COLUMN ONE : ‘Rhodies’ Eye Wider Network : With Bill Clinton’s election, Rhodes Scholars can finally point to a U.S. President among their number. And that fact hasn’t been lost on the young Americans now studying in Oxford.

Question: How many Rhodes Scholars does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer: Three, and they all put it on their resumes.

The watery English sunlight of late afternoon strikes the spires and ocher walls of Oxford like a benediction, imparting a monkish hush that seems impervious to the noise of traffic or even raucous student laughter. Through the sounds of footsteps on cobblestones and soft gravel pathways, music from pipe organists at practice in ancient chapels reaches out to a passerby like a tendril of philosophic thought, a contemplation of lofty purpose.

Like . . . networking.

Or the national deficit, health care policy, education policy, worker retraining, structural economic change, political accountability in an era of mass communications, urban poverty, rural poverty, the widening gap between rich and poor. . . .

It was two days after the election when Byron Shafer, professor of American government, in his office in one of those hushed corners at Oxford, in Nuffield College, received a call from a former student, one of last year’s crop of Rhodes Scholars, working now at a prestigious New York law firm. The caller was updating his resume, seeking a letter of recommendation: He wants a job in the Clinton Administration.

“He’s very interested in social policy, regulatory policy, civil rights, civil liberties,” Shafer told a visitor. “Oh, he’d love a job in the Administration, in any of those areas.”

The call came as no great surprise. “I won’t say it’s common, but it is happening,” he said, adding that it is only natural. “The kind of Americans who come here in these special programs are very likely to be interested in public life eventually. And students like that cannot miss what has just happened.”

What has just happened, of course, is that the Rhodes Scholars have got themselves--at last!--an American President, a man destined to be (if he isn’t already) the most famous former Rhodie of them all. The knowledge has shot through the community of Rhodes Scholars and other American students here like the sweet bite of youthful ambition.

This is hardly surprising, for ambition and accomplishment are familiar forces here. American Rhodes Scholars have produced three U.S. Supreme Court justices (John Marshall Harlan, Byron White, David Souter); six U.S. senators (J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland, David L. Boren of Oklahoma, Larry Pressler of South Dakota and Bill Bradley of New Jersey); a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (Carl Albert of Oklahoma); two U.S. governors (Clinton and Richard F. Celeste of Ohio); a secretary of state (Dean Rusk); a chief of the CIA (Stansfield Turner); a top-level presidential adviser (Walt W. Rostow); one singer-songwriter-movie star (Kris Kristofferson), and a host of achievers in the fields of law, business, education, medicine, science and the arts.

Indeed, the election of a U.S. President was about the only niche still vacant in the distinguished list of achievements notched up by former Rhodes Scholars. As Sir Anthony Kenny, the warden of the Rhodes Trust, said, “It’s nice to have filled this lacuna in our history.”

Still more Rhodies loom on the horizon as names to know in the incoming Administration. Among the highly ranked “Friends of Bill” who are former Rhodes Scholars are Clinton’s Oxford classmate Robert B. Reich, the Harvard professor who is heading the new Administration’s economic transition team; Ira Magaziner, another economic adviser and a Clinton classmate at Oxford; Bruce Reed, the campaign issues director, and campaign spokesman George Stephanopoulos.

A good many more American Oxonians were active as free-lance thinkers and campaign volunteers throughout the country. And some can now reasonably expect a role, however minor, somewhere in that Clinton Country where shared memories include the reading rooms of the Bodleian Library, the choirs of evensong at Christ Church and New College, the nighttime quads bordered by study lights shining through leaded glass, the ever-present menagerie of Oxford eccentrics, and the talk, the endless, to-the-wee-hours talk: How does it work, how do you fix it and (by the way) the implicit promise to keep in touch.

Renewed Curiosity

The attention suddenly paid to Oxford, through Bill Clinton’s success (and his readiness to draw upon other Oxford-educated advisers) has freshened curiosity over the “Oxford experience” and what it brings those who go through it.

Discussions with students and professors suggest that the experience of today is not markedly different from what it always has been, and in today’s students can be found some of the same interests and activities that occupied Clinton and his classmates nearly 25 years ago--with the major exception of the war in Vietnam, a source of much agonizing back then, not only with Clinton but with many of his contemporaries.

What doesn’t seem to have changed is the number of students, particularly Rhodes Scholars, who are interested in issues of public policy, if not elective politics, and who--much like Clinton--spend hours in discussion and argument with their classmates, debating America’s problems and how to fix them.

“I have to say,” said Kristy Parker, of Wichita, Kan., who is a Kansas State University graduate, “I’m impressed with the number of people I’ve met here who’ve worked out their own health care policies.”

The “policy wonks” seem more conspicuous among the Rhodies than other groups, because of their predominant numbers over scholars in science and the arts. Most enroll in a course of study in “PPE” (politics, philosophy and economics) leading to the equivalent of an American bachelor’s degree, and they seem perpetually out and about at conferences, talking, arguing, trying out the latest refinements in their pet theories.

Indeed, their long dinner-table conversations, over endless bottles of soda water, tend to free-ranging discussions of American social, economic and political problems.

There is widespread agreement over what the priority issues are: education (most often at the top of their lists), health care reform, the inner cities, the gap between rich and poor, race relations, the problems of restructuring the U.S. economy. The arguments are not over goals, but about how to arrive at them.

“What we do, mostly, is talk,” said Wesley Sand, 23, a Rhodie from Roseburg, Ore., and Cornell University. “Talking is the best part of the experience, I think. Probably it’s where you learn the most, where you sharpen your arguments, where you are forced to think.”

Sand counts himself among the few political conservatives in his 32-member class of American Rhodes Scholars. A sweeping majority in his (second-year) class and this year’s new arrivals were Clinton voters who call themselves Democrats.

“There is a certain hope out of this election that government can change things, that it can be a force for something positive,” said Stephen Brown of Portland, Ore. “It’s not necessarily that government has all the answers or should have all the answers, but that it can take a more activist role in solving our problems.”

“I think all Americans here are pretty excited by the election,” said Robert Esther of St. Louis. “You could feel it very clearly. People were celebrating the day after the election.”

While they are hopeful, even energized, over the prospects of a Clinton Administration, they are far from ready to paint him as a role model. As Esther said, “There’s something that doesn’t set right about the idea of Clinton starting out 25 years ago to be President.”

At the same time, Rhodes House, the home base for the yearly crop of about 79 Rhodes Scholars from 17 countries who enter the program every year, is widely considered a hotbed of political aspiration.

Munificent Magnate

Part of it comes from the provisions of the will of Cecil Rhodes, the British diamond magnate and African colonialist, whose fortune funded the scholarship plan after his death in 1902. The will specified that the scholarships were not designed for “mere bookworms,” but for the student who displays “instincts to lead” and who might choose “the performance of public duties as his highest aim.”

“The selection process more or less guarantees that you’re going to have people here interested in politics, if not necessarily elective office,” said Leonard Stark, 23, a self-described “political junkie” in his second year as a Rhodes Scholar.

He is also a student of demonstrated brilliance, having earned two bachelor’s degrees (economics and political science) and a master’s (European history) in four years at the University of Delaware, and he is now digging into a thesis on leadership fights in British political parties. He’s not sure what he will wind up with for a career (law school is a probability), but public issues are likely to be a continuing absorption. And, like other Rhodies, Stark realizes that connections made now could be useful later.

“It’s almost impossible to come out of here without a nice little network,” he said.

But it would be unfair to accept the reputation the Rhodies have (in some quarters of Oxford and beyond) as a collection of grasping, hustling, overambitious dweebs spending all their time studying the intricacies of social or economic policy.

In interviews with more than a dozen of them, all came off as considerate, modest, exceedingly polite, confident, yet aware of their own shortcomings and areas of naivete. They also demonstrated a thoughtful awareness of what they see as their country’s problems, and most of them displayed an apparently genuine sense of debt, a feeling that their good fortune in having arrived at Oxford requires some repayment in service, although as yet ill-defined.

These winning qualities, of course, are bedrock ingredients in the art of public relations and politics, a talent for which assisted their arrival here in the first place. It is clear that, for some of them at least, their political careers are already under way.

Prof. Shafer, in his eighth year at Oxford, has seen a wide variety of American students here. “Some of them are just here polishing their resumes,” he said, “and some of them are very basic, down-to-earth, good kids. I’ve had a couple that I would just about guarantee will one day be U.S. senators. I’d put my wallet on it right now.”

The three “conservative” members of the current second-year Rhodes class--Wesley Sand, Jesse Malkin and Micul Thompson--when asked if they contemplated political careers someday, smiled warily, eyeing one another over their dinner plates. “Maybe everyone here is interested in being a politician someday,” said Sand, to a chorus of sly laughter, self-effacing but not altogether dismissive. Clearly, the thought had crossed their minds.

“No doubt about it, there’s a lot of political ambition around here,” said Patricia Lopes of Honolulu, another second-year Rhodie and a graduate of Washington and Lee University. Fittingly, as a prospective journalist, she watches her fellows with a gimlet eye. “There are one or two who are already planning to be President.”

For raw ambition--and accomplishment--Chris Howard is hard to miss, as several Rhodies (begging anonymity) pointed out. Howard, 23, is black, a star football player and academic standout, first at his high school in Plano, Tex., and then at the Air Force Academy, where he graduated 13th in his class (after having turned down scholarships at a dozen of America’s best universities).

Howard moves too quickly to catch up with easily, but he found time to talk during the lunch hour of a session of the Oxford University Strategic Studies Group (he’s a member of the executive committee) holding daylong discussions on the Yugoslav problem. Still looking like the star halfback of the 1990 Liberty Bowl, Howard was dressed in a dark suit, a yellow bow tie, his hair trimmed close to the sides and stacked on top.

Working the Room

After 10 minutes working the room, snapping off bright “yes-sirs” and seating the distinguished guests from the military and academia, he sat down over broiled chicken and chips. As a commissioned Air Force lieutenant and a “citizen-soldier,” he requested that he not be asked to comment on the election of the “new commander in chief,” but he would be happy to comment on his views of the nation’s problems, his experience at Oxford and his future, as far as he could see it.

“I’ve had so many discussions with fellow Rhodes Scholars . . . and we all recognize that our problems are not unique to us. But, for America, I think the inner cities is a big one--and that is a whole plethora of problems, drugs, family abuse, poverty. . . . Also, education, the lack of parity between upper-middle-class America and the inner-city schools.

“The question is, how do you do it? You can’t just throw money at it. But there is a question of how much money we are willing to spend on schools in order to avoid having to build prisons later. Our country just isn’t going to survive if we don’t solve some of these problems. I just wish any kid growing up in America could have the same opportunities I had.”

The foremost among those advantages, Howard says, is “an unbelievably great family,” his parents and older brother, a household whose guideposts were discipline, “tough love” and a strong religious sense.

Howard’s list of accomplishments pile up, like conversational driftwood, through a 40-minute talk: an internship on the Senate Armed Services Committee as an undergraduate; studying at the RAND Corp. to predict “what the Gulf area would look like after the Gulf War”; another internship at the State Department; “trying to make myself an asset to the country,” agreeing to a speaking tour at inner-city high schools in four states. And next summer, he hopes to intern at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels to “study the problem of the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into the NATO structure.”

Broad Ambitions

If NATO doesn’t come through, he plans to do his pilot training, then complete work for two degrees at Oxford. After that it will be the Air Force--at least for a few years.

Has he thought of politics? “I want to be a pilot, and a good commander. Being a fighter squadron commander, that is my first dream. After that, perhaps appointive office, elective office. I would never name any office I would want to go for.”

Would he ever want to be President? There--it was out.

Chris Howard looked down at his unfinished chicken. He’d barely had time to eat. He laughed, softly.

“Well, the fact that you could sit there and ask such a question is very . . . flattering.”

He let the subject slide away toward other plans, how he’d like to apply for a White House fellowship one day. “I’ve always been concerned about public service,” he said. And he adds, with the calm conviction that has impressed his classmates, “I want to make bad things good.”

He would, he said, stay in touch with his Rhodes Scholar classmates. “Absolutely, sure. Not just for the contacts, but because these are people who want to do things. Look at Clinton’s campaign. It’s very easy to see how he had all these contacts all his life. You have these long, deep, intellectual conversations, and they go on all night. There are 20 people in my house, from 17 countries. You should hear the mealtime conversations. I call it breakfast-table education.”

But it is not all a mad dash for enlightenment and resume points. Howard has become engaged, as have several other Rhodies during their time at Oxford--mostly, as Len Stark notes, to “significant others” back home.

“Back home,” to most of them, has become a place they say they appreciate more the longer they are overseas. And Oxford, after presenting what at first seemed a bewildering absence of regimen and structure, encourages those “smell-the-flowers” forays down pathways some have not explored before. Even a committed ponderer of policy like Bill Clinton found time for an Oxford fixation on Dylan Thomas, devouring his books and taking trips to the poet’s Welsh homeland.

Similarly, Ed Pallesen of Lincoln, Neb., and Jeff Shesol of Denver, second-year Rhodie sidekicks and students of politics and history, have “discovered John Updike” and are plowing through all his books with the dedication of fresh converts.

Along with the nights full of talk and the rambles through an institution that, in Evelyn Waugh’s description, “exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth,” it is these byways that may be Oxford’s finest gift, ambition notwithstanding. As Shesol noted, the best of revelations is when “you finally figure out that it’s OK to hang out all day and read John Updike.”