BLOOD SPORT DÉJÀ VU, CONNECT THE DOTS

Birds of a feather flock together. Barack Obama, supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton, versus John McCain and the Swift Boat Veterans.

The Political Poof versus the Iron Man.

The fact that Obama’s colleges -- Occidental College, where he was a student for two years before attending Columbia University In New York City and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Princeton University in New Jersey have each sealed all attendance, academic, and activities of Barack and Michelle Obama is déjà vu as the blood sport of journalism unfolds.

Why is this stuff being hidden, in the same way Oxford University in England covered up records of Clinton’s time there from October 1968 to June 1970, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, covered up records of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s records there in the 1970s?

Sixteen years ago, when Bill and Hillary Clinton ran for the White House, stories emerged late in the 1992 campaign about Bill Clinton’s flight to Oxford University in England in 1969-71 as a Rhodes scholar to avoid the military draft, his leftist anti-Vietnam war activism as a demonstrator outside the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square, and his strange train trip across Europe to the Soviet Union at a time when just a few Americans were being admitted.

The Soviet KGB allowed Clinton in and hosted him to spend several weeks tooling around Moscow as their guest at the city’s most exclusive five-star hotel.

Everyone wanted to know why Clinton dodged the military draft to flee to Oxford, how he got to Finland, the epicenter of anti-U.S., pro-Soviet, pro-Hanoi activism, and from there to Moscow, which was providing the arms and missiles that were killing American soldiers in Vietnam and knocking planes, including Navy Lieutenant Commander John McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk, out of the air during bombing runs up the Red River Valley to Hanoi.

I was sent to England by The Washington Times in September 1992 to report the Clinton at Oxford story. The bottom line was that Clinton lived with Strobe Talbott, Christopher Hitchens, and a few other American lefties in a row-house in Oxford, drank lots of beer, fornicated, played around mostly with three girlfriends, including one who was a lesbian, and did little more leftist activism than help hoist a noose from a balcony into the Oxford Union when British Labourite George Brown, then secretary of state, went there to give a speech.

Clinton did not attend most of his lectures at Oxford, did not complete his required papers or sit for exams, and was the lone n’er-do-well of six American Rhodes scholars who failed to get his Oxford degree because he spent his time drinking beer, smoking pot, carousing, and having a good time as an American draft-dodger, rather than studying.

Oxford University later bestowed on Clinton an honorary doctorate in political philosophy degree, thus getting a visit and speech by him while he was president. The elites rewarded their own.

The questions about how Bill Clinton, the carousing, pot-smoking bad student at Oxford somehow got to Moscow as an impoverished guest of anti-war peace groups with help from a Catholic priest friend of the radical Berrigan brothers still remain.

Clinton dodged the bullet, and historians and nosey reporters still have not told the full story, despite valiant efforts of great investigative writers Roger Morris (Partners In Power: The Clintons and Their America) and James B. Stewart (Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries).

I enjoyed doing my part on assignment for The Washington Times at the end of the 1992 election cycle.

Just for the record, here follows my banner "Clinton at Oxford" story published on Sunday, October 25, 1992, just days before the pivotal election when Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush for president. Déjà vu regarding the political blood sport now under way. Similarities between Clinton at Oxford and Obama as “community organizer” in Illinois abound.

You connect the dots.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
PAGE A1
OCTOBER 25, 1992

CLINTON AT OXFORD
‘Brideshead’ visited in the war years

Antiwar activism was an
Integral part of Bill Clinton’s
experience at Oxford from
October 1968 to June 1970.

BY GEORGE ARCHIBALD
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

OXFORD, England -- This ancient campus, a serene expanse of green lawns and cloistered buildings, was seething with fury when Bill Clinton arrived in October 1968 – fury at America for making war in defense of the embattled anti-communist government of South Vietnam.

The young Mr. Clinton was 22 years old and a Rhodes scholar, and his bucolic origins in a small town in Arkansas were writ large upon him.

Rage at the war, and for Britain’s support of the American cause in  Vietnam, suffused both the city and the campus. Cherwell, the university’s student newspaper, trumpeted a notice of a protest against the war – and a protest against America – set for Oct. 27, just outside the American Embassy in London.

The protest turned into a rampage as 5,000 marchers, screaming “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” – a tribute to North Vietnam’s Communist leader – made four unsuccessful assaults to break through a cordon of helmeted bobbies defending the embassy.

The demonstration was organized by leaders of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students, one of whom soon became a close friend of the young man from Arkansas newly graduated from Georgetown University. A year later, Mr. Clinton would help organize a similar protest against U.S. foreign policy in London’s Grosvenor Square.

For Bill Clinton, anti-war activism, driven largely by his fear of his pending draft induction notices back home in Hot Springs, Ark., was a preoccupation bordering on obsession while he was at Oxford from October 1968 to June 1970. While noting his Rhodes scholarship as a key element of his resume during the ’92 campaign, Mr. Clinton actually did not complete the prescribed course of study leading to a degree. He was one of six Americans in his class of 32 not to do so.

His close friend and fellow antiwar activist, Frank Aller of Spokane, Wash., who later killed himself while facing Army induction, finished his degree despite pending prosecution as a draft resister.

Interviews with those who attended Oxford with Mr. Clinton or knew him in the 20 months that the future Democratic presidential candidate attended Oxford’s University College, recall a bearded, pudgy student who argued both sides of many arguments and, despite his outspoken anti-war feelings, befriended the curmudgeonly former sergeant major of artillery who was the British school’s porter.

Like many things about Mr. Clinton’s life and career, his Oxford years are a tangle of contradictions.

He is remembered by some as an affable bumpkin who stood out among typically haughty Harvard-like Rhodes scholars, but others thought his Southern charm to be phony, a rube playing Rhett Butler.

“I remember thinking you could go on holiday with him and still not know him,” Philip Hodson, a London psychologist, told the London Daily Mail. “He was too open, not real. It’s the eyes that gave it away – they moved on before he’d finished talking to you.”

Mr. Clinton himself has said virtually nothing publicly about his days at Oxford. Indeed, in Arkansas few people are quite sure how the small-town Baptist Sunday-school boy wound up among the Jesuits at Georgetown. In a letter to the head of the ROTC at the University of Arkansas in December 1969, where he hoped to win a billet to avoid the draft, he said he was a student in England “because [due to the war] there is nothing else I can do.”

“In fact, “ he continued, “I would like to have been able to take a year off perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.”

At the time, Mr. Clinton said preparing himself for a political life and opposing the Vietnam War and the draft were his central aims.

“Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year,” he noted in the widely quoted December 1969 letter to the director of the ROTC.

The contents of the letter of recommendation on behalf of Paul M. Parish, a Rhodes scholar from Port Gibson, Miss., have been the subject of considerable speculation in both Arkansas and Washington, but have never been made public. Mr. Parish, now a waiter and part-time ballet critic in Berkeley, Calif., declined to be interviewed.

Rage and activism against an American war

Like most large universities in the late 1960s, the faculty and student body at Oxford had their share of rebels preaching revolution.

In a 1969 survey reported in the campus newspaper, Cherwell, 10 percent of Oxford’s faculty described themselves as Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites or other kinds of communists. A majority were socialists or described themselves as left of center.

The emphasis in Oxford’s politics program was on “participatory democracy,” several professors who were there now recall. Draft resistance and anti-war activities were ways that many U.S. Rhodes scholars translated political ideas into their reality.

“Because of the Vietnam War, demands were being made by the state that were crucial to the way they lived their own ideas,” Katherine Gieve, one of Mr. Clinton’s friends at Oxford and now a lawyer in London, said in an interview with the Independent, a London newspaper.

Noam Chomsky, a visiting American professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an adviser to many American students at Oxford, described himself in a June 11, 1969, Cherwell profile as “an anarcho-Marxist.” At the time, Mr. Chomsky said his help was being “very urgently” sought by an unidentified American graduate student with “a draft problem.” He did not identify the student further.

Oxford’s new senior proctor at the time, John Torrance, a politics professor at Hertford College, said in a Cherwell interview Nov. 12, 1969, that the university was “the place to train for revolutionary politics, not to practice the.”

Mr. Torrance was described as a “conservative” by Cherwell.

“’Violent exercise’ is Sunday’s recipe,” said the headline of Cherwell’s story touting the October 1968 anti-war protest in London. “For many militants, Oct. 27th is merely a rehearsal for the revolution,’” the paper declared.

Such protests were part of “the building up of an important mass Marxist movement in this country,” Tony Hodges, co-leader of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation (ORSS), told the newspaper.

Anti-U.S. demonstrations help achieve “increased awareness and experience of organized mass action,” added ORSS co-leader Christopher Hitchens, a good friend of Mr. Clinton’s at Oxford and now Washington editor for Harper’s magazine.

Pressed on the legitimacy of the use of violence to accomplish political goals, Mr. Hitchens told editors of Oxford’s student magazine, Isis, on Oct. 9, 1968, “Peacefully if we may, violently if we must.”

An American at Oxford heard little good about his country. “The temper of the times was that America was viewed by British opinion, and certainly at Oxford, as a villain and seeking objectives in Vietnam that were perhaps unwise and were morally questionable,” says Stefan Halper of Great Falls, Va., who with Mr. Clinton was pursuing a graduate philosophy degree in politics.

“And the opinion at the time was so strong that, unless you thought about it very carefully or were skeptical about what you were hearing, you were easily drawn into this flow of opinion which pervaded the university and the city [of Oxford] and certainly Americans in London as well.”

Playing the system

Mr. Clinton played the anti-American climate to his own benefit.

“It was fashionable to be a radical revolutionary, but he believed in the system,” Martin Walker told U. S. News & World Report. Mr. Walker was an Oxford classmate of Mr. Clinton’s and is now Washington bureau chief for the Guardian newspaper of Manchester and London.

The “system” included using political connections to help oneself.

The young man from Hope, the tiny town in southwest Arkansas where he was born, had just graduated as a political science major from Georgetown University and finished a stint on Capitol Hill as an aide to Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Fulbright, an early supporter of the war, had become one of its bitter critics.

Mr. Clinton, who did not have the requisite athletic background to go with his good academic record to win a Rhodes scholarship, had asked Mr. Fulbright, a one-time football hero at the University of Arkansas and a Rhodes scholar himself, to help him obtain the Oxford scholarship.

Yet, once in England, Mr. Clinton’s objective was not to pursue his Oxford egree but to avoid the draft and help other American students avoid military service, say those who knew him at the time.

“One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine, Mr. Clinton wrote in the December 1969 letter to Col. Eugene Holmes, head of Arkansas’ ROTC program. “After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans here for demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16…

“From my work, I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate…. Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country.”

Says Lincoln Allison, a politics lecturer at University College here who knew Mr. Clinton then: “A lot of people who probably should have been doing more academic work or should have been doing something else sat around middle common rooms in Oxford agonizing about their latest letter from their draft board, the war and all the rest of it.”

“It was a very debilitating experience for everybody,” he added.

Mr. Allison, who now teaches at the University of Warwick, obtained his Oxford degree the year before Mr. Clinton arrived in England and spent a lot of time with him and and other American Rhodes scholars.

“In addition to our formal studies, we were enrolled in a permanent, floating, teacherless seminar on Vietnam,” Strobe Talbott wrote last April in Time magazine. Mr. Talbott, Mr. Clinton’s roommate and another Rhodes scholar who opposed the war, is now editor at large of Time magazine.

“Like many of our contemporaries, we felt the war was profoundly wrong. Many of us had to decide what to do if we were ordered by our government to fight, kill, perhaps die for a cause we did not believe in. We talked about that more than anything else among ourselves.”

Mr. Talbott, like many of Mr. Clinton’s friends and acquaintances from his Oxford days, refused to be interviewed by The Washington Times. But he told the World Media Conference in Seoul last summer that the passage of time had tempered his view of the Vietnam War.

Mr. Allison insisted that Mr. Clinton’s opposition to the Vietnam War was “purely selfish” and unrelated to any principled opposition to the Southeast Asia conflict.

He recalls that Mr. Clinton seemed to argue for the sake of arguing and would take contradictory positions for friends on either side of disputes over race relations, or U.S. military intervention to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam.

One friend, Karl A. Marlantes of Portland, Ore., was in the Army Reserves while at Oxford, Mr. Allison says. A very patriotic man, “he actually went and fought in Vietnam.” Mr. Clinton defended his classmate’s patriotism while attacking U.S. war policies, Mr. Allison says. South against traditional Northern prejudice while arguing against South African apartheid in spirited debates with a Boer from South Africa, the professor recalls.

Mr. Clinton seems to have had no close women friends his first year at Oxford. Says Mr. Allison, “His overt interest in women was marginally less than average.”

In the recollection of several acquaintances, his closest friend at the time was the most ardent pro-military man around, University College’s head porter, Douglas H. Millin, a former sergeant major in the Royal Artillery.

“Douglas was the guy who ran the place, the most powerful man at Univeersity College,” Mr. Allison says. “Bill used to sit in the [porter’s] lodge for hours having cups of tea and answering the phone, as I recall.”

Mr. Millin, retired in Oxford, would not be interviewed.

According to one British newspaper account, Mr. Millin was so fond of Mr. Clinton that he even allowed him to decorate the porter’s lodge like a U.S. grocery store.

While at Oxford, Mr. Clinton had a memorable exchange with Germaine Greer, the feminist author. At a January 1070 Oxford lecture on women in literature, Miss Greer titillated her audience with the remark that she enjoyed sexual intercourse with blue-collar men more than with their white-collar counterparts.

Reports the Independent of London” At question period she was met with a still silence, until Bill Clinton rose, resplendent in a pink poplin suit and ginger beard, and said, “In case you ever decide to give bourgeois men another chance, can I give you my phone number?”

Miss Greer said she would consider it.

Draft politics

Mr. Clinton’s Oxford world collapsed in early 1969 when the first of two draft notices arrived from the Garland County Selective Service board in Hot Springs.

He wrote to the board after his first induction date in April to say that he had only just received the first draft notice. A second notice in May ordered him to report for Army duty on July 28, 1969.

Mr. Clinton called his uncle, Ray Clinton, an automobile dealer in Hot Springs, and Mr. Fulbright’s office in Washington, seeking the application of political pressure on his draft board to avoid induction.

He returned to Arkansas over the Fourth of July holiday to seek a Navy or Air Force commission as a last alternative to Army service. He failed physical requirements for commissions in both services.

With political help and his promise to enroll in the Univeersity of Arkansas Law School, Mr. Clinton gained acceptance into that school’s ROTC program, which enabled him to obtain a draft deferment for another year.

But he did not inform officials that he had an Army induction notice. This made him ineligible for ROTC, according to a Sept. 7, 1992, affidavit by Col. Eugene J. Holmes, now retired, who signed up Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Clinton then drew number 311 in the draft lottery enacted by Congress in September 1969. He returned to Oxford and never fulfilled his promise to join the ROTC.

“The threat of Vietnam was so great that Clinton did not expect to return to Oxford for a second year,” London’s Daily Mail reported last month. “At the end of his first year [June 1969], he made no arrangements for new lodgings and a farewell party was held for him.”

Yet Mr. Clinton was back in Oxford by Oct. 11 for the beginning of the 1969-70 term.

Turning radical

The close brush with the draft had radicalized him. He had gone from Arkansas to the headquarters of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in Washington, where for a month he helped plan anti-U.S. protest activities in England to coincide with demonstrations planned in the United States.

Only four days after his return to Oxford, Mr. Clinton marched on the American Embassy in London with about 200 other students demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.

Mr. Clinton then “helped organize an anti-Vietnam rally of students from all over Britain, who marched in front of the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square,” the Daily Mail reported. This rally, on Nov. 15, 1969, was called “The March of Death.”

“With [fellow Rhodes scholar] Tom Williamson, he slept overnight at the London School of Economics and helped marshal approximately 100,000 student demonstrators,” the Daily Mail reported.

Protesters circled Grosvenor Square throughout the day, calling out names of American war dead in Vietnam and dropping white cards with individual names into an open black coffin on the sidewalk.

At nightfall, protesters were joined by about 500 Communist Party members behind a giant banner, “Vietnam Moratorium Day, 31st Communist Party Says U.S. Troops Out.”

Mr. Clinton and other protest leaders went to the U.S. Embassy gates and tried to deliver the coffin to embassy officials, recalls Georgetown University professor Richard McSorley, who participated in the protest with Mr. Clinton.

At the same time, John Gollan, general secretary of the British Communist Party, and Tony Chater, the party chairman, also tried to give embassy officials resolutions calling for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, reported the Morning Star, the official newspaper of the British Communist Party.

Protest leaders were not allowed in the embassy compound.

At a torchlight vigil outside the compound, name cards in the coffin were then placed in black plastic bags and delivered to the embassy gate by Heinz Norden, chairman of Group 68 “Americans in Britain for Complete Military Withdrawal from Vietnam,” according to the Star account.

Group 68 had organized the demonstration along with the British Peace Committee, a front of the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council, and the pro-Hanoi Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. British actress Vanessa Redgrave, a key financial angel of the British Communist Party, marched in the protest.

Mr. Clinton, despite earlier claims to the contrary, now says that he never organized any ”big” demonstrations and was the sole organizer of a teach-in in connection with the Nov. 15 rally.

The day after the Nov. 15 protest, Mr. Clinton “wanted to give young Americans an alternative to a more radical event planned by British Marxists,” U.S. News & World Report reported earlier this year, citing an account by Oxford classmate Richard G. Stearns. “So he helped stage a parayer service at St. Marks Church, across from the U.S. Embassy.”

After the service, participants walked to the embassy. “I’m sure someone tried to deliever a letter, but no one would speak to us,” Mr. Stearns told U.S. News. “So we laid little white crosses on the steps of the embassy.”

Back at Oxford

In his second year in England, Mr. Clinton moved into a small row house at 46 Leckford Road in North Oxford with Frank Aller of Spokane and Strobe Talbott of Cleveland.

“Aller had already decided to resis the draft and remain in England as a fugitive from American justice,” Mr. Talbott wrote in Time.

Mr. Clinton, in the Dec. 3, 1969, letter to Col. Holmes explaining his anti-war activities said of Mr. Aller: “One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is one of the bravest men I know. His country needs men like him more than they can know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.”

Acording to friends, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Aller, while roommates at Oxford, were inseparable. English author Sara Maitlan told the Independent that she vividly remembered the two men taking her to a pub on Walton Street “and talking to me about the Vietnam War.”

“I knew nothing about it, and when Frank began to describe the napalming of civilians, I began to cry,” Miss Maitland said. “Bill said that feeling bad wasn’t good enough. That was the first time I encountered the idea that liberal sensibilities weren’t enough and you had to do something about such things.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Clinton had grown his ginger-colored beard, and his Leckford Road home “was to become a party spot for some of the more adventurous spirits in Oxford at the time,” Henry Porter wrote in a profile of Mr. Clinton in the July-August issue of Esquire magazine.

Among Mr. Clinton’s regular guests was Mr. Hitchens, dubbed by Cherwell the “leader of Oxford’s Mao-Mao,” who persuaded the Oxford Union by a 266-233 vote the previous October to adopt a motion “that American democracy has failed.”

“Like most former friends of Clinton, Hitchens is uneasy about describing his days and nights at Leckford Road in detail, fearing to harm the candidate,” Mr. Porter wrote in Esquire. “But he remembers ‘a number of polymorphous soirees’ there. Quite what this means is unclear, but one can be sure that voters out on the plains would not approve.”

Anna Somers Cocks, now editor of Art Newspaper and another Leckford Road regular, told Esquire that “Oxford had its Brideshead element, of course, but everyone smoked dope.”

Mr. Clinton has acknowledged smoking marijuana on one occasion but says he did not inhale. “He was always on about his nasal allergies or some something,” Martin Walker recalled for Esquire.

“I particularly remember him at parties diving out of the window for fresh air,” Mr. Walker said. “Clinton couldn’t stand the smoke.”

Miss Maitland and two other Oxford women –- feminist studies professor Mandy Merck, now on the faculty at Cornell University, and Miss Giever – were Mr. Clinton’s closest female friends.

“Bill was plumpish and ill-kempt, no a ladies’ man, although he was flirtatious in an amiable way,” Miss Merck told the Independent in an Oct. 11 interview.

Miss Merck, a lesbian, wrote for the newspaper Marxism Today, now defunct, participated in forums organized by lawyers for the British Communist Party and recently produced a gay television series, “Out on Tuesday,” for London’s Channel 4.

“Bill was the first boy I ever ‘came out’ to,” she says. “In fact, he was just about the first person outside my circle I ever felt that I could tell I was a lesbian.”

Miss Gieve said her “abiding impression of Bill is that he was a softie. He wasn’t afraid of expressing his feelings.” Miss Maitland said Mr. Clinton once burst into tears during a London concert when Mahalia Jackson sang the Lord’s Prayer a capella. She said it made him feel homesick.

Innocent abroad

After the Nov. 15-16 protests in London, Mr. Clinton set off on a tour of European cities where he visited pacifist groups and peace leaders.

He arrived in Oslo on Nov. 18 and says he bumped into Father McSorley, a Jesuit priest who heads Georgetown’s Center for Peace Studies, as they stepped off the train. Together, they visited the International Peace Research Institute at Oslo University and met with others opposed to the Vietnam War.

Mr. Clinton said recently he merely accompanied Father McSorley to meet “a guy from Arkansas.” Father McSorley told The Times that Mr. Clinton accompanied him for visits to several places in Oslo lasting nearly nine hours.

In late December 1969, during Oxford’s six-week winter break, Mr. Clinton took off alone on a 40-day train trip through Sweden, Finland, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

Mr. Clinton says he “mostly was just a tourist” in Moscow and that his trip had nothing to do with his anti-Vietnam War activities.

Saying he arrived in Moscow on Dec. 31, 1969, for a visit of about a week, Mr. Clinton adds that he went on his own initiative, stayed in one of Moscow’s more expensive hotels – the National, much favored at the time by the Soviet elite – and paid for the trip himself.

Mr. Clinton was unemployed at the time and had only his $2,760 yearly Rhodes scholarship to pay for all tuition and living costs at Oxford, including vacations. He won’t say how much the trip cost or where he got the money for it.

Charlie Daniels, a Norton, Va., plumbing contractor who met Mr. Clinton on Jan. 4, 1970, at the National Hotel, offers a clue to how the Oxford student ate while he was there.

Mr. Daniels, now 73, was in Moscow with two other Americans and a French couple seeking information on 30 missing U.S. military personnel in Southeast Asia. He says he and the late Henry Fors, a Washington state poultry farmer whose son was missing in Laos, invited Mr. Clinton to dinner when they first met in the hotel elevator.

Mr. Daniels quoted the following entry from his diary on Jan. 4, 1970:

“Henry and I went to the foreign exchange bar for our one-for-the-road drink…. We were joined there at the table by Bill Clinton, a young giant of a man sporting a full beard whose home was in Hot Springs, Ark. Bill was a political science major at Oxford and had decided to visit Russia to get firsthand knowledge of communism.

“His knowledge and ability to explain the inner workings of communism kept Henry and I avid listeners until the bar closed.” For the next two days, Mr. Clinton tagged along with his group to restaurants and on sightseeing trips.

“Most of the time he spent with the whole group. He was always hungry and had no money, so if anyone was going somewhere to eat or see the sights, they’d take Bill,” Mr. Daniels said.

Mr. Clinton wore an old combat jacket and had a heavy beard, Mr. Daniels said. The Southwest Virginia contractor said he has remained a close friend of Mr. Clinton’s and contributed money to his gubernatorial campaigns in Arkansas.

No Oxford degree

Mr. Clinton never got his bachelor of philosophy in politics degree at Oxford. He did not write his required 30,000-word thesis or sit for exams, the only formal degree requirements.

Among the five other Americans who did not complete their degree requirements was Tom Williamson, now a Clinton campaign fund-raiser, according to Rhodes Trust records.

Mr. Clinton’s class also included Michael A. Shea of Iowa City, a Rhodes scholar who was drafted in 1969 and left England to fight with the Army in Vietnam. Mr. Shea returned to Oxford after his military service and completed his degree at Balliol College.

Oxford has clamped a tight lid on information about almost anything Mr. Clinton did at Oxford. Professor W. John Albery, master of University College, declined repeated requests for an interview and would not even describe Mr. Clinton’s course of study or identify his professors and tutors.

He declined to reveal the subject Mr. Clinton declared for his thesis, which several professors said would have been “the driving force” of his course of study.

Mr. Albery’s secretary, Elizabeth Bowles, said “he has reviewed the file” but “did not want to help” get such information to the American public. Sir Anthony Kenny, warden of the Rhodes scholars program at Oxford, declined to speak to a reporter or answer questions about Mr. Clinton’s tenure there. Rhodes House has an extensive file on Mr. Clinton, university officials said.

A Rhodes House official said the warden was acting on orders from Sir Richard Southwood, Oxford University’s vice chancellor, who directed that no information or comments about Mr. Clinton be given out beyond a four-paragraph statement issued by the university press office.

Sir Richard’s office acknowledged that he held “an emergency meeting” and issued his order at Mr. Albery’s request after initial inquiries by The Times.

Oxford’s “Examination Decrees” for 1969 required candidates for a bachelor of philosophy in politics degree to submit papers in four different subjects in addition to writing a major thesis and sitting for exams.

There is no evidence in university records that Mr. Clinton completed any of the papers, according to a university official who has reviewed the files. The official disclosed his findings on condition that he not be identified.

The examination decrees required two compulsory papers on “general social and political theory – the nature of the state and other forms of social organization” and “international, national and local political institutions.”

“Candidates will be expected to show knowledge both of the history and of the contemporary practice of institutions,” the decrees stated. “This paper will not be limited to the United Kingdom, the United States of America and France.”

Subjects for two other required papers included “political theories of Hegel and Marx,” “social structure of Great Britain and other modern societies,” “comparative local government … with special reference to the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Germany, France and the U.S.S.R.,” “the politics of new states,” “federal government,” “sociology of politics,” and “international communism.”

University officials would not say which subjects Mr. Clinton chose for his required papers or his final thesis. Oxford’s official statement about Mr. Clinton’s academic record does not address the specific degree requirements.

It says of Mr. Clinton, in part: “His tutors were pleased with his progress, reporting that he was intelligent and hard-working. However, in August 1970 Bill Clinton won a place at the Yale Law School and decided to continue his studies at Yale rather than return to Oxford.”

But an Oxford official who reviewed Mr. Clinton’s file and spoke with The Times on condition of anonymity said: “Not all his tutors wer pleased with his progress. There were periodic reports from tutors who reported to Sir Maurice Shock as supervising tutor, and from Sir Maurice himself. Some of the reports said Clinton was intelligent but not hard working. They expressed disappointment, saying he was obviously capable of very good work but that he wasn’t doing it.”

Sir Maurice also declined to be interviewed.

The young Mr. Clinton may have been merely typical. Not many students took Oxford’s “B. Phil” program very seriously, Mr. Allison says. “I never finished mine either.”

“The B. Phil. Was a joke in the sense that anybody who was reasonably educated and English speaking could walk their way through it. You read what you wanted, you studied what you wanted, and you didn’t bother.”

It was more common to sit around talking about the war,l drinking or playing rugby, which is what Mr. Clinton and his friends did most of the time, Mr. Allison says.

Mr. Clinton himself summed up his Oxford years this way in the book, The Comeback Kid: The Life and Career of Bill Clinton, a campaign biography: “Being in England was incredible. I got to travel a lot. I got to spend a lot of personal time – learn things, go see things. I read about 300 books both years I was there.

“For a person like me who just likes to organize every minute of the day – I’m almost compulsively over-active – to have two years where you couldn’t do that … it was a great deal.”