Remember late in the 1992 campaign, GW Bush down and about to lose? One of the final campaign issues became Clinton's trip to Moscow as a Rhodes Scholar in 1969. Saturday Night Live parodied it best, because it was really only worth parody as a response:
Bill Clinton: Sam, this kind of attack shows how desperate the Bush campaign has become. Yes, I did go to Moscow by train in 1969. And while on the train, I struck up a conversation with a man in the seat next to me. He gave me a package to take to Moscow and instructed me to leave it folded in a newspaper in a kiosk across from Lenin's tomb. I've explained this many times. Yes, the KGB did subsequently pay my way through law school, but that was the last contact I had with the KGB until years later when Hillary and I were having problems, and it was a KGB agent, Nikolai Kuznetsov, who let me stay at his place for a while until we patched things up.
For a look at the ridiculous charges...
From the far right, here is how this issue was framed (freeper alert):
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.
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 Clinton and Talbott’s other roommate Frank Aller was doing similar work on the unpublished notes of Edgar Snow, an academic associate of Lattimore.
Oh my. Guilt by association. Academics. Communists. Krushchev. Sound familiar?
Over summer vacation that year, Clinton returned to the US, dividing his time between taking steps to avoid the draft and organizing antiwar activity. Maraniss summarizes:
That summer Clinton's efforts to avoid the draft and protest the war merged. He spent half his time in Arkansas feverishly working the system so that he could get accepted into the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas Law School--which he would never attend--and thus delay induction. The rest of the time he was in Washington, working as a low-level organizer in the anti-war movement.
Community organizing! After traveling to Moscow! He's a veritable Manchurian Candidate!
Schecter similarly recalled meeting Clinton shortly after Talbott got the Khrushchev assignment:
Before leaving London, I also spent a day with Strobe at Oxford and met his long-haired, amiable housemate, Bill Clinton, who prepared omlets for our breakfast. I never asked Strobe how he told Bill about his new assignment.
Talbott was again in Moscow about the same time Clinton was there in 1970, though he insisted he did not travel there with Clinton, a Boston Herald article by Wayne Woodlief and Joe Battenfeld mentions. A dozen other Rhodes Scholars also followed up Talbott’s visit to Moscow by going there in 1969-1970, Maraniss’ article notes.
He wasn't supposed to be there... what WAS Clinton doing in Moscow... and WHY DID HE RETURN???
In either case, Clinton’s next stop was Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he arrived on January 6, 1970. There he looked up the family of his Oxford friend Jan Kopold. Kopold’s family was well-connected in Czech Communist circles. Clinton received a guided tour of Prague from Marie Svermova, the widow of Czech Communist Party hero Jan Sverma, who was Jan Kopold’s grandfather. In 1969 the Kopolds ostensibly held dissident political views against the ruling regime, which had grown unpopular among reformers and student activists after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year.
So... Clinton takes a trip many other Rhodes Scholars take, hangs out with some credible academics (Strobe Talbott), and, in the eyes of the smear, he's a virtual Commie.
Note: Clinton went on to win in a landslide.