by Fred Kaplan
An elite school with high standards, Exeter expected even bright boys to get low grades. These were expected, though, to come at Exeter, not before. Gene’s sponsors were estimable, his grades poor but not terrible. Some claim may have been made that he had special talents, in writing and painting. Certainly Auchincloss’s name and his partner-trustee’s would have been invoked. His father’s and grandfather’s also, which would have carried the weight of their careers in public life. It may have been a close call for the admissions office, which allowed Gene admission for September 1940 with a proviso: that he attend the five-week summer school to make up deficiences in his record. Before he knew it, he was grinding away at three onerous courses, two of them subjects he despised. Ironically, English was even more painfully offensive to him than Latin and math. Eager to be creative, to show his skills as a writer, he quickly found that his English teacher, Hamilton Bissell, was having none of it. “I’ll allow you to write the way you want to, but first you must show me that you can write the way I want you to.” Either Gene would grammatically parse standard English sentences and write dry, formal, correct prose, with the business letter as model, or he was in trouble. He was. Bissell ripped into his compositions. He responded resentfully, defensively. For the four themes he wrote each week he got C’s and D’s. When a boy sitting next to him strained to look at his paper during an exam, he ironically pushed it toward him. Bissell, who saw only part of what had happened, thought he was cheating, which further soured him on an arrogant student who resisted doing things the Exeter way. Bissell did what the rules required: he reported the offender to the acting principal of the summer school, Darcey Curwen. Expulsion should have been automatic. For some reason Curwen allowed him to stay. The grinding five weeks finally came to an end. Gene had failed Latin. He had gotten a D in math. He had passed English with a C, a very respectable grade at Exeter in the days before grade inflation. But all in all it was a dismal performance. He was happy to have the summer session done with.
Amid the banners, cheers, and hoopla stood the newly famous Mr. Wendell Willkie, the Indiana-born Wall Street lawyer about to receive the 1940 Republican presidential nomination. He would challenge the demon himself, Franklin Roosevelt. Caesar-like, by running for a third term, Roosevelt was about to turn the republic into an empire, all good Republicans and many conservative Democrats feared. Whomever they were for separately, they hated “that man in the White House” and worried he was about to deliver them up to the conflagration that had begun in Europe the previous September when young Gene and his classmates had sailed home-ward from Liverpool. In the late-July weather, uncomfortable Philadelphia steamed. What better place, though, than the cradle of liberty from which to launch the campaign to save the republic! Crowds, heat, colorful banners, hot rhetoric, Liberty Bells, America First! Not a breeze was to be had except from ceiling and hand fans of the sort right-wing California Senator Vandenberg’s supporters handed out by the thousands. “Fan with Van,” they said, a message sufficiently ambiguous to lend itself to anti-Vandenberg jokes. An internationalist lawyer who had long ago left the Midwest, Willkie charmed Middle America with his Hoosier accent, promising little, implying much. He would keep America out of war, a sentiment that Senator Gore had heard from Woodrow Wilson in 1916, not long before Wilson decided that America too must fight. Blind, portly, white-haired, cane extended before him, immediately identifiable, Senator Gore was among ideological soulmates. Always obsessed with his favorite American spectator sport, he had taken his fifteen-year-old grandson to one of America’s quadrennial spectaculars, a national political convention.
Earlier, at Willkie’s hotel suite, on the reception line with his grandfather, Gene shook the soon-to-be-nominated, soon-to-be-defeated candidate’s soft, sweaty hand. Now, from his seat high up in the bleachers, he could see at the press table far below, huge cigar in mouth, big round eyeglasses, stubby, wide-faced, acerbically satirical H. L. Mencken, a hero of American journalism whom Gene did not yet recognize but later identified from a newspaper photo. Politicians, favor seekers, power brokers—American history buzzed all around him at the hotel, at the convention, in the streets. Pink-faced from the heat, the normally gray-looking former President Herbert Hoover addressed the convention competently. Halfway through Hoover’s speech, Gene’s grandfather muttered, “He’s the only person in this hall who doesn’t know that he will never be President again.” When Hughdie arrived, the three went to lunch at the Philadelphia Raquet Club. Youthful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, handsome in a naval uniform, the center of attention, joined them. An enthusiastic Willkie supporter and a major contributor, Hughdie had had visions of the Italian ambassadorship dangled before his eyes. Lodge’s father and Gene’s grandfather had changed world history: together they had killed the League of Nations. At lunch they talked politics and war, the past, the future. “I remember thinking how extraordinary that this young handsome man is already a senator. Even at that age he seemed more in my age range than I had thought he would be. There was a slight stirring of ambition in me.”
In mid-September 1940 an Auchincloss limousine took Gene from Newport to New Hampshire. The venerable redbrick preparatory school, for the next three years another one of his homeless homes, soon came into sight. For some reason his summer-school grades had not excluded him from matriculation as a Lower Middler (sophomore), though they were to be an accurate indicator of his later marks. That he was a celebrity boy who had flown a plane at ten years of age, grandson of a former senator, son of a former Roosevelt cabinet member, stepson of a wealthy alumnus whose partner was an Exeter trustee undoubtedly helped. That he was just plain smart, whatever his classroom performance, some of the Exeter people recognized. As he may have himself anticipated as he was driven into town in late summer, he was to be, in his own way, a distinctive student. The limousine moved up Main Street to the collegelike campus. He asked the chauffeur to stop. With the chauffeur’s help, Gene’s luggage was placed on the sidewalk. He did not want to be seen as a rich boy who had been driven to school in a limousine. As the car pulled away, he carried his bags across the street and up the hill to the academy building.
Having already spent the summer session there, Gene was not unfamiliar with the Exeter campus, but the sheer size of the student body and faculty—about seven hundred and fifty boys and more than seventy teachers for the autumn term—struck him as noticeably different from any school he had been to before. It did not seem in the least frightening; in fact, the larger the school, the less school- and prisonlike it felt to him. Still, it was a startling change. He had with some degree of suddenness gone from an experimental ranch school in the New Mexican wilderness to an elite New England preparatory school almost as old as the republic itself. Founded in 1781, its first famous graduate Daniel Webster, Exeter dominated, with half a dozen or so other such schools, the American Protestant establishment’s educational system at the secondary level. A gatekeeping school, it sent huge numbers of its students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. From there the best went on to Wall Street law firms, high business positions, Ivy League professorships, government service, state and national political office. Some few struck out for the movie industry, for the arts, for wander years and wander lives. Occasionally some dropped out, to be referred to in the reunion classbook directories as “missing” or “unknown.” “Exeter Fair, O mother stern yet tender,” as the school song put it, trained national leaders. Just as there was correct “Exeter English,” there was a correct Exeter ideology. A rigorous curriculum was based on the belief that mental is the highest exercise, playing fields are essential as adjuncts to the classroom, privilege demands civic responsibility, intellectual challenge sharpens the mind and character, competition makes men. Those who could not keep up would be eliminated. Those who did not catch on that the Exeter maxim, “There are no rules until you break one,” meant that a first or at best a second infraction resulted in expulsion soon found themselves expelled. The emphasis was on stern rather than te
nder. Exeter prided itself on building “character.”
A major gift from Edward S. Harkness had resulted in an educational innovation in 1931 that typified Exeter’s dedication to intellectual excellence. The Harkness plan required and paid for low teacher-student ratios and a large number of small classrooms. Every class, composed of no more than twelve students, was to be taught at an oval seminar table, often in a room with a small subject-focused library. Relevant books and reference works were immediately available. Academic standards were high, the work ethic intense. Determined to match intellect to privilege and responsibility, Exeter created, with some of the Harkness money, a scholarship program, sending representatives around the country to identify and recruit the brightest, hardest-working boys. From the large academy building, on its rise above the campus, the lawns sloped toward residence and dining halls in two directions, additional classroom buildings, the chapel close by (daily attendance compulsory). Across Main Street stood the library, the student center, more residence halls, various administrative buildings, some faculty housing, the playing fields in the distance to the east. To the northeast, abutting the campus, was the old New England town through which ran the narrow, swift-flowing Exeter River, then marshes and a lake, with more Exeter property, then countryside. The school itself was mostly a self-contained world, sufficient unto itself, a total community. Town was there. But only gown counted. Whereas Los Alamos Ranch School had created unity by isolation, Exeter created it by intensity, by critical mass, by privilege, competition, and challenge.
Gene’s venue was the debating hall and the library. At the academy building he had been handed his program for the year, the same subjects he had always hated—math, Latin, and the only slightly less distasteful French. English with Mr. Crosbie was genial, gentlemanly, dull, another exemplification of correct Exeter prose. Crosbie, a fellow student in the class remarked, “looks 80, stresses spelling and punctuation, and simple, straight sentences with an absolute fixed order of things.” That Gene wrote poetry was fine, even good, but that was not what this was about. After starting with decent grades in Latin, he quickly descended to a D. “We pull Caesar apart,” Otis Pease recorded, “noun from noun, verb from verb, and explain why and why not. You must ‘know your grammar or get out.’” Gene barely ever rose above an E in math. In French he oscillated between a C and D the first term, mostly D’s thereafter. Once he saw that the only way to do better in English was to give Mr. Crosbie what he wanted, he produced enough to rise to a C, though he did not conceal that this was a concession. Quick, alert, sometimes condescending in class, he made it all too easy for teachers to recognize that they had someone bright on their hands. Only fulfilling the required work tasks, though, earned good grades. That he read frequently, avidly, made no difference. Mostly he was reading the wrong books, especially histories and novels rather than required assignments. Even his English-class compositions usually fell short, especially during his first two years. But he sensed, quite rightly, they would not expel him, except for something egregious, an infraction that related to the character issue, to mother Exeter, “stern but tender.” Short of that, he could neglect the classroom and still scrape by academically, though there would inevitably be tensions between himself and the faculty, between himself and his nightmares. “If you missed two chapels, you were out. You couldn’t cut chapel. I still have nightmares about that…. I’ve done all that I have done. I am who I am now but I’m still at Exeter…. I have a list of the classes I should go to, and I haven’t been to any of them. And we’re doing the final exams. What should I do? And I wake up in a sweat.” One teacher wrote on his department report that Gene might well become a credit to the school if they could stand him for another two years.
His best public performances were in the Daniel Webster Debating Hall, at the top of Phillips Hall, where the venerable Golden Branch and G. L. Soule debating societies and the Phillips Exeter Academy Senate met regularly. The competitive intensity rose to the intellectual and rhetorical equivalent of the controlled battles on the athletic fields. Any student could join either of the two societies. Members in the Academy Senate were elected. Debating was both a participatory and a spectator sport. At each debate four to six students got to speak. The rest served as audience, extended by other students and faculty who were attracted to the topic or the speakers. Boys who imagined themselves one day arguing important cases before the highest judges of the land or of reaching nationally renowned oratorical heights in the highest legislative arenas flocked to the debating hall, where the spiritual presence of one of the great original Exonians might inspire them. Accounts of the debates appeared prominently in the student newspaper, published twice a week, headlined with bold print as large and as well placed as any other campus event, other than football games. In autumn 1940, when Gene made his first appearance on the platform, debating had taken on a new urgency. Membership in the societies had increased. Whereas before debates had covered a wide range of topics, now the war in Europe, the prospect of America’s entry, the policies of the Roosevelt administration, and the heated Roosevelt-Willkie election campaign dominated the interest and the passions of many. And war was on the horizon: Exeter boys knew that on graduation day they might indeed move from a debating society to a combat zone. Suddenly almost all the debates touched, directly or indirectly, on this subject. The national debate between those who wanted to avoid American involvement in this foreign war and those who had embraced the internationalist ideal of America as the arsenal of democracy had its microcosmic representation in this schoolboy world. Anger, anxiety, desperation were as much in the air as idealism, patriotism, and youthful courage.
Like his grandfather, Gene too wanted to be a senator, an elevation he easily achieved at the recently established Academy Senate. A mock legislative body, it was large, unwieldy, given to committees, cabals, and posturing, an excellent place to gain and sharpen political skills. Within two weeks of his arrival, he received notification that he had “been elected to membership in the P.E.A. Senate. If possible, attend the next meeting, Sunday, Oct. 9, 1940, in the Debating Room of Phillips Hall.” He soon became one of the senators from Virginia. “I don’t remember what my first debate topic was…. I remember the room was spinning around. I do know that I could never speak without full notes…. I prepared carefully…. It took time and effort to prepare for each debate. Then I learned the trick of reading without appearing to read.”
After dark the town of Exeter fell silent, even more so once cold weather set in. On campus, night life was restricted to club activities, study hall, the dormitory, the radio, private bull sessions, public debates. Each Sunday evening the senators met in raucous session. On Wednesday night the Golden Branch Debating Society assembled. Gene soon became a member, accomplished simply by attendance and then a maiden speech. With notes in hand he appeared, fully formed it seemed, an electrically eager, epithet-extending debater to be reckoned with, sharp and acerbic in his spontaneous comments. He prepared for debates, not classes. On Friday night the G. L. Soule Debating Society convened. At the beginning of October the Golden Branch debated “Why Willkie Should be President.” The affirmative won. At the end of the month, as the election approached, Willkie won the student poll, 438 to Roosevelt’s 146, the faculty poll 20 to 18. Republicans’ hopes, on and off campus, were high. In November many boys stayed up late to hear the election results on the radio. Like the majority of Exonians, Gene was disappointed. But at the same time as Exonians favored Willkie, they also favored, by a smaller margin, that America enter into a military alliance with Great Britain. Passionately sharing his grandfather’s politics, the senator from Virginia took the conservative side in most debates: he was a happy, if not gleeful, warrior, like the Roosevelt whose political skills he admired, whose views he opposed. He increasingly perfected his Roosevelt imitation: “I hate waaaar! Eleanor hates waaaar.” Soon he organized an “America First” chapter. His more numerous, powerful opponents, led by the smart, articula
te Tom Lamont, a grandson of J. P. Morgan’s partner, had created “Bundles for Britain.” London was being bombed. German troops marched into Romania. Lend-Lease ships sailed the North Atlantic to Britain. Gene and Lamont became instant political enemies.
By spring his favorite faculty member, whom he never had for a class, was the anti-Exonian, ex-Princetonian Tom Riggs, who had recently come to Exeter. He was not there for long. Sharply intelligent, ironic, dissident, the outspoken Riggs, who taught English, attracted the disapproval of the largely mainstream Exonians. “He seemed fonder of the kids than of the faculty,” one of his colleagues remarked, “whom he thought of as fuddy-duddy establishment people. Riggs had no anchors down—he was a free spirit who didn’t care about gaining the respect of the Exeter people, and it was clear to everyone that he was there only temporarily. He rejected the discipline of the environment.” When obliged to take his turn presiding at morning chapel, the scrawny, balding, sharp-nosed, jug-eared Riggs “would pull his clothes on over pink-and-white striped pajamas, plainly visible at wrist and ankle,” Gore Vidal recalled, “and read the lesson and announcements in a voice like W. C. Fields.” The principal, Bliss Perry, who had been leading Exeter since 1914, found Riggs a major nuisance. Gene thought him fascinating, totally admirable. Since Riggs encouraged him to talk about literature and politics on terms that did not include Exonian condescension or punitive put-downs, Gene felt conversationally at ease with him, someone he could express himself to and learn from. Acutely political, Riggs was the son of a former governor of Alaska. At Princeton, with other undergraduates, he had helped create in spring 1936 a national stir with the satiric “The Veterans of Future Wars.” Its main platform was that all potential veterans should immediately receive a bonus of $1,000 so that they might get the full benefit of compensation before they were killed or maimed. “Soldiers of America, Unite. You have nothing to lose.” The national press, partly bemused, publicized the new organization. Congress investigated. One humorless congressman called them “Communists because they welcome Pacifists and Fascists with open arms.” They were beneath notice, he concluded, but should be investigated. Partly joke, partly angry satire, lightly serious, the witty Princetonians made their point effectively. Since the Veterans of Foreign Wars sold poppies to commemorate the dead, the Veterans of Future Wars sold poppy seeds. As opposed to American involvement in foreign wars as Senator Gore, Riggs came at it from the radical left. A Marxist, he seemed both brilliantly talented and sensibly antiwar. It was an eye-opener for the Senator’s grandson. When Gene showed Riggs some of the Senator’s speeches, Riggs ironically commented, “He knows how to make the eagle scream.” At Exeter, T. P. Gore received scant respect. The Willkie Republicans, mostly internationalists, thought him a reactionary rabble-rouser who, fortunately, no longer served in the Senate. Roosevelt Democrats despised him. The radical left agreed with his antiwar views but nothing else. For the first time Gene had to take seriously criticism of his grandfather’s political positions.