First In His Class (39 page)

Merry Christmas

Sincerely,

Bill Clinton

That same week, Clinton sent another letter to the United States. It was his application to Yale Law School.

His lengthy writ of conscience did not find an especially receptive audience when it reached Colonel Holmes in Fayetteville. “The letter was the talk of the unit,” according to Ed Howard, the drill instructor. “We all knew about it. Lieutenant Colonel Jones advised us of the letter. He was more upset than the average instructor.” Howard, who went on to become a real estate broker in Malvern, Arkansas, in later years supported Clinton's political endeavors in the state, but he harbored ill feelings about Clinton's handling of the ROTC episode. The letter, he said later, only intensified the anger the ROTC staff had felt toward Clinton since he had failed to enroll at the law school. “There was anger again. Our feeling was that his conscience bothered him.” According to Howard, no one on the staff believed Clinton's explanation that he abandoned ROTC because he wanted to be drafted. “I don't think anybody ever took it serious. It was apparent to us that he used the dodger routine.”

Another effect of the letter was the creation of a Bill Clinton heading in the Dissidents File at the ROTC headquarters in Fayetteville. The military during that era maintained files on anyone associated with the program who opposed the war. Howard said there was an intelligence network linking all the units around the nation. “If we had a guy from Houston or Austin demonstrating against the war, we'd clip the story and send it to Fort Sam Houston, Fifth Army Headquarters for the ROTC, and then on to the pertinent unit.
A dissident
file was kept on Bill Clinton after he wrote the letter to Col. Holmes.” The letter was the main document in Clinton's file.

As one who worked in the ROTC unit and later supported Clinton, Howard was a witness without any apparent hostile motive. Holmes'
s reactions
fluctuated over the years, ranging from benign to neutral and finally, near the end of the 1992 election, to openly hostile. When asked in 1978 to comment on Clinton's behavior during the ROTC episode, he claimed that he could not remember any specifics. In 1991, his recollection was that he had treated Clinton “just like any other kid.” Early in the 1992 presidential campaign, he began to speak out, telling the
Wall Street Journal
that he felt that he had been manipulated by Clinton. Late in the campaign, on September 16, 1992, he issued a lengthy statement questioning
Clinton's “patriotism and his integrity,” and saying that he came to believe that Clinton deceived him to avoid the draft.

The Holmes statement was written with the help of his daughter, Linda Burnett of Fort Smith, a Republican activist, and released with guidance from the office of the former Republican congressman from that district, John Paul Hammerschmidt. According to David Tell, a member of President Bush's opposition research staff, he and several other Bush campaign officials reviewed the letter before it was made public. Although it might have honestly conveyed Holmes's long-repressed antipathy toward Clinton, there was much in it that was illogical. Tell, in fact, was disappointed when he first read the letter because it was “
full of
rhetoric and precious few facts.” Most of the letter expressed Holmes's outrage over Clinton's participation in antiwar rallies. Recalling now in detail a conversation that he said he could not remember at all when he was first asked about it in 1978, Holmes said that Clinton failed to reveal his history of antiwar protest during their initial meeting in July 1969. “
At no
time during this long conversation about his desire to join the program did he inform me of his involvement, participation and actually organizing protests against the United States involvement in Southeast Asia,” Holmes stated. “He was shrewed [sic] enough to realize that had I been aware of his activities, he would not have been accepted into the ROTC program as a potential officer in the United States Army.”

What Holmes failed to take into account was that Clinton's antiwar activities came
after
their July meeting: Clinton could not tell him about events that had not yet occurred. Holmes certainly knew that Clinton had worked for Senator Fulbright, a staunch opponent of the war. And as drill instructor Ed Howard pointed out, Holmes's ROTC unit was
not above
enrolling law students who were seeking a way around Vietnam. His unit, in fact, had grown considerably in 1969 precisely for that reason.

CHAPTER TWELVE
 
THE GRAND TOUR

I
T WAS TRADITIONAL
in the eighteenth century for young English noblemen to embark on grand tours of Europe before they got on with their futures. Sir Edgar Williams, the longtime warden of Rhodes House, a man of traditional tastes, thought of the Rhodes mission as “
a modern
version of the old Grand Tour” for the American scholars under his supervision at Oxford. During long breaks between terms, the scholars were expected to explore the continent on their Rhodes stipend. Whatever academic skills they acquired at Oxford seemed almost secondary to this notion of introducing the best men for the world's fight to the Old World for which they would do intellectual battle. Clinton had traveled to Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, and Austria during previous breaks and long weekends; but now, for the Christmas holiday of his second year, he was ready to undertake one of the full-length grand tours, to Russia and back—five weeks by train moving in a circle north, east, and then west, with extended stops in Oslo, Helsinki, Moscow, Prague, and Munich.

Clinton's was
not a
nobleman's holiday. There were no servants at his command, he slept at youth hostels more often than hotels, and he lacked the trunkful of formal attire, instead lugging a bag that held denim jeans and cigarettes to sell, trade, or give away as thank-you presents. He traveled solo, which was rare for him, though part of the Rhodes tradition—most scholars went off by themselves at least once during their Oxford years. But he was never alone for long: he rode the chuckwagon line, to use an idiom of the American West, finding friends, relatives of friends, or friends of friends at every stop along the route.

The first stop on his forty-day journey was in Oslo.
As he
was ambling down the stairs of the Oslo train station, Clinton noticed that Father McSorley was in the crowd directly ahead of him. Clinton's strides carried him abreast of McSorley and he caught the priest's eye. They had met only one month earlier at the antiwar prayer service at St. Mark's Church in London. “‘What are you doing here?'” McSorley remembers that Clinton asked him, to which he answered that he was there to visit several peace groups in the Norwegian capital. Clinton, with no immediate plans, asked if he could come along. McSorley was delighted to have a companion. “I said, ‘Sure,' and off we went.” In place of a tourist guidebook, McSorley carried a calendar from the War Resisters League listing the important peace groups in each European community. He had annotated his copy with advice from Quaker peace activists in London. Their first stop was an old Victorian mansion near the University of Oslo that housed the Institute for Peace Research, where they met several young Norwegians who were conscientious objectors opposed to Norway's role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

McSorley and Clinton strolled through the university, lunched with a professor teaching the New Testament, visited another peace center founded by two actors, and drank tea at a chalet near the train station before parting. “‘This is a great way to see a country!'” Clinton said as they sipped tea. “‘You see as much as a tourist, you have an important subject to talk about with the people you meet, and you learn something of the process of working toward peace.'” Clinton's comment stuck in McSorley's mind so firmly that he considered using ‘A Great Way to See a Country' as the title for a book he would later write about his peace travels around the world. That book, which McSorley published himself under the title
Peace Eyes
, offers a brief account of his afternoon with Clinton in Oslo.
It was
from McSorley's account that Republican partisans during the 1992 presidential campaign began painting a distorted picture of Clinton's trip to Moscow. Was it an accident, they asked, that McSorley and Clinton toured the peace institutes of Oslo, or were they in fact traveling together across the continent on what was called “the Peace Train”? The answer is that Clinton and McSorley were not traveling together. They met by coincidence. Clinton tagged along with McSorley because he was an insatiably curious fellow who liked companionship. From Oslo, McSorley traveled south and west, through Sweden to Copenhagen. Clinton headed the other direction, toward Finland.

While still in Oslo, Clinton had another innocuous encounter that later became the subject of a joke that in turn fueled a rumor that was exaggerated down through the years. The meeting was with
James Durham
, an old acquaintance from Hot Springs. The false rumor was that during their meeting, Clinton broached the subject of staying in Scandinavia and renouncing his American citizenship. Apparently it was that bogus rumor that excited certain Republican officials so much during the 1992 campaign that they searched Clinton's passport files in a State Department
warehouse to see if any documents there offered clues to his alleged flirtation with apostasy.

James Durham was another Hot Springs golden boy, a brilliant student and track star in the class ahead of Clinton's who was studying biophysics at the University of Oslo on a Fulbright fellowship. During his time in Norway, he had gone native. He had joined the Norwegian national rowing team. He dreamt every night in Norwegian. He became enchanted with Scandinavian socialism and for a time embraced pacifism. He attempted, he said later, to become “a flaming radical—I was in Europe longer and immersed in those processes longer than Bill. I experimented in radicalism.” He told his parents he planned to marry a Norwegian and stay there. There would, of course, be a military consequence to any such decision. Durham had a low lottery number and was protected from the draft only because the Garland County Draft Board gave him even more preferential treatment than Clinton had received. He was still classified 2-S, protected by a graduate deferment for more than a year and a half after such deferments were eliminated.

When Clinton arrived in Oslo, he had Durham's address in his pocket, and went to see him at his closet-sized room in the student housing complex. “So Bill knocks on the door and I was surprised,” Durham later remembered. “He hadn't called. I wasn't expecting him.” They talked for a few hours, mostly about the draft and Vietnam. Durham said that he still had a deferment and was not sure what he would do next. Clinton said he was 1-A but had a high lottery number and was planning to return to the United States to attend law school at Yale. It seemed to Durham that Clinton was looking for support and encouragement that he was “doing the right thing by going back.” The two young men from Hot Springs agreed on most points, but got into an argument when Clinton talked about antiwar demonstrations. Durham opposed the war but did not like demonstrations. The argument did not dominate the discussion, and when Clinton left the apartment, they parted on friendly terms.

Over the
years, the argument between Durham and Clinton, which Durham had passed along to his father, a staunch Republican and Hot Springs physician, ballooned into an impassioned exchange during which Clinton said he was about to renounce his citizenship and Durham talked him out of it. That version became more popular in the 1980s when Clinton was governor of Arkansas and Durham jokingly evoked the Oslo meeting to members of his family who were complaining about Clinton's actions in Little Rock. “Well,” Durham told them sarcastically, “I did what you wanted—I sent Billy home!” By 1992, the rumor spread through the GOP gossip circuit that Clinton had once tried to renounce his American citizenship and someone had a letter to prove it. And Jim Durham, who had once talked of staying in Norway and marrying a Norwegian, which he
never did, was now Colonel James Durham of the United States Marine Corps, with an office at the Pentagon, and quietly bewildered by it all.