First In His Class (36 page)

The fall of 1969 was an odd, rushed, condensed time back in America. The antiwar movement was constantly splintering, one faction trying to outdo another. By November, the movement was larger but more fractious than ever. Another protest was held in Washington one month after the
moratorium, this one organized by the more confrontational but still peaceful wing of the antiwar movement, known as the New Mobilization Committee, or Mobe. On the eve of the demonstration, William Ayers, a leader of the Weathermen, the most provocative of several radical groups, tried to blackmail the organizers by saying that for $20,000 his band of predominantly upper-middle-class suburban white revolutionary nihilists would not trash the November 15 event. Ayers said the Weathermen needed the money to pay for legal bills they had piled up after their arrests for a violent demonstration in Chicago. The organizers refused to pay. A Mobe leader asked Ayers what the ultimate goal of the Weathermen was. “To kill all rich people,” came the response. When it was noted that Ayers's father was a wealthy financier, he replied, “You know what Abbie Hoffman says, ‘Bring the war home. Kill your parents.'”

The day
of the Mobe brought the biggest demonstration in the history of Washington. A crowd estimated by police at 250,000 and by organizers as more than half a million marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and assembled at the Washington Monument. As the event ended, a few thousand young militants scrambled across to the Justice Department and incited a rocks-and-bottles versus tear-gas melee with police. Attorney General John N. Mitchell and his top deputy, Richard G. Kleindienst, looked down on the confrontation from their offices on the fifth floor and seized on the opportunity to portray the antiwar movement as anarchistic, even though all but a fraction of the demonstrators were peaceful and the organizers had fielded more than two thousand marshals to try to keep matters under control.

In London
that day the same drama was played out on a miniature scale. Clinton and his American friends at Oxford attended the protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. This demonstration was larger than the October 15 event, drawing more than five hundred American and British protesters who gathered at midafternoon and spent several hours marching around the square four abreast. Each marcher wore a black armband and carried a card bearing the name of an American soldier killed in Vietnam. One at a time, hour after hour, marchers stepped before a microphone and read the name of a dead soldier before placing the card in a small coffin. Late in the afternoon, a small band of young Communists came marching down the street, chanting anti-imperialist slogans and taunting the police. Father Richard McSorley, a Georgetown University professor active in the world peace movement, happened to be in London that day, taking part in the peaceful protest. He encountered a young Communist who was yelling “Down with imperialism!” through a bullhorn. “You know, peace activists organized this event and people came to act peacefully. If you had tried to organize it on the theme of down with
imperialism, no one would have come,” McSorley told him. “You have no right to interrupt what we're doing.” Rick Stearns and Clinton “ended up on the sidelines watching various Trotskyites pitching coins at horses” in Grosvenor Square. “There was an ugly mood in that crowd,” Stearns said later, adding that he and Clinton “were both offended by anti-American taunts and the aura of violence the groups projected.”

At the end of the evening, they announced over a loudspeaker that they would hold a prayer service at St. Mark's Church across from the embassy the following day. Clinton arrived in a suit and tie. He recognized Father McSorley from his Georgetown days and asked the priest to open the prayers. McSorley recited St. Francis's prayer for peace. “
After my
prayer we had hymns, peace songs led by two women with guitars, and the reading of poetry by a native white South American woman,” McSorley later wrote. Stearns recited John Donne's sermon—“Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” McSorley wrote that he found all the poems moving. “Mixed with the reading were more peace songs. All the readers were young people. Although it was a sad day, it was encouraging and comforting to see the determination of these young people who would stand against the evils of war.” And, McSorley noted, he was “glad to see a Georgetown student leading in the religious service of peace.”

After the
service, Clinton introduced McSorley to Stearns and his other friends, and they again marched over to Grosvenor Square, this time carrying small white crosses, which they placed on the steps of the embassy. There were no confrontations with police.

Decades later, Republican partisans would attempt to portray Clinton as an unpatriotic if not seditious radical for helping to organize the London protests and criticizing his government while overseas. Weighed in the context of the times, the charge loses gravity. Opposition to the war was so strong in Clinton's age group that
among the
Rhodes Scholars who came to London to protest that fall were Willy Fletcher, who was an ensign in the Navy, and two graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy, J. Michael Kirchberg and Robert Earl. (Earl was nervous about getting his picture taken.) Kirchberg eventually became a conscientious objector; Earl later ended up in the White House during the Reagan years serving as a top assistant to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. Another American student at the London School of Economics was more prominently mentioned than Clinton in the local press accounts of the October 15 demonstration. Michael Boskin, identified as a student from Berkeley, California, was quoted in
The Guardian
as saying that the demonstrators had asked the American Embassy to close for the day so that employees could join the protest. This same
Michael Boskin would later serve as chairman of Republican President George Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

A
LONGSIDE
Clinton's role in the London antiwar protests was another story—his decision to give up the 1-D deferment, scrap the University of Arkansas Law School and ROTC altogether, and resubmit himself to the draft. It is a difficult episode to sort out, muddled by Clinton's various accounts, which tend to be incomplete or contradictory, and by a scarcity of documentary evidence. The essential question is not so much what Clinton did as why he did it. Was it a decision driven by guilt and honor that should be accepted at face value? Or was it the end-game maneuver of a draft-wise young man playing every angle to avoid military service without appearing unpatriotic or duplicitous? Was Clinton unaware of all the draft news coming out during the time he made his decision? Or was he aware at the time he relinquished the ROTC deferment that actions taken during that period by the Nixon administration had considerably narrowed the odds of his getting drafted again? There is a temptation to choose one or the other explanation, yes or no, rule out anything in between. But with Clinton it is rarely that simple. A civil war raged inside him between his conscience and his political will to survive. It seems that he tried to appease both impulses. At times he might have been guided by virtue. Other times he deceived the world, if not himself.

The question of when Clinton decided to give up the deferment is important as it relates to his truthfulness in later accounts and to what he would have known about his vulnerability to the draft on the day he made the decision.
His draft
records show that he held the 1-D deferment from August 7 to October 30, 1969. Those two dates mark the days when the Garland County Draft Board met, considered Clinton's case, and reclassified him, first from 1-A to 1-D, then back from 1-D to 1-A. They are not the dates, however, when Clinton took the actions that led to the reclassifications. According to a letter he wrote to Denise Hyland, Clinton struck his ROTC deal with Colonel Holmes on July 17—three weeks before the draft board officially reclassified him. Similarly, it seems certain that Clinton notified the draft board that he wanted to give up his deferment and be reclassified 1-A some time before the official October 30 draft board action. There are no documents substantiating this. The draft official with whom Clinton and his family dealt in giving up the deferment, William S. Armstrong, then the chairman, died before anyone had reason to ask him.

Clinton's first public response to questions surrounding the deferment came nine years later, in 1978, when he was back in Arkansas running for office.
His answer
was largely accepted as reasonable at the time, though
in retrospect it does not hold up. According to the
Arkansas Gazette
edition of October 28, 1978, Clinton, responding to a charge that he had used the ROTC to dodge the draft, stated that “the accusation was baseless because he never received a draft deferment.” The central paragraph in that article reads:

Clinton explained Friday that while at Oxford he had decided to take advantage of the ROTC opportunity and had made the agreement in the summer of 1969. The ROTC unit was to mail the agreement to Washington at the end of the year and the deferment would start in 1970. On returning to Oxford, however, he decided against the deferment and wrote to Col. Holmes, the ROTC commander, saying he would prefer to go ahead and subject himself to the draft and get it over with although he would proceed with the ROTC training if Holmes desired. A relative of Clinton's talked to Holmes and was told the agreement would be cancelled, Clinton said.

The most obvious problem with Clinton's 1978 response is his claim that he never received the deferment. It was later established that he had been deferred and that it was the deferment that saved him from being inducted on July 28. His induction deadline was not part of the dispute in 1978 because neither his accusers nor the press were aware that he had been drafted and Clinton did not volunteer that fact. As to the concluding thought in the paragraph, that Clinton said he told Colonel Holmes he would go ahead with the ROTC training anyway if Holmes so desired, there is no mention of this in
the only
letter Clinton wrote Holmes later, and Clinton never raised the matter again in his subsequent statements on the issue.

Clinton offered a different narrative thirteen years later, during a December 1991 interview with Dan Balz, a political reporter for
The Washington Post
. In that interview, he again failed to mention that he had been drafted in the spring of 1969, and in fact left the impression that he had never received a draft notice. “…
I expected
to be called while I was over there the first year,” Clinton said, “but they never did.” He then told how he had arranged to get into law school and the ROTC but decided at the end of the summer that “that was not a good thing to do, you know?” He went on: “I'd already had one good year at Oxford, but by then four of my classmates had died in Vietnam, including a boy that was one of my closest friends when I was a child. And so I asked to be put back in the draft…. And the guy that was head of the ROTC unit really tried to talk me out of it. He said, ‘You don't need to do this.' I said, ‘Yeah, I just can't put it off. Call me. Let's go.' I told my draft board. They said okay, if that's what you
want, we'll do it. The guy at the draft board then said they were going to call me in January.”

There is no evidence that either of the conversations Clinton related to the
Post
in that account took place in the manner he described. Months after the interview, in fact, Clinton acknowledged that he did not directly make the arrangements to be placed back in the draft, since he was already in Oxford by then, but rather used an intermediary in Arkansas, his stepfather Jeff Dwire. Another important revelation came after Clinton's interview with the
Post
—the letter Clinton wrote to Colonel Holmes in December 1969 explaining why he had given up his deferment. The text of that letter, which will be examined in detail later, leaves the impression that Clinton was explaining his actions to Holmes for the first time, making it less plausible that the student and the colonel had an earlier conversation of the sort Clinton related to the
Post
.

The best
estimate of when Clinton gave up his deferment can be deduced from statements made by Randall Scott, the graduate student at the London School of Economics who dealt with Clinton while organizing the October 15 teach-in and protest at the American Embassy. According to Scott, when he first called Clinton at the end of September or beginning of October to find out whether the Rhodes Scholars would participate on Moratorium Day, Clinton told him that he was “very uncomfortable being involved in the moratorium with [my] 1-D.” Clinton indicated that some of his high school friends had been killed in Vietnam and that he did not feel right protesting while he remained in what might be viewed as a safe haven. He told Scott that he “intended to drop it.” On the day of the protest, according to Scott, he met Clinton and told him that carrying the petition to the U.S. Embassy was a courageous act by the Rhodes Scholars. Clinton's response was, “And I told my draft board to make me 1-A.”

From Scott's reconstruction of his conversations with Clinton, then, it seems that Clinton, acting through his stepfather, asked the draft board to drop his deferment and reclassify him 1-A sometime between October 1 and October 15.

The fact that Clinton felt uneasy about his deferment and thought about giving it up is documented in the July 20 letter to Denise Hyland and the September 10 letter to Rick Stearns. “There is still the doubt that maybe I should have said to hell with it, done this thing [submit to the draft] and been free!” Clinton wrote in the Hyland letter. To Stearns, he wrote: “Nothing could be worse than this torment … and if I cannot rid myself of it, I will just have to go into the service and root out the cause.” If Clinton sincerely wanted to ease his torment by entering the service, however, he could have given his draft board chairman the letter he said he stayed up all night on September 12 writing—the one revealing that he did not have
his heart in the ROTC program and wanted to be drafted as soon as possible—instead of keeping it in his back pocket for weeks and leaving for Oxford without mailing it. Or, surer yet, he could have simply enlisted. The reason he took neither of those routes is explained in the letter he wrote to Colonel Holmes a few months later, in December 1969, in which he said, “…
I didn't
see, in the end, how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved.”