Читать книгу The Politics of Presidential Appointment - Sheldon Hackney - Страница 9

It all started innocently enough in the summer of 1992. I was then halfway through my twelfth year as president of the University of Pennsylvania, and I don’t think I am deluding myself by remembering that things were going extremely well. It is true that the University was facing a dense collection of prickly problems. Our state appropriation was being held up and threatened in Harrisburg, producing an uncomfortable budget squeeze. We were being sued by an advocacy group for allegedly not fulfilling our century-old obligation to provide “Mayor’s Scholarships” to Philadelphia students.[1] We were negotiating with the city to acquire the civic center, which borders the campus and was critical to the expansion plans of our Medical Center. It was no longer needed by the city because of the construction of a modern convention center on Market Street East. We were also planning an ambitious cogeneration plant that the local electric company, PECO, was opposing by bringing political pressure to bear on us. All of these things together put us in a delicate political situation, making us more vulnerable than usual to the push and pull of political and economic forces in society at large. “Ivory Tower” is less and less appropriate as a metaphor for the position of the university in society.

On campus, a coalition of advocacy groups was pressing the University to dispossess the fraternities that occupied houses on Locust Walk, the pedestrian Broadway of our large but compact campus. Their point was that having the all-male, mainly white fraternities occupy such privileged space in the heart of the campus was not only unfair to women and members of minority groups who were excluded, it also communicated an unfortunate message about the University. Fraternity partisans responded that it was not their fault that the University had grown over the last hundred years, so that their houses that once had been on busy city streets on the periphery of a disparate collection of academic buildings were now on bucolic Locust Walk in the heart of a consolidated campus, and it would be unfair as well as illegal to evict them.

Other issues were swirling around. I wanted to buy the huge, empty General Electric factory building on our border even though we had no immediate need for it. A new land-use master plan was pending before the trustees, having been thoroughly debated on campus. The trustees were divided on the merits of a proposed new student center and bookstore, given such a spectacular design by Kohn Pederson Fox that it seemed sure to become a signature building. A high profile faculty/administrator/trustee “process re-engineering” task force was roaming the University looking for cost savings. Lesbians and gays were campaigning for recognition of same-sex partnerships by the University so that partners would be covered by health insurance just as spouses were. The reaction to the Rodney King jury verdict had come close to igniting the campus earlier in the year, indicating that intergroup relations were still a bit raw. With all of these matters demanding attention, I was losing one of my most able and trusted colleagues, the executive vice president, who was leaving to join an investment management firm.

Such problems, part of a different story that I do not intend to tell here, are the ever-present companions of college presidents, hardly oppressive enough to make me want to leave. Besides, there were more reasons to feel good than to cause worry. Undergraduate students were proud to be at Penn, as was I. The undergraduate program was zooming up through the U.S. News and World Report rankings, suspect though they may be, and was on the verge of breaking into the top ten where it was destined to settle in. Wharton, Law, Education, and Medicine in particular were on steep upward trajectories. Nursing and the Annenberg School for Communications were arguably the best of their kind in the country. Only Stanford had as many professional schools ranked in the top ten as Penn. The fund-raising campaign that was due to end in June 1994 was roaring along successfully. We were already nearing the ambitious one billion dollar goal we had set, and I was quietly confident that we would exceed the then existing record of $1.3 billion, set by Stanford University, for five-year campaigns, not bad for a campaign that was planned during the stock market crash of 1987 and was conducted during a recession.[2] More important than the dollars raised, buildings built, and faculty hired, Penn had shaken off its version of the Philadelphia disease, the feeling that it is not really as good as the best. While no one was looking, Penn had begun to think of itself in a new way.

As the academic year 1992-93 started, I had reason to feel good about things. The problem lay elsewhere. It had to do with the rhythm of an institution’s life. I was approaching the end of my “work plan” for Penn. If I were to stay longer, I would need to reassess our strategic plan, produce an entirely new set of objectives for the next five years that would grow out of that reassessment, and be prepared to stay long enough to assure their success. If I did not want to make that major commitment of imagination, energy and time, I should go. The logical time for me to leave Penn would be the end of the campaign in June 1994, twenty-two months away. I had therefore already begun talking confidentially to the chairman of the trustees, Alvin Shoemaker, so we could together plan for a smooth transition.

For me, at the age of fifty-eight, this created a “what next?” problem. Flying back to Philadelphia in the middle of August from a wedding in Maine of the daughter of one of our close friends, I found myself thinking about the remarks that I would be making to freshman convocation Labor Day weekend. For twenty years, plane rides had provided a large share of the quiet time that I needed for reflection. Wedged into my seat (never in first class, of course; neither my own sense of self nor the democratic ethos of Penn would tolerate that), I was free of phone calls and meetings. This was rare unstructured time when I could read and think without feeling guilty about some pressing matter that was waiting to be tended to.

I thought that I might play upon one of my favorite themes at that convocation, one of the great paradoxes at the core of the human personality: our simultaneous desire to be valued as unique individuals and yet to be part of something bigger than we are individually. We want to be both the One and the Many. The traditional college years, eighteen to twenty-two, are typically the years when students are trying to determine who they are, to solve what Erik Erikson termed the “identity crisis.” Consequently, it is a time of self-absorption and introspection, of trying on different roles and experimenting with alternative values. Yet, it is also a time of painful cliqueishness and elaborate strategies to make sure that one belongs, and even that the belonging is evident in one’s appearance. As we explore our uniqueness, we are paradoxically seeking experiences of “solidarity” that reassure us that we are not alone. While we are looking inward, absorbed in the self-centered struggle to determine who we are as individuals, we are also looking outward, establishing close, trusting relationships with others. The friends we make during these years are frequently the best friends of our lives. This paradox is rich in meaning. In order to give of yourself, you need to know who you are, but you find out who you are in the act of giving yourself to others in friendship or in common enterprises. Both are true at the same time; we are both individuals and social animals. Particularly in American culture, the interplay between individualism and community is the site where each of us works out his identity.

I wanted to connect this phenomenon to public service. I had long been a booster of student volunteerism and service learning, and I was delighted that Penn had become a national model of student service. In a presidential election year, and at a time when cynics of the left and the right were attacking government as useless and inept, perhaps I could swim against the tide with a message about the duty and the rewards of public service. Thinking about how I was going to exhort the freshmen caused me to think about my own sense of duty, a strong residue of my Methodist upbringing.[3]

A couple of weeks later, back on Martha’s Vineyard for a final week of vacation before the hordes descended upon the campus, I played as much golf as possible. I know that it is not politically correct to play golf, linked as it is to racial, gender, and religious intolerance, but I am a shameless enthusiast who came to the game late in life, courtesy of a bum knee that made tennis no longer much fun. An even greater complication for any hope I might entertain of posing as the simple tribune of the people is the fact that, among my golfing buddies on the Vineyard, where I have been going in the summer with my family since 1966, is Vernon Jordan, the high-profile political and corporate insider.

I had known Vernon since 1982 when his daughter graduated from Penn and he was the Commencement speaker. Aside from that pleasant experience, we also shared several things: a delight in the Vineyard, a boyhood in the South, and a dedication to racial justice. It was natural that we would get along well. Being a friend of Vernon, of course, does not distinguish me from roughly half of the American population. His astonishingly wide acquaintanceship, and his excellent judgment, make him an extremely valuable advisor and board member. When he and I talked in August 1992, he was enjoying a last rest before being engulfed in the intense post-Labor-Day presidential campaign of another of his long-time friends, Bill Clinton.

As it happened, my wife, Lucy, and I were also, in a more modest way, supporting Clinton for president. Lucy is a lawyer who has devoted her career to juvenile law and advocacy on behalf of public policies affecting children. After our youngest child, Elizabeth, reached school age, Lucy went back to school herself, finishing the final two years of her bachelor degree by going part-time to Princeton University, where I was then teaching, finishing in 1975. While I was serving as president of Tulane University, and Lucy was being the “charming-wife-of,” she was also going to law school full time, receiving her J.D. in 1979 from Tulane. She started her career in New Orleans, as a staff attorney for Advocates for the Developmentally Disabled, a public-interest law group that represented people with disabilities, children among them, and worked on issues of public policy.

When I went to the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 as president, Lucy first took some time to get us settled into the new president’s residence on campus and then went to work as a staff lawyer in the excellent public interest law group in Philadelphia, the Juvenile Law Center (JLC). After an eight year mutual tutorial with the remarkable founder and director of the JLC, Robert Schwartz, Lucy left in 1990 and set up a statewide research, resource, and advocacy organization, headquartered in Harrisburg, called Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC). It is a state-level version of Marion Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), on whose board Lucy served. The chair of the CDF Board was Hillary Clinton.

I first saw the Clintons in action at a planning retreat for CDF held at the summer home of Laura Chasin on Chappaquidick a couple of years earlier. Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas and a presidential hopeful, accompanied his wife. What impressed me about Bill Clinton then was not only his legendary warmth and intelligence, but the fact that he did not “take over” the meeting. He behaved as simply another interested observer of the Board’s discussions. His wife led those discussions and was clearly in charge. That, I thought, was impressive; few of the rich and powerful with whom I dealt could have done that.

Not only did I admire that ability to play a subordinate role, but I liked the other things that I knew about Bill Clinton. He was a progressive Southern governor, liberal on race and social issues, conservative on economic and fiscal policy, and pragmatic about politics. He was a founder and leader of the Democratic Leadership Forum, a faction that was attempting to move the Democratic Party to the center of the political spectrum. In broad terms, his politics were my own. Lucy and I had contributed the maximum allowed by the law and our budget as soon as there was a Clinton Campaign organization in existence. A year later, in the fall of 1992, I joined a group of university presidents in the unusual act of endorsing Clinton for the presidency. Looking back, I am sorry I did that, not because of any judgments about Clinton’s performance but because it is not a good idea for university presidents to endorse political candidates. It is fine to speak out on public issues having to do with education, and I have done that throughout my career, but engaging in partisan politics risks politicizing the university in an unhealthy way.

Nevertheless, when I was poking through the woods of the Farm Neck golf course with Vernon Jordan just before Labor Day in 1992 looking for our errant tee shots, I was already a firm supporter of Bill Clinton. At the urging of our playing companion, Don Brown, with whom I had been talking about my future, I explained my “what next?” problem to Vernon. During a previous round of golf at Farm Neck, he had told me that under no circumstances would he take a position in a Clinton administration, but I nevertheless told him that working in Washington in a Clinton administration was something that might interest me.

As usual, Vernon gave me very good advice. While acknowledging that there might be a chance for me to do something interesting in Washington, he told me to think carefully about two things. Did I want to make the financial sacrifice a tour in government would entail, and did I want to live under the heightened scrutiny that public service at my level would certainly bring? Washington was getting to be a mean place, Vernon said, implying that he was not sure that I could survive in that atmosphere. He was right to worry. Nevertheless, he said he imagined that he and Warren Christopher would be involved in the talent search, if Clinton were elected, and that he would be glad to look after my interests.

I told the Trustee Executive Committee at its September meeting that I intended to leave by June 30, 1994, and that I thought I should announce this publicly at some time between January and June 1993. The tail end of any college presidency is always tricky. On the one hand, it is desirable to provide enough public lead time for a careful search for the next president and then for a smooth transition. On the other hand, it would be good to minimize the resulting “lame duck” period of inevitably slowing rates of progress. I hoped we could get it right. The departure of the executive vice president was a blow, of course, but my chief-of-staff, John Gould, had moved over to serve as acting executive vice president while the search for a permanent EVP proceeded. John was doing extremely well in a challenging situation. I had also kept Mike Aiken, the provost, fully informed of my thinking, so I could expect him and perhaps Rick Nahm, the vice president for planning and development, to be open to job possibilities elsewhere. I worried about the appearance of my administration “unraveling.” On the other hand, there were several deans who could serve as interim provost or even interim president, and the development staff was deep in talent.

The fall was packed with problems both routine and unusual; I was also teaching my undergraduate seminar on the history of the 1960s. While juggling the crammed agenda with as much of the outer appearance of inner serenity as I could muster, Lucy and I went to Korea and Japan to make connections with alumni/ae and to cultivate fund-raising possibilities. I got through the meetings of the full Board of Trustees in late October with no damage, and Lucy and I were elated when Bill Clinton won the election on November 5. I was particularly pleased that I had invited Hillary Clinton well before the election to be Penn’s Commencement speaker in May 1993 whether or not her husband won the election. Lucy and I went to Washington for the CDF gala in November soon after the election. The President-elect and Hillary attended. Hillary spoke after dinner and was impressive. Lucy and I exchanged pleasantries with the Clintons at the reception, and it was interesting to discover how thrilled we both were with that simple and inconsequential event. Even though we have lived lives that have brought us into frequent contact with the rich, famous, and powerful, so that we are no longer excited by the prospect of meeting a celebrity, the aura of the American presidency affected us, just as it does most Americans.

Some time between the election and Thanksgiving, I worked up my courage and called Vernon Jordan. He and Warren Christopher were indeed deeply involved in managing the transition. At Vernon’s suggestion, but without any expectations or any particular position in mind, I sent him my curriculum vitae, the first of several that disappeared aimlessly into the great maw of Washington. More purposefully, I wanted to get a delegation of college presidents in to see the President-elect to emphasize the importance to higher education of the student-aid programs and the research budgets administered by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and various cabinet departments. Indirect cost recovery on research contracts was an especially hot topic then, and I hoped we could explain its mysteries to the President-elect in a more sympathetic light than was being shed by Representative John Dingell or the daily press.

Realizing that every other organized sector with things at stake in Washington would be pressing for a similar audience, I was prepared to be shunted aside to see Johnetta Cole, the president of Spelman College who had just been named to head the transition “cluster” that included higher education. I knew Johnetta only slightly, but favorably, from our service together on the Board of the American Council on Education, the “umbrella” organization for all post-secondary education. She would be a friendly face and sympathetic voice.

Vernon told me that he would see what he could do about getting an audience of some kind for me, but he warned that my delegation could not look just like me. He meant that it could not consist entirely of white males representing elite research universities. This hint from a friend alerted me to the importance of the “politics of perception,” the ruling ethos of the public world with which I was about to collide, and it made me think again of the disjunction between the way I think of myself and the thing that I sometimes symbolize to others.

With that warning tucked into my subconscious, I continued to chip away at the year’s agenda for Penn, and to mull over my “what next?” problem. I had for some time been aware of a troubling proposition that applied to me. Sometimes, you cannot be the person you want to be by doing the things you want to do. In my case, there has been a contradiction between the pleasure I get from contemplative pursuits—puttering in my study, reading, thinking, writing, preparing to teach—and the satisfaction I derive from being at the center of action, preferably leading an organization toward a worthy goal. I love the process of thinking and writing, the ways in which a teacher/scholar spends his time; I don’t enjoy the ways in which a college president spends most of his time, even though I love being at the center of decision making.

In addition to this unresolved conflict in my psyche, certain other personal disabilities emerged from my late-life vocational crisis. I was raised in modest circumstances in a Methodist family in Birmingham, Alabama. The virtues that I most admire were absorbed from that strict upbringing: humility, self-sacrifice, courage, determination, self-discipline, integrity, and service to others. I certainly do not claim that I always exemplify those virtues, but they are the ones by which I measure myself.

Somehow I also managed to infer from the conscious training that I got in Southern manners that they were not just empty forms, not simply gestures that marked one as belonging to a particular stratum of society, though they were that as well: giving rise to the term, “polite society.” They were all based on the belief that selfishness is bad. Each of us must realize that we are not the only individuals in the world, so we have to work out ways of sharing the world with others. There are many ways of doing that, of course, but in the South of my childhood, Christianity was the unspoken paradigm: men were to defer to women, the young were to defer to the old, the able were to defer to the infirm, and the strong were to defer to the weak. Since we are all God’s children in equal measure, it was not polite to do anything that would call attention to an inequality. Hip post-modernists would hasten to point out that these rituals of manners “enacted” or “performed,” and thus reinforced, the prevailing patriarchal order. If this is true, it is true in an upsidedown kind of way, in a way that can only be understood in terms of the Christian paradox: Jesus as both Lord and servant. This is the opposite of the way segregation “performed” the caste subordination of blacks that was required by the dominant white Southern society. The more important function of being polite was to remind the favored of their stewardship obligations, and to remind us all of our mutual obligations to each other. Manners, like other symbolic behaviors, are not frivolous.

I can even now hear my mother speaking scornfully of particular people in Birmingham who were flamboyant self-promoters, or who seemed to be publicly self-serving. In her world, one was not supposed to put oneself forward. “If you have to blow your own horn,” she repeatedly said in various ways, “there must be something wrong with the music.” That contrasts with the more popular current mantra, “If you don’t blow your own horn, who will?” The attitudes that I derived from my parents not only seem quaintly anachronistic in celebrity-haunted America, they may be fundamentally disabling.

One of my favorite cartoons of contemporary Washington shows the President and another man standing in the Oval Office. They are looking out the French doors. The visitor says, “Beautiful sunset.” The President says, “Thank you.” The connection between what one does and what one takes credit for, never very strong in politics, is weakening as attention spans shorten, news cycles speed up, and the manipulation of public perceptions gets more sophisticated.

I have seen this trend at work in my own field. When I began at Tulane my eighteen-year career of being a college president, even while believing in, and using, participatory decision making, we always tried to keep the long-term good of the university as the policy objective. After the consultive process had produced that policy, then we turned our attention to the task of explaining it to the various audiences (students, parents, alumni, trustees, faculty, staff, the higher education community, and the general public). Increasingly, I think, decision makers ask simply, “What can we explain successfully to our various audiences? That is what we will do.” It is a short step from that to merely communicating instead of acting, substituting image for substance. This is easy enough to grasp in theory, but I find it unnatural and very difficult to put into practice.

My career is a good example of the aphorism that life is what happens to you when you are planning something else. The “something else” that I was planning was to teach history at the college level and be a scholar. I was very naive about what that life was actually like, and especially about how to prepare myself for it, but I benefited from some amazing good fortune.

As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, my love of history was stimulated and encouraged by an excellent history faculty. Their lives looked pleasant enough to me, so I decided to become a teacher. First, however, I owed three years of service to the Navy because I was at Vanderbilt on an NROTC scholarship. I spent those three years, 1956-59, on the USS James C. Owens (DD-776), a World War II era destroyer based in Norfolk, but usually at sea. That was a totally absorbing experience that I did not so much enjoy as find fascinating and rewarding. Nowhere else could I have gotten so much responsibility while so young, and come into contact with men from vastly different backgrounds from my own. Toward the end of my time aboard the Owens, I got a letter from the Office of Naval Personnel offering me the chance to teach at Annapolis if I would extend my service for two years. By then, I was married and had one child and very little money, and I thought that it would be a great idea to have a two-year transition to civilian life at full pay, the glorious sum of thirty-five hundred dollars per year. Besides, teaching history would be a good way to learn and to prepare for graduate school.

When I arrived at the United States Naval Academy in the summer of 1959, I was shocked to discover that my promise as a scholar had somehow gone unnoticed, and I had been assigned to the Weapons Department. I went hesitantly to see the Captain who was the head of the Weapons Department and explained that I thought I might be able to make a bigger contribution to the USNA in the English, History, and Government Department, called the “bull” department in Academy parlance, revealing a particular view of the hierarchy of knowledge. “Nonsense,” said the Captain, with the certainty of military command, “Bull professors are a dime a dozen. What we need is a gunnery officer fresh from the fleet to help shape up these midshipmen.”

I therefore spent the next two years during daylight hours drilling midshipmen in the operational niceties of naval gunnery, anti-submarine warfare, and the theory of surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles. On a couple of nights a week, I went into Washington and took history courses in the evening division of American University.

Occasionally I drew weekend duty and would have to chaperone the afternoon dances arranged for first-year midshipmen, called Plebes. The dances at tea time were therefore known as “Plebe Tea Fights.” Bus loads of young ladies from area colleges would arrive at the entrance to cavernous Dahlgren Hall, home of both the Weapons Department and the scheduled “vertical wrestling matches.” Disgorged from the buses, groups of young ladies would come down the broad stairway onto the huge gym floor. Plebes were herded behind a rope to one side. Outside the rope stood an upperclassman from the committee in charge of the event. He would size up each young woman descending the stairs in her proper 1950s tea dance outfit, reach into the milling herd behind the rope, grab a Plebe of the proper height, and propel him out to escort that particular guest. A surprising number of marriages came out of this system.

Now, it happened that the leading historian of the South, and the man I most wanted to study with in graduate school, C. Vann Woodward, was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University, not very far up the road in Baltimore. It also happened that Lucy’s parents, Clifford and Virginia Durr, had known Professor Woodward since he was a graduate student at Chapel Hill writing Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel. On one of my mother-in-law’s visits to Annapolis, she arranged for us to go up and have tea with Vann and his wife, Glenn. The conversation was pleasant, though I was pretty much dumbstruck in the presence of the great man. Professor Woodward eventually excused himself from the group and told me to follow him into his study, where he quizzed me about my background and my interests. He told me that he was about to move to Yale University and that I should be sure to apply there. I did so, and I was admitted, although without a fellowship. I would be paying my own way.

As I was rejected at Hopkins, Harvard, and Princeton, I suspected that Professor Woodward had used his influence to get me in. Years later, he confirmed this suspicion when he was introducing me as the keynote speaker at a conference of history teachers. He went on to say that when he finally got to Yale, a year after I had arrived, since he had a Guggenheim fellowship that provided a year for research, he approached the Chairman, John Blum, and asked, “How is my boy Hackney doing?” John Blum said, “It’s OK, Vann. You’ll get the hang of Yale standards after you’ve been here a while.” I persevered. Eventually I figured out what the study of history was about, and Vann’s gamble was vindicated when my dissertation won the prize as the best in American history at Yale in 1966.

In my fourth year at Yale, when I was in the midst of writing that dissertation on the Populist and Progressive political movements in Alabama between 1890 and 1910, Professor Woodward called me to his office. He said that Princeton University was looking for someone in American history and he was sending me down. That is the way it was done in 1965. I went down, gave a talk to the department about my dissertation, met the senior Americanists individually, and had lunch with a large group of historians. Not having used the wrong fork, I was offered the job before I left campus that day. Woodward’s imprimatur was powerful.

Even though we remained good friends until his death in December 1999, I think Vann never really forgave me for becoming an administrator. It was a great waste of his investment in making me a good historian. I can only plead that it happened inadvertently.

Having three children, a lot of debt from graduate school, and the magnificent salary of eighty-five hundred dollars per year, I couldn’t afford to spend the summers doing research and advancing my scholarly career. My first summer at Princeton, 1966, I taught in a summer institute for high school history teachers run by Robert Lively, who had taken an interest in me because I was a discussion leader (a “preceptor” in Princeton lingo) in his large lecture course, and because I was also from his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. The second summer, 1967, I taught in the Princeton Cooperative School Program, an Upward Bound program for disadvantaged high school boys, mostly black, from the inner cities of New Jersey. The director was a good friend, John Flemming, from Arkansas by way of Sewanee and then graduate school at Princeton, who was also just starting out on a career that has led him to being one of the world’s leading scholars of medieval literature. In 1968, he passed the directorship of PCSP on to me. After taking it through the summer, I convinced the University to install Earl Thomas as the full-time, non-faculty director of PCSP, providing administrative stability and excellent leadership for a long time into the future.

About the same time, I was startled one day when the door to my basement office in McCosh Hall[4] burst open and there stood Lawrence Stone, the great British historian who had arrived at Princeton in 1963. He could be blunt and intimidating, but he was also enormously generous with his time and his help to younger colleagues, including me. “I have just come from Nassau Hall,” he announced. “They want me to become the chairman of the department. I made it a condition that you be the assistant chairman. Will you do it?” It was more a command than a question, so for the next few years I did much of the scutwork of the department while Lawrence transformed a good department into a great one. I learned a lot by watching and listening to Lawrence; he ranks alongside Vann Woodward as my academic hero and model.

I remember walking across the campus one day in the spring of 1968 when I encountered President Robert Goheen heading back toward Nassau Hall. He stopped me and said that he had been trying to reach me because he wanted to talk to me. I was startled to think that he knew who I was. Furthermore, I was young enough to think that when the principal sends for you it isn’t going to be good.

On the other hand, a summons from the President might have meant anything in those days because remarkable things were happening at Princeton. The revolution was in full cry. A faculty committee chaired by Gardner Patterson was doing a careful study of the likely impact of coeducation, a study that provided the factual support for President Goheen’s successful argument to the trustees that coeducation would be cost efficient, would attract more and better male applicants, and would in other ways improve Princeton. The trustees agreed and decided to allow the admission of women as undergraduate students the following year. At the same time, Professor Stan Kelly and a faculty/student committee, on which I served, were working on a report that would make the governance of Princeton much more consultative. The system of selective eating clubs was under attack from within the student body. Various impolite voices disrupted the collegial calm from time to time about the war in Vietnam and racial justice at home. It was a great time to be alive and to be at Princeton.

As I walked with the President to his office in Nassau Hall, he explained that he thought the University had to respond in some way to the demands for more recognition in the curriculum of the experience of black Americans. It was not clear to him what needed to be done, nor that the faculty would approve any significant steps that might be suggested, but he was committed to supporting a serious consideration of various alternatives. It was bound to be controversial, but he wondered if I would be willing to chair a committee on the subject.

That President Goheen was turning to a junior member of the History department might have seemed a little ominous. It never occurred to me, however, that I might have been picked to be point man of this skirmish line because I was expendable. Being young and foolish, I was flattered. There were, after all, benign explanations for my being put in charge of this project. I am a specialist in the history of the American South, which is inherently about blacks and whites and their relationships to each other. Revealingly, there was no one else on the Princeton faculty whose field was more centrally concerned with the black experience. In the supercharged atmosphere of that time, my being white made it more difficult for me to be taken seriously by black students or by black activists and scholars outside the University. However, there was no choice on that account. Princeton had no black faculty member, other than the economist, Sir Arthur Lewis, and this was not his thing.

So, the committee was appointed. We spent the summer gathering information about what other institutions were doing and constructing a reading list of available scholarship. One of the quiet objections to doing anything was that, however legitimate the subject, there simply wasn’t enough scholarship to support a serious intellectual effort. The mere heft of the committee’s bibliography refuted that argument.

The major fault line within the committee, and among the faculty in general, distinguished between a department and an interdepartmental program. That question occupied a good bit of the committee’s vigorous discussions during the academic year 1968-69. I will not rehearse those arguments here. The committee eventually chose to recommend an interdepartmental program. I believed then, and continue to believe, that in the Princeton context, that was a crucial and wise decision.

Nor will I plod through the politics of winning the approval of the faculty for a new program in Afro-American (now African American) Studies. Approval was not a foregone conclusion, even with the support of President Goheen and Provost William Bowen. Suffice it to say that we succeeded. We cobbled together a sufficient number of related courses already on the books which, with the addition of a couple of new courses, presented a respectable beginning of an effort to include the experience of African Americans throughout the humanities and social sciences at Princeton.

By the time the faculty brought the program into legal existence, it was clear that we did not have adequate faculty to lead the program or to sustain real scholarly inquiry over a long period of time. I served as the acting director of the program through its first year of existence while we recruited a permanent director.

Then, in the wake of the Cambodian incursion, in the spring of 1970, when the dormant anti-war movement was awakened with disturbing fervor, I was asked by the administration to set up a draft counseling office where students could have their options and legal obligations explained. This was a situation that made me very uneasy, though I understood the University’s desire to be as responsive as possible to legitimate student needs and desires. I was opposed to the war, but I was not in favor of draft resistance. My own Southern sense of honor would have required me to accept a draft call even though I was against the war. On the other hand, I also thought that every eligible man deserved to know what rights and options he had within the system so he could make up his own mind about what to do. I proceeded on that basis. I was the chair of the local ACLU, so I easily found my way to qualified counselors in the region and arranged for them to staff a center in a university building where students could go for information. It was the policy of the center, of course, that there would be no advocacy of draft resistance, and so far as I know there was none.

As the unpaid faculty overseer of this activity, I was one of the people consulted by the Princeton undergraduates who organized a chapter of what became the Union of National Draft Organizations (UNDO). That summer, UNDO called a national meeting in Princeton. Hundreds of politically engaged college students would be coming to our picture-postcard college town. Where would they stay? There was certainly no room at the Nassau Inn. My wife and her friends, with enormous effort, enlisted scores of sympathetic Princeton faculty and townspeople who were willing to house groups of visiting UNDO students. However, when those students arrived in Princeton for the rally, hirsute and unkempt, they would have nothing to do with bourgeois hospitality. They brought their sleeping bags, guitars, and recreational substances, and they sprawled together on the soccer fields of Princeton, saving many a neat, clean, wholesome Princeton home from certain depredation.

I was on sabbatical leave during the academic year 1970-71, spending a good bit of time on the road doing research on the Civil Rights Movement. When I returned to full-time teaching in 1971-72, the mood on campus had swung dramatically toward quiescence. This was the period when the commune movement was roaring along. Young people disillusioned by the supposedly ineffectual attempts to change society through direct confrontation or through politics decided to build intentional communities that would live by alternative values, thus converting the world to a better way of life by demonstrating the superiority of cooperative values.

This was also Bob Goheen’s last year of a remarkable presidency that had transformed Princeton. To the surprise of very few, the Trustees turned to his provost, William Bowen, to become the next president of Princeton. That winter, President-elect Bowen asked me to meet him after a basketball game, a considerate bit of timing in that we were both Princeton basketball fanatics. I don’t remember who won the game that night, but I do remember that Bill asked me to take his place as provost when he moved into the president’s office that summer.

As Lucy and I talked about it that night and the next day, I realized that I was spending a lot of my time doing administrative chores of one kind or another, while also teaching and publishing. I constantly felt torn, pulled in different directions. Perhaps a stint as a full-time administrator would allow me to discover whether I liked that better than full-time teaching and writing. If I didn’t like it, I could always return to the faculty after five years and not be much the worse for wear. The new administration was especially rich in talent. I learned a lot from my colleagues, and I particularly learned from Bill Bowen, a remarkable academic leader.[5]

Unfortunately, in my third year as provost, the fall of 1974, before I had a definitive answer to the question of which university track I wished to run on, I got a call from Edmund McIlhenny who was chairman of the Tulane University Board of Administrators, that is, the trustees. He was looking for a new president and had been told that I might fit Tulane’s needs.

The lure of the South was great. If I were going to remain in administration, being president of a first-tier private university would allow me to make a contribution to my native region, a region that suffered then even more than it does now from an educational deficit. The universe of first-rate private universities in the South is extremely small. It consists of Duke, Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Emory, with Rice as a special case. Tulane, I eventually decided, was an opportunity that I could not pass up.

I labored five years in New Orleans in a tough environment, what in the business world would be called “a turnaround situation.” Tulane’s trajectory changed dramatically. I earned the usual number of enemies for doing what was necessary, and I made some mistakes that exacerbated the inevitable friction. When Penn came looking for a president to succeed Martin Meyerson, I was therefore receptive. The Tulane and Penn stories await a different telling. For current purposes, I need only note that when I moved to Penn in February 1981, I found myself in the middle of a huge controversy because the trustees had selected me rather than the inside favorite, Vartan Gregorian.

At Tulane, I had arrived as the exotic ivy leaguer, full of mystery and magic. At Penn, it was assumed by campus activists, the student newspaper, and the local press that I must be the opposite of Greg. After all, our appearances differ. He was short, plump, swarthy, charming, and ebullient; I was tall, slender, white, and reserved. Since he was liberal and creative, I must be conservative and managerial. Charisma is in the eye of the beholder. Given my later public persona, it is ironic that I spent the 1980s fencing with the “progressive” activists at Penn, who cast me as the oppressive representative of corporate America. It took me perhaps four years to break through those stereotypes completely and establish warm relationships with the dominant political center of faculty and students.

The point of this race through my resume is that, after applying to graduate school, I never had to hustle or to promote myself to get my next job. They came to me. This created a hazard of good fortune. Here I was in the winter of 1992-93, faced with a “what next?” problem of large proportions, without a lot of experience in finding jobs for myself, especially in Washington. I was therefore not surprised to notice shortly before Christmas that the Clinton cabinet had been filled without me. I was at least clever enough to realize that if I wanted to go to Washington, reticence was not going to work. On the other hand, I didn’t have a particular job in mind, and I didn’t know how to pursue it, even if I knew what I wanted.

Then, on December 2, I read in the newspaper that Lynne Cheney had resigned as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to become effective January 20, 1993, the day President Clinton would be inaugurated. Nothing could have made her political conception of the job more apparent. Ignoring that storm warning, I thought to myself, “Hmmm, that is a job I could do. It might even be fun.” I realized that I was at a great disadvantage in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering for jobs in the new administration. I did not even hear the gossip. So, I called Joe Watkins, who had been one of my assistants at Penn, and who had gone to Washington to work in the Bush administration. He was on his way back to the Philadelphia area with the hope of finding a way to run for public office as a Republican. He made an effort in the Republican primary for U.S. Senator, but the odds were too long. The Republicans missed a terrific candidate.

Joe dropped by Eisenlohr, the president’s house on the campus, in late December, bringing me the “Plum Book,” which lists all the appointive offices in the federal government, along with a lot of good advice about how to maneuver. He also reported that he had sent my c.v. to the Clinton transition office in the hands of a friend of his who is a Democrat, with the message that I would make a good chair of the NEH. I had also just learned that, without my asking, Judge Leon Higginbotham, a Penn trustee, had sent a letter on my behalf to Vernon Jordan. Joe’s advice was to flood the office with as many pieces of paper as possible. Chaos being the rule in such operations, you could never tell when a c.v. or a letter of recommendation would find itself in the right pile of papers at the right time to get one on a list of prospects. After his tutorial, I remember thinking that I was probably in the process of being humbled.

Lucy and I took our family, eleven in all, including children, in-laws, and grandchildren, to Club Med in Ixtappa, Mexico in early January for a wonderful week of sun and fun together. I went to the convention of the American Council on Education in San Diego when we returned. There I had a long talk with Tom Ehrlich, a close friend since we had worked side by side at Penn during my first five years, when he was provost, before he went to be the president of Indiana University. He was leaving IU now, so we had a lot to discuss about our futures. He had decided that he didn’t want to do another university presidency, though there were a couple of great ones pursuing him. He and Ellen were headed back to Palo Alto to lead a more civilized existence near their children. When I told him that I was a bit at a loss to know how to pursue the NEH chairmanship, he told me that I should call Joe Duffy, who Tom thought was the most wired-in person in Washington. Joe was then the president of American University, though he soon joined the Clinton administration as the director of USIA. I had known him for some time. In addition, he could tell me something about the NEH; he had served a term as chairman as the appointee of President Jimmy Carter.

I called Joe in late January, not long after I got back from San Diego. He was extremely nice and very helpful. By then I knew that one of the pieces of paper with my name on it had fluttered onto the right stack in the right office at the right time and that my name had once been somewhere on a long list of people being considered for the NEH. David Morse, Penn’s excellent director of federal relations, had called John Hammer, director of the National Humanities Alliance, the coalition of scholarly and public organizations that benefit from NEH grants, and learned that my name was not being pursued because it was thought that I was not interested. I told Joe Duffy this bit of gossip, and he promised to find out what the state of play was, and also to pass on the word that I really would be interested.

This was after the Inauguration, so the appointment process was now being handled by Bruce Lindsey’s Office of Presidential Personnel, and the transition team had melted away. David Morse had also been able to construct a list of “mentions,” people whose names were being unofficially circulated as possibilities among various interested organizations in order to gauge the possible reception of their nomination. There were nine on David’s list, and I knew seven of them relatively well, and they were all attractive candidates. The good news here was that it was not yet done; I was not too late.

Bolstered by this information, on January 29 I called Senator Harris Wofford, whom I had known since his days as president of Bryn Mawr College. I asked him if he could help me, assuming that he did not have another horse in the race. He was immediately supportive. Not only did he not have another candidate for the NEH, but his candidate for Secretary of Education had not been picked, and he thought Clinton needed to appoint some people from the big industrial states like Pennsylvania that had supported him. It sounded like a good argument to me. I began to practice my Rocky imitation, though it usually comes out sounding more like the southside in Birmingham than south Philly.

Harris said he would go all out for me. He then advised me to get as many endorsements as possible from influential folks, politicians and others. We went over some names. He urged me to get Marion Wright Edelman to speak to Hillary for me. I said that if I approached it right, I could probably get Lucy to speak to Hillary as well. I was beginning to get the hang of this thing.

I was also getting excited about what I could do at the NEH. Joe Duffy had told me that it was more of a day-to-day management job than people realized, a useful warning because Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney had turned it into a conservative pulpit. I remember thinking at about this time that I had great respect for what the NEH did; I thought I could do the internal management of the agency, the politics of the humanities community, the lobbying of Congress, and still have time and energy to perform as a depoliticized spokesperson for the humanities in American life, and to help the NEH create some exciting new programs.

Harris’s follow-through was impressive. He called Bruce Lindsey immediately. I am sure he had a number of things to take up with Lindsey, but he also put in a word for me. I also got busy. I called Philadelphia Congressmen Tom Foglietta and Bill Gray; both were supportive. Bill Gray, a member of the Democratic leadership in the House, called Bruce Lindsey on my behalf. I began to ask other friends, like Robert Brustein, director of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, to write to Lindsey about me.

Meanwhile, Mike Aiken and Rick Nahm let me know that they were about to be selected to head other institutions, Mike to be chancellor of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and Rick to become president of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. I had contingency plans ready. After appropriate consultations, I would name Marvin Lazerson, dean of the School of Education, to act as provost, and I would simply promote Ginny Clark, associate V.P. for Development and Alumni Relations, to succeed Rick. There was, however, a timing problem presented by the search for the new executive vice president (EVP). I could not really announce that I planned to step down on June 30, 1994, until the EVP had been named. Naturally, I would have to tell that person what was about to happen, and that would make the selling of the job a little harder.

My dual life was far from boring, as a reconstruction of February 3, 1993, indicates. My day started at 8:30 A.M. with a briefing of a large group of trustees by our financial team on a “sources and uses” analysis of University finances, tracing more clearly than ever before where our revenues came from and how they flowed within the institution. That meeting dissolved into a meeting of the Trustees’ special Long Range Planning Committee where Bill Kelley, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the medical center, successfully presented his strategic plan for the medical center. Those crucial discussions occupied the morning. Between 2 and 3 P.M., I conferred with the general counsel, Shelley Green, and the vice provost for research, Barry Cooperman, about a suit against the University by a company accusing our faculty of leaking its trade secrets about solid-state batteries. Between 4 and 5 P.M., Mike Aiken and I met with the faculty senate executive committee, about a committee report recommending changes in the “just cause” procedures, the process through which faculty members can be disciplined, which had just failed miserably to handle a case of faculty plagiarism. I spent the evening, from 6 P.M. to 10 P.M. at the annual football banquet, which was very upbeat.

During the little empty spaces in the day, especially between 3 and 4 P.M., I did my telephoning. Among my calls that day was one from Harris Wofford, who reported that he had talked to Bruce Lindsey again and that Bruce had said that my name was on a short list for the NEH. He also assured Harris, with what I imagine was a bit of exasperation, that, yes, he understood how distinguished I was. I remember thinking at this point how frustrating it was to be working in the dark; no one from the White House had gotten in touch with me to make an assessment of how well I might be expected to do the job. I had no chance to speak for myself. It also felt strange to know that the White House’s ultimate selection would be heavily influenced by political consideration, what constituency or person it wanted to please, and what message might be communicated by the selection of a particular person. My value, initially at least, was purely symbolic. I could only line up my support and hope for the best.

I left the next day for an alumni speaking engagement and fund-raising excursion in Florida. Lucy was in Montgomery caring for her mother after an operation to repair a broken hip, so I traveled alone. I spent a delightful evening on Key Biscayne in the home of Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz; Carlos was a Penn alumnus who had been extremely successful in business. Ironically, Carlos and Rosa, whom I do not think of as arrogant, left-wing elitists, collect the work of Andres Serrano, the Latino artist whose “Piss Christ” ignited one of the most ferocious attacks by Jesse Helms and the religious right on funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

After my work was done, I went up the coast to spend the rest of the weekend with Don and Ann Brown at their place at Frenchman’s Creek. Ann, an active consumer advocate, was waging a quiet campaign for appointment to be chair of the Consumer Products Safety Commission. We had fun swapping stories about the process. She also was successful in her quest and was a brilliant success in the job.

I returned to Philadelphia that Monday, February 8, to find some messages from David Morse who had been trolling for information in Washington. He reported that John Hammer had been asked by the White House whether there were any negatives about me in the humanities community. We don’t see the wind; we just see the ripples on the water.

The next bit of hearsay evidence was provided by a call on February 12 from Jackie Trescott, the reporter on the culture beat for the Washington Post, who was pursuing a list of seven possible nominees for the chairmanship of the NEH. I could only tell her that the White House had not been in touch with me. Shortly afterward, someone from Bruce Lindsey’s office called my office and asked that my c.v. be sent to them, yet another paper missile fired into the dark void of Washington. David Morse guessed that they were delaying a choice for the NEH hoping to be able to announce the NEH and NEA together. If there were a woman for the NEA, and all the rumored candidates were women, that would provide some camouflage if the NEH went to a white male. I understood that.

On March 3, the Washington Post reported that I was the leading candidate for chairmanship of the NEH. This was news to me, albeit good news. It also began to make my situation mildly uncomfortable. Rumors were swirling about. The Chronicle of Higher Education sent a photographer to take my picture, saying they would save it for an appropriate occasion. Stan Katz at the American Council of Learned Societies, my friend and later my close ally, was telling people that I was about to be nominated. Harris Wofford called to say that he had talked to Hillary about me and that she was enthusiastic. Charley Pizzi at the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce told me that he had heard it was to be announced that week. The Daily Pennsylvanian called me for a reaction because they had it from an unimpeachable source in the White House that I was to have been announced the preceding Friday. I could not react to something that had not been announced, nor could I explain why it had not been announced. Neither could the reporter. This state of suspended animation had its amusing aspects. Students would fall into step with me on Locust Walk and ask brightly, “Have you gotten the job yet?” Others would just say, “Good luck,” as they passed. Worry about being a publicly rejected suitor was the major discomfort at this point.

Lucy and I went to Montgomery, Alabama the weekend of April 2-4 where I gave the annual Durr Lecture at Auburn University in Montgomery, an event that celebrated the life and work of Lucy’s father, Clifford J. Durr. My talk began by examining an apparent paradox, one of my favorite devices because I believe paradoxes expose the problem areas of cultures, and thus they can yield very interesting insights into the culture. I have been thinking about paradoxes and using them analytically for a long time, and I continue to be fascinated with them. In this case, I observed that the new globalism was begetting tribalism. It is a curious fact that the shrinking of the world under the influence of modern transportation, information technology, and the integration of economies was accompanied by an epidemic of sectarian violence. The closer we get to each other, the more we fight one another. This phenomenon, I argued, should make Americans think more carefully about what values and commitments were strong enough to hold our racially, ethnically, religiously, linguistically, culturally diverse society together. This was a theme I had pursued before, used for my remarks at Commencement in May 1993, and one that I would return to later at the NEH.

The next day, Friday, April 2, when Lucy and I were staying with my brother, Morris, and his wife, Brenda, in Birmingham, I was run to earth by Bill Gilcher, who was phoning on behalf of the Office of Presidential Personnel. Could I come talk to them next week? I said that I thought that I might be able to work that into my schedule.

Actually, it was not easy because Cokie Roberts and her mother, Lindy Boggs, were going to be on campus as Pappas Fellows that week. They were personal friends of ours and I wanted to be there during their visit. So, I could not visit Washington until Friday, April 9. I rode down on the train in high spirits the evening before. Cokie and Lindy had been a wonderful team. Cokie was brash and irreverent; her mother as usual was so sweet that you had to listen very closely to get the wisdom that she was dispensing about public life in Washington. They are so different, yet they are clearly devoted to each other. Large student audiences loved them.

In addition to that reason for feeling good, I thought that I was at last going to learn where the search for a NEH chair was. Silly me! I had spent many late night hours during that week filling out personal information forms sent by the White House, covering finances, jobs, organizational affiliations, club memberships, and residences over an impossibly long period of time. I thought that they probably would not require me to do such an onerous chore if they were not serious about me, but I was not sure.

After checking into the Hay-Adams, across the park from the White House, I met Martha Chowning in the lobby. She was the lone Clinton political appointee at the NEH, so she was to brief me on the current state of the agency. It was then functioning under Lynne Cheney’s choice as acting chair, Jerry Martin, a former political appointee who had “burrowed” into a senior civil service position at the NEH.

Martin eventually left the NEH and became the first president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization started by Lynne Cheney, with a founding board full of high-profile public figures, including Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman (of whom, more later). The ostensible purpose of ACTA is to hold universities accountable for protecting free speech on campus, and for teaching students the fundamental values of Western Civilization. That is the way that it describes itself, but it rests more specifically upon a consistent right-wing critique of higher education that has been developed and elaborated over the past fifteen years.[6] I became the symbol of the “liberal elite” that is alleged by the right wing to be running American universities, and that is at work undermining the traditional values on which our culture depends. If this sounds to you like a conspiracy theory, you have been paying attention.

A quick flash forward can reveal this critique at work in the report released in December 2001 by ACTA, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.”[7] The report begins by noting that the country responded with admirable patriotism to the terrorism of September 11, 2001. “Not so in academe. . . . professors across the country sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America.” The report’s evidence consists of 115 brief quotations from speakers on college campuses, ripped out of context, that say such things as “revenge is not justifiable”; “stop the violence, stop the hate”; “an eye for an eye makes the world blind”; as well as such dangerous truisms as that we need to understand how America is viewed by the rest of the world. The report concludes that colleges are “short on patriotism.” “The message of much of academe was clear: blame America first.” The technique here is quite familiar. Point to a few outlandish examples that suit your purpose, and then act as if they are typical of the whole rather than marginal. The thing to note, I believe, is that the report does not engage the dissenting ideas themselves. It simply implies that all of higher education is unpatriotic.

Why would an organization dedicated to free speech on campus attack higher education for permitting free speech? It is enough to make one suspect that the authors of the report don’t want free speech; they want their speech. This is only one of a number of curiosities. Why, with President George Bush’s approval ratings hovering around 92 percent, was it thought important to coerce the last 8 percent into line? Indeed, in an era of Republican hegemony, when political scientists who measure such things report that the political spectrum has shifted markedly to the right and is increasingly polarized between centrists and the right wing, do culture warriors speak in such apocalyptic terms about a liberal conspiracy to subvert the republic? The solution to these curiosities is that the ACTA report is not about rallying support in the current crisis; it is about furthering its long-term project of de-legitimizing higher education in the public mind, and advancing the world view of movement conservatives.

Meanwhile, back on April 8, 1993, I was still innocent of the covert actions and dirty tricks of the people who saw me as a convenient representative of their conspiracy theory. Martha Chowning, however, gave me an astute analysis of the internal politics of the NEH, and also handed over to me a load of NEH publications and a briefing book that told me everything anyone could want to know about the NEH and its programs. Things were beginning to look serious.

I got over to the Old Executive Office Building the next morning a little before eight, only to find that my name had not been entered into the security computer. Was this a subtle message? I was rescued from this purgatory by Leslie Maddin who happened by and recognized me. She is the daughter of a retired Penn faculty member, and she was then working in the Office of Presidential Personnel, though in a different area from the one interested in me. She quickly found Bill Gilcher and Susan Reichly, and they all took me over to the White House Mess, where Jan Piercy met us for breakfast.

We had an interesting conversation about the NEH and the other cultural agencies. After a very long time, I finally asked, “Am I going to get the nomination?” “Oh, yes,” they laughed, “we thought you knew.” I suppose I should have understood that Jackie Trescott was the White House messenger.

As David Morse had guessed, they had been trying to hold the NEH until the NEA and the Institute for Museum Services were also ready to announce. They finally realized that those decisions were so indefinite that they should go ahead with the NEH—but going ahead did not really mean going ahead. They normally did not announce an “intention to nominate” until after the FBI background check. In this case, however, they would try to get Bruce Lindsey to approve going public before the check was completed. Furthermore, I would have to be cleared by the general counsel of the White House. That would take about an hour of conversation with a lawyer after he had studied my personal data. A quick telephone call revealed that the general counsel had not received the forms that I had sent by Federal Express the day before.

I explained that my situation was increasingly uncomfortable on the campus. The Washington Post had reported on Thursday, the previous day, that my nomination was a “done deal.” A Daily Pennsylvanian reporter and photographer had ambushed me in 30th Street Station that evening as I was setting forth for Washington. It was very clever of them to figure out exactly what was going on. That picture and a story about my job interview in Washington appeared in the DP on Friday, even as I was eating breakfast in the White House Mess with the President’s headhunters. Furthermore, the New York Times had reported that same morning, Friday, that the White House was poised to announce my nomination. It would be good for me if the President’s intentions were public information so I could be definitive in announcing my own plans. They understood this, but they couldn’t promise anything.

I got back to Philly at 1 P.M. and was met by a university car that took me directly out to Kennett Square, near the Penn Veterinary School’s campus for large-animal medicine, to talk about Penn’s appropriation with State Representative Joe Pitts, the ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee. He was, as always, very supportive. By the time I got back to my office on campus, about 3:45, the White House General Counsel’s Office had called to get my telephone numbers. They now had the forms and would be calling me. Before that could happen, however, about 4:30, Bill Gilcher called to say that at 5 P.M. the White House was going to announce the President’s “intention to nominate” me. Late afternoon on a Friday, I realized later, is the traditional time to make announcements that one hopes will be seen by as few people as possible. Nevertheless, I was delighted.

A few of my close advisors assembled later that afternoon to figure out what I could and should say in public.[8] That was relatively easy: “I am delighted to be chosen and, if confirmed, will be honored to serve.” I would then have to say to the university community that the trustees and I had given much thought to contingency plans and more would be announced about those shortly. Then I picked up Lucy and we caught a train for New York where we were to attend a large dinner party that evening that was part of the fund-raising campaign. The easy part of getting to Washington was over; the nightmare would soon begin.