by Sally Quinn
I was married to Ben at the time of the nomination. I had obviously told him the story. He was properly outraged and disgusted but not surprised. He had always thought Tower was a repugnant little “pissant.”
One day during the hearings I was at home when the doorbell rang. I answered it and two FBI agents were standing there holding out their identification, asking if they could come in. I ushered them into the front hall but did not invite them into the living room. We stood there staring at each other. They were clearly uncomfortable and wouldn’t look me in the eye; instead, they were shifting from foot to foot.
They had come, they said, because they were vetting Senator Tower for the job of secretary of defense and had heard the story about his sexually assaulting me. They would like to ask me a few questions. I refused to confirm it. “But you don’t understand,” one of them said to me, “this will be totally confidential.”
I burst out laughing. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Where do you think the Washington Post gets its stories? From guys like you who leak.”
They left empty-handed.
Shortly after that visit, John Tower’s confirmation was defeated. As was reported in the Washington Post, it was the first time in history that a new president had been denied his first choice for a new cabinet position, the ninth time that any cabinet-level nominee had been rejected by the Senate, and the first time since Eisenhower’s choice for secretary of commerce that a cabinet nominee had been turned down. One of those voting against Tower was Kansas senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, the only Republican to vote no. I later learned from a friend who was working for Teddy Kennedy that Nancy had voted against Tower after she heard my story.
“It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” said Ben. Barry and Daddy were not displeased either.
Later, Anita Hill made a decision I did not. She agreed to testify “confidentially” about Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. I could have been Anita Hill, or something close.
The common belief is that forgiving always makes you feel better. If you hold a grudge, you’re only hurting yourself more than the person you are angry with. As the saying goes, you take the poison hoping someone else will die. People say that letting go is the best revenge, that holding a grudge is like a cancer, that forgiving is the healthy thing to do, the right thing, the Christian thing. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I don’t buy it.
Of course there are some things you can and should forgive. However, I don’t believe in forgiveness without an apology, a sincere apology. There are too many nonapology apologies. They happen in love, in business, in politics, in foreign policy, in every area of life. “I’m sorry if I offended you” or “I’m sorry if you were hurt” are not apologies.
In this case, even an “I’m sorry I tried to rape you in the back of a cab when you had just turned twenty and were innocent and I was a U.S. senator” wouldn’t be good enough. Some things can’t be forgiven unless there is true remorse. Tower never apologized for anything.
Aaron Lazare, in his book On Apology, wrote about a time when two friends betrayed his trust, which led him to “question both my trusting approach to relationships and my overall ability to judge people.” It occurred to him that if they “would sincerely apologize, our relationships could be restored.” He elaborated:
This idea, which may seem simple and obvious . . . was an epiphany to me, a sudden, spontaneous realization of something I felt was important and perhaps even profound. I was intrigued that an apology, which appears to be such a simple event, could change so much.
Bishop T. D. Jakes once said to me when I was interviewing him about his book on forgiveness, “I may forgive. But I never forget.” That’s true for me as well.
The important thing about this incident in my life is that it was so searing and so traumatic that I never got over it. I can’t help thinking now that if he had raped me, it would have affected my views on sex, love, trust, and maybe even marriage, all things that have given me great joy throughout my life. No, this experience didn’t ruin my life. It really didn’t change my life, but it made a huge impression on me in many ways. I wasn’t the same person after that incident. I became more cynical and less trusting. If I had been a nonbeliever before that happened, this experience certainly wouldn’t have changed my view. It wasn’t that I had suffered the worst trauma anyone could suffer. But I felt that I had seen the face of evil, up close and personal. I was aware for the first time what it truly felt like to be dehumanized. There was too much of that in the world.
* * *
My sophomore year I returned to Smith no less confused than I had been at the end of my freshman year, by which time I still didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing. Consequently, this next term I dove immediately into the theater and stayed there. I found I had a particular talent and proclivity for the theater of the absurd, especially Ionesco. It would serve me well in life and help prepare me to eventually work in Washington.
That fall we had an assembly at John M. Greene Hall and attendance was required for the whole student body. The speaker was a young woman named Marian Wright, the first black woman to enter Yale Law School. There was considerable snickering among the students. Why did we have to listen to this colored girl talk? they said. I was curious.
I ended up being stunned by the effect that her speech had on me. What happened next changed my thinking entirely. Marian talked about her life. She spoke eloquently about growing up black in the South, with no hint of anger or bitterness or self-pity. Her tone and manner were so contained that her story was all the more powerful. I had goose bumps and was deeply moved. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
She—this “colored” girl—was not my equal; she was undeniably my superior. She was brilliant, funny, persuasive, authentic, and certainly engaged in work that mattered.
I had never seen anyone like her.
On the way back to Talbot House with my Southern friends I was silent. They were laughing and tittering and making jokes about Marian. Had they not just seen what I saw, heard what I heard? Then they broke into song:
Alabama niggers should be free,
hail to the N double ACP;
Throw Jim Folsom [former governor of Alabama] out the door:
Roy Campanella [black baseball player] for gov-e-nor.
Hail Autherine Lucy [first black student admitted to the University of Alabama],
Hail Autherine Lucy.
Yo so big and black and juicy,
how we loves you, Autherine Lucy.
Hey, hey, what’s all the fuss?
We wants to ride in the front of the bus.
I was incredulous. The words were immediately burned into my memory. I felt shocked and outraged and yet I said nothing. Another shameful moment. I just ran into the house and up to my room to get away. Who was I? I thought of myself as someone who was looking for meaning, yet I had just seen myself behave by being silent when I should have spoken. Right then I felt devoid of morals, ethics, and values. I felt I had no sense of myself. Was I not a person of courage? Not only did I need to find myself, but I needed to find friends who were enlightened and knowing and learn from them.
Chapter 6
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
—translation by Irish poet, John Anster, inspired by lines from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Part I
During my college years I had occasional psychic moments. By this time I really didn’t think much about it; it was simply part of my life. The phone would ring and I knew who it was before answering. I would know what someone was going to say before he or she said it. I would sense when something bad was going to happen. I knew what the end of some difficulty or disagreement would be well before there was any resolution. These are not uncommon phenomena. Many people have similar experiences. My mother understood what was going on. She would often ask me what I thought of something when
I knew what she wanted to know was what the future would bring.
I used to laugh at the lyrics of that Doris Day song: “Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera.” I most definitely sensed that the future was ours to see.
One afternoon I was in my room at Talbot House when I was overcome with dread. Something terrible was happening to my mother. I had to get to a phone. I rushed down the hall to the one phone on my floor and called home. My family was still living at Fort Myer at the time. The phone rang and rang. No answer, but I let it ring. It was not possible that there was nobody home. We had several military orderlies at the house and one of them was always there. I held on. The phone must have rung fifty times. I wouldn’t put it down. I was frantic. I just kept hanging on listening to that distant—and unanswered—ring, determined not to hang up.
At last an orderly answered the phone and put Mother on. She was hysterical, crying so hard she couldn’t talk. “Mother, what happened?” I asked. She was gasping and couldn’t catch her breath. She was trying to talk to me, but I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. I held on, just listening to her cry. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to hang up and leave her alone. Just then I heard a man’s voice calling for her.
“Mrs. Quinn?” It was another one of the orderlies. I heard him say, “Jesus,” then yell to someone else, “Get General Quinn. Tell him to come home right away.”
“Mother!” I was screaming at her. “What has happened? What’s wrong? Put him on the phone.” She was composed enough to hand the phone to the orderly.
“She’s okay,” he managed to sputter. “The bathroom is completely flooded. Your mother looks like she’s been drowned. Let me call the dispensary and I’ll call you back.” He hung up. I tried to call Daddy. I called back and the line was busy. The orderly had called the army dispensary that was right next door to our quarters. They sent over medics, and Daddy had come home, while I sat on the floor in the hall next to the phone waiting. Finally he called.
Mother had been taking a bath that afternoon. She had the water running when suddenly someone threw a jacket over her head and pushed her under the water. He held her head down until she thought she was drowning. She inhaled some water. While this was happening the phone started to ring—it rang and rang and didn’t stop. The tub was overflowing. As she was about to drown, the man took his hands off her and ran out of the bathroom, but not before the room was flooded. She managed to get out of the tub, soaked, naked, and distraught. That’s how the orderly found her.
The intruder turned out to be a GI who lived in the barracks on the other side of the parade ground. They found a number of my father’s missing items in his bunk, three watches, some cuff links, and other things that he had previously stolen from our house. The soldier had not expected anyone to be at home. He said he didn’t know what to do about my mother so he tried to drown her. When he heard the phone ringing, he got scared and fled. He was sentenced to seven years. My mother, then in her early forties, was so traumatized she never got her period again.
* * *
Weekends at Smith in the winter were especially lackluster and dull. But there was always the possibility of dates. If one of us had a date, we’d fix up our other friends with their friends. Since I hadn’t met anyone I really cared about, I would choose to hang out in the theater, although not much was going on there during weekends. We didn’t have TVs. The idea of actually studying wasn’t considered, at least not by me.
One Friday morning in February I got a call from the older brother of a friend of mine who wanted to know if I would like to go skiing in Vermont that weekend. I had never dated him because he was known as a wild man. The idea of going with him alone to Vermont was terrifying. However, he wanted me to bring a friend for his Harvard roommate.
I had heard of his roommate because he was notorious. Apparently once, under the influence, he had stolen a police car in Cambridge, among other things. I said I’d look around and get back to him. I found a friend who was a bit apprehensive, but we were both bored and decided to go. The boys said they would pick us up Friday afternoon and we would drive up. We would be staying at “Fat City,” a cabin in Vermont that several Harvard guys rented and that had a terrible reputation—worse even than one of the fraternities at Dartmouth that had the nickname “Animal House” and later served as the model for the movie of the same name.
“Fat City!” exclaimed one of my friends. “Are you both out of your minds?” We figured if we clung to each other the whole weekend we would be fine. Besides, we really wanted to ski.
The drive up was a nightmare. Our “dates” were drinking and speeding along winding, snowy country roads in the pitch-black of night. We were scared to death, but it was too late to do anything about it except keep begging them to slow down. Mercifully we arrived at Fat City in one piece, to find several other guys who were already crashing there. One of them showed us to our room, which was on the first floor opposite the living room. Immediately we both made sure there was a lock on the door. Everyone was tired and went to bed, thankfully without incident.
The next morning we got up, grabbed our skis, and hitched a ride to the slopes with one of the other “houseguests” staying there. The weather was perfect and we had a wonderful day of skiing. All we wanted to do was come home, have a bowl of soup, and go to bed. The boys, however, were ready to play. They seemed to have been imbibing most of the day, and things got bawdier and raunchier as the night went on. The tipping point came when our dates broke out in a lewd song: “Let’s all git drunk and git nekkid, let’s all git drunk and git nekkid, let’s all git drunk and git nek-kiiiiiiiiiid, and git in a great big piiiiiiile.” The situation called for some serious action. It was time for some palmistry.
“Okay, guys,” I said. “I’m now going to read your palms and tell your futures.” They perked up. Nothing like talking to a man about himself. I wasn’t as worried about our escorts. They were so far along they didn’t pose much threat. There was a brooding, poetic-looking guy in the corner who had been eyeing us and who hadn’t had that much to drink. He was exuding sexual tension. I chose him as my first victim. He was eager.
I settled in, looked deeply into his eyes, took his hand, smoothed his palm, and began to read. “You are a poet,” I said. He looked startled. “You are deeply sensitive but nobody understands you. You have a brilliant mind, but you are wasting it on childish things. You choose the wrong companionship. You need to trust your own instincts and do what is right for you, or you will ruin your life.”
I went on to predict certain fabulous things that would happen to him in the future unless he blew it. He was overcome with emotion and disbelief. Nobody had ever told him these things, he said. Nobody had ever seen so deeply into his soul. By the time I had finished, he settled back into his corner and spent the rest of the evening brooding over his palm.
The interesting thing was that even though I was trying to divert his attention away from my girlfriend and me, I really did see those things in his palm. I think that’s why he reacted so strongly to what I said. I was unnerved by it. Once I had read his palm, the others were hounding me to read theirs, which I did. I felt sad reading my friend’s palm. I didn’t tell him exactly how sad. I left him staring pensively at his palm, and, the animals finally subdued, we went to bed.
Around three A.M. my roommate woke me up. “It’s raining,” she said. “It can’t be,” I told her. It was twenty degrees outside. Then I heard the sound of water splashing against our window. “How is that possible?” Next came the raucous laughter and the singing. “We are wee weeing on the window . . . We are wee weeing on the window.” We peeked through the curtains and there they were, all of them except the poet, doubled over with laughter as they sprayed our window until they couldn’t anymore. Depleted, they went to bed and we went back to sleep.
The next morning we insisted they take us back to school and there were no objections. They were too hungover
to do anything else. We had a long silent drive home. They never asked us out again, nor would we have gone. I’m told the poet went on to become a successful writer. The others did not fare so well. For as long as I followed them, everything I read in their palms turned out to be true. Who said I had no religion?
I began to see the power of the mystical, the mysterious, and the magical. I had a glimpse of the spiritual as a possible substitute for religion—unorthodox as what I was seeing and feeling may have been.
* * *
Although I majored in theater, I took a lot of French courses because I had planned to spend my junior year abroad in France. (As it turned out that didn’t happen because I was so swept up in the theater that I really couldn’t go.) By the second semester of my sophomore year, I had decided I wanted to be an actress and spent the entire time at the theater, involved in every production. I sporadically dated a couple of guys, but my heart wasn’t in it. I hardly studied at all and barely squeaked through.
I took a course in Molière, the French playwright, for theater, but also studied him in my French courses. Reading his play Tartuffe had a profound and long-lasting impact on me. I began to think more about religion. Up until that point, my views on religion had been about my not believing in God; certainly not believing in an omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving God, a personal God to pray to. Tartuffe was about hypocrisy and religion, something I vaguely had been aware of but had never really articulated. Now it seems so obvious I can’t imagine it hadn’t struck me before. The leaders of the Inquisition were “Christian,” the South was “Christian” during the Civil War, the Nazis were “Christian,” and the segregationists were “Christian.”
After reading Tartuffe, everywhere I turned it seemed that people were proclaiming their faith at the same time as eschewing many of the basic tenets. Nowhere did it seem more egregious to me than during the civil rights era in the 1960s. Schools were being desegregated using National Guard troops, blacks and their white supporters were being murdered, black churches being blown up, and Martin Luther King was changing America. In fact, change was coming so quickly that it was hard to keep up, hard to formulate one’s views before being confronted with other views even more powerful.