First In His Class Read Online Free PDF

season; or to form a jazz band and play riffs in the auditorium during lunch hour.

    The young men of Boys Nation were invited to lunch with the senators from their state in the Senate Dining Room. Bill Clinton sat between Senator John McClelan(left) and Senator J. William Fulbright. Clinton had already studied Fulbright’s life and career and considered the intellectual Arkansan his first political role model.

    The highlight of Boys Nation was a visit to the Rose Garden. After a brief speech, President Kennedy greeted the boys, and Clinton made sure he was the first to shake his hand. Later, at graduation, when friends and teachers gave him their yearbooks, Clinton often turned to the page with this picture on it and signed below the photograph, which has subsequently become famous.

    Georgetown, 1965. As the student officer responsible for making the incoming freshmen feel welcome, Clinton had the opportunity to make new friends and build his consituency at the same time. No one knew how to navigate the campus more skillfully.

    The five seniors who shared a house on Potomat Avenue were “boringly respectable.” Within the wider spectrum of sixties behavior, Clinton and his housemates were trim and tame. Despite the war in Vietnam and the rioting following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Jr., Tom Campbell (right) thought of it as “a sort of never-never-land up there.”

    Clinton with Denise Hyland (center couple), his steady girlfriend at Georgetown, at a black tie ball with friends—Kit Ashby (far left), Jim Moore (fourth from left), and Tom Campbell (fourth from right).

    For his first full-time campaign adventure. Clinton worked on Judge Frank Holt’s run for the Democratic nomination for governor of Arkansas. Holt lost the election but helped Clinton land a job on Senator Fulbright’s staff.

    The young recruits, a coterie of college student leaders who became known as “the Holt Generation,” often worked sixteen-hour days. Clinton eventually became a chauffeur for the judge’s wife and two daughters, who barnstormed the state. When the route took them to Hope, Clinton asked if he could give the speech, since his grandmother would be in the audience.

    For the Rhodes Scholars in the class of 1968, being in England may have removed them from the chaos and excesses of student activism back home, but it could not rid them of their anxieties and concerns about the draft.

    No one had expected Clinton back for his second year at Oxford—his draft status had seemed so hopeless. So Clinton freeloaded for a while with friends before being invited to share a flat at 46 Leckford Road with Strobe Talbott (left), the Russia scholar, and Frank Aller (right), the China scholar and draft resister. Aller’s suicide in 1971 marked an end to the sixties for their Rhodes group. Clinton maintained a strong relationship with Talbott, and chose him to be ambassador at large for Russia and the other former Soviet republics and later appointed him deputy secretary of state.

    In 1986, eighteen years after the Rhodes Scholars of the class of 1968 sailed across the Atlantic, Robert Reich, who was teaching politics and economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in the
American Oxonian
: “Rumor has it that Bill will be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. I just made up that minor, but by the time you read this, the rumor will have spread to the ends of the nation.” Reich’s work on industrial policy and world trade became a cornerstone of Clinton’s economic thinking, and Reich was appointed secretary of labor.

    Clinton was never more in his element than on the campaign trail. Every hand he shook, even corner store he stopped in, every pie supper he attended, helped him transform his image from the long-haired Rhodes Scholar and law professor into a young man of the people.

    After working on the staff of the House Judiciary