This summer, I worked with Professor Brigham on a project that will ultimately address Bill Clinton’s foreign policy and the forces that shaped his ideologies and political persona. For my research, this first meant understanding the demographic changes affecting the country as the baby boomer generation came of age. I poured over U.S. Vital Statistics and Census Reports, tracking population demographics, educational levels, unemployment rates, and ethnic breakdowns between 1944 and 1962. I compared national figures to Little Rock, Arkansas, North Adams, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut, and had remarkable and helpful exchanges with other scholars across the country.

I then moved on to Clinton himself, and looked into his early life in Hot Springs, AK, and into how child welfare and foster care programs operated in the 1950s. 

The Vietnam War escalated as Clinton was in college. When he lost his student deferment in 1968, Clinton was heavily at risk of induction, an experience that deeply influenced the rest of his political outlook. I collected everything Clinton wrote about his father, his childhood, and the Vietnam draft in his 2004 memoir, and compared it to the same information turned up by biographer David Maraniss in 1994. To track the complicated and slippery ways that Clinton escaped the draft by the skin of his teeth, I made a detailed timeline of his draft experiences and a chart to keep track of the sources available to back up what Clinton claims happened and what Maraniss discovered. 

My work culminated with the question “How did the Vietnam draft really work?” I read every book about it in the Vassar Library, plus a few more ordered through ILL. Fascinated and appalled, I produced a thesis-length report on the inconsistent and sometimes shocking ways that the draft operated for men navigating Selective Service and induction both before and after the 1969 draft lottery reforms.