My life

I arrived in New York at 9:45 p.m., nine hours late, thanks to delays on both ends. By the time I got to Manhattan, it was after midnight, so I decided to stay up all night to catch an early-morning flight. I woke up Martha Saxton, and we sat and talked for two hours on the front steps of her place on the Upper West Side, then went to an all-night diner, where I got my first good hamburger in months, talked to two cabdrivers, read E. H. Carr’s What Is History?, and thought about the extraordinary year I’d lived through and what lay ahead. And I stared at my nicest going-away gift: two little memory cards with French sayings entitled “L’Amitié” and “Sympathie.” They had been given to me by Anik Alexis, a beautiful black Caribbean woman who was living in Paris and going out with Tom Williamson. Nikki had saved those cards for eight years, since she was a schoolgirl. I treasured them because they reflected the gifts I had tried to give, share, and draw out of others. I framed them and have put them up in every place I’ve lived for the past thirty-five years.

I left the diner with less than twenty dollars to get home to Arkansas, yet I wrote in the last page of my diary that I felt like “a wealthy man indeed, full of good fortune, and friends, and hope and convictions a bit more specific and well thought out than the ones with which I started this book last November.” In that crazy time, my mood went up and down like an elevator. For good or ill, Denise Hyland had sent me a second diary in the spring to chronicle whatever happened next.

When I got home at the end of June, I had about a month before reporting for induction, during which I was free to make other military arrangements. There were no available spots in the National Guard or reserves. I looked into the air force, but learned I couldn’t become a jet pilot because I didn’t have fusion vision. I had a weak left eye, which had often tilted outward when I was very young. It had largely corrected itself, but my vision still didn’t come to a single point, and apparently the consequences in flight could be severe. I also took a physical for a naval officer program but failed it, too, this time because of poor hearing, a problem I hadn’t noticed and wouldn’t until a decade later when I entered politics and often couldn’t hear or understand people talking to me in crowds. The best option left seemed to be enrolling in law school and joining the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at the University of Arkansas.

On July 17, I went to Fayetteville and in two hours was accepted by both. The officer in charge of the program, Colonel Eugene Holmes, told me he was taking me because I would be of greater service to the country as an officer than as a draftee. His second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Clint Jones, seemed more conservative and skeptical of me, but we had a pleasant talk about his daughter, whom I had known and liked in Washington. Joining ROTC meant that I would go on active duty after law school. Apparently, they couldn’t formally enroll me until the next summer, because I had to go to summer camp before I could enter ROTC classes, but signing a letter of intent was enough for the draft board to waive my induction date and give me a 1-D Reservist classification. I had mixed feelings. I knew I had a chance to avoid Vietnam, “but somebody will be getting on that bus in ten days and it may be that I should be getting on it too.”