If You Live by the Sword: Politics in the Making and Unmaking of a University President

By Lawrence K. Pettit

If You Live by the Sword offers an honest portrayal of the human struggles faced by a university president and it explains how these seldom discussed stresses of the position are intensified by the intrusion of politics. Pettit goes behind the scenes and writes openly about intrigue, betrayal, anxiety, and the contention for power that is faced within the university system.

In a career that has mixed academia and politics for over forty years, the author was fired more than once for his politics. And when he ran a gubernatorial campaign, he actually had to fire the candidate’s mother. On a more personal level, the author experienced two divorces because of the turbulence of his career, and had to fend off false rumors of sexual impropriety and endure politically inspired audits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450208406

Lawrence K. Pettit

Lawrence K. Pettit has been a U.S. Senate staff member, campaign manager for a Governor, a Washington representative for higher education, and once ran for Congress. He has been a university chief executive officer in Montana, Texas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, and now enjoys a vigorous retirement in Montana.

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Copyright © 2010 Lawrence K. Pettit.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-0838-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-0839-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-0840-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010901719

iUniverse rev. date:  09/30/2021

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

PART I

Chapter 1Montana: Growing Up With Joe McCarthy

Chapter 2Montana: College as a New Lease on Life

Chapter 3Across the U.S.A.: Academic and Political Apprenticeships

Chapter 4The Hybrid Career Begins: Penn State and the American Council on Education

PART II

Chapter 5Montana: The Ambiguity of Identity

Chapter 6Montana: The Clash of Political and Academic Imperatives

Chapter 7Montana: Hardball Politics

Chapter 8Montana: Don Quixote’s Political Adventure

Part III

Chapter 9Texas:…y Justica Para Todos

Chapter 10Illinois: Don’t Let the University Embarrass

the Board

Chapter 11Illinois: Partisanship Comes Knocking in the Night

PART IV

Chapter 12Pennsylvania: Flagship Abuse

Chapter 13Pennsylvania: Ambush, Intrigue,

and the Beginning of the Fall

Chapter 14Pennsylvania: The Dagger and the Sword –

A President’s Reward

CONCLUSION

Chapter 15Pennsylvania and Montana: Bittersweet Transition

into Sagehood, and a Return to Peaceful Values

Endnotes

Dr. Lawrence K. Pettit has proven that sometimes truth is more fascinating than fiction. His truthful, first-hand account of life in politics and academia is a powerful account of the people, events and policy-making that touch us all. His ‘read to believe’ stories of politics and academic life provide a rare window through which modern politics and higher education can be better viewed and understood. They are stories from which we can all learn a great deal.

----Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle

Preface

For nearly all my adult life I have had the good fortune to dwell in my two greatest passions: politics and higher learning. Much of the time I embraced the thrill of life on the edge as I risked serial flirtations with politics, while presuming to sustain loyalty to academia. This memoir recounts the struggles, consequences, triumphs, and occasional punishment that attended such a risky duality; its writing led me to reassess how I look at the psychological contexts of leadership, particularly in higher education. As a memoir, this is not intended to be a conventional, full scale autobiography. I introduce biographical material to set the stage for case studies or episodes in which I was a central actor, and which illustrate problems or issues in university leadership and in the government-university relationship. Moreover, in the first part of the book I describe a particular political socialization and intellectual development that resulted in a dual (and often conflicted) life focus on politics and academia, and that shaped a risk-taking personality. It is also the character of these two processes that influenced my approach to an academic career, one that revealed a penchant for cultivating political linkages external to the academy, and one in which, therefore, I found comfort in leadership more than in scholarship.

Feedback from those who read the pre-publication manuscript showed that the autobiographical material in the first quarter of the book was enjoyed particularly by younger readers in their twenties, and by fellow retirees. I hope also that those who are interested in leadership, and especially academic leadership, will be able to build useful hypotheses from this same narrative with respect to how the course of one’s life affects how he or she interprets and executes leadership roles. I like to view my writing generally as the kind that avoids trying to be the final word on a subject, but suggests topics for further inquiry by others. I hope that by sharing candid and honest biographical and career episodes in this work I might provide useful, and in some cases essential, data for those who are interested in leadership studies, university-state relations, a number of university-related political issues, the intrusion of politics into university leadership and management, institutional histories, and histories of certain times or issues in the states in which I served.

Schadenfreude is a German concept for which there is no single English equivalent, so far as I know. Like paranoia, schizophrenia, or bipolar, this term, in addition to its clinical meaning, has a somewhat different popular meaning in American usage. I interpret schadenfreude in the popular sense as taking delight or finding comfort in the ill fate of one’s competitor, rival or enemy. Or, at a less personal level, it means seeing justice in the high and mighty being taken down a notch or completely felled. Who has not seen schadenfreude in action in all aspects of life, especially politics? And who has not entered the groves of academe without feeling enveloped in a miasma of this charming spirit?

The good feeling one derives from schadenfreude has a corollary sentiment: resentment of the successes of a competitor, rival or enemy – or perhaps even of a friend. One learns quickly in politics writ large and in the more personal politics of academia that one’s success will attract not only gratitude and praise, but also a spate of resentment. At the leadership level, schadenfreude is energized by contention for power, prestige and legitimacy, and fueled by opposing notions of purpose and mission. It may become institutionalized and ossified, as battle lines are drawn and prolonged over time. A common thread in my career, and thus throughout this narrative, is what I title, success and its discontents. In each setting, success was sometimes resented by powerful others. This is not unique to my career, of course, nor to academia, as in a competitive environment, or in a zero-sum decision circumstance, one’s success may be truly hurtful to another. Less often recognized, however, is the price one may pay for success that upsets a consensual equilibrium, as when the success of a president and his institution upsets the desired parity within a university system, or when a president’s success disturbs a power equilibrium between his office and the faculty union, or even between him and his board. I hope this memoir will illustrate how the dynamic of retribution for success plays out in the interrelationships of personal life, career, and the larger political setting. It should illustrate as well what most university presidents know, but has not been written: success, rather than failure or incompetence, can be one’s undoing.

This is written for the general reading public as much as for the college and university audience. I have endeavored not to write a text book, nor to assume the responsibility of a scholarly work. Rather, I hope this hybrid without a standard niche will be at once interesting to the public and useful and informative to those who work in and study higher education. There are scoundrels and heroes, hubris and self criticism, joy and sorrow, wins and losses, love and divorce, and generally a succession of career highs and lows, the latter including having to deal with the professional impact of a false and devastating rumor of sexual misconduct.

This book comes from the trenches where the vast majority of people in higher education work, from the second, third and lower tier institutions where most people’s college-going kids end up. Most other presidential memoirs have been written by former presidents of elite colleges and universities. The collection of such works is scintillating, gracefully written, and affording the mass of us a glimpse of life at the top, much as novels about the British upper class do. But such books do not touch the lives of the ordinary citizen or the average student, faculty member, trustee, or college president or chancellor. There are, of course, principles that reach across all levels, and I have profited greatly from the written observations of other former presidents.

This presidential memoir may be unique for another reason. Because the focus is on a dual career in pursuit of politics and academia, in the early chapters I give attention, as mentioned above, to my own political socialization and intellectual development. I do this against the backdrop of evolving political history, especially those events and persons that helped shape who I was before I ever became a university leader. The academic career is discussed within its political, sociological and psychological context. Some readers will relate more to these early chapters than to the life of a president that follows. Some may identify with the struggles of a child born into rural poverty, who at nine is setting pins in a bowling alley and at eighteen is being labeled a communist by community elders, and then – the first in his family to attend college - eventually becomes a university president. This is a less accommodating and rockier trail than the prep school-Ivy League cultivated pathway that is more commonly written about in presidential memoirs. I hope it provides the reader more drama.

Acknowledgements

Many persons read parts or all of the manuscript, and provided useful commentary. They include Sidney Armstrong, Kent Kleinkopf, James W. Thompson, Haider Mullick, Paul Fossum, Ruth Riesenman, Susan Delaney, Rosemary Gido, Rosaly Roffman, William Arceneaux, Ellen Ruddock, Randy Gray, Joe Darby, Howard Hastings, Robert J. Ackerman, John J. Schulz, Ned O.Wert, Sharon Anderson Pettit, Edward Gondolf, Jay Kirkpatrick, Karren Baird-Olson, Zane Davison, Catherine Walsh, Mitzie Lund, Bill Gregory, the late Betty Peters, and Bob Brown, former Montana Secretary of State and Republican candidate for Governor.

During a beautiful Montana summer of 2008, Moira Ambrose asked if I would read the manuscript to her, chapter by chapter, as her late husband, the historian Stephen Ambrose, had read his book manuscripts to her. We agreed to weekly readings, which involved Jean Baucus and Rosemary Fossum as well. All three ladies provided gracious hospitality and keen insights that improved the manuscript. Both Moira and Rosie would pass the next year without having seen the finished product, but the memory of their friendship and their avid interest in the book continues to give me confidence and hope.

Others allowed me to subject them to interviews through which I gained valuable information and perspective: Judy Hample, Jeffrey Coy, Don White, Edward Nolan, Dave Wanzenried, Jack Noble, Keith Colbo, and George Darrow.

Ned Wert generously permitted use of a detail of one of his compelling abstract paintings as backdrop for the cover design.

There are family, friends, colleagues, mentors and staff who were so central to my career that without them there would have been no story to write. They are mentioned throughout the book, and they include above all my four children – now middle-aged – Jennifer Fossum, Matthew Pettit, Allison Pettit, and Edward Pettit, who felt all the pains and joys of this remembrance along with me. These four wonderful human beings, with maturity, tolerance and understanding – with class, as it were – stoically endured the years of my putting career ahead of family, and steadfastly rallied for me with each of my life’s crises.

Across the generational divide are several young people, many of whom worked in my IUP office, who gave me friendship, joy and the opportunity to mentor, and who played key roles at different turns in the flow of my personal and professional lives. They include Patrick Coulson, Michael Sample and Allan Roberts, whose loyal support was sustaining at critical times.

Two young men from that group, Ryan Miller and Josh Shaw, became my closest friends with strong arms, generous hearts and keen minds when I needed them most. A. J. Pahach helped keep body and mind together as I struggled with the first post-retirement anxiety. Later, after I returned to Montana, Aaron Williams became a close and generous friend who added new dimensions to my life, led me back to the basic values, and gave me fresh perspective to enable the removal from the manuscript of the most egregious examples of self promotion. I owe each of these wonderful young men a special gratitude only he can know.

Haider Mullick served this project in many capacities: close friend, mentee, research assistant, webmaster, and technical consultant. Haider virtually shared ownership of the manuscript, and always stood ready to perform any useful and necessary task to see the effort through. My debt to him is enormous and life-long.

Among the students who served as board members during my terms as president or chancellor, I wish to single out four: Sid Thomas in Montana, Bill Hall in Illinois, and Michael Connell and Cameron Hollingshead in Pennsylvania, who not only served with distinction, but were steadfast and effective friends and supporters at critical times.

During the frustrating period of re-writes and dealing with publishers, my friend Mark Nay provided quiet counsel and encouragement. Without the help of a young Montana friend and novelist, Seth O’Connell, this aging latter-day Luddite could not have managed the online submission of the manuscript. I thank both Mark and Seth.

Finally, because I am unsure how one otherwise would footnote such a reference, I wish to thank Laurance Urdang for creating and editing The Timetables of American History (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1996). This is a marvelous reference which proved useful to me in checking the accuracy of my memory as I traced the historical backdrop that both shaped my political and intellectual development, and framed the political and academic tensions that defined my career.

This book is especially for my late mother, Dorothy Brown Pettit Gregory, who eschewed organized religion, but led an exemplary life. She was a quiet iconoclast, who always won through kindness, and who always asserted her independence with subtle but lasting effect. This is a belated gesture of love and gratitude to my mother, and as well to my extraordinary mentors, all gone now as well, Lee Metcalf, Vic Reinemer, Ralph K. Huitt, John F. Morse, John Holt Myers, and Nicholas A. Masters

PART I

Chapter 1

Montana: Growing Up With

Joe McCarthy

I was born in the heart of Montana into a rural poverty that cruelly inhibits the development of one’s intellect and imagination. It was 1937, just 20 short years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Fifty-three years later, in 1990, as head of a delegation from Southern Illinois University I sat across the table from a team of Russians, hoping to negotiate establishment of the first American college of business in that country. We occupied an ornate government office in Moscow, and one could walk a short distance from our conference table to the second story balcony on which V. I. Lenin had stood to deliver a fiery speech which has been forever captured in an historic rendition, with his right fist clenched and jutting into the air. The image is one with which I have identified throughout my life.

Over the course of that half century and since, my political consciousness has evolved and changed, beginning with an inherited faith in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal . As with anyone to some degree, my outlook assumed shape and hue as I reacted to events within my life, interpreted against the backdrop of nascent history, and filtered through whatever psychological apparatus may have predisposed me toward certain beliefs and preferences. This political socialization proceeded hand-in-hand with intellectual development and a persistent love for universities, forging a life-long duality in my sense of self. On occasion, almost as an addictive force, this duality would entice the educator into the more exciting and dangerous arms of politics, with harsh, but perhaps predictable, consequences. Inevitably, several of the lessons learned from the experiences of my career reflect the uneasy relationship between politics and higher education.

My generation, now predominantly in retirement, shares an expanse of history that swept us through the end of the Great Depression; World War II; the beginning and end of the Cold War; the McCarthy era; wars in Vietnam and Korea, and now Iraq and Afghanistan; the Watergate scandal and a President leaving office in disgrace; large scale civil unrest and protests; political assassinations; the Civil Rights movement and the end of sanctioned racial segregation; the environmental movement; a rapid journey from the first transcontinental air service to space exploration; transatlantic telephone service; the development of television and the onset of televangelism; the development of computers, cell phones, the Internet, and other accoutrement of the Information Age; the development of a birth control pill; the belated organized movement to gain equal rights for women; the revolutions in biotechnology and astrophysics; the establishment of the United Nations and NATO; the evangelical/fundamentalist Awakening by which a previously marginalized religious persuasion and style grew into a respected and powerful social force, not only threatening the moral hegemony of the established, mainline denominations, but wielding enormous political power through a skillful fusion of literal theology and political conservatism; and a strategic act of terror on September 11, 2001, that crumbled not only the World Trade Center towers in New York but also the confidence of the world’s singular power, and signaled that organized stealth, not connected to any nation state or its agenda, has supplanted rogue state aggression as the world’s chief threat and primary agent of fear.

One generation has experienced all this and, as a capstone in 2008, the improbable election of a black President of the United States as Senator Barack Obama shattered the racial barrier with a message of hope, unity and change, and a campaign brilliantly executed both in its use of cutting edge technology and its extraordinary ability to withstand a campaign of character assassination waged against him.

As my professional career neared its end, I looked backward in an attempt to see for the first time the genesis, evolution, and change of my own political consciousness, noting how my spot on the left-right continuum sometimes shifted in response to both societal and personal events. Because I began thinking about this effort when I was about 67 and had officially retired, it occurred to me that the many millions of us entering retirement at the change of the centuries had shared a remarkable set of politically related experiences, with a scientific and technological chasm separating our early and later years that is almost inconceivable for one lifetime. We and those who preceded us and still live, along with those who will follow in the next decade, constitute the largest demographic group in the American polity. Yet I discovered also, into my late 50s and early 60s, a preference for spending much of my time amid young people, drawing energy from their own exuberance, getting excited about a role in shaping their destinies, learning to talk their language, understand their music, and engage them as adults. If I had not understood it earlier, I did then that it was a love for the young, as much as a love for scholarship and the life of the mind, that drew me to a career in higher education.

I suspect those life forces that shaped me into a risk taker rather than a survivor are more common to our generation, however, than to those who follow us. We developed and matured during historical times that required moral courage and hard decisions, and our model for political leadership is that of Churchill and Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. We knew a time when university presidents also were strong and resolute, great leaders who took risks, and who spoke out on issues beyond the campus. In both politics and higher education there often are consequences for taking risks. How we confront those risks is determined in large measure by both a broad socialization shared by a generation and the more particular character shaped by one’s own evolving life circumstances. I look back on my own career as a chain of risks and consequences, one that I believe is worth sharing through this memoir for what it says about moral courage and independence in that exotic space, the public university presidency, where the intrigues and battles of politics and academia intersect, sometimes with excruciating pressures.

* * * *

Utica, Montana, is a post office, tavern and grocery store for surrounding ranches and the sprinkling of homes in the town itself, population fewer than 100. The town sits not quite at the foot of the Little Belt Mountains in the central part of the state, near the once well- known Yogo Sapphire Mine. Montana’s tourist bureau sometimes calls this Charlie Russell Country, in honor of the famous cowboy artist. Russell, who sought adventure in moving to the state from his native St. Louis, which is connected to Montana by the Missouri River of the Lewis and Clark trail, in fact did spend considerable time in Utica at the pool hall and barber shop of my maternal grandfather, Charles Brown. Russell completed one of his most famous paintings, Last of the Five Thousand, while staying in a small cabin outside Utica.

Although I was not born there, I spent my first seven years in Utica. The birth occurred in the nearest hospital, St. Joseph’s, some 35 miles to the East in Lewistown, noted as the precise geographic center of the state, and thus appearing as remote as can be on a map of the United States. On May 2, 1937, the nation was still reeling from the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just been re-elected in a landslide six months earlier, and while his New Deal got off to a flying start, most of the components of Roosevelt’s economic recovery program were yet to come. Poverty was generalized throughout the country, captured in FDR’s famous statement about one-third of a nation ill-fed, ill-clad and ill-housed. The lack of modern communications stunted consumer aspirations in any event. There was no television and very limited visual mass marketing, air travel was still quite rare, and the infrastructure for distant automobile travel was undeveloped. This, added to the generalized extent of poverty, made it less embarrassing, albeit no more enjoyable, for a young boy to grow up virtually without anything but food, clothing and a bed – with only a few cardboard toys and precious few of the stimuli that shape one’s brain in the first three years of life.

By the year of my birth my grandfather had long since abandoned my grandmother, and my mother and father had been divorced during her pregnancy with me. Until my mother remarried, when I was about four, I grew up in a household on welfare, with a grandmother, mother, and two older sisters. In this impoverished environment, Franklin Roosevelt was virtually God, offering the only hope there was for deliverance. My mother would tell me many years later that whenever FDR spoke on the radio we kids would stop what we were doing and listen. Though we could not necessarily understand the message, his voice and his spiritual presence in the room were so compelling that he mesmerized us even as he bound together in hope and resolve the millions of American adults who would have made him King. I thus inherited my initial political identity. This is true of most persons, but those of us who were born into the Roosevelt coalition inherited a movement psychology similar to following a Gandhi in India, or a Jinnah in Pakistan, or perhaps Churchill at the crest of his political career.

Of course, during my pre-school years I was largely unaware of the political world, especially given how my life was situated geographically, socially and economically. I was only two when Hitler invaded Poland, and four when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred and the United States declared war on the three major Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy. War has no intelligible impact on a four year old who is thousands of miles from the nearest combat zone.

I don’t recall hearing much about Republicans in those years. The enemies were poverty and despair and Germany and Japan, and so far as I knew, FDR was the horse – the magnificent and reassuring thoroughbred – on which every family bet its pennies. I don’t think the Republicans were very much in the game as I was absorbing a political allegiance.

When my mother, Dorothy Brown Pettit, married Wilbur Gregory we moved from my grandmother’s home to a rickety, Charles Addamsesque house on the edge of town, where we had no indoor plumbing. There was a barn with a few animals, mostly sheep. I delivered a lamb when I was five, having observed a ewe in distress as I was walking across the barnyard. It was the only time until late high school that I ever felt like a hero in my family. This, no doubt, is unrelated to my political socialization, except that in retrospect I must speculate that a budding young Republican, instead of grabbing the lamb and gently tugging, might have lectured the ewe on self reliance.

We moved into Lewistown as the school year ended in 1944. That summer, Allied troops under Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery invaded Normandy, their tanks driving through German defenses, on what became known as D-Day. At the same time, French underground forces rose up against the Germans. The Axis powers would surrender the next year. I do not remember this having registered with me, although I am sure that we all got caught up in the celebration. What I remember vividly, though, is the impact of Roosevelt’s death in 1945, when I was eight years old. My mother had sent me with a list of purchases to the corner grocery store where we had a charge account. When I got there people were talking in an agitated fashion. The first thing I heard was that Roosevelt had died. The second was that Truman had killed him so he could be president. I was stunned. I understood in an unformed manner the greatness of FDR, and to me Truman was a mystery. By now I had lived in Lewistown a year, and a steady diet of news reels at the theatre, where I spent every Sunday afternoon (fourteen cents for a double feature), had tutored me on the dominating qualities of the two great wartime leaders, Roosevelt and Churchill. The only president I had known was gone, but he was more than a president, he was a majestic force for good who touched the common people in an uncommon way. Even as a child I felt some sense of loss.

Upon entering the second grade at Lincoln Elementary School in Lewistown I had been placed in the slowest reading group. My early years in Utica had meant no kindergarten, and first grade in a two-room school where grades one through four were taught in one room, all by the same teacher. By the end of the year I was in the fastest group and excelled as a student thereafter. In school I had found my niche, my escape and the focus of my life. Lincoln was quite a progressive school for the times. It had a student council, to which I was elected each year, a result, I was certain, of my being the smartest kid in the class. It would be many years before I understood that electing the stronger intellect was not the natural order of things in American elections. The school also had a rich curriculum in music and art, and in social studies taught us thoroughly about the United Nations. I even remember learning at that tender age how the General Assembly and Security Council were constituted and functioned.

Many people in the development of their political selves experience anger, alienation and frustration that leads to rebellion and even revolution. Whatever it is that seems to be oppressing them appears too potent or too pervasive to deal with by accredited methods. Often I have reflected on what turns my life might have taken had I grown up in a city, in a neighborhood of the dispossessed – all that my family could have afforded-- where there would have been antisocial support systems to enable truancy, delinquency and eventually crime as an expression of alienation, or where there would have been role models and fringe groups to induct me into radical politics. In Lewistown I began to feel the frustration and resentment of my economic circumstances midway through elementary school, and at about the same time I could not bear to witness the living Hell of my mother’s life at home as she assumed far more than half the burden of support for four kids and my step-father’s two brothers who came and went and were never self sufficient. Over the course of a lifetime all men and women accumulate a record of both good and evil, and it seems unfair to recount only one’s failings after his death. So it is with my stepfather. By the last decade or so of his life, after so many years of my mother’s civilizing influence, he had become a respectable man in the community and a benign and loving family member. I grew to love him by then, having merely declared a truce at about the age of 15. But he had had enormous problems adapting from life as a cowhand who had been ejected from his home after just an eighth grade education to life as head of a family. There are memories from this early, formative part of my life that are painful, and that I had first chosen to ignore; I feel though that I must mention them as critical to my over-all socialization as a man, and of potential significance, therefore, to my political socialization, and even to my thoughts and behavior as a university leader later in life. I was actually frightened of my stepfather for years because of an incident that occurred when I was about five, and had to hear and observe his beating my mother.

Did this affect my political orientation? Perhaps. If I consider that I had no male role model – a father whom I never met, a step-father who was a negative model, my uncles on my mother’s side geographically distant, no older brother – and if conservatism is less sentimental, more judgmental, more punitive, more macho than liberalism, then at some psychological level I would reject the more fearsome and aggressive conservatism and embrace a more nurturing liberalism. Certainly, I would predictably be more in favor of women’s rights, more pro-choice, than a man who had had a father who was a great pal and a mother who was a shrew. Throughout my life, in politics and in education, I have been almost an inveterate risk taker. I have to believe that the early childhood experiences of poverty sometimes laced with physical or psychological brutality, the lack of protection from a father and only minimal nurturing from a mother who was kind and loving, but unable to express love verbally and who was worn down by her life circumstances, conditioned me to embrace risk as the only door to hope and advancement.

As a rule, small rural towns are not zoned into neighborhoods that are distinguishable by ascribed economic or social status. The rich and poor are likely to live side by side. Lewistown in the 1940s was no exception, and more of my friends were relatively well off than not. My rebellion, therefore, was personal. There was no gang to share my outlook or provide peer support. My friends were there out of personal loyalty, not class unity. By the fourth grade, I kept away from home as much as possible by taking a job as pin setter in a bowling alley, at a time when that task was manual. Had my mother had the energy and time to notice, she would have disapproved the kind of characters with whom I shared the back pits at the end of the alleys. I also haunted the town’s civic center, taking tap dance lessons after school and boxing in the evening. Those who know me as an adult find this hard to believe, but at Lincoln I assumed the responsibility in grade four of beating up each new boy in my grade who showed up on the playground. I also had constant battles with the art teacher, and was forced to remain after school often.

The importance of religious identity was underscored for me on the day that the mother of a neighborhood friend informed me I was eventually going to Hell because I was not Catholic. This I found to be somewhat confusing, but not exactly terrifying. I was beginning to form some primitive sociology of religion and relate it to politics, or at least to status. I was intimidated by the Episcopal church, not only by the status I ascribed to those who belonged, but by my Episcopal friends’ descriptions of juggling prayer book, hymnal and program, and knowing when to kneel and what to say that wasn’t written down anywhere. I was certain that if I ever entered that august sanctuary, I would commit some faux pas that would elicit aristocratic scorn. Most Episcopalians, I assumed, were Republicans. As were the Presbyterians, I guessed, but they seemed less high brow, and that’s where I, having no real family church, ended up at about the eighth grade. When I was growing up the fundamentalists were not a factor in politics, economics or social life. When an Assembly of God church opened near our house, my mother smiled and said, They’re holy rollers. That dismissive phrase provided the sum of my knowledge of the fundamentalists, except that it seemed to me even at an early age that these were people who were not much integrated into the rest of community life.

I have no explanation for my having been a civil rights partisan at the age of ten. We did not discuss race issues at home. The Dodgers played the Yankees in the 1947 World Series. Nearly everyone I knew was for the Yankees, so I rooted for the Dodgers. That was the year the Dodgers had brought Jackie Robinson onto the team as the first African-American in major league baseball, and I thought that was a noble move. I had no great understanding of race relations, but my choice reflected a larger pattern of being for the underdog, augmented, I suppose, by an incipient contrariness that impelled me to take a stand against the norm.

During my elementary school years our World War II ally, Russia, in its expanded form as the Soviet Union, began to pose a threat to world stability and American values, and in the fourth grade (1946-47) I gave a wrong answer – Russian – to a question that asked which race was referred to as red. (My sophistication seems to have grown significantly the next two years.) One could not be attentive to American news media without internalizing the notion that the red Russians and communism were the new enemy. In the election of 1946, to which I, just beginning the 4th grade, was oblivious, a new group of very conservative Republican candidates for Congress, Richard Nixon among them, demonstrated the effectiveness of nailing the soft on communism label on Democratic opponents. The 1946 election and its aftermath anticipated the cancer of McCarthyism that I was to confront head-on when I reached high school. Meanwhile the Democratic Administration continued to contend with international communism, announcing through the Truman Doctrine of early 1947 the intention to contain the expansion of communism anywhere in the world. President Truman also launched the Marshall Plan with the promise of $12 billion to help rebuild the war-torn nations of Europe, in part to strengthen them as an anti-communist bloc.

I entered junior high school in 1949, the year that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established as a defense against anticipated Soviet aggression. Only four years after the end of World War II, we were getting caught up in the need for preparedness with the hope that the greater the arsenal we built the greater would be the deterrent to the Soviets’ triggering World War III. The Cold War was well underway. The permanent headquarters of the United Nations was dedicated in New York. Feeding the cold war unease, eleven leaders of the American Communist Party were convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the government, and in China, another of our World War II allies, the Communists under Mao Tse-tung drove Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists off the mainland. Chiang established his alternative government on Taiwan – which was then called Formosa.

President Truman suffered from not being Franklin Roosevelt. He seemed a small, insignificant man in contrast to the imperial FDR, even though among hardcore Democrats he had earned hero status for his 1948 victory. The Republicans, always frustrated because they could not lay a glove on FDR, began to believe that they had Truman against the ropes, and they had a new political weapon: communism. FDR had been seen as the great rescuer of the victims of a depression attributed to his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Early on he assumed an additional mantle of crisis leadership as he rallied and led a unified nation against the forces of evil in World War II. Roosevelt and the Democrats properly refrained from the temptation of linking Republicans to those two persuasions that lie at the end of the rightward political path, fascism and