First In His Class (38 page)

Clinton's birthday brought him luck that night. August 19 was the 311th day picked.

When details of the lottery drawing reached Oxford the next day, it seemed as though Clinton's apparent draft gambit had worked. The lottery that year was the largest it would ever be, with a pool of 850,000 young men—400,000 nineteen-year-olds and 450,000 others of ages ranging from twenty to twenty-six who previously had held deferments. Clinton now rested near the bottom of an enormous pool. The last big monthly draft, in September, had taken 29,000 men.
It was
highly unlikely, given the administration's Vietnamization policy, and the staged withdrawals of troops from Vietnam, that the monthly numbers would reach that magnitude again. Even if they did, the yearly quota for 1970 would be about 350,000 men, which would be filled at least one hundred numbers short of Clinton's No. 311. Although he was theoretically draftable for another year, and at times he told friends that his draft board still thought it might get to him, he was, in reality, free.

In a situation where Clinton once thought all his options were bad, he had avoided everything he did not want to do. He did not want to resist the draft, and thereby imperil his political dreams. He did not want to get drafted and fight in Vietnam. He did not want to spend three years in the safe haven of ROTC, and two years after that as a commissioned lieutenant, even if the war had ended long before then. He did not want to go to the University of Arkansas Law School, when so many of his Rhodes friends were heading to Yale. And he did not want to feel guilty about his deferment. “It was just a fluke,” Clinton would say decades later, when first asked how he had made it through this period without serving in the military. But of course it was not a fluke. A fluke is a wholly accidental
stroke of good luck. What happened to Clinton during that fateful year did not happen by accident. He fretted and planned every move, he got help from others when needed, he resorted to some deception or manipulation when necessary, and he was ultimately lucky. In the end, by not serving in the military, he did what 16 million other young American men did during that tumultuous era.

All that was left for Clinton after he won No. 311 in the draft lottery was to explain his actions to one of the men who had helped him at a crucial moment, Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas ROTC. On December 3, Clinton belatedly wrote Holmes a letter explaining why he had decided not to enroll in the ROTC after all. This letter would later emerge as the best known essay of Bill Clinton's life, the testament of a bright, troubled, manipulative young man struggling with his conscience and his ambition. It is a remarkable letter, classic Bill Clinton, sincere and deceptive at the same time, requiring a careful reading between the lines, paragraph by paragraph.

Dear Col. Holmes,

I am
sorry to be so long in writing. I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month, and from now on you will, but I have had to have some time to think about this first letter. Almost daily since my return to England I have thought about writing, about what I want to and ought to say.

(It was, in fact, the only such letter. Clinton wrote no more to the colonel. He had every reason to know that Holmes would have little interest in hearing from him after this.)

First, I want to thank you, not just for saving me from the draft, but for being so kind and decent to me last summer, when I was as low as I have ever been. One thing which made the bond we struck in good faith somewhat palatable to me was my high regard for you personally. In retrospect, it seems that the admiration might not have been mutual had you known a little more about me, about my political beliefs and activities. At least you might have thought me more fit for the draft than for the ROTC.

Holmes did save Clinton from the draft by working out the ROTC deferment before the July 28 induction deadline. Though Clinton did not know him very well, Holmes was a straightforward, gentle father figure of the sort Clinton had long cherished, going back to his high school days with
band director Virgil Spurlin. When in the presence of such men, Clinton was inclined not to say or do anything that would disappoint them.

Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I did it for the experience and the salary but also for the opportunity, however small, of working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam. I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there was a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did.

Clinton rewrites his own history here. When he began working in the documents room at the foreign relations committee in the fall of 1966, he had no strong feelings about the war and leaned toward support of President Johnson's position. There is no doubt that he studied the issue while he was there and dramatically changed his position over two years, but his opposition to the war was fairly quiet. No one at Georgetown University considered him an antiwar activist. Father McSorley, the leading peace activist on campus, had never met Clinton during his undergraduate years; their first encounter was at the London demonstrations that fall.

I have written and spoken and marched against the war. One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine. After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans here for demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16.

Again, apparently for dramatic effect, Clinton overstates his role. He did not travel to England primarily to organize for the October and November demonstrations, but he did help organize the Americans at Oxford once he was there. The “close friend of mine” he refers to as a national organizer of the moratorium apparently was David Mixner. Clinton had met Mixner only that summer. But Rick Stearns, when asked whether that qualified Mixner as a close friend of Clinton's, commented, “It doesn't take more than a day for Clinton to consider someone a close friend.”

Interlocked with the war is the draft issue, which I did not begin to consider separately until early 1968. For a law seminar at Georgetown I wrote a paper on the legal arguments for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objection, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not
simply to “participation in war in any form.” From my work I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation. The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case. Nor was Korea—an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.

This paragraph is a crystallization of countless conversations and debates Clinton had had with his Rhodes friends over the previous year. The most revealing sentence is not his explanation of why he considered the draft illegitimate then, but why it was legitimate in World War II. Clinton and his classmates could not dismiss the memories of their fathers and what was considered the last good war. In claiming their moral ground on Vietnam, it was important for them to think that they would have been eager to fight in World War II. They felt mistreated by fate that they had reached adulthood at a time when their country was fighting a war they did not believe in.

Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong. Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is one of the bravest, best men I know. His country needs men like him more than they know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.

(George Butte and Paul Parish in Clinton's class had filed as conscientious objectors. Several members of the class ahead of theirs were in the process of seeking C.O. status, including one commissioned lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.
The letter
of recommendation was for Parish. Aller, the roommate resister, was both a source of inspiration and guilt for Clinton.)

The decision not to be a resister and related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my
beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system. For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead. I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years. The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway.

When Clinton says he decided to accept the draft, he means accepting it in the sense of not being a resister. Some critics have focused on his desire to maintain his political viability as a sign of overbearing ambition. In the context of Clinton's life to that point, it seems less raw, rather an honest reflection of who he was and where he was going. The final sentence reads more like Aller than Clinton, and was no doubt influenced by their long discussions during the week before Clinton wrote the letter.

When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted you. ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance. Going on with my education, even coming back to England, played no part in my decision to join ROTC. I am back here, and would have been at Arkansas Law School because there is nothing else I can do. In fact, I would like to have been able to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.

The first line here is a basic admission that he had been drafted in the spring of 1969, a line that somehow was ignored decades later when the letter surfaced at a time when Clinton was not acknowledging that he had received a draft notice. The rest of the paragraph seems somewhat disingenuous. When Clinton met with his Georgetown housemates the previous July, he left the impression with them that he wanted nothing more than to return to Oxford for his second year. His September 9 letter to Stearns underscored that notion as well, ending with the line, “I want so much to tell you we're going back to England.”

But the particulars of my personal life are not nearly as important to me as the principles involved. After I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no
interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm. Also, I began to think I had deceived you, not by lies—there were none—but by failing to tell you all the things I'm writing now. I doubt that I had the mental coherence to articulate them then.

Clinton here reveals that he understands that deception can involve more than lies. In dealing with the draft issue over the ensuing years, he would be plagued more than anything else by what he did not say—omissions in his story.

At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1-D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and loss of my self regard and self confidence really set in. I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep. Finally, on September 121 stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying to help in a case where he really couldn't, and stating that I couldn't do the ROTC after all and would he please draft me as soon as possible. I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it on me every day until I got on the plane to return to England. I didn't mail the letter because 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. So I came back to England to try to make something of this second year of my Rhodes scholarship.

This paragraph presents the basic contradiction in Clinton's explanation of why he gave up his deferment. On the one hand, he wants the moral high ground of making himself 1-A, but on the other hand, he still does not want to be drafted or go into the Army and fight in Vietnam. It also again suggests that Clinton played the draft like a chess player and withdrew his deferment only when he thought it safe to do so.

And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel. I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal. Forgive
the length of this letter. There was much to say. There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait. Please say hello to Col. Jones for me.