their meeting, Clinton told him that he had researched his situation and determined that since he had already received the induction notice, the only way he could enlist in a military alternative such as ROTC was with the approval of the state Selective Service System director in Little Rock, an appointee of Republican Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. Jackson had connections to Rockefeller, and would be in Little Rock that summer working for the state Republican Party.
If Clinton was scheming with Jackson to void his draft notice, he gave little hint of that to his Oxford friends. They bade him farewell in June assuming that he would not be coming back. Parish drove to Heathrow Airport with his girlfriend, Sara Maitland, to see Clinton off. It was, Maitland said later, ``just a mess. ... We had this tearful departure at the airport. It had all become an enormous emotional drama. Bill had decided to go. Was it the right thing to do? The wrong thing to do? It was all very stressful, going back to Arkansas.''
|n n| IN HIS FIRST DAYS HOME, it appeared that Clinton saw no choice but to submit to the draft. There was little time left. In a letter he wrote to Denise Hyland, his former college girlfriend, he revealed that he had been given a new induction date: July 28. The local National Guard and Reserve units, which had been checked out by his stepfather and his uncle, were full. ``I'm going to be drafted,'' he wrote to her on July 8. ``There isn't much else to say. I am not happy, but neither was anyone else who was called before me, I guess.''
But that mood of resignation did not hold. As the July 28 deadline loomed, Clinton renewed his efforts to find an alternative to induction. He took physicals for the Air Force and Navy officer candidate schools, but failed both because of faulty vision and hearing. Finally he turned to the advanced ROTC program connected to the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville, which had no quotas and was open to law students. The program had grown rapidly in the year since graduate student deferments were eliminated.
Lee Williams, Fulbright's chief aide in Washington, worked the telephone from his Capitol Hill office trying to arrange Clinton's enrollment. Williams, a graduate of the law school and a vehement opponent of the war, had tried to help hundreds of young men find alternatives to fighting in it. His papers, now part of the Fulbright Archives at the University of Arkansas, indicate that he contacted the director of the university's ROTC program, Col. Eugene J. Holmes, on July 16, after discussing the specifics of Clinton's situation with one of Holmes' assistants. At about the time Williams made his phone call, at least one inquiry came from the office of Gov. Rockefeller. ``Can we do anything to help young Bill Clinton?'' one of Holmes' assistants was asked. ``Probably,'' came the reply. ``Have him come and see us.''
Clinton, his hair trimmed, traveled up to Fayetteville that week to make his case. He met with Holmes at his home and with Lt. Col. Clinton Jones at the ROTC headquarters on campus. Holmes later said that his meeting with Clinton involved ``an extensive, approximately two-hour interview.'' Clinton did not tell Holmes that he was an opponent of the Vietnam War and of the draft. The next day, Holmes took several calls from members of the Garland County Draft Board telling him that Fulbright's office was putting pressure on them and that they needed the colonel to relieve it by enrolling Clinton in the program. Holmes decided to accept Clinton. The July 28 induction notice was nullified. The Garland County Draft Board granted Clinton a 1-D deferment as a reservist.
A few days later, Clinton wrote to Denise Hyland about the change in his draft status: ``On the 17th, eleven days before my induction date, I was admitted to a two-year, two-summer camp ROTC program at the University of Arkansas for graduates and junior college transfers. I will have a two-year obligation just as if I've been drafted, but I'll go in as an officer three years from now. It's all too good to be true, I think. There is still the doubt that maybe I should have said to hell with it, done this thing and been free!''
He concluded: ``If this letter is a bit disjointed and rambling, it is because I am not yet fully adjusted to the new circumstances and my apparent future.''
IT WAS NOT UNTIL CLINTON had signed up for the University of Arkansas ROTC that he became actively involved in the antiwar movement. In mid-August he traveled to Washington and spent several days with a Rhodes colleague, Rick Stearns, who was working on a commission headed by Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., reforming Democratic Party rules. He also visited the Vietnam Moratorium Committee headquarters, where activists were planning a nationwide protest for Oct. 15. Clinton had a few friends who were well connected in the movement, including Stearns, but he was on the outer edge of the antiwar subculture, according to David Mixner, one of the principal organizers.
The brief visit to Washington restored Clinton's spirits, but it also reminded him of how odd he felt in Arkansas. He wrote to Stearns a week later: ``I am home now, still full of the life that your friends and my friends and the city pumped into me. Before I forget, let me tell you how grateful I am to you for introducing me to all those people. Arkansas is barren of that kind, or at least I've found few of them. Maybe they have better sense than to traffic with such a naive, sloppy romantic.'' Clinton added that he hoped he could go with Stearns to a September gathering in Martha's Vineyard planned by young leaders of the antiwar movement. ``I need and would like like hell to be doing something like that.''
On the evening of Sept. 8, Stearns called Clinton from Washington. They talked about Oxford and the draft. Clinton said he felt guilty and hypocritical for having the ROTC deferment. Stearns was among the many scholars who had managed to get graduate school deferments for the first year, even though they were supposed to have been discontinued, but Stearns had recently been reclassified 1-A (available for service) by his draft board in California and expected to be drafted any week. Nonetheless, Stearns had decided to go back to Oxford for his second year.
``I told Bill that the only fair thing for me to do was to take my chances,'' Stearns later recalled. ``If I get drafted, I get drafted, but I wasn't going to worry about it. If the day came, it came. I felt that was more honorable than trying to connive a way of avoiding the whole thing.''
The next day, Clinton wrote Stearns.
``My mind is every day more confused than it was before; and countless hours doing nothing save waiting for the phone to ring are driving me out of my head,'' Clinton's letter said. ``Nothing could be worse than this torment. ... And if I cannot rid myself of it, I will just have to go into the service and begin to root out the cause. I wish I could describe to you the quandary I am in, so you could counter with some helpful advice - I have been here all summer in a place where everyone else's children seem to be in the military, most of them in Vietnam. ... You see, I haven't explained it very well - the anguish is not that apparent - I am running away from something maybe for the first time in my life - and I just hope I have made the correct decision, if there is such a thing. I know one of the worst side effects of this whole thing is the way it's ravaged my own image of myself, taken my mind off the higher things, restricted my ability to become involved in good causes or with other people - I honestly feel so screwed up tight that I am incapable, I think, of giving myself, of really loving. I told you I was losing my mind. Anyway - I'm anxious to hear from you. I want so much to tell you we're going back to England.''
Three days later, on Sept. 12, Clinton stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of the Garland County Draft Board, saying that he never had any real interest in ROTC and wanted to be reclassified 1-A and drafted as soon as possible. But if writing that letter was a cathartic moment for Clinton, it did not resolve his ambivalence. He carried the letter around with him for several weeks. But he never mailed it.
The series of events that led Clinton back to Oxford are in dispute. By Clinton's account, he talked to Col. Holmes and gained permission to return to Oxford for the second year since the basic training that he was required to attend before beginning advanced ROTC would not start until the following summer. Holmes said later that he allowed Clinton to return to Oxford for ``a month or two,'' but expected him to enroll in the law school as soon as possible. But a letter that Clinton wrote Holmes from Oxford in December 1969 in which he apologized for not writing more often--``I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month,'' Clinton said in the letter--is the strongest evidence that Holmes was aware of and approved Clinton's plan to go back to Oxford.
It may be that Holmes made a private agreement with Clinton that he was embarrassed to acknowledge years later. If he did, he apparently never told his subordinates. The rest of the ROTC staff was expecting Clinton to enroll that fall. Ed Howard, the drill instructor, later recalled that there was great anger when word spread through the office that Clinton was not on campus. ``A lot of people in the unit were kind of mad about it,'' Howard said. ``We did not know where he was. All we knew is that Bill Clinton did not show up.''
Cliff Jackson was among those angered by Clinton's decision. He said in a letter to his girlfriend that he was starting to suspect that Clinton's friendship with him was mere convenience. ``Bill Clinton is still trying to wiggle his way out of the `disreputable' Arkansas law school,'' Jackson wrote in one letter. ``P.S.,'' Jackson added in another letter, ``Bill has succeeded in wiggling his way back to Oxford.''
NO ONE AT OXFORD HAD EXPECTED Clinton back for a second year. When the American Oxonian, official journal of the Rhodes Association in the United States, published its list of scholars studying at Oxford in the fall of 1969, Clinton's name was not on the roll. He arrived in late September and slept on a rollaway bed in the corner of Rick Stearns' second-floor room at Holywell Manor overlooking a 12th-century church and graveyard. He was rootless, moving through Oxford with scruffy hair and a red beard and grubby Army coat. He seemed less connected to the establishment than at any other time in his life.
Within a few weeks of his return, however, Clinton's draft status changed once more. He decided to give up the deferment that he had worked so hard to get and resubmit himself to the draft. It is a difficult episode to sort out, muddled by Clinton's various accounts over the years, which tend to be incomplete or contradictory, and by a scarcity of documentary evidence. The essential question is not so much what Clinton did as why he did it. Was it a decision driven by guilt and honor that should be accepted at face value? Or was it the endgame maneuver of a draft-wise young man playing every angle to avoid military service without appearing unpatriotic or duplicitous? There is a temptation to choose one explanation, yes or no, rule out anything in between. But with Clinton, it is rarely that simple. A civil war raged inside him between his conscience and his political will to survive. It seems that he tried to appease both impulses. At times he might have been guided by virtue. Other times he deceived the world, if not himself.
The preponderance of the evidence leads in one direction: to the notion that with each passing week there were more signs that he might not get drafted even if he abandoned his deferment. In the weeks before Clinton's return to Oxford, the government announced several major policy changes concerning the draft. The most significant came on Oct. 1, when Nixon, seeking to defuse the antiwar clamor on campuses, ordered the Selective Service System to change its policy for graduate students. From that day on, graduate students who received draft notices would be allowed to finish the school year. Clinton was safe at least until the following July.
Even before that announcement, the wind of change was in the air. On Sept. 14, newspapers in New York, Washington and Arkansas carried articles quoting sources as saying that the administration would soon withdraw 35,000 troops from Vietnam and suspend the draft temporarily later that fall. On Sept. 17, President Nixon confirmed the troop cuts in Vietnam and said that he would soon announce a major policy change on the draft. Two days later, Nixon announced that the October draft call would be spread out over three months - essentially canceling the call for November and December - while the administration pushed for a draft lottery system. Young men, under the lottery, would be vulnerable to the draft for only one year. Those with high numbers would probably never have to worry about the draft again.
Clinton's draft records show that he held the 1-D deferment from Aug. 7 to Oct. 30, 1969. Those two dates mark the days when the Garland County Board met, considered Clinton's case and reclassified him, first from 1-A to 1-D, then back from 1-D to 1-A. These are not the dates, however, when Clinton took the actions that led to the reclassifications. According to the letter he wrote Denise Hyland, Clinton struck his ROTC deal with Col. Holmes on July 17 - three weeks before the board officially approved his 1-D deferment. Similarly, it seems certain that he notified the draft board that he wanted to give up his deferment and be reclassified 1-A some time before the official Oct. 30 draft board action.
The question of when and why Clinton gave up his deferment is important as it relates to his truthfulness in later accounts and what he would have known about his vulnerability to the draft on the day he made his decision. Twice in his political career - during his first run for governor in 1978 and in his campaign for president - his draft status has come under scrutiny. Both times he specifically said he never had a 1-D deferment. Neither time did he mention he had received an induction notice. In fact, in a 1991 interview, he left the opposite impression. ``I expected to be called while I was over there the first year,'' Clinton said in the interview. ``But they never did.''
There are no documents substantiating exactly when Clinton asked the draft board to drop his deferment. The best estimate can be deduced from statements made by Randall Scott, who worked with Clinton in organizing an Oct. 15 antiwar protest at the American Embassy in London. Clinton indicated to Scott that some of his high school friends had been killed in Vietnam and that he did not feel right protesting while he remained in what might be viewed a safe haven. On the day of the protest, according to Scott, he told Clinton that carrying a petition to the American Embassy was a brave act by the Rhodes scholars. Clinton's response was, ``And I told my draft board to make me 1-A.''
It seems likely from Scott's account, then, that Clinton asked the draft board to reclassify him 1-A sometime between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15, right during the time when he would have known that he was less vulnerable. In summary, it was a mixed bag of certainties, probabilities and unknowns that Clinton was dealing with that October. But it was not clear that Clinton had avoided the draft completely. He had, whatever his motivations, exposed himself to some degree of risk by asking to be reclassified. If the lottery came, his draft fate would depend on a number.
Luck would help determine the fate of a gambling town's favorite son.
TWO MONTHS LATER, on the first day of December 1969, the first draft lottery since World War II began at 8:02 p.m. in a small conference room at the Selective Service System headquarters in Washington. Clinton's birthday brought him luck that night. Aug. 19 was the 311th day picked. The yearly quota for 1970 was predicted to be about 350,000 men, which would be filled at least 100 numbers short of Clinton's No. 311. Although he was theoretically draftable for another year and at times he told friends that his draft board might still get to him, he was, in reality, free.
All that was left for Clinton was to explain his actions to the man who helped him at a crucial moment. On Dec. 3, he wrote a letter to Col. Holmes that would later emerge as the best known essay of Clinton's life, the testament of a bright, troubled, manipulative young man struggling with his conscience and his ambition. It was in the letter to Holmes, which resurfaced during the 1992 presidential campaign, that Clinton thanked Holmes for ``saving me from the draft'' while noting at the same time that the only reason he even temporarily ``accepted the draft'' despite his political beliefs was ``to maintain my political viability within the system.''
In a situation where Clinton once thought all his options were bad, he had avoided everything that he did not want to do. He did not want to get drafted and fight in Vietnam. He did not want to spend three years in the safe haven of ROTC, and two years after that as a commissioned lieutenant, even if the war had ended long before then. He did not want to go to the University of Arkansas School of Law when so many of his Rhodes friends were heading to Yale. And he did not want to feel guilty about his deferment. ``It was just a fluke,'' Clinton would say years later, when first asked how he had made it through this period without serving in the military.
But of course it was not a fluke. A fluke is a wholly accidental stroke of good luck. What happened to Clinton during that fateful year did not happen by accident. He fretted and planned, he got help from others when necessary, and he was ultimately lucky. In the end, by not serving in the military, he did what 16 million other young men did during that tumultuous era.
Next: Act Two, Politics in Monday Extra
Excerpted from ``First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton.'' 1995 by David Maraniss. Published by Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission. Distributed by The Washington Post Writers Group.
by CNB