No one knows better than Bill Clinton that the Vietnam War continues to reverberate in American life. The issue dogged him throughout the 1992 election and again last week when Sen. Jesse Helms said the president would need a bodyguard if he visited bases in North Carolina. Clinton is well aware of the need to reach out to the armed forces; while on vacation in Hawaii, he made a point of dining with military commanders. Ironically, it was a quarter of a century ago this week that a 23-year-old Bill Clinton, then a Rhodes scholar studying in England, penned his now infamous letter to Col. Eugene Holmes, director of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The letter is best known for its line thanking the colonel for "saving me from the draft." In fact, the document offers other interesting clues to the president's character.
There is the noble side of Clinton in his statement that he "opposed and despised" the Vietnam War "with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism." And there is the neurotic side that has been on display since he took office. Clinton, then as now, describes his insomnia, his overeating and his indecision. He agonized for weeks, he writes, about sending the letter. There is Clinton the braggadocio, who tells the colonel how hard he's thought about an issue. Back then, Clinton the student pedantically told Holmes that he had written a paper about conscription; for nearly two years, Clinton the president has peppered speeches with remarks about how hard he toils.
Gore's travail. Coincidentally, the New Yorker magazine last week printed similar letters written by Al Gore in 1970 when he was trying to decide whether to join the Army. If anything, the future vice president's remarks were more incendiary than the future president's. Gore wrote his father that America has "inveterate antipathy for Communism -- or paranoia as I like to put it.... My own belief is that this form of psychological ailment -- in this case a national madness -- leads the victim to actually create the thing which is feared the most. It strikes me that this is precisely what the U.S. has been doing. Creating -- and if not creating, energetically supporting -- fascist, totalitarian regimes in the name of fighting totalitarianism .... For me, the best example of all is the U.S. Army."
Interestingly, while Clinton's draft letter dogged him for months, the vice president managed to dismiss his with a simple quip: "Well, obviously that's a college kid's silly language ... I went into the Army right after that. And I found out better." Gore's letter is not being scrutinized under the klieg lights of a campaign; and the Tennessean, of course, served -- which makes him immune to Helms-style attacks. But the clarity of his repudiation did knock the story down before it became front-page news. Clinton's equivocation about his own draft status, in all likelihood, will continue to plague him when he stands for re- election in 1996.
