America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

This is a glimpse into the past -- the fall of 1969 -- and into the lives of two Americans abroad, Frank Aller and Bill Clinton. I shared with them a sparsely furnished row house in Oxford. Frank was there to learn about Chinese history and culture; Bill's field, not surprisingly, was political science. But in addition to our formal studies, we were enrolled in a permanent, floating, teacherless seminar on Vietnam. Like many of our contemporaries, we felt that the war was profoundly wrong. Many of us had to decide what to do if we were ordered by our government to fight, kill, perhaps die for a cause we did not believe in. We talked about that more than anything else among ourselves.

We were also engaged, although from a distance, in an angry, ugly debate that was going on back home. In the polarized climate of those days, each side impugned the motives of the other. Those of us who opposed the war didn't just disagree with those who conducted it -- we often denounced them as fools, knaves, even criminals. I'm not proud of having marched to the cadence of "Hey, hey, L.B.J.! How many kids did you kill today?" For their part, supporters of U.S. policy were quick to charge dissenters with selfishness, cowardice, even treason.

I recall all this now, 23 years later, because that whole messy, divisive issue is back, along with the tendency toward cynicism and name-calling. This is happening because Clinton may become the first member of the Vietnam generation to be a candidate in a general election for the post of Commander in Chief.

Clinton and I have remained close since Oxford. I've always suspected that eventually his prominence as a political figure would require me to write about him. Readers are entitled to know if a journalist has personal ties to a subject of public attention. Therefore I've been prepared to acknowledge the bias of friendship the first time Clinton's name appeared under my byline.

But now that the day has come, I find that what also requires full disclosure is my knowledge of Clinton's attitude and conduct during the Vietnam War. What I know is quite different from what the electorate has been led to believe.

"Draft questions still plague Clinton," reported the Wall Street Journal on its front page last Friday. The item added that to fend off Republican attacks on this score, Clinton may feel compelled to pick as his running mate his erstwhile rival Bob Kerrey, who lost a leg and won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam.

Since shortly before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton has been accused of having dodged the draft. His opponents are hoping that impression will resonate with attacks on his character. That's politics, I suppose. But I've been disappointed to see how many of my colleagues in the press, in their coverage of Clinton, have referred to the matter as though draft dodging were proved. Well, it's not, and it can't be, because it's not true.

In the summer of 1969, after the first year of his Rhodes scholarship, Clinton was indeed casting about for some way to avoid going to Vietnam -- not by evading the draft, but by taking advantage of one of a number of special deals that the system offered to young men who were well connected. One way was to enlist in the National Guard. That's how Dan Quayle was able to do military duty in his home state of Indiana.

An alternative was to join a Reserve Officers Training Corps program in graduate school. Clinton signed up for ROTC at the University of Arkansas Law School, which he intended to enter the following year. That would have exempted him from being sent to Vietnam for several years, by which time the war would probably be over.

As the summer went on, Clinton was increasingly unsure about the course he had chosen. He and I talked about his situation on a number of occasions by phone that August, when I was home in Cleveland and he in Hot Springs, Ark. He was troubled that while he would be earning an officer's commission and a law degree, some other, less privileged kid would have to go in his place to trade bullets with the Viet Cong.

In September 1969 he decided to withdraw from ROTC -- specifically in order to put himself into the pool of young men liable to call-up. Back at Oxford, he asked his stepfather in Arkansas to notify his draft board of this decision. He was reclassified as 1-A, or draftable, in late October.

In early December, Clinton explained his decision in a letter to Colonel Eugene Holmes, the ROTC director at the University of Arkansas: "I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been."

The letter to Colonel Holmes, which was released two months ago, has only fueled the controversy. Ironically, it turns out that Clinton opened himself to the charge of draft dodging by doing just the opposite -- by making himself subject to the draft.

A number of articles have argued, in essence, that giving up the ROTC option was a disingenuous, self-serving gesture, since Clinton was already safe from the draft. The heart of the case was summed up in the headline on a front-page article by David E. Rosenbaum in the New York Times on Feb. 14: CLINTON COULD HAVE KNOWN DRAFT WAS UNLIKELY FOR HIM.

Why? Supposedly because during that period, the Nixon Administration lowered draft quotas, decreasing the risk to those in the pool, and announced that graduate students would be able to finish their current academic year before being called. Furthermore, on Dec. 1, two days before Clinton wrote Colonel Holmes, the government had held a lottery based on birth dates -- the higher the number, the lower the chance of being called. Clinton had drawn a lucky 311.

Against that backdrop, his letter to Colonel Holmes has been disparaged as an after-the-fact gimmick intended to establish a noble-sounding alibi for his maneuvering during the preceding months. The incident is being treated as evidence of how slick "Slick Willie" was even in his salad days.

At issue here is what lawyers call state of mind: How real was Clinton's concern that he might be drafted? The surmise that Clinton had nothing to worry about is based on more than 20 years' hindsight. It's a perfect example of how a partial recitation of the facts can lie, especially if it fails to take into account the tenor of the time when the facts occurred.

In the autumn of '69, no one who was at the mercy of the draft knew for sure who would be called up when and according to what procedures. The Administration's policy was constantly shifting, and its pronouncements were, from the standpoint of an antiwar 23-year-old, far from trustworthy.

Clinton showed up in Oxford that fall so uncertain about his future that he didn't even arrange in advance for a place to live. He camped out with various friends, including Richard Stearns, a Rhodes scholar from California who is now a superior court judge in Massachusetts. After living the life of an off- campus nomad, Clinton moved in with Aller and me.

Aller had already decided to resist the draft and remain in England as a fugitive from American justice. Clinton later referred to him, although not by name, in his letter to Colonel Holmes: "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."

I sat in on many long, intense discussions between Frank and Bill that fall. One particularly sticks in my mind. That November, we had a houseful of visitors, including a young woman from the U.S., whom I subsequently married. She found a turkey in a local market and prepared it for Thanksgiving. She used a recipe that required basting the bird every 15 minutes for four hours. She organized the crowded household for the task. Frank and Bill shared what was supposed to be the first shift and ended up so deep in conversation that they did the whole job. Perhaps because it was such an American holiday and they felt so far from home in so many ways, they talked on and on about whether real patriotism required submitting to the draft or resisting it.

The hell of it was, there was no right answer. If you obeyed your country, as Bill had concluded he should do, you'd be contributing to its greatest folly. If you followed your conscience and defied the law -- Frank's choice -- you would be causing pain, even disgrace, to your family and outrage in your community back home.

Those, like myself, with medical deferments had our own, less muscular demons to wrestle with. My gimpy knee was enough to keep me out of the Mekong Delta but not off the squash courts and playing fields of Oxford. As a beneficiary of the capriciousness of the system, I felt relief, of course, but also a moral discomfort that bordered on guilt, especially when I listened to Frank and Bill discuss the ethical implications of their 1-A classifications.

While very clear in my mind, these are recollections from more than 20 years ago. But there's at least one document that has not come to light before. It is a letter Clinton wrote to Stearns on Sept. 9, 1969. It's full of articulate ambivalence, expressing confusion, self-doubt, even self-recrimination. The principal reason for the anguish is the one he stressed to me in our phone conversations during the preceding weeks: after arranging to go to the University of Arkansas (which he mocks in the letter as "THE thing for aspiring politicos to do"), he spent the summer in his hometown, "where everyone else's children seem to be in the military, most of them in Vietnam." He felt he was "running away from something maybe for the first time in my life." As a result, he describes himself as being in "mental torment," adding that "if I cannot rid myself of it, I will just have to go into the service and begin to root out the cause."

He writes that he is on the brink of a decision to abandon the ROTC shield from the draft: "I am about resolved to go to England come hell or high water and take my chances." He is not referring to the risk of being run over by a double-deck bus on the Oxford High Street.

In tone and content, this letter is totally consistent with the now famous one that Clinton wrote to Colonel Holmes three months later. Together, the two letters bracket the period when Rosenbaum and others suggest Clinton was confident that he had successfully dodged the draft.

After withdrawing his name from the University of Arkansas, Clinton applied to Yale Law School. In the spring of 1970, the Rhodes administrators circulated a questionnaire to determine which scholars were planning to return for a third year at Oxford. Clinton's answer: "Perhaps. If not, will be entering Yale Law School, or getting drafted."

Such was his state of mind. Frank's was even more tormented. Like Bill, he had initially decided on one way of coping with the dilemma posed by the war and the draft, then had second thoughts. After a miserable year, he concluded that it was a mistake to cut himself off from his family and his country, so he went home to Spokane to sort out his life. He was unable to do so. On Sept. 12, 1971, he killed himself. I called Bill with the news. There was nothing slick in his grief.