Stacy, a good web site to check out stuff that sounds like an urban legend is Snopes.com
The "info" you posted about Clinton is an urban legend. No federal felon, no pardon by Carter. All just made up out of whole cloth by someone who didn't give a shit about the truth. I hate people like that.
The documentation on Clinton's avoidance is actually fascinating, he was very much opposed to the war, and treaded very carefully in order to stay out of it while not becoming a "resistor" and thereby killing his future ambitions.
So far, my research leads me to believe that, yeah, I can certainly respect Clinton's avoidance every bit as much as I can respect Bush's avoidance. I feel pretty sure that Bush didn't spend any sleepless nights wondering about the morality of the war.. he just doesn't strike me as the type. But hey, I'm gonna read up on the history of Bush back then, who knows, I might be surprised.
Here is a perspective piece on the reporting of the subject (highlighting mine):
November/December 1992 |
ContentsCampaign Issues
DRAFT
by William Broyles, Jr.
Broyles, former editor-in-chief of Newsweek and California magazines, was also founding editor of Texas Monthly. A decorated Marine corps Vietnam veteran, he is the author of Brothers in arms: A journey from War to Peace, an account of his return to Vietnam in 1984. He was co-creator and executive consultant of the television series China Beach, and creator and executive producer of Under Cover, another series.
As the coverage of Bill Clinton's draft history and its coverup reminds us, the Vietnam war, which brought out the best and worst in America, did the same for the press. In the beginning the stories were all body counts and no context, no history, no help. the good news is that these dumb simplifications gradually gave way to more thoughtful complexities. The story, over time, got told.
I should begin this with a personal disclaimer. I was at Oxford just before Bill Clinton and, like him, did everything I could to hang on to my draft deferment. Like him, I finally got a deferment -- mine in the Peace Corps, his in the ROTC. But, as he claims to have been, I was troubled by the inequity in my success: Why should I be safe when my friend from high school were having to fight and die? I had found a way to live, but I couldn't live with myself. So, as Clinton says he did, I gave up my deferment and made myself eligible for the draft.
There the comparison ends. I went to Vietnam and, unless he is holding back still more information, Bill Clinton did not. That is close to the complete list of facts about this story of which I am personally aware. Did the reporting on this issue add to the truth of the story, or not?
The first wave of coverage, during the early primaries, showed resourceful reporting, but was too often generationally tone deaf. The implication was that avoiding the draft during Vietnam was the moral equivalent of turning your back on America after Pearl Harbor, and not the accepted practice of an entire generation of college student. It was as if a younger generation of reporters had been let loose without the counsel of older male writers, editors, and new producers, most of whom had themselves evaded the draft.
This simplistic approach was followed by more thoughtful articles of the confusing moral issues the war raised. The newsweeklies were among the first to weigh in with the "how it really was back then" stories. In February, Time editor at large Strobe Talbott, one of Clinton's Oxford roommates, wrote a personal defense of the sincerity of Clinton's behavior and recounted the story of another roommate, a draft resister, so troubled by the war that he eventually killed himself.
Time also brought out the thoughtful Lance Morrow, who asked: "Has the statute of emotional limitations run out on Vietnam? . . . Was a prosecutorial press stirring up artificial controversy about something relatively unimportant that happened years ago when Clinton was young? Were the political media roaring along heedlessly aboard a sort of Heisenberg Express, distorting the process even as they observed it?
Well, were they? Morrow doesn't say. He works for Time. He doesn't have to answer questions, just ask them. Over at Newsweek, Jonathan Alter suggested that part of the press's enthusiasm for this issue came from reporters who wanted Clinton to step up and vindicate their won opposition to the draft and the war. David Hackworth, Newsweek's military affairs expert and one of the few Vietnam veterans on the story, argued that he would have doubted Clinton's judgment far more had he enlisted in 1969, since by then the war had deteriorated into a bloody, pointless stalemate.
Moral complexities are bad for headlines, so the press found itself playing down the choices Clinton made then and focusing on his increasingly tortuou explanations of those choices now. Although ABC News dug up Clinton's now-famous 1969 letter to his ROTC head -- which Clinton then released in a defensive move -- the toughest and most solid reporting was almost all in print. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum of The Wall Street Journal, who on February 6 broke the original story of Clinton signing up for an ROTC unit he never joined, was out front early and, with William Rempel of the Los Angeles Times, stayed there. In September, when it printed the most comprehensive, balanced account of what actually happened, the Times also turned up the efforts of Clinton's uncle to delay Clinton's physical and to get him a place in the Naval Reserve.
The Republican attack apparatus helped keep the story alive, even as polls were showing that voters were much less interested in this issue than the press seemed to be. The Republicans could hammer the issue of credibility and draw the constant, unspoken contrast between Bill Clinton, Draft Dodger, with George Bush, War Hero. But if the issue was Clinton's credibility, why was the attack carried at the beginning by Bob Dole, whose crippled arm was a vivid reminder of his own war service? Why even refer to Bush's war service at all?
For a time, the Republican attack diverted attention from the fact that so few leading Republicans had served in Vietnam. To its credit, the press refused to be diverted. Stories homed in on the questionable war records of leading Republicans like Dick Cheney, Rich Bond, Pat Buchanan, and the man most likely to be inspired by George Bush's war record, his son, George W. Bush (who rushed to fulfill his patriotic duty in that haven of draft evaders, the National Guard). In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post on the day Bush and Clinton addressed the National Guard Association, James Fallows wrote that "listening to Bush campaign strategist Mary Matalin Call Clinton a draft dodger made me feel like women must feel when men lecture them about abortion."
Again, however, the initial breathless reporting was evidence of how so much of daily journalism lives in a void, ignorant of history, even its own. A few months after the fall of Saigon, Fallows wrote a memorable article called "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" Fallows, who starved himself to get a deferment, tallied his 1,200 Harvard classmates and found only fifty-six who had entered the military at all, and only two who had gone to Vietnam.
What kept the story going was the persistent belief that Clinton had not leveled about what the did, that in his record was the smoking gun. Clinton answered the questions he was asked, most of the time truthfully. But a lot of small truths didn't add up to the larger truth, indeed added up to some troubling questions about just whether Bill Clinton even knew what the truth was. What, exactly, does that say about his character? That he is a liar, that he has selective memory, that, as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette argued, he has a contempt for history -- or that the mind is a mysterious thing?
Reading all this coverage I found myself wondering if the press is too blunt an instrument to probe such sensitive psychological terrain. How well would we journalists answer shouted questions about what we did twenty-five years ago?
When journalists who didn't serve are asked about the war, they tend to become . . . Bill Clinton! I asked the Journal's Jeffrey Birnbaum, one of the most responsible and resourceful reporters covering the story, about his own history. First, he pointed out that he himself had had a draft number, implying he had been caught up in the war. Then he mentioned it was a high number, but, when asked, at first couldn't remember exactly what it was. I pointed out that by the time he turned eighteen, the earliest he could possibly have been drafted, all American combat troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam. Then he remembered that he had been 4-F all along. I suspect many male reporters and editors, if put on the spot, would give equally tortuous explanations.
But why use other journalists when my own case is worse? Shortly before I wrote this story a friend reminded me of how he had tried to get me a direct commission at the Pentagon to save me from going to Vietnam. Even though this was for me a matter of life and death, I had completely forgotten about it. If I had been asked, I would have denied the story with utter conviction. But it was true.
