First In His Class (30 page)

Jim Waugh, who took neither side in the rivalry, looked at those same Clinton character traits and interpreted them differently. He found Clinton not so much manipulative as flexible, while Jackson was rigid. “
Cliff had
a personality that didn't deal well with adversity, and I knew it well because it was similar to mine; where the people side of things is going wrong, the tendency is to pull back and wonder why people don't like me. Cliff responded that way. Bill didn't. Bill came forward, and if he saw something wrong, he tried harder. Cliff pulled back when things were not working
out in a human sense. He was a control freak. There was a sense that if there weren't people involved, he would be the one at the top of the totem pole. But he had trouble dealing with the multitudes of variety of people. Not everyone is going to like you, so what do you do about that? Treat it as though someone shot you in the heart or as an opportunity to learn more about people? Clinton used it as an opportunity to broaden himself. Cliff tended to narrow down, and ultimately that led to wanting to get even.”

For all their sharp differences, Clinton and Jackson shared one preoccupation: the war in Vietnam. Jackson supported President Nixon and hoped that he could fulfill his promise of peace with honor. But his intellectual endorsement of the war was not different in one respect from Clinton's opposition. Neither young man was eager to fight.
Waugh spent
many evenings with Jackson in the Junior Common Room at St. John's watching reports from the war on television. Jackson was always quiet and somber on those occasions, according to Waugh. “He didn't say a lot when he watched the war. He was imagining: ‘What if that were me?' rather than a Canadian like me saying, ‘Shit, what are they doing there? Why not get out?' He was torn between his rightwing views and the fact that he could be the next guy shipped off, a concern not atypical of most other Americans at Oxford.” Jackson talked to Waugh about the draft. “It certainly was a big issue with him. He was scared of it. My sense was that he was doing everything possible with his connections back home to avoid it. It was something that would come up in our conversation almost every time we met. He would say he called so-and-so or had written so-and-so.”

Jackson later denied that he had tried to pull any strings on his own behalf, but acknowledged that he was preoccupied and anxious about the draft—even though he was in less jeopardy than many of his American classmates. Unlike Clinton, Jackson had gone to Oxford with some protection from being ordered back to Arkansas for induction. He was classified 1 -Y, a physical deferment that meant he would be called up only in times of national emergency. He had received the deferment after presenting officials with letters from his doctors attesting to his allergies and vascular headaches. But he was a self-described worrier who constantly fretted that his draft board would reclassify him or that the war would escalate to the point where I-Y's became vulnerable. “
I was
scared and anxious, yes, like most young men of that period,” Jackson recalled later.

A
LTHOUGH
being in England could not rid the Rhodes Scholars of their anxieties and concerns, it did remove them from the chaos and excesses of 1969 student activism in the United States. Their histories make it
probable that the most active scholars would have steered clear of violence had they been in American graduate schools that year. They were on the moderate side of the youth rebellion. But the rage of the times might have placed them in more precarious situations than they encountered in Oxford and London. It was partly a matter of numbers. According to the sociologist Todd Gitlin, the first year that Clinton and the Rhodes Scholars were in England marked a dramatic turn toward violent confrontation on American campuses, with “
over a
hundred politically inspired campus bombings, attempted bombings, and incidents of arson nationwide, aimed at ROTC buildings, other campus and government buildings. In the spring of 1969 alone, three hundred colleges and universities, holding a third of American students, saw sizable demonstrations, a quarter of them marked by strikes or building takeovers, a quarter more by disruption of classes and administration, a fifth accompanied by bombs, arson, or the trashing of property.”

The increasing violence of the American protest movement was a debate topic that spring at the Oxford Union when Allard Lowenstein made an appearance. Lowenstein—the demanding, charismatic leader of the “Dump Johnson” movement, the early Pied Piper of student antiwar activism—was as articulate in his opposition to the Vietnam War as ever, but had become equally vehement in his denunciation of movement violence. By the spring of 1969, his campus speeches were often attacked by student radicals who derided him for still believing in an electoral system. Everywhere he went that spring, Lowenstein encountered a sense of despair among onetime allies in the student movement that led them either to become more confrontational and sectarian or to drop out altogether. Many of the same students who earlier had shorn their hair for Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy's presidential campaigns had now, in the wake of the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the violence of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the election of Richard Nixon, and the continuation of the war, concluded that democracy was nothing more than a racket.

When Lowenstein spoke at Oxford, Clinton went with Darryl Gless to hear him. They were both taken by Lowenstein's combination of passion and reason, but the intensity of their reactions differed in one significant respect. When Gless listened to Lowenstein, he heard only the ideas. When Clinton listened to him, those ideas became a part of a political calculus. “
I was
naive, effusive, extremely enthusiastic about Lowenstein,” Gless recalled later. “Bill brought me up short by saying, ‘Well, he's good for the times.' I said, ‘What do you mean? He's good, period!' But Bill said he was a good politician, and politicians must invariably compromise. I was making him out to be a flawless hero and Bill wanted me to rethink it.” Gless
got irritated at Clinton for being less enthusiastic, but later concluded that Clinton was right. “Bill's little lecture was: Don't be naive in your hero worship. You must qualify such views by understanding what politicians must do. Bill several times tried to teach me to be a little less naive about the way the world works.”

The inner circle of Rhodes politicos, which included Clinton, Rick Stearns, Strobe Talbott, Bob Reich, John Isaacson, and Frank Aller, prided themselves on their sophisticated understanding of the world. They searched for historical connections, eager for the next book that might put their political and personal unease in the sharpest intellectual context. One day that term, Talbott and Isaacson were playing squash on the Univ court when Isaacson took a swing at the ball and thwacked Talbott in the right eye. Talbott was wearing protective glasses, but they were cheap ones that he had bought in New Haven the year before, and they shattered, severely cutting his cornea. His friends took him to Radcliffe Infirmary, where he underwent surgery. Clinton visited Talbott almost every day during his recovery, and since Talbott's vision was temporarily impaired, he sat at his friend's bedside and read to him. After passing along the Rhodes gossip of the day,
Clinton would
open
Pax Americana
by Ronald Steel, a foreign policy analyst, which explored the interventionist impulses that had led the United States into Vietnam, and argued that intervention could become “
an end
in itself, dragging the nation down a path it never intended to follow, toward a goal it may find repugnant.”

“
What we
need are fewer historical compulsions, less Manifest Destiny, more skepticism about the ideals we are promulgating, and a greater realism about the causes in which we have become involved,” was Steel's conclusion. “Above all, we need to develop a sense of proportion about our place in the world, and particularly about ourselves as the pathfinders to the New Jerusalem. America has little to fear from the world, although perhaps a good deal to fear from herself—her obsession with an obsolete ideological struggle, her well-meaning desire to enforce her own conception of virtue upon others, her euphoria of power, and perhaps most dangerous of all, the unmet, and often unacknowledged, inadequacies of her own society…. It is now time for us to turn away from global fantasies and begin our perfection of the human race within our own frontiers.” What Clinton was reading echoed in many respects the work of his mentor, Senator Fulbright.

Another scholar
at Oxford who would play a key role in developing that theme in years to come was Richard Stearns of Stanford, perhaps the most accomplished political mind in the Rhodes crowd. Stearns was a year older than most of the other scholars and had arrived in Oxford after a hectic
student political career that included a year as vice president of the National Student Association and another working in the McCarthy campaign. At the time they met, Stearns was well ahead of Clinton on the national Democratic stage, though he was the insider type, more comfortable dealing with party functionaries than with constituencies. He seemed outwardly as dour and sarcastic as Clinton was irrepressibly eager. At Balliol College, the incubator of British politicians, he enjoyed leaving the impression with avid Marxists that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Where Clinton was open and obvious, Stearns moved about shrouded in mystery. But he was smart and slyly funny, and he and Clinton hit it off. Stearns later noted that they both “came from middle-class backgrounds and were not embarrassed by it.” “And we were the two most interested in electoral politics in the entire group. The fact that I had worked on a presidential campaign fascinated Bill.”

When the
middle term at Oxford ended in late March, Clinton and Stearns traveled together to Germany, arriving at 9:26 on the morning of March 23, according to the records of Rudiger Lowe, who picked them up at the station. Lowe, the former Fulbright fellow from Germany who had met Clinton during a conference at Georgetown in their senior year, had by then developed a penpal relationship with Clinton that would continue through the decades. Also waiting for them in Munich were Ann Markesun, Clinton's last Georgetown girlfriend, and a friend of Markesun's who was already there working as an au pair. The group roamed Bavaria together, exploring Munich and the Bavarian castles. In a postcard to Denise Hyland on March 27, Clinton wrote: “
Have been
in Bavaria in snow for week seeing churches, castles, landmarks. Staying in a little village outside Munich. Sunday I went ice skating for the first time in my life…. In the shadow of the Alps with beautiful light snow falling.”

The brief note to Hyland left out an adventure at a rink in Garmisch, where Stearns got ordered off the ice by local authorities.
He had
been speed-skating around the oval in Olympic style, his arms pumping long and smooth, one fist occasionally placed with casual grace behind his back, feeling free and easy, obviously impressing the awkwardly slip-sliding Clinton and the young women, when rink officials told him to knock it off because he was digging ruts too deep in the ice for the figure skaters. It seemed always thus with Stearns and women in those days: trying too hard for his own good. His friend Clinton would have much advice for him on that subject in later months, but not now. Right now Clinton was having enough trouble of his own.

Clinton and Markesun were quarreling again, much as they had been the previous September when Markesun had visited him in Hot Springs before he left for Oxford. “She was very attractive and fiery and they were always
fighting,” Stearns recalled. “If the trip was an effort to get them back together, it didn't succeed.” They stayed together long enough to travel with Stearns to Vienna, where they spent much of their time at the opera house, standing in the rafter area to watch
La Bohème
and
Don Giovanni
.
Then the
tempestuous relationship exploded. Clinton and Markesun not only parted ways, but they threw Stearns into the middle of the dispute. He had been planning to travel on to Italy alone. Instead, suddenly, he was hitting the road for Graz and Venice with Ann Markesun at his side.

On March 29, traveling alone,
Clinton headed
north to reunite with Rudi Lowe at the family home in Bamberg. Clinton, who had been studying Eastern Europe in his work with Zbigniew Pelczynski, was eager to see the border. He and Lowe drove to the village of Blankenstein in Upper Franconia, a town that was divided east from west by a small stream and a fence guarded by East German troops. Clinton was “very taken by the physical manifestation of repression and animosity,” Lowe recalled, and asked his host to take pictures of him at the border. He stepped two meters across the line to pose. “I told him to be careful, they are watching,” Lowe recalled later. “He said they wouldn't shoot an American.”

N
O
sooner had Clinton arrived back in England than he went off to meet Sharon Ann Evans.
She landed
at Heathrow for a whirlwind ten-day tour in which Clinton served as her escort, host, and tour guide. That Clinton could move in such quick succession from the brilliant, assertive Markesun to the beauty queen Evans showed that his tastes were as eclectic in women as in everything else.

Evans felt that she was “running with the herd” in England. That was how it always seemed with Clinton, she thought. Back in Arkansas the previous summer, they were together amid a larger crowd of friends. Now it was the same with this new herd: Paul Parish and his girlfriend; Frank Aller and his; Strobe Talbott, Bob Reich, Tom Williamson, Rick Stearns, sometimes Jim Waugh and Charlene Prickett—there was always some combination of interesting new people with them wherever they went.
They spent
the first five days in London, according to a record of the trip that Clinton kept and later gave to Evans. On Friday the 4th of April they saw Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Lincoln Statue, No. 10 Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Piccadilly Circus, the parade of the Horse Guards, and London Bridge. The following day they toured the Houses of Parliament and watched a national band festival at the Royal Festival Hall. On Easter Sunday, they went to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park and listened to black power advocates from the West Indies,
observed an Irish Republican Army rally in Trafalgar Square, and returned to Westminster Abbey for evensong services.