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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12KB | 240 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 32

AMERICA ABROAD

Clinton and the Draft: A Personal Testimony


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 i