First In His Class (25 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT
 
THE DREAMING SPIRES

T
HE FIRST ROOMS
that Bill Clinton occupied at Oxford were on the second floor of an old stone almshouse, ornamented with honeysuckle, which faced Helen's Court in the right rear corner of University College.
He had
a sitting room and a bedroom. Doug Eakeley lived across the opposite stairwell in similar quarters. There was a toilet on the first floor and a cold-running shower on the second. The only warmth came from coin-operated electric heaters. No shillings in the pocket, no heat at night. The Americans at Helen's Court were cared for by a “scout” named Arch, a chubby-cheeked servant who according to college lore once waited upon Feliks Yusupov, the Russian prince who had assassinated Rasputin. Bob Reich and John Isaacson, the other two Rhodes Scholars at Univ, were housed on the far side of the college in a modern red brick building with central heating that disappointed them with its featureless twentieth-century efficiency.

Even in the gray gloom of that Oxford autumn, University College was a museum of enchanting colors. The gold-yellow stone walls streaked with black-brown dirt from ages past. The green Front Quad, different somehow from the green of Arkansas and other verdant plots in the New World: richer, sublime, as though every blade of grass had been hand-colored in deep green day after day, century after century. The white marble statue of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Muse of Poetry, a Univ man himself once, long ago, before he was sent down, expelled in 1811 for publishing an atheist tract, but now honored in his own mausoleum, a drowned romantic figure in Carrara marble the white of white chocolate. The soft reds and greens of portraits in the Hall above red-brown oak paneling and below a warm brown hammer-beam roof. The luminous blues and yellows of painted glass in the chapel depicting the Fall and expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.

Every morning
during his first week, Clinton bounded down the cold stairwell of the almshouse out onto the brick courtyard, weaved through the Gothic maze of Univ past the porter's lodge, and stepped out into the mist of the High Street to explore his new surroundings. He visited most of the nearly thirty colleges that comprised Oxford University, separate academic fortresses with their own personalities and traditions, walled off and imposing from the street, entered through heavy oak doors opening onto brilliant lawns framed by ancient stone buildings. He loped across the street to inspect the classic beauty of Queens College and the new digs of Frank Aller, the tall, brilliant Asia scholar from Washington. He traipsed past the Bodleian Library and under the Bridge of Sighs along dark and narrow Catte Street, and turned left on Broad to Blackwell's bookshop, a bibliophile's paradise that he would revisit countless times, then on to Balliol College, new home of eight Rhodes Scholars, including Rick Stearns and Tom Williamson. He made his way north to Rhodes House with its squared rubble front, where Sir Edgar resided and occasionally invited his Rhodes charges to dinner. He ventured east to the slender, meandering River Cherwell and the deer park in the forest grove of Magdalen College, where Strobe Talbott was staying. To the west he absorbed the bustle of the covered market and the hustle of shops along Cornmarket. South down St. Aldate's he found Pembroke College, where J. William Fulbright learned to smoke a pipe and wear tweed knickers.

He walked fourteen hours a day that first week or so, returning in the dark to his room to plop down “
sore and
exhilarated.” Reich was his frequent companion and fellow explorer. They talked nonstop, gesticulating as they roamed the ancient streets. “
We were
suddenly within ruins! We were in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century ruins! I can't describe the feelings we shared,” Reich said later. “The architecture, the customs, the manners, the strange ways the English talked. We were constantly comparing notes.” For centuries, their college, affectionately known as Univ, had laid claim to being the first of the Oxford colleges, going back to King Alfred in the year 872.
It turned
out that this boast was spurious and that the founding of Univ was more accurately placed in the thirteenth century, slightly after Merton and Balliol. Such ancient quibbles were of some importance in a place where an institution called New College was indeed new in 1379.

Clinton was so excited by his daily excursions through Oxford that he could not sleep much at night. In an October 14 letter to Denise Hyland, he reflected on how beautiful he found it all, even with the miserable weather. “
I am
happy if lonely,” he wrote. “And I'm convinced I was right to come even if I'm drafted out soon.”

America seemed
very far away. In the Weir Common Room, he and Reich, Eakeley, and Isaacson sipped tea, ate Cadbury biscuits, and read the London newspapers for political news from home. Through a foreign lens, the United States often appeared chaotic, a land troubled by assassinations and wars. Londoners complained of the Americanization of their city every time another cement slab rose on the skyline. The
Sunday Times
ran articles on the obesity and violence of Americans, quoting one as saying, “We are the most terrifying people on earth.” Oxford, in contrast, seemed insular and quaint, if not irrelevant, to many of the Americans. Perhaps that was always the case—Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “
the wind
that blows in Oxford blows out of the past”—but it seemed especially so that year. Tom Williamson, removed from a country where “
our cities
were burning and our campuses were in turmoil,” found life in Oxford “like being put in a crypt and awakened one hundred years before.” There were no telephones in their rooms. The scholars communicated through notes or by showing up at one another's quarters and hoping someone was there. They ate at fixed times, dining in college halls wearing fashionably shabby black waist-length academic gowns, listening to fellows recite grace in Latin and Greek in dialogues that were part prayer, part witty repartee with the college master.

At times it seemed that Clinton stood out like a multicolored plaid sports coat in this atmosphere of subdued tweeds. He was, thought Doug Paschal, a scholar at Christ Church, “
always the
character who wanted to do one more thing, go one more place, stay up one more hour, have one more drink. He came across as somebody with a great appetite for life … a bit clumsy physically and verbally, making waves.” To Paschal, Clinton seemed unguarded. “He would say things others might have said if they weren't so worried about it. The Oxford of that time was a very complicated place, and we could not escape the sense of the brash and loutish and insensitive American presence, always slightly aware of not fitting in exactly. On the other hand, there were lots of people who responded quickly to the robustness and good nature of people like Bill, though there would always be some class-conscious Englishmen who would bristle at someone like him crashing around in the china shop.”

The cultural
gap led to some measure of tension in the relationship between the Americans and certain Oxford dons. George Butte, studying literature at New College, encountered one tutor who, while gazing out his office window as he sipped his sherry, said with a chuckle that he was amazed to read Faulkner and discover that he was a good novelist. Tom Williamson's dons gave a cool reception to his proposal to write about slavery, dismissing the topic as too American and parochial, but were far more enthusiastic when he switched his interest to Ethiopian politics. John Isaacson found his philosophy dons disdainful of the attempts
by American students to relate philosophy to the ethical dilemmas of the age.

That is not to say that the ancient town of dreaming spires was devoid of the confrontational politics of the sixties. Emboldened by the student uprisings that had swept through the capitals of Europe, the young men and women of Oxford were pushing up against the walls of tradition. “
People were
starting to question all kinds of assumptions about how the place should be run, the extent students should be involved,” recalled Nick Browne, an Englishman in his third year at Univ when Clinton arrived. “It was a time when the Rolling Stones were extolling the street fighting man and you could hear The Who on campus. The revolution in dress had reached Oxford: hair down to your shoulders, bright yellow satin shirts, an affected scruffiness.” Wilf Stevenson, a Scottish undergraduate at Univ, noted that students then were catching a wave of generational energy from the street revolt in Paris the previous spring and were looking for ways to ride it. “
We knew
about the barricades of Paris. But we were absolutely naive and hopeless. We didn't know how to turn into action everything we were feeling. It was evanescent, with nothing at the end of the day to show for it.”

The protests
at Oxford did not match the bold student actions in Paris, but they did offer a decidedly British satiric touch. Dozens of agitated junior fellows disrupted the matriculation ceremony outside the Sheldonian Theatre, complaining that the formal rite accepting new students to Oxford was anachronistic. The protest gave birth to a memorable picket sign: “Matriculation Makes You Blind.” Another satirical protest was launched against the stuffiest college, All Souls, which had no undergraduate or graduate students, only fellows for life, and was derided as a haven for reactionaries. Of an All Souls master by the name of Sparrow, one sign proclaimed: “Sparrow Is a Tit.” Humorous radicals led by Christopher Hitchens of Balliol College, who went on to become a rambunctious British journalist, seemed to enjoy nothing more than lampooning Master Sparrow. They adopted the albatross as their logo of the left, a sarcastic symbol of intimidation. “Albatross Eats Sparrow” was one of their signs.

On broader issues, the student body leaned leftward.
The most
ferocious Oxford Union debate of the term addressed the question of whether American democracy had failed. Arguing the negative, Clive Stitt declared that “had it not been for one major boob in Vietnam, the Johnson-Humphrey administration would have gone down as one of America's greatest” Arguing the affirmative, a purple-shirted young aristocrat named Viscount Lewisham “poured scorn” on the American presidential candidates, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Republican Richard M. Nixon. The motion that American democracy had failed carried 266 to 233. All this
denunciation of America unsettled the Rhodes Scholars during their first term at Oxford. Many of them were harshly critical of American foreign policy and disappointed in the choice offered in the 1968 presidential election, but they were not ready to give up on American democracy, and certainly not to hear it blasted by class-conscious Englishmen. Darryl Gless was often angry with the Brits. “
They assumed
that because we were Rhodes Scholars we were prowar and rich. They were so critical of America, I often found myself defending my country.”

Clinton'
s reaction
was similar. Martin Walker, a British student at Oxford, sat near Clinton at a party that year where the dissolution of the United States was the primary topic of discussion. “One guy was going on about how democracy had failed and the country was in a prerevolutionary situation, and Clinton countered that. He said, no, the system was able to work. And he cited civil rights. At the time that was not a fashionable position to take. Everyone else in the room was taking the fashionable position that America was hopeless.”

In early November, the Americans stayed up all night at the Rhodes House watching the stateside elections, and returned gloomily to their rooms the next morning after learning that Nixon had won the presidency. One of the few bright moments of the long night was when word came that Senator Fulbright had won reelection. The next day Clinton sent a telegram to Fulbright in Little Rock:

BILL

GOT RESULTS
AT RHODES HOUSE ELECTION PARTY YOU RECEIVED A GREAT CHEER EVERYTHING FINE HERE HAPPY FOR YOU AND MRS FULBRIGHT CONGRATULATIONS