First In His Class (46 page)

About the
White House Fellowships: the best story I know on them is that virtually the only non-conservative who ever got one was a quasi-radical woman who wound up in the White House sleeping with LBJ, who made her wear a peace symbol around her waist whenever they made love. You may go far, Cliff; I doubt you will ever go that far!

You know as well as I do that past a certain point there is no such thing
as a non-partisan, objective selection process. Discretion and diplomacy aren't demanded so much by propriety as by the necessity not to get caught. I don't mind writing to Fulbright for you, if you'll tell me what you want me to ask him to do, but you ought to know that he won't give your politics a second thought. It would look good for Arkansas if you got the thing…. Wouldn't mind dropping David Pryor a line, either. He's in the favor-doing business now anyway, as you know.

With that acute sense of how the political game was played came the joy of playing it.
Clinton thrived
on what politics offered: endless opportunities to meet people and befriend them and make connections. Bekavac remembers how thrilled Clinton was when his mentor J. William Fulbright visited Yale. Clinton was invited to a private reception before the senator's speech and brought Bekavac along. Bekavac sensed that what seemed to excite Clinton most was the opportunity to introduce her to Fulbright. He planted her in a stairwell where she was sure to get a moment alone with him. “It wasn't that Bill wanted me to know that he knew this important person. He wanted me to share in the enjoyment of it. He had this great sense of occasion and pride and wanted me to have that experience.” (That night in New Haven, Fulbright greeted Bekavac courteously and told Clinton to get his hair cut.)

After spending several weeks watching Clinton operate, Bekavac concluded that her friend, along with his obvious analytical skills, had a “novelistic sensibility about people.” He would remember things about their lives. He thirsted for life stories. He remembered home towns and names of parents and brothers. “If he were a novelist, he would be like Tolstoy. Everyone has an epitaph—‘the hulky Pierre.' He had that kind of impressionist sensibility. What he remembered about people was some human fact about their life not unrelated to sentimentality and emotionalism.” That, says Bekavac, is how Clinton saw life: in thematic, recurrent, novelistic patterns.

His living
quarters on Long Island Sound provided ample material for the novelist. It was a four-bedroom house with thin walls designed primarily for summer shore use, with a large glass-enclosed porch looking out on Fort Trumbull Beach. The tide would often go out hundreds of yards, providing a vast expanse of hard sand as a field for the young men and their friends to play touch football when the weather was suitable. On clear nights, the porch offered a spectacular view of the moon softly lighting the sand and the glistening Sound beyond. Clinton, Pogue, Eakeley, and Coleman shared the space with a stray dog that Pogue had found on the beach—a little mutt named Burt that chewed the furniture—and several women friends. Pogue's future wife was the most frequent guest. Clinton was
interested in several women then. He had a capacity, Bekavac thought, for “fitting them all into one semester. Simultaneously.” He had what his friends described as a brief and passionate love affair with a friend of Coleman's sister. Coleman would tell the story of this romance to classmates as though he were describing a scene from
Gone With the Wind
. Clinton was also still writing letters to his many former girlfriends. When he learned that Denise Hyland, his Georgetown sweetheart, was to marry that winter, he wrote her a long goodbye letter.

Although no one was there much during the week, on weekends the beach house usually throbbed with friends escaping the grime of
New Haven
. With Carole King music playing in the background, Pogue would warm up huge batches of cider and grill chicken outside, satisfying his customers with “a pretty mean coq au vin.” Clinton was reading novels that year. On Eakeley's birthday, he gave his housemate several of his favorite works by William Faulkner and Reynolds Price. He said that understanding Faulkner was essential to appreciating human nature and the southern mind. According to a letter he sent Denise Hyland, he had also picked up a habit of the tweedy, literary set, a surprising one for someone who never smoked cigarettes. “I am,” he wrote, “smoking away on my pipe.”

Eakeley was the most responsible member of the household. He had found the house and he organized the living arrangements and the rent. He was the furthest along in his law studies, having begun his law work at Oxford. When his mother visited from New Jersey, he could pound the place into shape for an adult cocktail party. A Skull and Bones man from his days as a Yale undergrad, he was on his way to a certain Wall Street career. He looked as calm and placid as the waters of Long Island Sound on a still night, but he had insomnia. He would walk the beach at midnight and drink scotch to help him get to sleep.

Pogue was the house radical. He wore a leather jacket and drove a racy red Norton Commando motorcycle to school. When the beach house discussions strayed into the economic realm, Coleman remembers, “Don would accuse us of taking too superficial a look at it. He'd say, ‘This is part of the capitalist system that needs to be changed.'”

Coleman was the son of William T. Coleman, Jr., a black Republican civil rights lawyer who later became Secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration. His family “believed in integration and the idea of blacks assimilating and becoming part of white society,” and as part of his socialization process Coleman went to predominantly white private schools, first Germantown Friends in Philadelphia, and then Williams College in Massachusetts. At Williams, his sense of pride in being part of the black bourgeoisie was “promptly dealt with and taken apart” and he discovered
the concept of black pride. He and his black compatriots at Williams took over the administration building one night. One fellow called himself the minister of defense and tried to surround the building with electrical wires to shock anybody who came in. On the third day of the takeover, Coleman's mother obtained the telephone number inside the building, called him, and begged him to come out. “I said, ‘Mother, I've got to do this, please don't embarrass me by calling anymore!'” By the time he reached Yale, Coleman had resolved the inner question of who he was. He could move between the black and white worlds comfortably by then, and in fact was known as an extremely friendly, laid-back student with a sardonic sense of humor and a tendency, like Clinton, to cram for exams.

“N
EW
Haven is the vile crotch of Connecticut,” Bob Reich wrote to his fellow Class of 1968 Rhodes Scholars in his first annual letter that winter for the
American Oxonian
magazine. “Travelers avoid it, letters and telephone calls rarely penetrate its polluted periphery. Those of us who have braved it for a year find ourselves strangely out of touch with the rest of the world, even when we leave it. Maybe we smell. As a result, news of our Rhodes group must be based primarily on rumor, scandal, muck-raking, hearsay, Bill Clinton, gossip, and intuition—not the most reliable sources, I'm afraid, and I apologize in advance for borderline fiction.”

The original plan was for Reich to live at the beach house with Clinton and Eakeley, his friends from Univ College, but he had decided that he wanted to stay in a dormitory to be closer to the Yale Law library. One semester in a dormitory proved enough even for him, however, and for the second semester he moved with Bekavac and two other students into a house on Crown Street that featured a front door painted bright orange. The landlord, a stranger to the cultural revolution exploding around him, was reluctant to rent to a mixed-sex group. He required his tenants to provide letters of approval from their mothers, but luckily for him, he rarely probed inside the orange door.

Reich was notable, wherever he went and whatever he was doing.
Time
magazine, which had featured him in a profile years earlier on the college seniors of 1968, sent a reporter up to Crown Street to file an update. The writer described Reich's house as “an urban commune”—a hyperbolic touch that did not reassure Bekavac's mother back in Clairton. And how had Reich changed since the fiery days of 1968? “
Robert Reich
is now less confident about how to achieve” social change, the reporter wrote. He noted that “life as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford's 700-year-old University College gave him his first serious look at democratic socialism, a system he thinks is inevitable for the U.S.” Of his own future, Reich told
Time
, “I hope to be a kind of cross between a philosopher and a political hack.”

The Rhodes
Scholars had scattered. Reich noted in his alumni letter. Tom Williamson was in Ethiopia working as a consultant on public policy. Danny Singer was at medical school at Harvard. Keith Marshall was an art curator in New Orleans. George Butte was fulfilling his conscientious objector obligation in Dallas. Rick Stearns was commuting between Oxford and Washington, where he was working on the nascent presidential campaign of George McGovern. John Isaacson was “living it up in the nether-world of political hackery, and occasionally attending classes at Harvard Law School.” A batch of scholars were still at Oxford, including Bo Jones, who was spending “an idyllic year in a cottage fifteen miles outside Oxford”; Mike Shea, who had been relieved from his Army obligation because of his bum knee; Paul Parish, who had returned from his nervous breakdown and was finishing his honors courses at Christ Church College, still unsure about when he might serve out his conscientious objector requirement; Darryl Gless, who missed getting drafted in the lottery by one number and was finishing his advanced degree in literature; and Strobe Talbott (“Izvestia's ‘rising young CIA agent,'” Reich wrote), who was completing the Khrushchev memoirs and trying to get back into the Soviet Union.

And what had become of Frank Aller, the brilliant, troubled Rhodes draft resister? “Frank Aller made a traumatic reentry into the States, having missed his original induction day,” Reich wrote. “Much to everyone's relief, a new induction day never came, and Frank spent the remainder of the year safely in Newton, Massachusetts, doing research into cable television. With the recent thaw in China's foreign policy, Frank hopes to be able to continue his Oxford studies on the Chinese mainland. He is now in Spokane, Washington.”

Reich's account was incomplete. Aller traveled on a much more difficult journey that year than merely heading from Oxford to Newton to Spokane. When the Leckford Road gang parted company at the end of their second year at Oxford,
Aller went
to Spain to work on an autobiographical novel about a draft resister. It became his obsession and he continued writing it early that fall in Oxford and London. He wrote the novel twice through and never considered it done, yet the very act of writing it had a profound effect on him. “My whole experience with the book … was really the first time I tried to deal honestly with the questions of draft resistance and exile,” he later confessed in a letter to Brooke Shearer, who was then studying at Stanford. “It was an exciting but also sobering experience, as I tried to assess what the decision meant after two years of living with it and what it was likely to mean in the long run. At the end of the period when I was actively revising the second draft … I realized that I was being led toward another decision just as difficult as the first one, if not more so.”

Aller did not regret his decision to resist, nor consider it futile; but in grappling with its consequences while writing the book, he concluded that
the symbolism of his action had outlived its usefulness. By early November 1970, he had come to believe that “the effect has ended, or nearly ended.” With his effectiveness diminished, he and his “fellow criminals and conspirators,” he wrote, could have “very little influence on what happens in the US in the future. Out of sight is out of mind. It's taken me some time to realize that.” His positions on the war and the direction of American politics had not changed, but he was starting to feel irrelevant. He dreamed about going home. “To stay in this situation is to have my life defined by the war in Vietnam—sort of like being locked into a political time-capsule.” Finally, the practical burdens of his decision were wearing him down as well—“the problems of passports, immigration requirements, citizenship regulations etc.—or my family.”

Aller decided to come home. It was not an easy decision for someone who had been transformed into a martyr, a hero, by his Oxford friends. Brooke Shearer was but one of many friends Aller felt compelled to write to and warn about his decision, to “reassure them—when they hear about it—that I haven't suddenly lost control of what few mental faculties I originally had.” Although he spent six weeks, after turning away from the second draft of his novel, trying to find another course of action, he could see “no other exit.” It had become “a question of realizing when you're on a losing track—and doing something about it—or letting life pass you by.”

When Aller finally arrived in Spokane, he was met by his family and a U.S. marshal, who was there to arrest him. As he walked off the plane, Aller made a gesture—hands up and bent at the elbows, fists closed, as though he expected to be handcuffed on the spot, but the marshal waited until they were in the car before he made the arrest. After his arraignment, Aller flew back to Boston, where he visited a draft lawyer who sent him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist concluded after one visit that Aller was severely depressed and unqualified for military service. With the psychiatrist's letter in hand, Aller flew back to Spokane. He finally took his draft physical, which he failed. He was reclassified 1-Y, a deferment that protected him from service except in case of a national emergency. The next day his indictment for draft resistance was dropped. It was a rather anticlimactic ending to a three-year drama. Now Aller was again faced with the prospect of what to do with the rest of his life. He bounced back and forth between Spokane and Los Angeles trying to line up work as a journalist.