The Campaign: The Long Shadow Of Vietnam

Bill Clinton in those days slept on a mattress on the floor of his bedroom at 46 Leckford Road in North Oxford, England. He ate bad Indian and Chinese food -- curry, dim sum -- from restaurants on the corner.

It was a cold, gloomy late November in 1969. Clinton, a Rhodes scholar from Hot Springs, Ark., fed sixpence and shillings into the meter of the electric fire in order to warm himself. He sat at a rickety table lighted by a gooseneck lamp and worked on a letter about Vietnam, moral principles and the draft.

Sometimes, to clear his head, Clinton put on an old Georgetown University sweatsuit and went for a run on the Port Meadow about half a mile away. His hair was shaggy. He wore a full beard. He was an American male, 23 years old, and like millions of other young American males, he was trying to figure out what to do about going to the war.

His housemate Frank Aller, another Rhodes scholar, from Spokane, Wash., had come to a decision. He would resist the draft. He would become a fugitive from his own country. Clinton and Aller talked endlessly about the choices that were closing in on them. The conversations were urgent and anguished -- and by no means theoretical. Toward the end of 1969, the number of Americans killed in Vietnam climbed past 40,000.

The letter that Clinton composed in a chilly room at the end of 1969 was addressed to Colonel Eugene Holmes, the director of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas. In three typewritten pages, Clinton explained why he did not enroll in the university's ROTC program as he had previously agreed to do. Getting into ROTC at the university's law school would have given Clinton a four-year draft deferment, but he told Colonel Holmes that he had decided to take his chances with the draft.

The letter was a search of conscience and also a surprising exercise of precocious political calculation. Clinton said that he opposed the draft and the war and that he was "in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill and maybe die for their country . . . right or wrong." But he would not resist the draft. He would "accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system."

It seemed startling that Clinton at the age of 23, in the midst of the turmoil of Vietnam, would think so clearly about his long-term trajectory. In relation to other college graduates of the time, the letter placed Clinton about where he stands now in the political spectrum -- in the role of an anguished moderate.

Clinton was never called for the draft. His stated intention to enter an ROTC program had already given him two months of exemption. The Nixon Administration cut back on the draft. When the new draft lottery system began on Dec. 1, Clinton drew a very high number (311), and so was never summoned.

Frank Aller, the housemate who resisted the draft, would become a casualty nonetheless. After living for a time as a fugitive in England, he returned home to try to sort out his life. Not long afterward, he shot himself.