First In His Class (35 page)

The war was undergoing a subtle transformation on September 14, the day Mike Thomas died.
In Saigon
that morning, General Creighton W. Abrams, the United States commander in Vietnam, paid an unusual visit to the residence of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to discuss President Nixon's intention to withdraw 35,000 troops from Vietnam and to revise the military draft system back home. Some sixty-five miles from Saigon in the Vietnamese countryside,
Lieutenant Thomas
put on his pack and led his troops back from a mountain peak they had been guarding. A relief platoon had just arrived. Thomas was driving through a jungle trail in the second vehicle on the way back, with his radio operator at his side, when they were ambushed by Viet Cong. Everyone jumped for cover. The radio operator, who was overweight, got caught in his wires. Thomas crawled back from the brush and was untangling him when a mortar shell hit the hood and killed them both.

Their deaths brought the American toll in Vietnam to 38,953.
The Army
posthumously awarded Thomas a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Good Conduct Medal. The mortar shell that killed Mike Thomas
took other
casualties as well. For a long time his father grieved that perhaps he had spent too much time glorifying war by talking so much about his own exploits in World War II. Greg Schlieve went through decades of psychological distress after returning from Vietnam. “I have always thought that I should have died, and not Mike. I am the one who was an asshole,” Schlieve said later. “I did not like God's plan to take Mike and leave me.”

Schlieve eventually came to believe that Vietnam led his entire generation into denial—soldiers and nonsoldiers alike. No one wanted to talk about the real reasons why he and Mike Thomas went to war or the reasons why Bill
Clinton and
his Rhodes friends did not. “I believe it is hard for a soldier to admit that he went to Vietnam and killed human beings just for the glory of it, or because he had nothing better to do,” Schlieve concluded. “But I also believe there is another truth to be told by the students, that they were protesting the war because they were deathly afraid of
dying, which is what they should have felt if they were human. Approval and acceptance are of such importance to human beings. Antiwar protesters had smokescreens. They would get enormous approval from peers to be against it. And vets had their own smokescreens. We couldn't see the truth about ourselves, either. We would say we were patriotic, responsible young men. That's bullshit. Maybe ten percent of the true story. For a lot of us who went, we were going after the same thing—approval. We were trying to get it from our peers, from our father who had been in World War II. We were striving to get our father's love. It's hard to see the truth, and many will deny the truth before accepting it. And it doesn't matter if you were a soldier fighting the war or a student fighting against it. We all had our reasons for taking up our battle cries, and I believe our battle cries very cleverly fooled us all.”

B
ATTLE
cries. They could be heard one weekend that September at the fashionable Martha's Vineyard estate of John O'Sullivan, the antiwar son of an investment lawyer. Clinton and Stearns were there along with a few dozen former student leaders in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. The Vineyard conclave was a reunion one year after the chaos of Chicago. It was a long weekend of touch football, antiwar rhetoric, congressional vote counting, and posturing among a fraternity of ambitious young politicos. Like the teenagers who traveled to Washington for Boys Nation in 1963, like the Rhodes Scholars who sailed across the Atlantic in 1968, many in the crowd at O'Sullivan's estate thought of themselves as future leaders of the free world. One of those in attendance, Taylor Branch, who had just arrived from Georgia where he had worked on a voter registration project, referred to the group as “
The Executive
Committee of the Future.” He said it with a touch of irony.

In Georgia, Branch had seen an old black man dip inside his overalls and show him a hernia the size of a squash. Now he was surrounded by earnest young men in their early twenties sitting around calling senators by their first names. There was Frank (Church) and Harold (Hughes) and Gene (McCarthy) and George (McGovern). “The whole antiwar scene seemed inflated, unreal, compared with the experience in Georgia,” Branch recalled. “It was my first realization that people you thought were on the inside really are not so much inside or superior. There is a real nervousness for political people who feel important to get together and be together. This intense awareness of who was there and who had done what. It was the end of the sixties up there, but all those people had their tickets punched for the future.”

Clinton took a long walk along the beach with David Mixner that weekend.
They talked about their common roots from small-town America. Mixner had grown up in Elmer, New Jersey, a place not unlike Hot Springs in its patriotic fervor. Behind his tough facade as a movement leader whose name was constantly in the papers,
Mixner confided
to Clinton, he was just a rural kid who felt inadequate in this high-powered intellectual crowd and torn between his hatred for the war and his sense of duty. He felt more comfortable at a picnic in Elmer than at a dinner party hosted by a wealthy liberal. He did not even know how to eat an artichoke. Clinton reassured Mixner by telling stories about his life in Arkansas and how he felt torn between two worlds as well.

“Are you embarrassed,” Clinton asked Mixner, “when you go home and meet someone who's in the service?”

“Yeah,” Mixner said. “I try to avoid them.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
 
THE LUCKY NUMBER

R
HODES
S
CHOLARS WERE
provided rooms at their colleges only during their first year at Oxford. For the second year, they were expected to find their own digs.
Rick Stearns
rented a spacious, rectangular second-floor room at Holywell Manor overlooking a twelfth-century church and graveyard. The apartment had two appliances of note: a short-wave radio from which Stearns learned French and listened to the music of Berlioz, Schubert, and Mahler; and a space heater that created a warm comfort zone of perhaps ten feet. Anything on the far end of the room was apt to freeze. That included the tapwater in the sink as well as Stearns's unanticipated lodger for the first month, his worried pal from Arkansas, Bill Clinton.

No one had expected Clinton back for a second year. He slept on a rollaway bed. He was rootless, moving through Oxford with scruffy hair and a grubby Army coat, the preferred cold-weather garb of the student set. He seemed less connected to the establishment than at any other time in his life.

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 was, in fact, in school that year, but his unexpected last-minute arrival had kept him off the
Oxonian
list. Whether he was a scholar in spirit as well as fact is an altogether different question. The Michaelmas term of his second year was much like the Trinity term of his first—he had little or no interaction with Oxford dons. Zbigniew Pelczynski, who had struck up a harmonious relationship with him the first year before taking a sabbatical, returned to Oxford that fall unaware that Clinton was there. “
I was
under the impression that Clinton had left and been drafted,” Pelczynski recalled. “It was extraordinary and tragic. I might have been able to help him in a difficult time. I have a feeling he felt his future was so uncertain, his Oxford life was so hanging on a thread, that he simply stopped attending tutorials regularly.” Pelczynski later examined Clinton's file to determine what had happened to him, and found that during the first term of the second year, Clinton's relationship with another tutor was “very, very tenuous.” Or perhaps it was nonexistent. One contemporaneous account indicated that the politics don who was supposed to oversee Clinton was on sabbatical that fall.

So Clinton was freeloading at Holywell Manor and paying little attention to his studies. But he was, finally, something that he had never been before, not at Georgetown during his Fulbright days, not at Oxford in his first year. He was now, briefly, a
fullblown antiwar
organizer. Through his work with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, Clinton became a key contact for American students who wanted to lend overseas support to the October 15 protest. Randall Scott, an American student attending the London School of Economics that fall, called moratorium headquarters in Washington before leaving for England to see if there would be a London version of the U.S. demonstrations. He was told to contact Bill Clinton at Oxford. Once he reached London, Scott called Oxford and after some difficulty found Clinton, who said the Rhodes Scholars might take some action related to the moratorium. “Many of us are quite concerned,” he later remembered Clinton telling him. Scott talked with Clinton again during the second week of October and was told that dozens of Americans at Oxford planned to travel to London to join a teach in at the London School of Economics and march to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where they would present officials with a petition against the war signed by Rhodes Scholars.

The American Oxonians held several meetings to plan their London actions. Steve Engstrom, a Little Rock native spending his college junior year abroad, was in Oxford then visiting friends and was taken to an anti-war meeting where, he was told in advance, he would meet a future governor of Arkansas. “
My friend
said the guy's name was Bill Clinton, and I laughed because I thought I knew all the up-and-comers in Arkansas. I had been a student politician. I knew Mack McLarty. But I had never heard of Clinton.” He found that many of the Rhodes Scholars were stridently anti-war and furious with the American government. Clinton, who ran the meeting, struck Engstrom as a voice of relative moderation. “I noticed that Clinton had already gathered the respect of the people in the room. He played the role of moderator. He was standing there listening to people asking questions and people making comments, and he facilitated the dialogue. I was amazed by how he handled an intense situation so calmly. I told my friend later, ‘You're right, the guy probably will be governor some day.'”

That Engstrom could look at an antiwar organizer and see a future governor of Arkansas says as much about the time as it does about Clinton. Opposition to the war was a mainstream sentiment that fall.
A Gallup
Poll conducted in late September showed that “disillusionment over the Vietnam war” had reached a new peak, “with six persons in ten now of the opinion that the U.S. made a mistake getting involved in Vietnam.” The moratorium, though organized by student leaders, was drawing
a broad
range of support from moderate politicians. The presidents of seventy-nine colleges and universities endorsed the moratorium. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird's son announced that he would participate in the protest at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Students at President Nixon's alma mater, Whittier College, said they would light an antiwar “flame of life” and keep it burning until the war ended.

Amid the panoply of protest on Moratorium Day, the London demonstrators barely gained notice. In a letter to his parents in Wisconsin, Randall Scott described the scene: “
And I
can express the feelings of several hundred happy Americans standing in front of their embassy at night with candles blazing—each one concerned for and not against their country. This was not a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. To give some indication, nearly all of the Rhodes scholars currently at Oxford signed a petition which was presented that afternoon.” Another peace petition, signed by forty Labour members of Parliament and presented to embassy officials by six MPs who attended the demonstration, was the only petition that made press accounts. The largest headline in the British newspapers about the protest was in
The Guardian
. “Mr.
Newman Supports
Students,” it announced, over a story revealing that the actors Paul Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, vacationing in London, had joined the students outside the embassy. It was a solemn, peaceful demonstration by all accounts. No one there was shouting for the defeat of the U.S. armed forces or victory for the NLF, the National Liberation Front of Vietnamese Communists and Nationalists often adopted as the home team in football-style chants. Clinton led a teach in discussion and served as a marshal outside the embassy. Tom Williamson, who traveled to London with Clinton and was also a marshal, thought they were “
soulmates in
opposition to the war,” and felt strongly about what they were doing, but noted that they were also typical young men who had other things
on the
ir minds. “If you were a marshal you got to stand in one place and watch a lot of people walk by. A lot of girls. That was one of the fringe benefits.”