Clinton and the military - 10 June 1994

I doubt that any public person we can think off was more thankful for the end of the D-Day celebrations than the president of the United States for there is in all his dutiful appearances with the military a barely disguised touch of embarrassment and in paying tribute to the men who died on the Normandy beaches and even more visibly when he saluted the veterans like the paratroopers who survived and stood there listening, that embarrassment was aggravated, was almost palpable.

I'm pretty sure that Mr Clinton must dread every ceremony he attends, which has to do with the armed forces. One of the offices he acquired when he became president was as you know the title of commander-in-chief, but it's not a courtesy title, it is the fact that he alone has the final word about the use and disposition of the army, navy, air force and marine corps.

The embarrassment I'm talking about, which is itself almost an embarrassment to bring up springs from an episode in his history that is never forgotten by friends or foes or neutrals in-between to put it most charitably, he eluded service in the Vietnam War. Many times during Mr Clinton's first year as president he was booed at many national ceremonies, his first appearance before an audience of veterans at the Vietnamese memorial in Washington, it must have been the most painful for him. The placards waved furiously at the back of the crowd "go home, shirker Bill" was the least offensive.

There' an interesting point here, only once to my knowledge gone into by a man of Mr Clinton's age who also managed to elude the draft and it's this, the actual men who declared that they would not fight who proclaimed themselves draft dodgers were a minority but a principled minority, they went to jail or they fled to Canada, they could be respected though most of them were not at the time because they took a clear stand and paid a price for it. But now there was a majority probably hundreds of thousands of men of Clinton's college age who once conscription was announced went through any one of a series of well practised routines to avoid military service.

I'm not thinking of the noisy visible rebels who marched and rioted on the campuses of Berkeley and Columbia and elsewhere, I am thinking of the majority who didn't want to make a public issue of it weren't going to expose themselves to ridicule and public abuse also didn't care much to go to jail, they just wanted to find a quiet way of sitting out a nasty war, so they suddenly enlisted in the reserves, they discovered or contrived various ingenuities like loosing weight, chewing quantities of tea before a medical examination. If they had an uncle, a father, a congressman friend, someone who knew someone in the military or on the local draft board, there were many ways of inviting pressure to get them released.

Now all these stratagems have gone on surely in all wars, but there was something new an enormous increase in the number of graduating college boys who decided suddenly they had a passion for research and must move on to graduate school. One of the decisions for which President Johnson was much criticised after the war was over but very little during it was the order that graduate students were to be excused from the draft. Now most of these tricks and diversions we knew about at the time while having the good taste not to point in the direction of any particular son of a particular friend, but a year or two ago a book appeared by a man of the president's age James Fallows who first told how he managed to fail his draft examination and then moved on to a study of thousands of his peers. He maintains that about four out of five of his type, his college generation were successful in one way or another in dodging the draft. And then he makes the rude general point that most college educated men stayed at home, that the Vietnam War was overwhelmingly a war fought by the poor and the lower middle class, that it was, quote, "America's most blatant class war since the American Civil War" when you may recall deferment was so open and brazen that anyone with money to spare could buy himself a substitute soldier from the poor, the unemployed, the blacks.

How does all this history touch President Clinton? The military, the Pentagon, the graduating classes of the navy, the air force, the army have been indoctrinated ever since they heard the name of Clinton as a presidential candidate in the belief that President Clinton was a rare and unenviable bird commonly known as the draft dodger. Nobody before James Fallows, I think, has brought up the interesting fact that the Congress and the professions are packed with men in their middle 40s who dodged the draft, no more and no less than the president, but the general perception about Mr Clinton as a special case has been there since the day he walked into the White House. He knows this, he undoubtedly feels it himself and quite likely it has much to do with his being, as the New York Times put it, "addled by any issue that involves even the rumour of war".

Well this is an argument maybe you haven't heard before; it's only the latest of the many increasingly strained theories about why American foreign policy appears to be paralysed. It obviously cannot be applied to the problem of why the foreign policy of Western Europe seems to be paralysed, though a recent survey showing well over 50% of German youth to be pacifists may have something to do with that.

However, whatever else explains the backing and filling, the indecisiveness of this administrations foreign policy, I do believe that the Fallows revelations about the behaviour towards Vietnam of Mr Clinton's fellow college students could go far to explain the embarrassment the president barely but steadily reveals whenever he is surrounded by military men, he's not had the protective assurance given to former presidents by their military service, no cause even to breathe the name of Eisenhower. But Truman was a tough infantry captain; Kennedy a naval hero so was Bush, Carter a nuclear submariner or submariner, how about Reagan?

Now he is a special case an interesting example of the power of appearances to transcend reality. You'll have seen him in uniform in more pictures than practically any other film actor, so he acquired the proper panache, he was called to active service in 1942 excused for nearsightedness, but then drafted into the first motion picture unit of the army air corps, which worked out of a Hollywood studio and there throughout the war Mr Reagan made training films but with enthusiasm, he adored the military. When he became president he saluted more than any general as in several other roles in the presidency he looked the part, but what I think he set him of from most others and certainly from President Clinton as a commander-in-chief was the trait that Reagan possessed and Clinton apparently does not, the feel, the attitude, the behaviour of leadership. Roosevelt had it, Truman had it, Reagan had it, a few simple ideas one or two strong convictions when it comes to foreign policy a capacity to act and order, a capacity which may have little to do with right or wrong.

The one break from the D-Day ceremonies and what I've hinted could have been a secret, but prolonged embarrassment for the president, the one break came at the end when he went to Oxford to receive an honorary degree and be feted and flattered in a jolly very non-military atmosphere. The Oxford visit was originally scheduled on the eve of the D-Day commemoration, but somebody in the White House felt that an appearance then and there would only revive more vividly the memory of young Bill Clinton as an active Vietnam protester.

As it was when the marching and the bands and the wreath laying were all over and outside the presence of any military at Oxford, the president actually talked about his Oxford days on a television interview on which he was surprised to be reminded of his having said way back there that he and his kind combined a detestation of the Vietnam War with quote "loathing of the military", he uncomfortably didn't remember this. This time he said that all his generation, quote "was hurt by their ambivalence over Vietnam because we loved the military so much". Let's hope he can make the second version stick or at least begin to learn a new respect for the best of the military by absorbing two truths. First, that no one loathes war more than an experienced soldier and the other maxim, which all civilians in charge of the military in a democracy should get by heart is the late CE Montague's memorable line,hell have no fury like a non-combatant scorned.

It will be interesting to put it mildly to see what the president's European visit did to his standing at home? Much ironically will probably turn not so much on the European memories as on the fate of the Clinton health bill now before two committees of Congress. If by a feat of populist campaigning around the country, the president is able to get some compromise health bill through the Congress, he will redeem much of the criticism and suspicion that's hung over him these past few months. If as some congressional leaders were saying this week, there would be no health bill passed this session this year, the effect on the Democratic majority in the House and in November on the party's actual hold on the Senate could be terrible to behold.

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