First In His Class (23 page)

That other way was more direct, providing Clinton with only temporary relief but not obligating him to military service.
Britt called
draft board chairman Armstrong, his close friend, and asked him, as he later recalled, to “put Bill Clinton's draft notice in a drawer someplace and leave it for a while. Give the boy a chance.” This is apparently what Armstrong did for several months. Another member of the Garland County Draft Board, Robert Corrado, later remembered Armstrong holding back Clinton's file and saying that they had to give him time to go to Oxford. According to Opal Ellis, the board secretary, the board “kind of leaned over backwards to let him go to Oxford.”

Special consideration for Rhodes Scholars was not unusual around the
country.
The draft
board in Alameda County, California, was so impressed by the achievements of the only black Rhodes winner that year, Tom Williamson of Harvard, that they granted him a graduate school deferment even though such deferments supposedly no longer existed. Darryl Gless, whose small home town in Nebraska was so proud of him that
they strung
a banner across the Main Street bank welcoming him back from his successful Rhodes interview, also was given a special deferment.
Dartmouth scholar
John Isaacson visited his draft board in Lewiston, Maine, and pleaded with them to let him go to Oxford, which they did.
University of
Iowa scholar Mike Shea went to England “happily but erroneously 2-S” for the first year.
Paul Parish's
mother in Port Gibson, Mississippi, received a letter from the governor telling her that Paul should go to England because they were trying to get an exemption for Rhodes Scholars. For virtually every member of the Rhodes class of 1968 there was a similar story.

Willie Fletcher, a Harvard graduate from Washington State, was a year older than most of his classmates and feared that he would be drafted immediately.
He cut
a deal with the Navy, signing up for a four-month officer candidate school that summer on the condition that when he finished in October they would defer his commission for two years and let him go to Oxford. The only reason he enlisted was to avoid service during the time when the war was being fought. He considered the war “deeply immoral,” did not want to fight in it, and hoped that by the time he earned his commission it would all be over.

Vanderbilt'
s Walter
Pratt had won one of the four Rhodes slots from the South region with Clinton and was so awed by his accomplishment at the time that he seemed ready to fly home without an airplane. Members of his draft board in Jackson were equally proud of their native son and left him with the impression that they would let him go to Oxford without drafting him, even after the deferments for graduate students were abol-ished. Many of the scholars, including Clinton, had acknowledged during their undergraduate years that the draft system gave unfair protection to the wealthy and educated. Pratt was the first one to act on that sense of guilt. As he got closer to going to England, he felt that he could not “in good conscience claim a deferment that nobody else was going to get.” He had friends who were graduating and not receiving deferments. Subcon-sciously, he said later, he was comparing himself to them. “I did not see myself as special. So I went to the local Army recruiter and signed up for officer training school.” While his colleagues prepared to set sail for the British Isles, Pratt reported for basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana.

Clinton was
less certain about his obligations. His life seemed unsettled. He wrote Denise Hyland on September 23, ten days before he was to leave, that he had not figured out how to get his trunk to New York for the
Atlantic crossing. “I still know nothing about the draft,” he added. “I am resolved to go and enjoy whatever time I have.” Denise was working that fall in the marketing research department of Chase Manhattan and was having second thoughts about the career she had chosen. She felt somewhat adrift, she wrote in a letter to Clinton. The corporate world seemed unfulfilling to her. She wanted something more. He told her he knew the feeling. It seemed as though their whole generation, their country, had lost its bearings. “To be adrift in a stormy sea is no sin,” he wrote. “Perhaps it is essential to really knowing yourself and seeking your future.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
 
THE GREAT ESCAPE

O
N A BRIGHT
and crisp early October noon, “the best men for the world's fight” assembled at the foot of West 46th Street in Manhattan for a most curious passage. There, at Pier 86 on the Hudson River waterfront along what once was known as “luxury liner row,” Bill Clinton embarked on a great adventure, certainly, yet one that found him advancing, retreating, escaping and searching all at once, sailing away from the fiery tumult of America in an opulent vessel from a bygone age bound for the sheltering, silent libraries of medieval England.

He arrived
wearing a gray suit and was seen off by Denise Hyland, who boarded the liner with him and stood on deck for a few minutes. When she looked into his eyes one last time to bid him bon voyage,
she was
struck by his expression of awe—a sense of “Oh, my God, I'm the luckiest guy in the world!” The anxiety he felt about his uncertain draft status gave way to the thrill of the moment: here he was, the first from any branch of his family to graduate from college, now standing amid the academic gold medalists of his generation, headed overseas for the first time, carrying not a rifle but a sack of books and a saxophone case, graced with a mark of prestige that would brighten his résumé forever, retracing the path to Oxford and worldly sophistication that Senator Fulbright had followed nearly half a century earlier.

The S.S.
United States
with her razor-sharp bow and two massive funnels was an impressive sight as she edged down the river out past the Statue of Liberty to the broad ocean beyond. She was known as “The Big U,” an affectionate nickname for the biggest, sleekest American luxury liner plying the North Atlantic, a quadruple-screw turbine steamship that since her maiden voyage in 1952 had proudly retained the Blue Riband as the world's fastest liner, averaging more than thirty-two knots and surpassing forty knots in occasional bursts of record speed. Fast and elegant she was, but also obsolete, destined for drydock within a year. The group voyage to England by sea had been a cherished Rhodes tradition, a rite of bonding, a decompression chamber of sorts from the New World to the Old, but it seemed out of date if not vulgar by now, when airplanes could reach the same destination in hours rather than days, and the world moved to a more urgent rhythm. The great ship and the elite young men sailed off together facing the same paradox. They were molded to succeed in a way of life that was vanishing.

There were dozens of other students sailing The Big U to England that month, including a sizable number of undergraduate women in junior year abroad programs whose presence greatly enlivened the trip. But as the voyage got under way, the first-year Rhodes Scholars spent much of their time among themselves, erasing and redrawing the invisible but palpable lines of highbrow versus middlebrow, Ivy League versus Land Grant, cool versus uncool. A historian among them once said of the American Rhodes Scholars that they go through several stages of self-realization. First, hearing the accomplishments of the others, they wonder, How did I get here? After spending five days together on the boat, the question becomes, How did they get here?

This might seem to be a hard crowd to intimidate. When “How Gentle Is the Rain” played over the sound system in the restaurant bar and Paul Parish blurted out assuredly, “
Anybody know
what this song is based on?” it seemed that the answer—“A Bach cantata!”—arrived from thirty voices at once. But beneath their surface composure many of the young men were struggling with a measure of self-doubt. George Butte, an English major from the University of Arizona, the son of Phoenix schoolteachers, looked around at the group of intellectuals and “
felt like
an outsider amid the mandarins.” Darryl Gless from the University of Nebraska suddenly assessed himself as “
something of
the provincial hick. I was really from the bushes compared to a lot of those guys.” The women on board seemed equally imposing to him. “A woman would say she was from Vassar or Barnard and I'd say, ‘Where's that?' and they'd look at me as if I were teasing them.”

Butte and Gless might not have realized that many of the fellows they considered mandarins were sizing up the competition and feeling deficient themselves. Robert Reich of Dartmouth, who made everyone else's list of the most impressive figures in the brood, was “
overwhelmed by
the intellectual firepower and felt grossly inadequate” during the first round of mingling aboard ship. The others, to Reich, “seemed ready to launch their careers in the direction of ambassadors or presidents or university professors.” He felt that “a great mistake had been made by the selection committee in picking me.” Reich's Dartmouth friend John Isaacson, a college
debate champion, felt as unsure of himself as anyone, though he was certain that he intimidated some of the others. “
At that
age you don't really know how to know about somebody, so you just try to talk your way through.”

Clinton was
different. While others looked for one or two compatriots, he ignored the hierarchy that was developing and looked for friendships everywhere. He had an ability to walk into any conversation on the deck and immediately place himself at the center of it. Some of his fellow scholars took to him quickly. Darryl Gless thought that Clinton was “down to earth and altogether lacking in pretense. Aside from the self-deprecating humor, he was also an extraordinary listener. Others were good at self-presentation with a script to impress you with.” Others found him a bit too manipulative. Daniel Singer's first impression was that Clinton “sought out everybody that he thought was informative or valuable and debriefed them. He picked brains.” Douglas Eakeley of Yale classified him as “a classic southern glad-handing politician.” Was he open about his political aspirations? Rick Stearns of Stanford certainly found him to be. “I remember meeting Clinton and him telling me within forty-five minutes that he planned to go back to Arkansas to be governor or senator and would like to be a national leader someday.” Then and always, these contradictions co-existed in Clinton—considerate and calculating, easygoing and ambitious, mediator and predator.

T
HE
first day at sea was smooth and sunny. George Butte, virtually penniless but for the Rhodes stipend, in a burst of optimism rented a deck chair for the full five days. Bob Reich basked in the afternoon warmth, his feelings of inadequacy melting along with larger burdens. The assassinations, the war, the draft, the raging cities—they were sailing away from all that. “
What a relief
!” Reich sighed. After four years of college activism, he was feeling “a little burnt out,” and now, as they left America, he felt as though a weight was being lifted from his shoulders.

Reich was a formidable character, with his piercing blue eyes, his curly black hair, his quizzical, hectoring nature—“What are you saying there?” he would ask, never at a loss for words himself. He was a physical runt, only four foot ten, his growth
stunted by
Fairbanks Disease, a rare genetic illness in which the hip joints fail to grow fully. Yet he was an overpowering theatrical presence. Tom Williamson, like everyone else encountering Reich, discovered that “
you put
his size aside within minutes of meeting him.
He was
totally smooth in engaging you, and he did it without a chip on his shoulder.” John Isaacson, his Dartmouth classmate, was impressed by Reich's sheer competence at everything but athletics. “He was a cartoonist,
funny, quick, actor, director, academic. He could come into the newspaper office and type at eighty words per minute an articulate essay on something. I felt like an awkward child in comparison.”