A few nights ago we had the
pleasure of sharing a dinner with out next door neighbors, a delightful family
who are a a never-failing source of unobtrusive cheerfulness and
helpfulness. Though I never anticipated
it, like so much else in my recent life, we have become the “elderly couple
next door.” And when that happens to you, and it will, you will be very lucky
if the moral equivalent of the Woods are living next to you. These are the kind of people who
surreptitiously dig out your driveway for you on an icy day, and who never
complain about the mess out around your garbage bins. The specific occasion, at least ostensibly,
was to honor Anna, the daughter, one of the nicer young women on earth, who
graduated from Princeton High School in the early summer and was just about to
leave home for New Orleans, where she is entering the freshman class of Tulane
University.
She couldn’t know it, but going off
to New Orleans filled with youthful enthusiasm was an experience which I myself
had shared, an experience recalled with sharp detail as we listened to her
talk of her exciting plans. For it was
in New Orleans that I myself set off on one of the several mysterious glide
paths of my life. Around Thanksgiving of
1958 I traveled to Little Rock for the state interviews of the annual Rhodes
Scholarship selection. I was then a
senior in college rather than a fresh high-school graduate, but, as I say, this
was 1958, and in “emotional age” I probably lagged by some distance the
sophistications of a current graduate of Princeton High. At the interview there were, I seem to
remember, about a dozen of us, all of us pumped up, apprehensive, doing our
level best to project a aura of nonchalance.
It was pretty obvious to me that I didn’t have a chance. Candidates included the Razorback football captain,
the Amory Blain of the hills and hollows, and a personage of semi-divine
stature in the State of Arkansas, as well as a guy from Harvard who was
supposed to have already filed three industrial patents. Nonetheless the next day I was sent on to the
“District” in New Orleans, my fellow state finalist being neither the quarterback
nor the inventor but an up-and-coming politician and an all-state string player
in the Youth Orchestra. Very nice
guy. There is modesty. There is false modesty. And then there is simple incomprehensible
good luck. I was awarded a Rhodes
Scholarship! I celebrated with the
Committee and the other district winners at a blowout meal at a sumptuous
New Orleans restaurant.
That was still nearly a year before
I would be graduating from college and actually heading for England, but I was
suddenly being cascaded with good wishes and startling opportunities, mostly
from strangers. The senior senator from
Arkansas at that time, J. William Fulbright, was one of the more complicated
southern politicians of mid-century. He
was an erudite redneck, a segregationist, anti-McCarthyite internationalist and
(I believe until this very day) the longest-serving Chairman of the Senate
Committee on International Affairs; a
former Rhodes Scholar, a former president of the University of Arkansas, and a
great believer in the value of international education. Hundreds if not thousands of Fulbright
Scholars have benefited from his vision.
I had never met the man, nor indeed laid eyes upon him. Though I had no reason to know it, he took a
special interest in Arkansas Rhodes Scholars.
Ten years later he would play a not insignificant role in advancing the
career of Bill Clinton. In those days,
or for all I know still in these, senators enjoyed among their perks the gift
of various “patronage” government jobs—remnants of the spoils system of one of
his spiritual predecessors, Andrew Jackson.
Fulbright got me a well remunerated
summer sinecure that allowed me to spend the summer following my graduation in
Washington, where I lived with a group of friends and classmates from
Sewanee. I was a clerk in the Senate
Document Room. Computer technology has
undoubtedly changed things, but at that time every piece of legislation working
its way through either legislative house was repeatedly reprinted in its latest
form for distribution to congressional staffers, lobbyists, and other
interested parties. I got paid what
seemed like a lot of money to stuff interoffice envelopes with tear-sheets of
the latest amendment to S. 356 or HR Res 193 or whatever, then drop them into a
mail chute or wait for some staffer babe to pick them up personally on the
run. Only occasionally was the work
demanding. The Senate Document Room was
approximately twenty yards from the door of the public gallery of the Senate,
and we spent a lot of time watching “business” being conducted on the Senate
Floor. This experience was educational
but also disillusioning. My first
conscious awareness of what would be the Viet Nam crisis came in one of these
sessions. Lyndon Johnson wandered over to
Bill Knowland, the minority leader in the Senate, and in a voice quite audible to me in the
gallery explained to him his take on the problem of Viet Nam. “They’re all Buddhists,” he said, pronouncing
the syllable Bud as though it were
the beer. “All they want to do is fuck
and pray.” Ah, there were giants in the
earth in those days! Was this the same
floor from which Daniel Webster had belted out his famous “Second Reply to
Hayne”?
And then one day toward the end of
the summer, just as I was preparing to pack up my belongings and head home
briefly before actually setting off for Oxford, I experienced another little
vignette that has stuck with me through the years. It was a very hot, sultry Washington late
morning, and I was sweating heavily in obligatory coat and tie as I negotiated
the difficult pedestrian semicircles on the way down from the Capitol. A golden tanned fellow in an open necked
shirt and an open red convertible, blowsy blonde next to him in the front seat,
actually slowed down to let me dart to safety.
He gave me a big wide smile and an indulgent wave of his hand. It was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, junior
senator from the state of Massachusetts.
There was already a lot of buzz.
