That time when one week in Moscow as a student almost cost Bill Clinton the election:
Bush challenges Clinton over 1969 week in Moscow
President Bush and Governor Bill Clinton each grappled with a different political threat yesterday, as the CIA admitted it had been covering up the Saddamgate affair and Mr Bush joined in the furore over Mr Clinton 's tourist trip to Moscow as a student in 1969.
The CIA's announcement that it was launching a formal investigation into its provision of 'incorrect and misleading information' to federal prosecutors in the Saddamgate inquiry is by far the more serious. The CIA is now, in effect, admitting it knew that United States food trade credits to Iraq were being spent on building up Saddam Hussein's military arsenal until the last weeks before the Gulf war.
But the strange case of Mr Clinton 's trip to Moscow looks to have a greater impact on this weekend's first presidential television debate, and on the election, now little more than three weeks away. Mr Clinton should 'level with the American people on the draft, on whether he went to Moscow, how many demonstrations he led against his own country from foreign soil,' Mr Bush declared on the Larry King television show.
'I don't have the facts, but to go to Moscow one year after Russia crushed Czechoslovakia, and not remember who you saw - I think the answer is, level with the American people,' Mr Bush repeated.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1992/oct/09/usa.martinwalker
