Decades later, Clinton would be ridiculed for grudgingly acknowledging that he had smoked marijuana overseas and then quickly adding the caveat that he did not inhale. Was it true? 'We spent enormous amounts of time trying to teach him to inhale,' Maitland recalled. 'He absolutely could not inhale.' The problem with Clinton was that he did not know how to smoke and could not take the tobacco, according to Walker, whose lasting image of Clinton at those parties is of the big southerner leaning his head out an open window gasping for fresh air. 'He was technically correct to say that he did not inhale.'