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The arc of future President Bill Clinton's controversial (in retrospect) activities in avoiding the military draft during the Vietnam War years of 1968-69 are difficult to trace with certainty in regard to all the details. By the time the issue became one of national interest in 1992, reporters and biographers were faced with reconstructing a 25-year-old account from the decades-old memories of those involved; some of the key participants were already dead, and the one person who knew the whole story, Bill Clinton himself, often responded to questions on the subject with misleading or inaccurate information. Nonetheless, available documentation and personal memories have enabled writers to reconstruct the essential elements of the tale. The saga began when an eighteen-year-old Bill Clinton entered Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in the fall of 1964. As required by law of all 18-year-old males at the time, Clinton registered with the Selective Service System on 8 September 1964, and on 17 November 1964 he was assigned a 2-S (student deferment) classification by Garland County [Arkansas] Draft Board No. 26. As American military involvement in Vietnam escalated in the mid-1960s, Clinton (like other male students his age) would reasonably have expected that his status as a college student would provide him with deferments from the draft for several more years, especially when in his senior year he was one of thirty-two American men selected to receive Rhodes Scholarships to study at Oxford University in England. However, on 16 February 1968 the federal government eliminated draft deferments for most graduate students, and Clinton would therefore no longer be eligible for additional student deferments after he completed his final term at Georgetown in the spring of 1968. Accordingly, his draft board reclassified him 1-A (available immediately for military service) on 20 March 1968. In mid-1968 Clinton, who maintained that although he was not opposed to the military or war in general he was morally opposed to the Vietnam War in particular, began to seek ways of avoiding the draft. His first opportunity was provided through the political and social connections of Raymond Clinton, his uncle, and Henry Britt, a Hot Springs lawyer and former judge, who made arrangements with the commanding officer of the local Naval Reserve unit, Trice Ellis, to secure a billet for Clinton in the naval reserve: The other way that had taken care of Clinton was a favor Henry Britt worked out with William S. Armstrong, chairman of the Garland County draft board, a favor that would provide Clinton with only temporary protection from the draft but would allow him to at least start his first year at Oxford without committing him to military service: As Clinton biographer David Maraniss pointed out, although the deliberate delay in issuing Clinton's draft notice was undeniably a case of special treatment, it was by no means an unusual consideration granted to Rhodes Scholars: Clinton set sail from New York to begin his first year at Oxford in October 1968. At the end of his first term in December, Clinton received a notice from the Selective Service instructing him to undergo an armed forces physical examination at a U.S. air base near London, which he took (and passed) on 13 January 1969. An Order to Report for Induction from the Garland County Draft Board followed three months later, but because the notice had been sent to England via surface mail it was late in arriving, and the assigned reporting date had already passed. Clinton had begun another school term by then (the academic year at Oxford consisted of three terms rather than two semesters), and the regulations allowed students who received draft notices to finish out their current terms before reporting — but Clinton would be obligated to report for induction after the end of the spring term unless he found an alternative before his new reporting date of 28 July 1969. As Clinton headed home for Arkansas from England, his options for avoiding the draft were limited. He likely would not qualify for conscientious objector status because he did not have a history of opposing military service or war in general, only the Vietnam War specifically. The local Army National Guard and Reserve units were full. He took physicals for the Air Force and Navy officer programs but failed them both. (He was undersize and didn't possess the visual acuity required for the Air Force program, and he failed the Navy exam due to substandard hearing.) Clinton's only available out seemed to be joining the advanced ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, which had no quotas and was open to graduate students, but since Clinton had already received an induction notice he would have to obtain the approval of Willard Hawkins, the state Selective Service director (an appointee of the Arkansas governor) to enter the program. Clinton called upon Cliff Jackson, an Arkansas College graduate who had been Clinton's acquaintance at Oxford and was now working for the state Republican party, and Jackson in turn asked his boss, the head of the Arkansas Republican party, to arrange a meeting between Clinton and Selective Service director Hawkins. Clinton also received assistance from Lee Williams, an aide to U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas (for whom Clinton had worked as a staffer while attending Georgetown University). Williams, a University of Arkansas Law School graduate himself, contacted the director of the university's ROTC program, Colonel Eugene J. Holmes, to help get Clinton enrolled. After an extensive, approximately two-hour interview, Colonel Holmes agreed to accept Clinton into the ROTC program on 17 July 1969 (a mere eleven days before Clinton's 28 July induction deadline), although Clinton would not actually be able to begin the program until he completed the basic training camp the following summer. Clinton's draft notice was nullified, and his draft board reclassified him 1-D (reservist deferment) on 7 August 1969. Clinton apparently did intend to begin attending the University of Arkansas Law School that fall, but sometime during the summer he changed his mind and decided to return for a second year at Oxford instead: The details of Clinton's subsequent actions and decisions are murky, but sometime after returning to Oxford that fall (where he later helped organize anti-war protests in London), probably between 1 October and 15 October 1969, he changed his mind again and asked his draft board to drop his ROTC deferment and reclassify him 1-A. Given recent policy changes and rumors of upcoming policy changes by the Nixon administration at that time -- graduate students who received induction notices were now allowed to finish out their school years rather than just the current terms; Nixon was said to be considering withdrawing 35,000 troops from Vietnam, temporarily suspending the draft, and changing the draft requirements so that only 19-year-olds would be called and only those draftees who volunteered for service there would be shipped to Vietnam; and the administration was reportedly pushing for a draft lottery system based on birthdates which would expose eligible men to the draft for one year only -- Clinton may have calculated that he was not risking much by opting to drop his ROTC commitment in favor of a 1-A classification, as biographer David Maraniss surmised: When the first draft lottery of the Vietnam era was held on 1 December 1969, Clinton's birthdate of 19 August was selected 311th, a number high enough to practically guarantee that he would not be drafted (and indeed he was not). A few days later, Clinton sat down and wrote the now-infamous letter to Colonel Holmes explaining his reasons for reneging on his agreement to enter the University of Arkansas and its ROTC program. That Bill Clinton went to great lengths to avoid the Vietnam-era draft, that he used political connections to obtain special favors, and that he made promises and commitments which he later failed to honor, are all beyond dispute. However, the timeline quoted above jumps the tracks when it labels Clinton a felon, because none of his actions, no matter how unethical or morally questionable they might have been, were illegal. When Clinton agreed in July of 1969 to enter the advanced ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, his draft board rescinded his induction notice and reclassified him with a reservist's deferment. That he later changed his mind in October 1969 and opted to forego the ROTC program and be reclassified 1-A did not constitute a failure to report or make him AWOL. At the time of his 1-A re-classification in October 1969 the previous induction notice was no longer in effect, and he was not subsequently re-drafted. If Clinton had still been obligated to report for induction, his draft board could have got him any time they wanted: they certainly knew where to find him, yet no one ordered him to report to an induction center, no federal agents arrested him for draft evasion, and no MPs came and hauled him away for being AWOL, because he hadn't broken any laws, civil or military. Likewise, President Carter's executive order of 21 January 1977, which provided pardons and amnesty for those convicted or suspected of violating the Military Selective Service Act between 1964 and 1973 did not apply to Clinton because he committed no such violation. Although what he did may not have been against the law, Clinton's broken promises and contradictory statements about his efforts to avoid the draft were prime examples of the kind of self-serving doublespeak that later earned him the sobriquet Slick Willie, as Maraniss concluded in his Clinton biography, First in His Class:
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