N ew Years morning 1969I opened the year on a happy note. Frank Holt had just been reelected to the supreme court, only two years after his defeat in the governors race. I drove to Little Rock, to the judges swearing-in ceremony. Predictably, he had urged us not to spend New Years Day on this modest ritual, but more than fifty of us diehards showed up anyway. My diary says: I told him I wasnt about to pull out just because he was winning! Ironically, as a new justice, he was assigned to the old offices of Justice Jim Johnson.
On January 2, Joe Newman and I drove Mother home to Hope to tell what remained of her family that she was going to marry Jeff the next day. When we got home, Joe and I took the The Roger Clintons sign off the mailbox. With his sharp sense of irony, Joe laughed and said, Its kinda sad that it comes off so easily. Despite the harbingers of doom, I thought the marriage would work. As I wrote in my diary, If Jeff is nothing more than a con man, as some still insist, then color me conned.
The next night, the ceremony was short and simple. Our friend Reverend John Miles led them through their vows. Roger lit the candles. I was best man. There was a party afterward at which Carolyn Yeldell and I played and sang for the wedding guests. Some preachers would have refused church sanction to the wedding because Jeff was divorced, and so recently. Not John Miles. He was a pugnacious, tough, liberal Methodist who believed Jesus was sent by his Father God to give us all second chances.
On January 4, thanks to my friend Sharon Evans, who knew Governor Rockefeller, I was invited to lunch with the governor at his ranch on Petit Jean Mountain. I found Rockefeller friendly and articulate. We discussed Oxford and his son Winthrop Pauls desire to go there. The governor wanted me to keep in touch with Win Paul, who had spent a lot of his childhood in Europe, when he began his studies at Pembroke College in the fall.
After lunch, I had a good talk with Win Paul, after which we headed southwest for a rendezvous with Tom Campbell, who had driven to Arkansas from Mississippi, where he was in marine flight training. The three of us drove to the Governors Mansion, which Win Paul had invited us to see. We were all impressed, and I left thinking I had just seen an important piece of Arkansas history, not the place that in a decade would become my home for twelve years.
On January 11, I flew back to England on the same plane with Tom Williamson, who was educating me about being black in America, and Frank Aller, who recounted his difficult holiday, in which his conservative father made getting a haircut, but not reporting for the draft, a precondition of Christmas at home. When I got back to Univ, I found in my stack of mail a remarkable letter from my old friend and baptismal partner, Marine Private Bert Jeffries. I recorded some excerpts of his stunning, sad message:
. . . Bill, Ive already seen many things and been through a lot no man of a right mind would want to see or go through. Over here, they play for keeps. And its either win or lose. Its not a pretty sight to see a buddy you live with and become so close to, to have him die beside you and you know it was for no good reason. And you realize how easily it could have been you.
I work for a Lieutenant Colonel. I am his bodyguard. . . . On the 21st of November we came to a place called Winchester. Our helicopter let us off and the Colonel, myself, and two other men started looking over the area . . . there were two NVAs [North Vietnamese Army soldiers] in a bunker, they opened up on us. . . . The Colonel got hit and the two others were hit. Bill, that day I prayed. Fortunately I got the two of them before they got me. I killed my first man that day. And Bill, its an awful feeling, to know you took another mans life. Its a sickening feeling. And then you realize how it could have been you just as easily.
The next day, January 13, I went to London for my draft exam. The doctor declared me, according to my fanciful diary notes, one of the healthiest specimens in the western world, suitable for display at medical schools, exhibitions, zoos, carnivals, and base training camps. On the fifteenth I saw Edward Albees A Delicate Balance, which was my second surrealistic experience in as many days. Albees characters forced the audience to wonder if some day near the end they wont wake up and find themselves hollow and afraid. I was already wondering that.
President Nixon was inaugurated on January 20. His speech was an attempt at reconciliation, but it left me pretty cold, the preaching of good old middle-class religion and virtues. They will supposedly solve our problems with the Asians, who do not come from the Judeo-Christian tradition; the Communists, who do not even believe in God; the blacks, who have been shafted so often by God-fearing white men that there is hardly any common ground left between them; and the kids, who have heard those same song-and-dance sermons sung false so many times they may prefer dope to the audacious self-delusion of their elders. Ironically, I believed in Christianity and middle-class virtues, too; they just didnt lead me to the same place. I thought living out our true religious and political principles would require us to reach deeper and go further than Mr. Nixon was prepared to go.
I decided to get back into my own life in England for whatever time I had left. I went to my first Oxford Union debateResolved: that man created God in his own image, a potentially fertile subject poorly ploughed. I went north to Manchester, and marveled at the beauty of the English countryside quilted by those ancient rock walls without mortar or mud or cement. There was a seminar on Pluralism as a Concept of Democratic Theory, which I found boring, just another attempt to explain in more complex (therefore, more meaningful, of course) terms what is going on before our own eyes. . . . It is only so much dog-dripping to me because I am at root not intellectual, not conceptual about the actual, just damn well not smart enough, I reckon, to run in this fast crowd.
On January 27, the actual reared its ugly head again, as a few of us threw a party for Frank Aller on the day he officially became a draft resister, walking along the only open road. Despite the vodka, the toasts, the attempts at humor, the party was a bust. Even Bob Reich, easily the wittiest of us, couldnt make it work. We simply could not lift the burden from Franks shoulders on this, the day when he put his money where his mouth was. The next day Strobe Talbott, whose draft status was already 1-Y because of an old football injury, became really unsuited for military service when his eyeglasses met up with John Isaacsons squash racket on the Univ court. The doctor spent two hours pulling glass out of his cornea. He recovered and went on to spend the next thirty-five years seeing things most of us miss.
For a long time, February has been a hard month for me, dominated by fighting the blues and waiting for spring to come. My first February in Oxford was a real zinger. I fought it by reading, something I did a lot of at Oxford, with no particular pattern except what my studies dictated. I read hundreds of books. That month I read John Steinbecks The Moon Is Down, partly because he had just died and I wanted to remember him with something I hadnt read before. I reread Willie Morriss North Toward Home, because it helped me to understand my roots and my better self. I read Eldridge Cleavers Soul on Ice and pondered the meaning of soul. Soul is a word I use often enough to be Black, but of course, and I occasionally think unfortunately, I am not. . . . The soul: I know what it isits where I feel things; its what moves me; its what makes me a man, and when I put it out of commission, I know soon enough I will die if I do not retrieve it. I was afraid then that I was losing it.
My struggles with the draft rekindled my long-standing doubts about whether I was, or could become, a really good person. Apparently, a lot of people who grow up in difficult circumstances subconsciously blame themselves and feel unworthy of a better fate. I think this problem arises from leading parallel lives, an external life that takes its natural course and an internal life where the secrets are hidden. When I was a child, my outside life was filled with friends and fun, learning and doing. My internal life was full of uncertainty, anger, and a dread of ever-looming violence. No one can live parallel lives with complete success; the two have to intersect. At Georgetown, as the threat of Daddys violence dissipated, then disappeared, I had been more able to live one coherent life. Now the draft dilemma brought back my internal life with a vengeance. Beneath my new and exciting external life, the old demons of self-doubt and impending destruction reared their ugly heads again.
I would continue to struggle to merge the parallel lives, to live with my mind, body, and spirit in the same place. In the meantime, I have tried to make my external life as good as possible, and to survive the dangers and relieve the pain of my internal life. This probably explains my profound admiration for the personal courage of soldiers and others who put their lives at risk for honorable causes, and my visceral hatred of violence and abuse of power; my passion for public service and my deep sympathy for the problems of other people; the solace I have found in human companionship and the difficulty Ive had in letting anyone into the deepest recesses of my internal life. It was dark down there.
I had been down on myself before, but never like this, for this long. As I said, I first became self-aware enough to know that those feelings rumbled around beneath my sunny disposition and optimistic outlook when I was a junior in high school, more than five years before I went to Oxford. It was when I wrote an autobiographical essay for Ms. Warnekes honors English class and talked about the disgust that storms my brain.
The storms were really raging in February 1969, and I tried to put them out by reading, traveling, and spending lots of time with interesting people. I would meet many of them at 9 Bolton Gardens in London, a spacious apartment that became my home away from Oxford on many weekends. Its full-time occupant was David Edwards, who had shown up at Helens Court one night with Dru Bachman, Ann Markusens Georgetown housemate, dressed in a z............