Young Bill Clinton Letter Jokes About Dodging Draft
Hoped a sports injury would help him avoid it
4.7.2015
A letter that Bill Clinton wrote in 1968 to a friend reveals a young man hopeful to avoid being drafted into military service, reports Yahoo.
The letter, along with some others, was presented for valuation on Monday's Antiques Roadshow on PBS. The recipient of those letters describes working for a gubernatorial candidate in Arkansas during that time when he befriended Clinton who was working on Sen. Bill Fulbright's campaign, a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. The man states that Clinton had recently returned from an anti-war rally and wanted to inform him of what had gone on there.
From Oxford University in England, Clinton wrote:
I am getting in pretty good physical shape. Have lost my belly and a lot of flab playing basketball and rugby. These British rugby players are pretty tough: I have already suffered a cut over the left eye and, if I play much more, I'm liable to get hurt so bad I'll flunk my draft physical. Wishful thinking.
The appraiser remarked that Clinton was probably glad this letter didn't surface when he was running for president. The letter was valued at $10,000 retail, with the lot of them valued between $12,000-$13,000.
During Clinton's run for president in the early '90s, he was often accused of being a draft dodger. Some of those accusations stemmed from a letter he had written on December 3, 1969 during his second year as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford to Colonel Eugene Holmes thanking him for "saving me from the draft." That letter, in which he also expressed his opposition to the Vietnam War and his sympathies for those wanting no part in it, was used to question Clinton during a 1992 Nightline program. The letter, along with the Nightline transcript, can be read here. In the interview, Clinton defended his feelings in the letter and questioned the motives of its
Young Bill Clinton Letter Jokes About Dodging Draft
Reply With Quote
