In My Time (8 page)

Leaving the church, August 29, 1964.

But our honeymoon afterward was one night in the Holiday Inn in Laramie, Wyoming.

Our first home was in a yellow, cinder-block apartment on the edge of campus. It was a real bargain at $53.65 a month furnished, but it lacked any kind of insulation—something of a drawback when the temperature dropped to 30 below. With an elevation over seven thousand feet, Laramie was known for its challenging winters. If you had a car, you had to install a head bolt heater and plug it in at night or else the engine block would freeze. Still, the natural setting was beautiful, with the Snowy Range and some good trout streams close by. When the fishing season opened, it was possible to get up early, drive up into the mountains and catch a few trout, and still make it back in time for morning classes.

As graduation neared, I decided to stay on and earn a master’s degree, and it was as a graduate student that I got my first taste of politics by working as an intern in the Wyoming state legislature. Half my stipend was paid for by the National Center for Education in Politics, an organization that went back to the 1940s and a belief on the part of Judge Arthur Vanderbilt, dean of New York University School of Law, that student participation in politics should be encouraged. The other half was paid for by the Republican Party, which was then under the enlightened leadership of Stan Hathaway, who would become one of Wyoming’s most popular and influential governors. I’d get up early in the morning and drive fifty miles over the pass from Laramie to Cheyenne, where the legislature met. After working all day, I’d turn around and drive the fifty miles home at night, often through some pretty brutal weather.

The legislative session lasted forty days, and it was a fascinating experience for me. The Republicans, usually dominant in Wyoming politics, were getting a lot of pushback from Democrats in the wake of the
1964 Goldwater debacle, and that made the session especially lively. The report I wrote on my internship won a Borden Award from the National Center for Education in Politics, and I received a check for one hundred dollars—an amount not to be scoffed at since that was nearly two months’ rent.

One of my professors gave me an application for another program run by the NCEP. This one, which was funded by the Ford Foundation, placed political science graduate students in mayors’ and governors’ offices across the country. I filled out the application and pretty much forgot about it until one Sunday night in late November when Lynne and I got back from a weekend at home in Casper and I found a telegram waiting. It informed me that I had been selected for the program and was expected at an orientation in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday morning. I had to hustle, but I made it in time to the Stouffer’s Inn where the group was gathering. I met graduate students from Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Ohio State, Ball State, and Penn State, all planning field assignments that would begin after the first of the year.

One of the most important people I met at the orientation was Maureen Drummy, assistant director of the NCEP. She would play a crucial part in my life over the next few years, and we became good friends. Maureen persuaded me that the best place for me to work would be in Madison, Wisconsin, in the office of Governor Warren Knowles. Lynne liked the idea because the main campus of the University of Wisconsin was located in Madison and had a fine English department, where she could begin work on her Ph.D. We packed up the ’65 VW bug we had acquired and headed for Wisconsin through memorably cold January weather. Along about Dubuque, Iowa, the car became difficult to steer because the grease in the steering column had stiffened with cold, and we had to put the VW in the garage at a gas station to thaw it out. Despite the freezing weather, we faithfully stopped the car every few hours so that Lynne could get out and walk around, per doctor’s orders. She was pregnant with our first child, Elizabeth, who would be born in Madison on a warm day at the end of July.

__________

WARREN KNOWLES LOOKED LIKE a governor. Tall, with wavy silver hair, he had been elected in spite of the Democratic sweep of 1964. I became an all-purpose aide, traveling with him all over the state. My pockets were filled with buttons emblazoned with “We Like It Here,” which was the slogan of a campaign he had initiated to promote the state. We hit all the county fairs, and my job was to follow the governor up and down the midway, handing the buttons out. I also carried a Polaroid instant camera, and I snapped pictures as we went along. When the photo slid out, I’d rip the cover paper off it and give it to the fairgoer the governor had just shaken hands with.

When I wasn’t traveling with the governor, I often worked at my desk, which someone had thoughtfully put in the center of the staff office so I could see everything going on. I participated in staff meetings and learned a valuable lesson early on. I don’t remember the problem we were discussing, but I do recall that I saw the answer with crystal clarity and offered it right up, using a tone of some authority, as I remember. There was silence, then the group went on talking, eventually ending up with the solution I had proposed, though it was as if I’d never offered it. As I thought about what happened, I realized that it’s often better to listen than to speak, particularly if you are the junior person around. Moreover, when a group has a problem to solve, they usually need to grapple with it for a while. If you have a solution, wait until people are ready for it, and then present it in a cool and collected way that makes the answer to the problem be about the answer—and not about you.

One night when we had been in the northern part of the state, the governor gave Mel Laird a ride to Chicago on the state’s official twin-engine plane. Mel was the congressman from Wisconsin’s 7th District, and he would become Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense during the height of the war in Vietnam. As the three of us, the governor, the congressman, and I, flew through the night, I listened to Laird warn his old friend to be very careful what he said about the war in Southeast Asia. It was 1966, and the American presence had just begun to expand. The antiwar movement had yet to gain much momentum, but Laird was concerned that the Johnson administration didn’t have a coherent
policy on the war and that things would get much worse before they got any better. I remember being impressed by the way Laird was looking beyond the moment, and, as it turned out, he offered good advice.

I hit it off with the governor, and when my fellowship was over, he asked me to stay on. He even offered me a paycheck. At the same time, I’d decided to begin my Ph.D. at Wisconsin. Lynne and I both wanted to be college professors, and while we looked at other places where we might both do graduate work, there were few universities where both the political science and the English departments were as good as the ones at Wisconsin. We had also applied for and received teaching and research assistantships at Madison, which, combined with my part-time salary from the governor’s office, would pay our way.

Shortly after I began work on my Ph.D., I turned twenty-six and was no longer eligible for the draft. In the days when I had been, I had received deferments as a student and father. Earlier, when I was doing line work, I had been classified 1-A, but draft numbers were low and I wasn’t called. If I had been, I would have been happy to serve.

MY MAJOR PROFESSOR AT Wisconsin was Aage Clausen, who was working on a study of roll call voting in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The work was highly statistical, and I spent a lot of time on the university’s computer, which in those days filled most of a big room, running calculations to show the various factors that played into a member’s vote. Our assumption—that political behavior could be understood scientifically—was very much the trend of the time, and the
American Political Science Review,
a prestigious academic journal, published a long article we wrote about our research. Professor Clausen, a generous man, shared authorship of the paper with me.

But in 1967 many days were a reminder of a far messier politics. In October the presence on campus of recruiters from Dow Chemical Company, which made the napalm being used in Vietnam, precipitated what became known as the Dow Riot. When students blocked the entrance to the building where the recruiters had set up, the police were called in to remove them by force. In the resulting free-for-all, tear gas
was fired off, and demonstrators as well as police were bloodied. Prancing through the whole chaotic scene, urging the demonstrators on, was a mime troupe from San Francisco. Lynne encountered the white-faced mimes, who were carrying animal entrails over their heads, as she tried, but failed, to get to a classroom where she was supposed to teach freshman composition.

I strongly disagreed with the protestors trying to shut down the university and portray Ho Chi Minh as a hero. As a general proposition, I supported our troops in Vietnam and the right of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to make the decision to be involved there.

Early in 1968 I got a job offer to manage a congressional campaign. The Republicans had a candidate who needed some help running in the 2nd District against the popular five-term Democratic incumbent, and a friend in the governor’s office called to see if I’d be interested. It sounded like something I’d enjoy doing, and it paid well, a thousand dollars a month as I recall. Taking the job would require delaying my preliminary exams—the comprehensive tests that had to be passed before starting a Ph.D. dissertation—but I saw no harm in that. When I approached the powers that be in the political science department, however, they were far from enthusiastic. It wasn’t just that I would have to delay the prelims, one senior professor said, but that working in a campaign would send the wrong professional signal. “If you get involved in politics,” he said, “you will not be taken seriously by political scientists.” That gave me a lot of pause, since I was pretty sure that real-world experience would be an asset whether I was doing research or in the classroom, but what did I know about how the academic world worked?

I decided to turn down the campaign job and return to school fulltime. Before long, however, another interesting opportunity presented itself, and this one had the political science department’s approval. Senator Joe Tydings, a Maryland Democrat, had contacted the university about establishing a fellowship in honor of his grandfather, Joseph E. Davies, who had been born in Wisconsin and had served as FDR’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. Tydings wanted to make the fellowship
part of the American Political Science Association’s congressional fellowship program, and the political science department suggested me as the first recipient.

Years later, after I became vice president, one of the trustees of the Davies Foundation sent me the letter of recommendation that the chairman of the political science department wrote to Tydings, which noted that I was married and the father of a two-year-old daughter and described me as “a very bright, hard-working, wholly personable, and attractive young man of twenty-seven.” The chairman quoted Aage Clausen saying that I was “the most cooperative, capable, and helpful assistant” he had ever worked with. When I read that letter thirty-seven years later, what struck me most was to think that in 1963, just five years before the letter was written, I had been sitting in a jail cell with my life pretty much in ruins around me. I’d gotten a second chance, and I’d made pretty good use of it.

Senator Tydings was scheduled to come to Madison in April to speak at a rally on behalf of Bobby Kennedy, who had entered the Democratic presidential primary for president and was slugging it out with Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy. I attended the rally and afterward met the senator in a bar on State Street, where we had a beer and a long conversation. He offered and I accepted the congressional fellowship that would take me to Washington, D.C., for a year.

More than thirty years later, when I was vice president, I attended a dinner at the University of Maryland where former Senator Tydings, now a trustee, was among the guests. I made a point of going over to thank him for what he had done for me all those years before. He was gracious, but seemed a little puzzled. Later he told a writer that he didn’t have the slightest idea what I was thanking him for. He didn’t remember our meeting on that cool spring night in Madison—although I have never forgotten it.

O
n a muggy Friday afternoon at the end of July 1968, I got behind the wheel of our black Volkswagen and headed south out of Madison. My goal was to drive to Washington and rent an apartment for Lynne, Liz, and me for when my American Political Science Association congressional fellowship started in September. Because I was cramming for my upcoming preliminary exams, I was determined to complete the whole process, including the 1,700-mile drive and finding and renting the apartment, over the weekend and be back studying by Monday morning.

I’d done a lot of long-distance driving and I enjoyed it. I listened to the radio as I drove through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, stopping every now and then for food and gas and once to sleep for a few hours. When I finally hit Interstate 495, the Capital Beltway that surrounds Washington, I had to decide which way to go. So I turned right and continued south until I saw a sign that said “Annandale,” which I thought sounded pretty good, and I exited onto Little River Turnpike, a major thoroughfare that despite housing developments
and apartment buildings hadn’t entirely lost its rural character. I turned into the driveway of an apartment complex—the Americana Fairfax—and found the rental office. Less than an hour later, I had signed a year’s lease on an unfurnished two-bedroom apartment for $130 a month.