Clinton Joined ROTC After He Got Draft Notice

Old letters written by an Oxford friend of Democratic presidential front-runner Bill Clinton say the future governor of Arkansas sought a deferment in 1969 because he had received an induction notice, and not because he was simply anticipating the draft.

Faced with disclosure of the letters, the Clinton campaign acknowledged late Saturday that Clinton received a draft induction notice in 1969 before he joined the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas. The campaign said Clinton received the notice while he was at Oxford in late April, 1969.

Clinton had maintained for months that he arranged for the short-lived deferment through an ROTC program because he was told by the local draft board that his number would be coming up for the Army in the summer of 1969.

But in a sworn affidavit given to The Times, Little Rock attorney Cliff Jackson said he wrote in letters more than 20 years ago that Clinton already had been sent a letter of induction in the spring of 1969 while studying at Oxford.

“Bill Clinton, friend and Rhodes (scholar) from Hot Springs, Ark., received his induction notice last week,” Jackson wrote in a May, 1969, letter to an old college professor and mentor.

In its statement Saturday night, the Clinton campaign said: “The (induction) notice had been sent by surface mail and arrived after the induction date. Gov. Clinton immediately sought guidance from his local draft board about the induction date that had passed. He asked whether he could finish his current term at Oxford.

“As was routine procedure, the request was granted and his induction was postponed. Gov. Clinton completed the spring term and returned to the United States in late June or early July.”

The statement seemed to conflict with remarks Clinton made in February to reporters during a half-hour news conference in New Hampshire. When asked why he was never called up for service after being eligible for the draft for more than a year, Clinton said, “It was simply a fluke I wasn’t called and there are no facts to the contrary.”

Asked to explain why Clinton said nothing in the intervening months about receiving an induction notice, campaign spokesman Jeff Eller said, “I do not have the answer to that question.”

A spokesman for the Selective Service System in Washington said last week there was no entry on Clinton’s records showing that he received a letter of induction. He said they only say that he was classified as 1-A, was sent a notice to take a pre-draft physical but received a deferment later in the year through the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas law school.

In addition, the former secretary of Clinton’s local draft board emphatically denied she ever authorized or signed a letter telling the Rhodes scholar that he had to report for duty. She said it was her job to send those induction notices to people selected for the Army by the three-man board.

“No, he did not get a letter of induction,” said Opal Ellis, the former secretary for Draft Board 26 in Hot Springs, Ark. “He was on the top of the list, but at that time we were slowing down on inductions.”

The typed and handwritten letters unearthed by Jackson last week span four of the most crucial months in the story of Clinton and the draft--between May 8, 1969, and Sept. 14, 1969--and were sent to two former professors and a friend at the time. The Times viewed the original letters before obtaining the sworn affidavit from Jackson.

They raise additional questions about just how far Clinton went at the time to avoid serving in the Army--questions that have dogged his campaign and caused some political damage.

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary in February, Clinton was forced to confront the issue after ABC News obtained a copy of a letter he wrote in late 1969 thanking the head of the ROTC program for “saving me from the draft” and admitting he “deceived” him about his depth of anti-war feeling when he enrolled in the officers’ program.

Clinton told reporters he signed up for the program at the law school as a way to obtain a deferment, which records show was granted Aug. 7, 1969. The deferment put him out of the reach of the draft during the following two months, when officials say his age would have make him a likely subject to be called for military service.

However, Clinton maintained he later had a change of heart and asked that his 1-A classification be restored so he could take his chances.

“Nearly everyone else was being called. . . . I had friends who’d been wounded there--I ultimately had four high school classmates who were killed there,” Clinton has explained. “I just didn’t think it was right.”

Records show Clinton was reclassified as 1-A on Oct. 30, but ROTC officials told The Times last week that he still would have been protected against the draft since he was enrolled in their program until December.

By the time he was discharged from ROTC and could be fully exposed to the draft, his chances of serving in the Army were further reduced by President Richard M. Nixon’s announcement exempting graduate students from immediate service and the fact that Clinton drew a high number in the first military lottery on Dec. 1, records show.

Clinton applied to Yale Law School the next day, Dec. 2, and wrote his letter to the ROTC program in Fayetteville on Dec. 3, leading Arkansas officials to release him from his officer training obligation.

The letters written by Jackson and discovered last week, however, describe Clinton as calculating and tireless in his efforts to avoid military service.

Jackson said he found the letters in his Little Rock home March 31 while looking through his belongings for some other item. He said they were written at a time when he and Clinton were friends and members of the Oxford ‘B’ basketball team. Jackson, who attended St. John’s College as a Fulbright Fellow, was the only other foreign student from Arkansas at the time.

A former Republican, Jackson has run for office unsuccessfully as an independent. He has actively opposed Clinton’s presidential campaign but adds that he has never contributed to any of the governor’s opponents.

Jackson said he decided to disclose the letters immediately so voters in the remaining Democratic primaries could “know the truth in advance of (Clinton’s) nomination.”

“In short, Bill Clinton was not trying to avoid being drafted; he had already been drafted and was trying to void, as well as avoid, his imminent induction as an Army private,” Jackson said in his sworn affidavit for The Times.

The first mention of Clinton’s alleged induction comes in a rough draft of a letter Jackson wrote in May, 1969. He wrote that Clinton, whom he identified as from Hot Springs and a Rhodes scholar, had “received his induction notice last week.”

Jackson said he retyped the letter and sent it to two history professors who served as his mentors, Ron Hathaway and Leslie Caine Campbell.

Campbell, now associate dean of history at Auburn University in Alabama, found his copy of Jackson’s letter in his correspondence files last week after being contacted by The Times. A faxed copy showed it was postmarked May 9 from Oxford and contained the news about the Clinton induction notice.

Hathaway, a high school principal in New Braunfels, Tex., said he remembers receiving letters from Jackson but was unable to confirm a mention of Clinton or find his copy of the letter before the weekend.

Jackson next mentions Clinton’s military quandary in a handwritten letter dated July 11 and sent to a friend, who subsequently returned the letters to Jackson. At the time of the second letter, Jackson had returned to Arkansas for the summer to work as the research director at the Republican State Headquarters.

“In comparison to others, I, or we, don’t have any real problems,” Jackson wrote in the letter. “Bill Clinton visited with me most of yesterday and night. He is feverishly trying to find a way to avoid entering the Army as a drafted private.

“At this moment, though he is still pursuing several leads, all avenues seem closed to him. The Army reserve and National Guard units are seemingly full completely, and there is a law prohibiting a draftee from enlisting in one of these anyway.

“The director of the state selective service is willing to ignore this law, but there are simply no vacancies,” Jackson wrote. “I have had several of my friends in influential positions trying to pull strings on Bill’s behalf, but we don’t have any results yet.

“I have also arranged for Bill to be admitted to the U of A law school at Fayetteville, where there is a ROTC unit which is affiliated with the law school. But Bill is too late to enter this year’s unit and would have to wait until the next April. Possibly, Colonel (Army Col. Eugene) Holmes, the commander, will grant Bill a special ROTC ‘deferment,’ which would commit him to the program next April, but the draft board would have to approve such an arrangement.

“They already refused to permit him to teach, join the Peace Corps or VISTA, etc. So Bill has only until July 28 to find some alternative military service. I feel so sorry for him in this predicament--it could have easily been me,” Jackson concluded.

More than a month later, Jackson referred to Clinton again in another handwritten letter to the same friend. By this time, Clinton had been admitted to the ROTC program and records show his status had been changed from 1-A to 1-D, giving him grace from the draft.

Despite that, the Aug. 27 letter says, Clinton had already begun thinking of a way out of his commitment to join ROTC at the law school.

“Bill Clinton is still trying to wiggle his way out of the ‘disreputable’ Arkansas law school. His latest scheme: Because his ROTC training won’t start until next year, he is going to ask the ROTC commander to give him special permission to go one more year to Oxford.

“Presumptuous? I don’t know. Perhaps I would do the same thing, if I were in his shoes,” he wrote.

When that permission to return to England was apparently granted to Clinton, Jackson made note of it in a postscript to a letter dated Sept. 14.

“P.S. Bill has succeeded in wiggling his way back to Oxford!”

Holmes could not be reached for comment. Other officials who handled Clinton’s case at the time confirm Jackson’s accounts of a young man desperate to escape military service.

“He was trying to get into everything rather than have me send him (a letter of induction),” said Ellis, now 84 years old. “He was talking about the Navy. He was trying to get into the Army Reserves. . . . He was trying to get into anything so he wasn’t inducted.

“He just thought he was too good to go,” she said. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s all I could do about it.’ That’s when he rushed up to Fayetteville and joined the ROTC.”

But Ellis and Clinton D. Jones, who helped admit Clinton into the ROTC program at Fayetteville, said the future politician never received a formal letter of induction.

Ellis said she warned Clinton personally that he would probably be among the first to be drafted during the summer of 1969, but she never sent the official letter.

And Jones, now retired and living in South Carolina, said the ROTC program would not have admitted Clinton if he indeed had received his notice. “We would not have taken him,” said Jones.

“As far as I knew, he was not inducted, didn’t have a letter of induction and didn’t have a letter in the mail,” said Jones.

Times staff writers Richard E. Meyer in Little Rock and Cathleen Decker and Douglas Jehl in New York contributed to this story.