Bill Clinton Accused by London Cab Driver of Being A Traitor

London Taxi Driver Calls Bill Clinton Traitor on His First Run for America's President

On a trip to London we had rented a car and driver for a couple of days. The driver was nice little man with a full head of white hair and was very interested in the Presidential race, particularly Bill Clinton it’s was his first “hat in the ring”. 

On a trip to London we had rented a car and driver for a couple of days.

This is our guy that was so nice-wish we had got his name

 The driver was nice little man with a full head of white hair and was very interested in the Presidential race, particularly Bill Clinton it’s was his first “hat in the ring”. Not wanting to offend us he asked permission to talk to us about America politics. Of course being political junkies we said yes.

1^st: were we voting for Clinton, we said NO and it got good from there, he let us have it with both barrels.

2^nd: How could Americans be fooled by Clinton, he was a traitor and should be shot.

3^rd: When he was Oxford he spent a lot of time on street corners bashing America.

4^th: He spent time in Russia on different occasions bashing America, wasn’t aware of this. We said No we hadn’t seen anything about it. He was very emphatic that Americans were getting the shaft with candidate. Author be

Bill Clinton’s Early Activism from Fulbright to Moscow

Bill Clinton’s Road to Moscow

Summary

During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s student protests and Moscow trip generated much controversy, but few answers. While Clinton’s government files from that era seemingly remain unavailable even today, there is at least more information available than in 1992. The public record reveals that Clinton’s social network and views on Vietnam were influenced by a pattern of contact between Communist agents and sympathizers and Clinton’s academic and political associates. This pattern is documented here through an analysis of Clinton’s antiwar activity up through the time he left Oxford in 1970. Included are quotations from a June 9, 1969 profile of Clinton by the Frederick, Maryland Post which does not seem to have been previously cited elsewhere.

As a Georgetown junior, Clinton inherited his antiwar orientation from his part-time employer, Senator J. William Fulbright. Fulbright’s views on Vietnam had in turn been influenced by scholar Bernard Fall. Fall had an academic background at institutions linked to Chinese Communist apologist Owen Lattimore. He had recently co-authored a book on Vietnam with Marcus Raskin, cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which disseminated Marxist propaganda aimed to sway Fulbright and other decision-makers. Fulbright’s office was also in regular contact with Igor Bubnov, a KGB operative on Capitol Hill. President Johnson had ordered the FBI to monitor Fulbright and his staff for suspected Communist contact at the time Clinton went to work for Fulbright.

Clinton remained relatively quiet about his war views during his first year as a grad student at Oxford from fall 1968 to spring 1969. He took an activist turn in summer 1969 while seeking to avoid being drafted. During summer vacation, he worked with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee (VMC), a US antiwar group which was helping a Communist-dominated coalition called the New Mobe organize fall protests.

Upon Clinton’s return to Oxford that fall, he and his friend Richard Stearns helped a British VMC counterpart called Group 68 organize Americans in England for Moratorium protest events. (A supplementary background profile of Group 68 follows the body of the article, exploring the group’s links to a British antiwar network centered around Bertrand Russell and Russell’s associate Tariq Ali. Russell’s network helped the North Vietnamese and Soviets disseminate anti-US propaganda through channels such as the International War Crimes Tribunal, sponsored by the Soviet front the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam.)

Clinton in 1969 spent a week in Moscow

Over winter vacation of 1969-1970, Clinton toured Moscow, where he had been preceded by his roommate Strobe Talbott. Talbott was then translating the memoirs of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which had been leaked to him by Victor Louis, a KGB disinformation agent and talent spotter. Clinton and Talbott’s other roommate Frank Aller was doing similar work on the unpublished notes of Edgar Snow, an academic associate of Lattimore.

Mr Clinton 's week-long visit to the Soviet capital, 23 years ago, had been part of a 40-day winter holiday touring Germany and Scandinavia while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. But Mr Clinton 's entire student experience, evading the Vietnam draft, taking part in anti-war demonstrations in Britain, and now the Moscow tour, are being conflated by the Republicans as something far more sinister.

The Republicans are scratching away at those doubts about Mr Clinton 's character which have nagged him since the draft avoidance and Gennifer Flowers scandals earlier this year.

Bill Clinton's past statements about his anti-war activities and trip to Moscow

Dec. 3, 1969 While a student at Oxford University in England, Clinton wrote to Col. Eugene Holmes, director of the Reserve Officers Training Corps program at the University of Arkansas:

"I have written and spoken and marched against the war. One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine. 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."

"Clinton said ... he had attended two" protests, "at Oxford and at Washington. He went to hear the speeches and he did not conduct himself in a way he should be ashamed of, Clinton said."

June 1989 A guest column in the Arkansas Gazette by a visiting Soviet journalist noted in passing that Clinton had spent a week in Moscow in the early 1970s and quoted him as saying: "Relations between our two countries were pretty good then. It ++ was a time of detente and the American moon landing had just been shown on Soviet television all over the country. ... I love riding the trains in Russia and the black bread, too."

Oct. 5, 1992 Referring to the Moscow trip during an appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live," Clinton said: "It was the first week of 1970, and actually relationships were thawing between our two countries. I was a student in England and I took a 40-day trip across northern Europe, through all the Scandinavian countries; spent Christmas with a family friend, a friend of mine in Helsinki, and then I went into Russia and spent a week and then came out through Czechoslovakia, and then went back to England. And I had an interesting week there, but I paid for my own trip. Nobody paid for it."

Oct. 7 --On the "Donahue" show, Clinton was asked, "Were you part of a 'march against death' on the United States Embassy in London in 1969?"

Clinton replied: "I don't remember that it was called that. I have said repeatedly that I was in two or three marches during the course of my life as an opponent of the Vietnam War. And one time I did go to the United States Embassy, and there were a couple of hundred people there I don't remember it being a big crowd, and I don't remember that being the title of it. But I did go there. A bunch of us from Oxford went down for it."

Q.: "And you were alone in Moscow on New Year's Eve in 1969?"

Clinton: "That's right."

Q.: You traveled alone?

Clinton: "I was by myself. And I just met people along the way, but I didn't have any particular agenda there. I went there because I wanted to see Moscow."

Oct. 8, 1992 Clinton told reporters that his Soviet trip was an "eventful, interesting week for me doing the things you would expect someone to do who'd never been to Russia before."