Living History (6 page)

The absence of male students cleared out a lot of psychic space and created a safe zone for us to eschew appearances―in every sense of the word―Monday through Friday afternoon. We focused on our studies without distraction and didn’t have to worry about how we looked when we went to class. But without men on campus, our social lives were channeled into road trips and dating rituals called “mixers.” When I arrived in the fall of 1965, the college still assumed the role of surrogate parent to the students. We couldn’t have boys in our rooms except from 2 to 5:30 P.M. on Sunday afternoons, when we had to leave the door partly open and follow what we called the “two feet” rule: two (out of four) feet had to be on the floor at all times. We had curfews of 1 A.M. on weekends, and Route 9 from Boston to Wellesley was like a Grand Prix racetrack Friday and Saturday nights as our dates raced madly back to campus so we wouldn’t get in trouble. We had reception desks in the entrance halls of each dorm where guests had to check in and be identified through a system of bells and announcements that notified us if the person wanting to see us was male or female. A “visitor” was female, a “caller” male. Notice of an unexpected caller gave you time to either get fixed up or call down to tell the student on duty you weren’t available.

My friends and I studied hard and dated boys our own age, mostly from Harvard and other Ivy League schools, whom we met through friends or at mixers. The music was usually so loud at those dances you couldn’t understand anything being said unless you stepped outside, which you only did with someone who caught your interest. I danced for hours one night at the Alumni Hall on our campus with a young man whose name I thought was Farce, only to learn later it was Forrest. I had two boyfriends serious enough to meet my parents, which, given my father’s attitudes toward anyone I dated, was more like a hazing than a social encounter. Both young men survived, but our relationships didn’t.

Given the tenor of the times, we soon chafed at Wellesley’s archaic rules and demanded to be treated like adults. We pressured the college administration to remove the in loco parentis regulations, which they finally did when I was college government President.

That change coincided with the elimination of a required curriculum that students also deemed oppressive.

Looking back on those years, I have few regrets, but I’m not so sure that eliminating both course requirements and quasi-parental supervision represented unmitigated progress.

Two of the courses I got the most out of were required, and I now better appreciate the value of core courses in a range of subjects. Walking into my daughter’s coed dorm at Stanford, seeing boys and girls lying and sitting in the hallways, I wondered how anyone nowadays gets any studying done.

By the mid-1960s, the sedate and sheltered Wellesley campus had begun to absorb the shock from events in the outside world. Although I had been elected President of our college’s Young Republicans during my freshman year, my doubts about the party and its policies were growing, particularly when it came to civil rights and the Vietnam War. My church had given graduating high school students a subscription to motive magazine, which was published by the Methodist Church. Every month I read articles expressing views that sharply contrasted with my usual sources of information. I also had begun reading The New York Times, much to my father’s consternation and Miss Fahlstrom’s delight. I read speeches and essays by hawks, doves and every other brand of commentator.

My ideas, new and old, were tested daily by political science professors who pushed me to expand my understanding of the world and examine my own preconceptions just when current events provided more than enough material. Before long, I realized that my political beliefs were no longer in sync with the Republican Party. It was time to step down as President of the Young Republicans.

My Vice President and friend, Betsy Griffith, not only became the new President, but stayed in the Republican Party, along with her husband, the political consultant John Deardourff. She fought hard to keep her party from taking a hard right turn and was a staunch supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. She obtained her Ph.D. in history and wrote a well-received biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton before putting her feminism and women’s education credentials to work as headmistress of the Madeira School for Girls in northern Virginia. All that, however, was far in the future when I officially left the Wellesley College Young Republicans and submerged myself in learning everything I could about Vietnam.

It’s hard to explain to young Americans today, especially with an all-volunteer military, how obsessed many in my generation were with the Vietnam War. Our parents had lived through World War II and had told us stories about America’s spirit of sacrifice during that time and the consensus among people after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that America needed to fight. With Vietnam, the country was divided, leaving us confused about our own feelings. My friends and I constantly discussed and debated it. We knew boys in ROTC programs who looked forward to serving when they graduated, as well as boys who intended to resist the draft. We had long conversations about what we would do if we were men, knowing full well we didn’t have to face the same choices. It was agonizing for everyone. A friend from Princeton finally dropped out and enlisted in the Navy, because, he told me, he was sick of the controversy and uncertainty.

The debate over Vietnam articulated attitudes not only about the war, but about duty and love of country. Were you honoring your country by fighting a war you considered unjust and contrary to America’s self-interest? Were you being unpatriotic if you used the system of deferments or the lottery to avoid fighting? Many students I knew who debated and protested the merits and morality of that war loved America just as much as the brave men and women who served without question or those who served first and raised questions later. For many thoughtful, self-aware young men and women there were no easy answers, and there were different ways to express one’s patriotism.

Some contemporary writers and politicians have tried to dismiss the anguish of those years as an embodiment of 1960s self-indulgence. In fact, there are some people who would like to rewrite history to erase the legacy of the war and the social upheaval it spawned. They would have us believe that the debate was frivolous, but that’s not how I remember it.

Vietnam mattered, and it changed the country forever. This nation still holds a reservoir of guilt and second-guessing for those who served and those who didn’t. Even though as a woman I knew I couldn’t be drafted, I spent countless hours wrestling with my own contradictory feelings.

In hindsight, 1968 was a watershed year for the country, and for my own personal and political evolution. National and international events unfolded in quick succession: the Tet Offensive, the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the presidential race, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the relentless escalation of the Vietnam War.

By the time I was a college junior, I had gone from being a Goldwater Girl to supporting the antiwar campaign of Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic Senator from Minnesota, who was challenging President Johnson in the presidential primary. Although I admired President Johnson’s domestic accomplishments, I thought his dogged support for a war he’d inherited was a tragic mistake. Along with some of my friends, I would drive up from Wellesley to Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday or Saturday to stuff envelopes and walk precincts. I had the chance to meet Senator McCarthy when he stopped into his headquarters to thank the student volunteers who had rallied around his opposition to the war. He nearly defeated Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, and on March 16, 1968, Senator Robert E Kennedy of New York entered the race.

Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, near the end of my junior year, filled me with grief and rage. Riots broke out in some cities. The next day I joined in a massive march of protest and mourning at Post Office Square in Boston. I returned to campus wearing a black armband and agonizing about the kind of future America faced.

Before I arrived at Wellesley, the only African Americans I knew were the people my parents employed in my father’s business and in our home. I had heard Dr. King speak and participated in exchanges with black and Hispanic teenagers through my church. But I had not had a black friend, neighbor or classmate until I went to college. Karen Williamson, a lively, independent-minded student, became one of my first friends there. One Sunday morning, she and I went off campus to attend church services. Even though I liked Karen and wanted to get to know her better, I was selfconscious about my motives and hyperaware that I was moving away from my past. As I got to know my black classmates better, I learned that they too felt selfconscious. Just as I had come to Wellesley from a predominantly white environment, they had come from predominantly black ones.

Janet McDonald, an elegant, self-possessed girl from New Orleans, related a conversation she had with her parents shortly after she arrived. When she told them, “I hate it here, everyone’s white,” her father agreed to let her leave, but her mother insisted, “You can do it and you are going to stay.” This was similar to the conversation I had with my own parents. Our fathers were willing―even anxious―for us to come home; our mothers were telling us to hang in there. And we did.

Karen, Fran Rusan, Alvia Wardlaw and other black students started Ethos, the first African American organization on campus, to serve as a social network for black students at Wellesley and as a lobbying group in dealing with the college administration. After Dr.

King’s assassination, Ethos urged the college to become more racially sensitive and to recruit more black faculty and students and threatened to call a hunger strike if the college did not meet their demands. This was Wellesley’s only overt student protest in the late 1960s. The college addressed it by convening an all-campus meeting in the Houghton Memorial Chapel so Ethos members could explain their concerns. The meeting began to disintegrate into a chaotic shouting match. Kris Olson, who along with Nancy Gist and Susan Graber would go on with me to Yale Law School, worried that the students might shut down the campus and go on strike. I had just been elected college government President, so Kris and the Ethos members asked me to try to make the debate more productive and to translate the legitimate grievances many of us felt toward institutions of authority.

To Wellesley’s credit, it made an effort to recruit minority faculty and students that began bearing fruit in the 1970s.

Senator Robert E Kennedy’s assassination two months later on June 5, 1968, deepened my despair about events in America. I was already home from college when the news came from Los Angeles. My mother woke me up because “something very terrible has happened again.” I stayed on the phone nearly the whole day with my friend Kevin O’Keefe, an Irish-Polish Chicagoan who loves the Kennedys, the Daleys and the thrill of high-stakes politics. We always liked talking about politics, and that day he raged against losing John and Robert Kennedy when our country so badly needed their strong and graceful leadership. We talked a lot then, and in the years since, about whether political action is worth the pain and struggle. Then, as now, we decided that it was, if only, in Kevin’s words, to keep “the other guys away from power over us.”

I had applied for the Wellesley Internship Program in Washington, D.C., and though dismayed and unnerved by the assassinations, I was still committed to going to Washington.

The nine-week summer program placed students in agencies and congressional offices for a firsthand look at “how government works.” I was surprised when Professor Alan Schechter, the program’s Director and a great political science teacher, as well as my thesis adviser, assigned me to intern at the House Republican Conference. He knew I had come to college as a Republican and was moving away from my father’s opinions.

He thought this internship would help me continue charting my own course―no matter what I eventually decided. I objected to no avail and ended up reporting for duty to a group headed by then Minority Leader Gerald Ford and including Congressmen Melvin Laird of Wisconsin and Charles Goodell of New York, who befriended and advised me.

The interns posed for their obligatory photographs with the members of Congress, and years later, when I was First Lady, I told former President Ford I had been one of the thousands of interns whom he’d given an introductory look inside the Capitol. The photo of me with him and the Republican leaders made my father very happy; he had it hanging in his bedroom when he died. I also signed a copy of that photo for President Ford and presented it to him with thanks and apologies for having strayed from the fold.

I think about that first experience in Washington every time I meet with the interns in my Senate office. I particularly remember a session Mel Laird held with a large group of us to discuss the Vietnam War. Al though he may have harbored concerns about how the Johnson Administration had financed the war and whether the escalation went beyond the congressional authority granted by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, he remained publicly supportive as a Congressman. In the meeting with interns, he justified American involvement and advocated vigorously for greater military force. When he stopped for questions, I echoed President Eisenhower’s caution about American involvement in land wars in Asia and asked him why he thought this strategy could ever succeed. Although we didn’t agree, as our heated exchange demonstrated, I came away with a high regard for him and an appreciation for his willingness to explain and defend his views to young people. He took our concerns seriously and respectfully. Later, he served as President Nixon’s Secretary of Defense.

Congressman Charles Goodell, who represented western New York, was later appointed to the Senate by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to replace Robert Kennedy until an election could be held. Goodell was a progressive Republican who was defeated in 1970 in a three-way election by the much more conservative James Buckley. Buckley lost in 1976 to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, my predecessor, who held the seat for twentyfour years. When I ran for that Senate seat in 2000, I delighted in telling people from Jamestown, Goodell’s hometown, that I had once worked for the Congressman. Toward the end of my internship, Goodell asked me and a few other interns to go with him to the Republican Convention in Miami to work on behalf of Governor Rockefeller’s last-ditch effort to wrest his party’s nomination away from Richard Nixon. I jumped at the chance and headed for Florida.