First In His Class (31 page)

The next day they toured the National Gallery. When they came outside, they noticed a peace demonstration in Trafalgar Square. The speaker's platform was set up near the statue of Lord Nelson; banners proclaiming “Americans Go Home” were draped across the dais. Evans and Clinton and that day's herd of friends watched the scene for an hour or so from the steps of the gallery. It was the first antiwar demonstration Clinton had witnessed during his time overseas. His presence there could not have been more innocuous, although decades later Republican operatives would attempt to give it a sinister meaning. Later that day Clinton wrote a note to Denise Hyland, relating that he had gone to the antiwar rally and “sat for hours” watching it. “
Times are
getting tough,” he said, referring to the way he and his friends were struggling with the draft and the war. Although he had been playing tourist and tour guide for nearly three weeks and had given hardly a glance at his studies, he felt compelled to give Hyland a report on his academic progress at Oxford. “My work is going well,” he wrote. “I might even become an educated man here.”

He also gave an optimistic draft update in the April 7 letter. “For now,” he wrote, “I hope to finish two years here before being drafted.” Why he would write this remains a mystery. Perhaps he had received an inside report from his uncle Raymond Clinton or his stepfather Jeff Dwire. Or perhaps he was just acting out of his innate need to please and to avoid unpleasant thoughts. In any case, it is difficult to imagine why Clinton, three months after passing his preinduction physical and classified 1-A, would think he could avert the draft for more than another year.

One moment when they were alone, Clinton talked to Evans about the draft and the war. In that conversation, he told Evans that he sometimes felt misplaced among the cynical expatriates at Oxford. “
My friends
,” he said, “just don't understand my need to serve.”

B
ERT
Jeffries was killed in Vietnam. The word from his mother reached Clinton the day after he and Evans got back to Oxford. James Herbert Jeffries was one of Clinton's oldest friends in Hot Springs, a neighborhood pal from the carefree preadolescent days up on Park Avenue, the son of A. B. (Sonny) Jeffries, Clinton's favorite Sunday school teacher at Park Place Baptist Church. They had stayed in touch through the years with letters and occasional visits home on holidays. Clinton kept up with Jeffries even in Vietnam, and had received a letter from him the previous December. On the morning after hearing of his friend's death, Clinton wrote a note to Jeffries's parents:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jeffries,

I heard
about Bert just yesterday when I returned to Oxford. Since then I have thought of him so much, remembering backyard football and dreaded band rehearsals and throwing knives in the floor in Sunday school. I remember too that we were baptized on the same night and playfully argued over who would be the last one into the water …

Bert had
lived a different life from his friend Bill in the years since high school. While Clinton was at Georgetown, Jeffries struggled to find himself. He attended the University of Arkansas for a few years, but never felt comfortable there and dropped out. He fell in love, got married, fell out of love, and got divorced. He moved to Dallas and worked for a printing company. He learned that two of his high school friends had been killed in Vietnam, and decided with two buddies, Duke Watts and Ira Stone, to join the Marines and go over to Vietnam, at least in part to avenge their deaths. “I didn't want him to go,” his father said later. “He was only twenty-one, and I was worried about him.” But Jeffries signed up and was sent to Vietnam in the summer of 1968—at the time Clinton was hoping he could delay being drafted long enough to sail for England and Oxford.

On March 20, 1969, Jeffries and his squad in the 106th recoilless rifle platoon of the 9th Marines went out on routine patrol ten miles north of Khe Sanh in Quang Tri Province near the demilitarized zone.
At just
after ten that morning, a member of his squad stepped on an enemy land mine. Jeffries was only a few feet away. The explosion sent shrapnel into his body, his face, head, neck, chest, abdomen, back, right leg and both arms, amputating his left hand. He died instantly. A. B. Jeffries was working out of town when the Marine Corps officers came to his house to break the news. His wife answered the door and knew that her son was dead. The Western Union telegram arrived the next day: “Please accept on behalf of the United States Marine Corps our continued sympathy in your bereavement.” More than four hundred friends mourned Bert Jeffries's death at the funeral services at Gross Mortuary on the morning of April 4. He was buried in a graveyard on the edge of town. Duke Watts and Ira Stone came back from Vietnam to serve as honorary pallbearers.

“
The thing
about Vietnam was that either you wanted to go or you did not want to go,” Watts reflected decades later. Jeffries wanted to go. So did he. Watts was proud of the fact that he went to Vietnam, even though he later decided that he hadn't accomplished anything there and he left feeling that “it never amounted to a hill of beans.” But he would never want to say that to Mr. Jeffries.

•  •  •

T
HE
final term of the Oxford school year started out a mess and deteriorated from there.
The tutor
Clinton thought so much of, Zbigniew Pelczynski, took an academic leave to work on a book on Polish communism in a palazzo on Lake Varese in Lombardy. Clinton's supervision was transferred to a sociologist at Hertford College, but it was never the same. He stopped attending tutorials, and though he continued reading a lot, he essentially stopped working toward his degree. Most of the books he read had nothing to do with his studies.
One week
his reading list included
True Grit
, a western written by Charles Portis, a native Arkansan;
The Moon Is Down
, by John Steinbeck;
Soul on Ice
, by Eldridge Cleaver; and
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom
, by Andrey Sakharov. He also reread
North Toward Home
by Willie Morris, the autobiographical account of a Mississippi-bred writer dealing with his roots and the disorientation he felt when he left the South. Senator Fulbright had helped Clinton meet Morris in New York City back in October on the day before Clinton sailed for England.
They had
toured Manhattan in a taxi, lunched at Elaine's, a writers' hangout, and talked about the South and watermelons and Oxford, where Morris had been a Rhodes Scholar twelve years earlier.

In letters to friends back home, Clinton talked constantly about how much he was hurting and how “heavy” the situation was for him and his friends at Oxford. He said that he could not shake the feeling that he should return to America and fulfill his military obligation. But he hated the war and did not want to fight in it. The war was all around him. Bert Jeffries was dead. Frank Aller was resisting. Paul Parish was going for a conscientious objector exemption;
he had
asked five people to write letters to the Claiborne County Draft Board in Mississippi attesting to his character. Bill Clinton; his mother and father; Lucy Turnbull, his professor of classics at Ole Miss; and
Sir Edgar
Williams, the warden of Rhodes House.

Sir Edgar Williams might seem like an unlikely ally, given his military bearing and his distinguished wartime service, but he had taken to this Rhodes class in all of its intense and anxious brilliance. When Strobe Talbott had injured his eye in the squash match, the Williams family invited him to their house to convalesce after his release from the infirmary. Sir Edgar took delight in the practical jokes that his wife and daughter played on young Talbott, who was, he said, “utterly soberminded.” Parish was an even more frequent guest at the Williams manse. That spring he came by most days for an hour or so at teatime. “I needed company and they gave it to me.”

The Rhodes boys called Sir Edgar “
The Rhodent
,” though never to his face. Some were so intimidated by his presence and his circumlocutions that they never tried to get to know him. But those who did, like Parish and Talbott, appreciated his dry, amusing soul. He would sit in his leather
chair and smoke his pipe and soon disappear in a cloud of smoke. He was not much for dispensing wisdom to Parish or any of the other troubled scholars, and when he did talk, he was not always reassuring. “He was such a prig about the war,” recalled Willy Fletcher, who opposed the war despite his status as a Navy ensign during his Rhodes years. “He once said to me, ‘Could you look yourself in the mirror in the morning if you didn't fight in it?'” Yet Williams willingly wrote letters to draft boards in the United States “
explaining what
it was they were doing at Oxford.”

Clinton spent
days drafting his letter for Parish, using it as a means of bringing coherence to his own thoughts. He had thoroughly researched the issue, and cited several Supreme Court cases that he argued had broadened the scope of the conscientious objection statute. He later said that he thought
it was
the best paper he had written all of his first year at Oxford. Parish agreed. He said it made his case.

On April 30, 1969, the number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam reached its all-time peak of 534,000. The next day, May morning, was a holiday in Oxford. Parish and Sara Maitland, Clinton and several friends went down to the Cherwell for a breakfast picnic, cooking eggs and sausages on a little outdoor stove. It was a glorious spring morning, and the Rhodes group watched with delight as the daughters of Oxford townsfolk, following an ancient tradition, covered themselves in daffodils, jonquils, and hyacinths, and got tossed into the slender river—clothes, hats, flowers, and all. The Lady Sara covered her pink corduroys and flowing silk shirt in flowers and got thrown in with the rest. The choir sang madrigals at 6:00
A.M
. from Magdalen Tower and the church bells rang with joy. The days before and after might be clouded by anxiety, but here, briefly, was one perfect day.

Clinton's own May Day of a very different sort had arrived that week in the form of a letter from the Garland County Draft Board. It was the five-page SSS Form 252, the Order to Report for Induction. Decades later, when recounting his dealings with the draft,
Clinton would
fail to mention that he had received this draft notice. He would claim that in the midst of everything else that happened in the months before and after, the draft notice slipped his mind. But it did not seem insignificant at the time.
He called
his mother and stepfather right away to tell them the news and to see what could be done. Somehow the letter had been sent by surface mail and had arrived in Oxford after the assigned reporting date. By the time the induction notice arrived, Clinton had begun another school term, and according to draft regulations that meant he was allowed to finish out the term before reporting. He was by no means alone in that regard.
A study
by the Scientific Manpower Commission released that spring indicated that between 16,000 and 25,000 young men received their draft notices while
in graduate school that year and had their induction dates postponed until the end of the term. But there was no getting around the fact that Clinton had been drafted. He wrote letters to many friends back in the United States telling them the news. “
You may
have heard that I've been drafted,” he said in the letter to Hyland.

Clinton talked about the induction notice with Cliff Jackson, who was heading home May 22 to work for the Arkansas Republican party in Little Rock. Jackson wrote letters to his mother and his college mentor in which he mentioned his classmate's plight. “
I really
hate to come back to Arkansas and start paying those expensive prices for everything,” he wrote his mother. “But I'm glad I'm coming back like I am and not like Bill Clinton from Hot Springs, who is a Rhodes Scholar here at Oxford. Bill has been drafted and will have to enter the Army probably in July. It is such a shame!”

Some of his closer friends at Oxford said later that they could not recall Clinton receiving a draft notice, although they remembered him under great duress during his final days in Oxford that spring.
Paul Parish
carried one image with him, but when he called it up in his mind's eye he could not say for certain whether it happened in real life or in a dream. The memory was that one night Clinton knocked on his door at Christ Church. Parish and Sara Maitland “were really involved in something” at that moment, so Parish did not answer. The knocking persisted for a long time before it stopped. The next day Clinton found Parish and said that he had gone to his room the night before to tell him that he had been drafted. When no one answered, Clinton said, he sat on the steps leading down from the fourth floor of the hall, alone in the dark, put his head in his hands, and cried.

CHAPTER TEN
 
THE TORMENT