Also impressive to me then was the fact that Sanders often worked across the aisle, collaborating with Republicans when possible and using his position as the only independent in Congress to drive dialogue on issues like trade. The lesson here, which Sanders himself would demonstrate some twenty years later when he ran for president, was that bipartisanship and appeal to independents was not the same thing as ideological centrism. I wrote that Sanders’s “real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system.”
I had forgotten about the contest until one day in March, when one of my teachers appeared, beaming, in the hall and pulled me aside after class. I had won first prize, she said, and would be flown to the library in Boston to meet the award committee and accept the scholarship money that went along with it.
A few weeks later, wearing a newly purchased suit (my first), I stepped into the soaring atrium of the JFK Library in Boston Harbor. Beneath its giant American flag, flanked by my parents, our principal Mr. Cassidy, and two teachers from Saint Joe, I was ushered to an elevator and up to a reception room commanding views of the Boston skyline, with planes descending toward the airport and ships crossing the harbor. It was unlike anything in Indiana.
My eyes widened as people I had only read about in the news milled about, holding soft drinks. The lanky and cheerful Senator Al Simpson, Republican from Wyoming, widely known as one of the wittiest members of Congress, began talking to me as if we’d known each other for years. (I was too new around politics to realize that for him this was a professional skill as well as a personal quality.) “You have to keep a sense of humor, otherwise they’ll chew your ass and it’ll get you down,” he advised. A distinguished-looking journalist named John Seigenthaler casually mentioned that he had launched USA Today, while another elderly patrician gentleman dropped that he had once chaired the Democratic National Committee.
Dignified and quiet, Caroline Kennedy was standing a little apart from the other guests with her three children at her side, looking as much like an attentive mother as like the American political royalty she was. Then, I had my first experience of the feeling in a room when a very famous person walks in. The energy of the room shifted perceptibly, and I turned to see the arrival of Senator Ted Kennedy, “the Lion of the Senate.” Moving slowly but with a kind of fire in his crisp blue eyes that made him all at the same time seem fierce and warm, he was heralded by the kids yelling, “Uncle Teddy!” as they rushed from Caroline’s side into his enormous embrace.
Feeling at once elevated and humbled, I was suddenly aware of looking like an Indiana hayseed, a schoolboy shaking hands with an icon. I have no recollection of what either of us said, until the end of the conversation, when he offered me an internship the following summer in his Washington office. His voice, full of Boston ah’s, sounded just like that of President Kennedy challenging America to go to the moon and do other great things, “naht because they are easy, but because they ah hahd.” In my mind, listening to the senator speak, I heard the strains of historic presidential leadership.
It felt like I had been handed a ticket to the major leagues.
2
City on a Hill
On the underground platform at the stop for Harvard Square, the approaching Red Line train made itself felt as well as heard. A breeze of air would push out of the darkness of the curving tunnel, a beat ahead of the rumble and the light from the lead car. Each time I sensed that little gust during my freshman fall, it brought with it the thrill of knowing I now lived in a city.
I know now that, by the standards of major global cities, Boston is mid-sized. Cambridge itself might be considered quaint. But to an eighteen-year-old freshman out of northern Indiana, navigating a subway unsupervised seemed nothing less than an initiation into the ways of the metropolis. I made an effort to blend in, entering the station weekly to catch the train for an internship at the JFK Library. As I trotted down the crowded steps, I would try to mimic the worldly and jaded affect of the commuters around me. But as I returned later in the evening, hustling past the florist and the Dunkin’ Donuts and on up the stairs into the Square, my face would still have stood out amid the grumpy Bostonians, betraying the fact that I was as exhilarated by the idea of being in a “big” city as I was by the new marvels of college life.
I would emerge into the Square, eyes darting around the lively scene. There were the teenage punks, their expressions just a little too bored to be menacing, who loitered with skateboards off the entrance to the station. Always, someone would be passing out flyers, usually for something edgy like a Lyndon LaRouche for President rally or a Chomsky talk down at MIT. Nearby, at Au Bon Pain, lingered a mix of postdocs, autodidact geniuses, and drifters. Some of the outdoor tables had chessboards built into them, one permanently occupied by a man with a little sign inviting you to PLAY THE CHESS MISTER. Looking up overhead, I could note the time on a lighted display over the Cambridge Savings Bank building. I felt that telling the time by reading it off a building, instead of a watch, affirmed that I was now in a bustling place of consequence, as downtown South Bend had perhaps once been.
Past Out of Town News, where you could get exotic newspapers like La Repubblica or Le Monde, I would cross the street, where, unlike home, cars would actually yield to pedestrians. Across Massachusetts Avenue and through a gate, the loose energy of the Square suddenly gave way to the serene precincts of Harvard Yard. The darkening quadrangle bespoke a kind of meaningful silence (Henry Adams would say, “If Harvard College gave nothing else, it gave calm”) as I trekked across it to my red-brick dorm, Holworthy Hall.
My room on the fourth floor was itself a wonder. It had hardwood floors and a wall of exposed brick, a style I’d only seen in fashionable restaurants and occasionally on television. There was even a fireplace (bricked up, but still), and a fire escape that, with some imagination and well-meaning disregard for rules, could serve as a balcony. A letter on your pillow had a list of everyone who had ever lived in your room, which in my case included Ulysses Grant Jr., Cornel West, and Horatio Alger.
No less impressive were the present occupants living up and down that staircase. They all seemed easygoing and normal enough at first, but soon it began to feel like the academy of X-Men: everyone had some concealed special power. Cate, on the second floor, could read books at four or five times the normal pace. Andrew, on the ground floor, could do a Rubik’s Cube from any starting point in about a minute. Steve, my roommate, was like a science fiction telepath; he could dissect social interactions and predict with remarkable accuracy how the relationships among other freshmen we knew would play out with time. Pretty much everyone expertly played musical instruments, sports, or both. I had gone from the top of my high school class to wondering how I would measure up.
From out the big green door of our Holworthy Hall entryway, I could look into the faint fog of history that blankets Harvard Yard, knowing which dorms had housed which U.S. presidents, from Adams (Massachusetts Hall) to Kennedy (Weld). Subtle cues everywhere linked history with expectation. A stone lintel over one of the gates read ENTER TO GROW IN WISDOM, and on the other side DEPART TO SERVE BETTER THY COUNTRY AND THY KIND. Though the seventeenth century Puritans who founded the place wouldn’t exactly recognize it these days, the basic message had not changed: you are among a select few admitted to this place, for the rare privilege of a fine education. And you had better put it to good use.
There were daily reminders that you were expected to be part of history, if not magnificently, then tragically. In Memorial Hall, after filling your belly with scrambled eggs, you emerged into a churchlike transept lit through stained glass and lined with marble panels bearing the memories of Harvard’s Civil War dead by name, date, and place, each punctuated by a grave period.
The names all seemed characteristically Harvard. The place names seemed apt, too, almost as if those places had originally been named in the foreknowledge that a great many men would one day die there. I s
ometimes paused to recite a few of them, under my breath, between eating breakfast and going to class:
Peter Augustus Porter. 3 June, 1864. Cold Harbor.
Richard Chapman Goodwin. 9 August, 1862. Cedar Mountain.
George Whittemore. 17 September, 1862. Antietam.
William Oliver Stevens. 4 May, 1863. Chancellorsville.
I tried to envision being part of the Civil War generation of Harvard students—or for that matter the World War I and II soldiers remembered at nearby Memorial Church. What would it be like to wrestle with college education at the same time a nation was at war? In that fall of 2000, it was hard to picture; war seemed unimaginably remote and theoretical, something that happened only to populations of a different time and place. Still less could I imagine that, after graduating, I would ever have occasion to carry a weapon on foreign soil.
AS SOON AS I ARRIVED on campus, I started hanging around the Institute of Politics, better known as the IOP, a center for undergraduates that brought speakers and fellows from government, policy, and journalism for the purpose of inspiring young people to pursue public service. At various events, you would munch on cheese or pepperoni pizza with impressive fellows; that fall’s slate included Rick Davis, fresh off managing John McCain’s first presidential campaign, and Jamil Mahuad, the ex-president of Ecuador who had just been deposed in a coup. More formal events in the forum would host a Cabinet member or foreign prime minister, there to give a speech containing some significant policy pivot that would make headlines the next day.
At first the proximity of these figures was one more shot in the arm for an already healthy Ivy League student ego. But the more attention you paid to the leaders who came through, especially the most accomplished ones, the more you sensed that their effectiveness did not come from the playing-up of prestige. The IOP’s director, the retired Senator David Pryor of Arkansas, embodied this: he specialized in putting you at ease. Slow-talking and plain-spoken, he cultivated the demeanor of a kindly bumpkin. Not very tall and just a little hunched, he would look at you with wide and gentle eyes and greet you in the Southern drawl you might expect of a former senator from Arkansas. Listening as you spoke, he would first furrow his eyebrows in concentration, then they would rise and his face would slowly open, as he took in whatever you had to say with interest and pleasure. Interacting with him, you would feel special—and disarmed, forgetting that you were face-to-face with the man who had outmaneuvered the segregationist former Governor Orval Faubus, mentored a young Bill Clinton, and dominated the politics of his home state for a generation.
This was the political education we really needed—the realization that success in politics was not necessarily about impressing people with your pedigree or intellect. Pryor’s successor at the IOP, former Agriculture Secretary and Kansas Congressman Dan Glickman, had a similar humble streak, only with a Midwestern flavor. At a function or meeting with students, he would never fail to open by joking that he never could have gotten into Harvard, and I suppose we took that at face value rather than as flattery. In fact, Glickman had a law degree from George Washington University, had chaired the House Intelligence Committee, and was an authority on the modern role of Congress. As a freshman, you might have been lulled into thinking that you really were deserving of such compliments from this Cabinet secretary. By junior year, hearing the same sort of thing, you would have matured enough to realize you were the recipient of a kindness, the treatment that is instinctual to a politician who knows that you will be best to work with if you have first been made to feel good about yourself.
Politics was in the air freshman year, though in retrospect it seemed like an almost quaint kind of politics, preoccupied with arguments that hadn’t changed much since the 1980s. I volunteered for Al Gore’s campaign that fall, chauffeuring guests around Boston during the run-up to the presidential debate there, but the sense among many students was that Bush and Gore were barely distinguishable on domestic policy: center-left versus center-right. The biggest campaign-related excitement was the arrival of riot police on the outskirts of the debate site to contend with Green Party protesters who were marching and chanting, “Let Ralph [Nader] debate.” When Bush ultimately prevailed in the Supreme Court and claimed the presidency, it still felt like little would change from the Clinton era.
National politics seemed sleepy compared to the scene on campus itself. In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters.
Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests, nor the more buttoned-up types I would find at the Institute of Politics, but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House, the dorm across the street, cooking up a virtual version of the paper face books that Harvard would distribute on move-in day.
We knew, of course, that the new century would herald great technological change. So much ink has been spilled on the flood of tech’s arrival that it is hard to say much about it that isn’t repetitive. But even now, looking back, the swiftness of it is stupefying. In that fall of 2000, my freshman dorm room had a “cordless” phone linked to a wired base, from which I could dial a 1-800 number to use a long-distance calling card and then reach home in South Bend. One year later, I returned to campus with a Sprint flip phone whose monochrome display let you see the number that was calling you, and which remarkably charged the same no matter what area code you were calling. One more year passed, and I had in my pocket a tiny (as was the fashion then) T68i phone by Ericsson with a 101-by-80 pixel display boasting 256 colors. What most excited me about it, as a tech fan, was that it could connect to a computer, with a new technology called Bluetooth, and download your address book without you having to key in every name with the numeric keypad. A year after that, I began to see the occasional professional around town with her face glued to a BlackBerry, which could be used to read email. What could possibly be so compelling, I thought, on that little screen?
The front end of Harvard’s own website, as of September 2000, was about one page long, and was all text except the Harvard logo and a rotating campus news photo the size of a postage stamp. To check email, you would open up a Telnet window and use a program called PINE to bring up an interface that resembled an Atari game. By 2002, the Harvard Crimson had occasion to run a story on the remarkable fact that newly arrived freshmen were checking their email almost exclusively by webmail.
As part of a side job for the IOP, I was entrusted in the fall of 2002 with an expensive digital camera, which I used to take photographs of visiting speakers like Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and Senator Kennedy. By the following year, as Serbia reeled from Djindjic’s assassination, most students had a digital camera of their own. Junior year I got a camcorder for Christmas, and brought it to campus to take video footage of dorm life—by senior year, to the great amusement of friends, I could edit it on my own laptop and burn it to a DVD. (YouTube would not exist for another year.)
“Social media” wasn’t a term of art yet, though we did notice it beginning to emerge around us even before Mark Zuckerberg changed the way all of us relate to the Internet and to each other. There was MySpace, and something called Friendster, and a few others that I never got around to signing up for. For a brief period, online social networking seemed like it might be a fad. It was intriguing, but could meet the same fate as the short-lived Kozmo.com, a within-the-hour retail delivery service that was popular on campus during my freshman year but arrived fifteen years too soon. Bu
t something did feel different about that February of 2004 when the creation of thefacebook.com ricocheted around campus, and we came to view it as part of Harvard, like the Crimson or the Square. It became indispensable for checking on your friends and exchanging gossip, and began to overtake AOL Instant Messenger and even compete with email. (Texting was still sporadic, since you generally had to pay by the text.) Suddenly you could look up who was friends with whom—and who was seeing whom.
In the privacy of my room, out of what I told myself was curiosity, I could even search which users were men whose profiles said they were interested in men. Still years away from facing the reality of my own sexual orientation, I had no practical use for the information, but I was impressed that some of my classmates had no reservations about putting it online in this way. Only today can I imagine the comedy of traveling back in time to tap my twenty-one-year-old self on the shoulder and explain to him that one day he would use a Facebook-connected app on a phone to be introduced to his future husband.
ACADEMICALLY, IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to decide that I should major in Harvard’s program in History and Literature. Plenty of subjects had been interesting in school, but it was literature that had captured not just my mind but also my emotions. I had wanted to explore it deeply ever since reading Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in Mr. Wylie’s sixth-grade English class at Stanley Clark School. At twelve years old, it felt like sudden enlightenment when we learned that this poem wasn’t just about two roads in a forest but about the choices we make in life. Once I’d figured out what a metaphor was, I saw them on every page of text. I wanted to read every great author, maybe even become a novelist. And doing History and Literature together meant that I could also study pretty much anything that had a past—ideas, politics, foreign countries, and global affairs.
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