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”. Not wanting to offend us he asked permission to talk to us about America
politics. Of course being political junkies we said yes.
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This is our guy that was so nice-wish we had got his name |
1st:
were we voting for Clinton, we said NO and it got good from there, he let us
have it with both barrels.
2nd:
How could Americans be fooled by Clinton, he was a traitor and should be shot.
3rd: When
he was Oxford he spent a lot of time on street corners bashing America.
4th:
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 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.)
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.
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."