poems to me. It was the first time I had heard “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” I loved it, and love it still when brave souls “rage against the dying of the light.”
I also took several trips with Tom Williamson. Once we decided to do a role reversal on the bad stereotypes of subservient blacks and racist southern overlords. When the nice English driver stopped to pick us up, Tom said, “Boy, get in the backseat.” “Yes suh,” I replied. The English driver thought we were nuts.
Two weeks after the election I scored my first touchdown, called a “try,” for Univ’s rugby team. It was a big thing for a former band boy. Though I never really understood its subtleties, I liked rugby. I was bigger than most English boys and could normally make an acceptable contribution by running to the ball and getting in the opposition’s way, or pushing hard in the second row of the “scrum,” a strange formation in which the two sides push against each other for control of the ball, which is placed on the ground between them. Once, we went to Cambridge for a match. Though Cambridge is more serene than Oxford, which is larger and more industrialized, the opposing team played hard and rough. I got a blow on the head and probably sustained a minor concussion. When I told the coach I was dizzy, he reminded me that there were no substitutes and our side would be one man short if I came out: “Just get back on the field and get in someone’s way.” We lost anyway, but I was glad I hadn’t quit the field. As long as you don’t quit, you’ve always got a chance.
In late November, I wrote my first essay for my tutor, Dr. Zbigniew Pelczynski, a Polish emigre, on the role of terror in Soviet totalitarianism (“a sterile knife cutting into the collective body, removing hard growths of diversity and independence”), attended my first tutorial, and went to my first academic seminar. Apart from those meager efforts, I spent the rest of the month sort of wandering around. I went twice to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s home, to see plays of his; to London twice, to see Ann Markusen’s former Georgetown housemates Dru Bachman and Ellen McPeake, who were living and working there; to Birmingham to play basketball badly; and to Derby to speak to high school students and answer their questions about America on the fifth anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. As December began, I made plans for my surprise homecoming for Mother’s wedding, filled with foreboding about my future and hers. A lot of Mother’s friends were dead set against her marrying Jeff Dwire, because he had been to prison and because they thought he was still untrustworthy. To make things worse, he hadn’t been able to finalize his divorce from his long-estranged wife. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of my own life was reinforced when my friend Frank Aller, a Rhodes scholar at Queen’s College, just across High Street from Univ, received his draft notice from his hometown selective-service board in Spokane, Washington. He told me he was going home to prepare his parents and girlfriend for his decision to refuse induction and to stay in England indefinitely to avoid going to jail. Frank was a China scholar who understood Vietnam well, and thought our policy was both wrong and immoral. He was also a good middle-class boy who loved his country. He was miserable on the horns of his dilemma. Strobe Talbott, who lived just down the street in Magdalen College, and I tried to console and support him. Frank was a good-hearted man who knew we were as opposed to the war as he was, and he tried to console us in return. He was particularly forceful with me, telling me that, unlike him, I had the desire and ability to make a difference in politics and it would be wrong to throw my opportunities away by resisting the draft. His generosity only made me feel more guilty, as the angstridden pages of my diary show. He was cutting me more slack than I could allow myself. On December 19, I landed in a huge snowfall in Minneapolis for a reunion with Ann Markusen. She was home from her Ph.D. studies at Michigan State and as uncertain about her future, and ours, as I was. I loved her, but I was too uncertain of myself at that point in my life to make a commitment to anyone else.
On December 23, I flew home. The surprise came off. Mother cried and cried. She, Jeff, and Roger all seemed happy about the coming marriage, so happy that they didn’t give me too much grief about my newly long hair. Christmas was merry in spite of last-ditch efforts by two of Mother’s friends to get me to try to talk her out of marrying Jeff. I took four yellow roses to Daddy’s grave and prayed that his family would support Mother and Roger in their new endeavor. I liked Jeff Dwire. He was smart, hardworking, good with Roger, and clearly in love with Mother. I was for the marriage, noting that “if all the skeptical well-wishers and the really pernicious ill-wishers are right about Jeff and Mother, their union can hardly prove more of a failure than did its predecessors—his too,” and for a while, I forgot all the tumult of 1968, the year that broke open the nation and shattered the Democratic Party; the year that conservative populism replaced progressive populism as the dominant political force in our nation; the year that law and order and strength became the province of Republicans, and Democrats became associated with chaos, weakness, and out-of-touch, self-indulgent elites; the year that led to Nixon, then Reagan, then Gingrich, then George W. Bush. The middle-class backlash would shape and distort American politics for the rest of the century. The new conservatism would be shaken by Watergate, but not destroyed. Its public support would be weakened, as right-wing ideologues promoted economic inequality, environmental destruction, and social divisions, but not destroyed. When threatened by its own excesses, the conservative movement would promise to be “kinder and gentler” or more “compassionate,” all the while ripping the hide off Democrats for alleged weakness of values, character, and will. And it would be enough to provoke the painfully predictable, almost Pavlovian reaction among enough white middle-class voters to carry the day. Of course it was more complicated than that. Sometimes conservatives’ criticisms of the Democrats had validity, and there were always moderate Republicans and conservatives of goodwill who worked with Democrats to make some positive changes. Nevertheless, the deeply embedded nightmares of 1968 formed the arena in which I and all other progressive politicians had to struggle over our entire careers. Perhaps if Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had lived, things would have been different. Perhaps if Humphrey had used the information about Nixon’s interference with the Paris peace talks, things would have been different. Perhaps not. Regardless, those of us who believed that the good in the 1960s outweighed the bad would fight on, still fired by the heroes and dreams of our youth.
FIFTEEN
New Year’s morning 1969—I 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 governor’s race. I drove to Little Rock, to the judge’s swearing-in ceremony. Predictably, he had urged us not to spend New Year’s Day on this modest ritual, but more than fifty of us diehards showed up anyway. My diary says: “I told him I wasn’t 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, “It’s 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 Paul’s 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 Governor’s 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:
