Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Off to College


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.