In October 1968, "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered at the Oxford cinema, Tiny Tim gave a concert at the Albert Hall in London, and go-go boots and the widest of hip-hugging bell bottoms were the rage.
A group called the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students battled police at sit-ins agitating for change in university life.A student was tossed out of a restaurant because his hair was too long. Another was disciplined for marijuana possession. A "coed" faced sanction for entertaining a man after hours in her room.
This was the Oxford University that greeted Bill Clinton as he arrived, a not-too-worldly 22-year-old Georgetown University graduate, for a two-year Rhodes scholarship.
Oxford was not the bastion of the effete, liberal left-wing that President Bush has at times portrayed it as. But neither was it as removed from the political extremism of the time as Clinton has at times indicated it was.
At least that is how more than a dozen of Clinton's contemporaries at Oxford contacted for this article remembered university life in 1968 and 1969.
A few knew Clinton; most did not recall him. But they all said the central passion, even obsession, of each and every American at the school back then were the same issues the Bush campaign has seized on this fall - opposing the war in Vietnam and avoiding the draft.
"For the Americans, it was a great deal more serious than it was for us," said Christopher Hitchens, today a columnist for The Nation, then a leading figure in the socialist students group.
"They had the prospect of being drafted. Plus they were ashamed and embarrassed over what their country was doing, and they had proper middle class doubts about how far you should go in saying that in a foreign country. So for them, it was a consuming subject."
Many Britons who knew Clinton at Oxford have grown hesitant about talking publicly about the time.
"Everybody liked him, and so everyone's pretty fed up with people trying to dig up dirt about him," said Anna Summers-Cocks, an editor who said Clinton had "shared digs with some very close friends of mine."
The university also has become wary. It has asked its staff not to comment to the media about Clinton on the grounds that it wants to eliminate any chance of influencing the outcome of the election.
"The policy the university has adopted is to give out as minimal information as possible on Bill Clinton," said Georgina Ferry, the school's chief press officer.
Oxford was where the pushes and pulls confronting an entire generation caught up with Clinton. Perhaps that is why his time there became the fulcrum in the campaign's debate over his character and trustworthiness.
It was the place where, he acknowledged last spring, he puffed on but did not inhale a joint of marijuana. It was where he sought to avoid the draft and took part in - and perhaps helped organize - anti-war demonstrations.
And it was while at Oxford that Clinton traveled to Moscow, a trip Bush has recalled in an effort to raise questions about his judgment.
Contemporaries who do recall Clinton do not remember a campus radical.
"There was no sense in which he was an extremist," said Katherine Gieve, 43, a London lawyer who dated Clinton in 1969. "There was a lot of discussion about the Vietnam War and about politics generally. He was concerned with practical politics and the meaning of political ideas for people's lives."
She remembered Clinton as "friendly, enthusiastic - a nice sort of man."
Martin Walker, 44, who got to know Clinton at Oxford in the fall of 1968 and who is now Washington correspondent for The Guardian newspaper of London, said Clinton "was not one of the leading organizers of the anti-war movement, neither among the Americans nor among the Brits."
"Quite a lot of the Americans at Oxford took the view that America was in a pre-revolutionary situation and that the entire system was rotten and had to be rebuilt from the bottom up," Walker said. "Bill was not so wild-eyed romantic about that. He believed in the system. There was something almost touching in his belief that the system would respond in a democracy."
Bush and his aides have sought to portray Clinton as an organizer of anti-war demonstrations in London. But two Oxford students who were at the center of the anti-war movement did not recall him.
"If he was very active, I would have known him because I was very involved," said Hilary Wainwright, 42, who teaches sociology and politics at Manchester University. "I can remember one or two Americans, but not him."
"If he'd been a firebrand type or a leader, I would have known him," said Christopher Hitchens.
Friends from the time speak of Clinton as being an inquisitive, good-natured, almost naive student who was a voracious reader and a good listener.
Mandy Merck, 45, who is teaching in the women's studies department at Cornell University, met Clinton in her second term after arriving from the United States as a graduate student in 1969.
He was the first man she confided in that she was a lesbian.
"I didn't have any feeling that he disapproved or that he was particularly freaked out by it," Merck said. "He just seemed a trustworthy person, which is what just about everybody thought."
Contemporaries said it wasn't surprising that Clinton traveled to Moscow during the winter break in 1970.
"I went to Moscow in the spring of 1968," Walker said. "You have to remember that the early stages of detente were under way."
"It wasn't unusual to go for a week or so to some strange place you weren't really attracted to but just felt curious about," Wainwright said. "I went to East Berlin."
She scoffed at the notion that Clinton would have come under the sway of, or been duped by, communists. "We were rebels against not only the American government but also the Soviet government," she said. "We had slogans like, `Neither Washington nor Moscow.' We were against both Cold War blocs."
Dist. by the New York Times News Service