He may be right. The NEWSWEEK Poll shows Clinton widening his lead over George Bush despite the recent “fixation.” So why is Carville yelling? Because he knows that Republicans are boring in, that GOP “attack” ads are in the works, that new “gotcha” stories are coming, perhaps this week. The draft is the only issue to have thrown Clinton off his stride since New York. It could be damaging if it allows the GOP to paint him as shifty. Some unanswered questions that Clinton must settle:
He was, but no politician wants to make that elitist-sounding defense. In the Vietnam era, draft boards gave breaks to the well-connected and the up-and-coming. Clinton’s board in Hot Springs, Ark., was no exception. Its members were retired politicians, city fathers and others who initially were willing to give a break to a young man with his resume: star student, intern for Sen. J. William Fulbright, Rhodes scholar. They gave him several extra months to finish his first year of studies at Oxford.
It’s a habit. In a state full of promilitary and culturally conservative Democrats, slipping past the draft was a topic to avoid, especially when Clinton first entered polities in 1974. That losing race for Congress came two years after he helped run George McGovern’s antiwar presidential campaign in Texas. Clinton’s base was the university town of Fayetteville. In a 1969 antiwar demonstration there, a young man stripped naked and climbed a tree. Republicans spread the false rumor that the man was Clinton. That year, and for years after, Clinton portrayed himself as a guy who had lucked out. As recently as last winter he said that his failure to be drafted was a “fluke.”
It wasn’t a fluke. Clinton did lobby, and others helped. But he has never been willing to frankly say so. He developed connections-which documents indicate he used-through Fulbright’s office. While his own family was not wealthy, it was well connected. One step-uncle owned the local Buick dealership; another had been a state legislator. At Oxford, he befriended an Arkansan who was a protege of the state’s GOP governor, Winthrop Rockefeller. They and others helped Clinton delay his initial induction notice and void a rescheduled one so he could gain last-minute admittance to an ROTC program that helped shield him from the draft.
Apparently not. Clinton never disclosed that he got an induction notice–a crucial, impossible-to-forget fact-until last April. His aides now concede that he got a rescheduled notice, three months after the first. They promised a search of documents and letters-and conducted one. But they may be waiting with the results so they can respond to the next round of stories. It turns out Clinton aides knew about-and researched last March-the story that family friends got him a Naval Reserve billet he never used. Clinton and his aides say now that he never knew about that effort at the time it happened. The claim is hard to accept given Clinton’s immersion in the task of avoiding the draft in 1969.
Besides using the draft as a “proxy issue” for the larger questions of trustworthiness, Republicans want to highlight Clinton’s draft history for another reason: to paint him as a peace activist. There would seem to be nothing controversial about Clinton’s earnest organizing work on peaceful marches in Washington and London in 1969. Friends describe him in coat and tie, eagerly networking as emcee of a prayer meeting in a London church and as a parade marshal, or attending a conference in Oslo, Norway, with a former professor from Georgetown. Republicans looking for film and pictures won’t find a naked man in a tree. But who knows what they-or the media-will settle for.
