A Heart to Serve

by Bill Frist

  When it came time to apply to college, I put Princeton as my first choice, much to the wonderment of Mother and Dad. I’m sure they feared I’d lose all of the solid Southern values that so characterized our growing up. Why go to Princeton, they asked, when right here in the South you have the University of Tennessee, Ole Miss, and Vanderbilt?

  The decision to list Princeton first was heavily influenced by the quiet counsel of Tommy, who was always the one in the family to shoot for the stars. Tommy and his wife, Trisha, were like a younger set of parents to me. They began dating when I was an infant and patiently allowed me to tag along everywhere they went. When they married, I even went along on part of their honeymoon, sitting between them on the front seat of their car, all the way to Florida. So a few years later, when Tommy nudged me toward Princeton, I was quick to consider it.

  Upon graduation from high school, rather than working to make a little extra money for college, I wanted to take a few weeks of the summer and see the country. One day after school, I suggested to my closest neighborhood friend, John Gibson, “Let’s do some traveling. Let’s take a cross-country trip to California before we have to split up and head for college.”

  “My parents would never allow me to do something like that on my own,” John said. “But since it’s your idea, they might let me. Let’s have your mother call my parents and make the suggestion.” Mother was always the one in the neighborhood who could grease the wheels for something a little out of the ordinary or the expected. John’s parents, probably reluctantly, said okay, so that summer John and I, untraveled and inexperienced, set off on our own across America, with no real destination in mind. We were simply two eighteen-year-old kids, going from place to place, camping along the way, trying to see what we could discover.

  We were amazed at how vast and how diverse America really is. We traveled all the way to the Grand Canyon, where we hiked down to touch the Colorado River at the base of the canyon (arriving with bleeding feet because of poor preparation). We drove on to Palo Alto, home of Stanford University, where we stayed with a family friend (and wondered, How can students spend so much time playing tennis?). We drove the length of Pacific Highway Number One, awed at the beauty of the California coastline (and equally amazed—though not necessarily as impressed—by the hippies of the time). For three and a half weeks, John and I ambled across the country and back, stopping to explore big cities and tiny towns, experiencing firsthand the highlights of each area. We grew up a bit, as well; I will never forget that fast-talking car repairman in Arizona who successfully convinced me to buy four new “special for the desert” tires that would better withstand the heat on our long drives!

  All too soon, it was time to say good-bye to friends and family and head off to college. I’d been accepted at Princeton.

  4

  Breaking Away

  Princeton was a long way from Middle Tennessee and from the values and family that I so cherished. My brothers and sisters had all gone to college in Nashville, not far from home. I was breaking the mold. On the other hand, I was free, out from being the little brother of the Frist siblings in Nashville, free to make my own decisions, good or bad; free to choose what I’d eat, when to get up or to go to bed, or even if I wanted to go to bed at all!

  Originally chartered in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is rich in history. Most of its early presidents were preachers (Presbyterian, as was I, which gave me some subtle, intangible affinity to the place) as well as educators, including Jonathan Dickerson, Aaron Burr Sr., and Jonathan Edwards, whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” remains one of the most famous ever preached in America.

  Another early Princeton president, a favorite of mine, was the great preacher John Witherspoon, the only college president and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Benign in appearance, Witherspoon was an indefatigable ball of energy. Besides preaching twice on Sunday and handling other pastoral duties, Witherspoon carried a heavy teaching load. He saw no conflict between faith and reason, and encouraged Princeton students to test their faith against a commonsense philosophy, which he felt would strengthen their Christian commitment, rather than erode it.

  Nor did Witherspoon have any qualms about teaching religion and politics. In fact, his faith compelled him to be a strong proponent of liberty. Under Witherspoon’s leadership, Princeton became known as a “seedbed of the American Revolution.” Many of Witherspoon’s students entered public service. Eventually, the pastor/educator taught at least one president and one vice president of the United States, as well as nine cabinet members, twenty-one senators, thirty-nine congressmen, three Supreme Court justices, and twelve state governors. Witherspoon himself was a member of the Continental Congress, and in 1783, members of the Continental Congress met at Nassau Hall, the large stone building that once housed the entire college, still the dominant building on campus where I arrived in the fall of 1970.

  I went to Princeton University knowing no one. It seemed like another world to this southern boy. It seemed as if every person I met there had gone to some elite eastern boarding school, reinforcing my feeling of inadequacy. I met a group of freshmen (some of whom reminded me of how “backward” they’d heard the South to be) in my dorm, Holder Hall, and quickly got drawn into one of the traditional capers at Princeton—the stealing of the bell clapper from atop Nassau Hall. Tradition said that if students could remove the clapper from the large bell in the stately bell tower before the first day of classes, the administration would call off classes until the following week. Whether the administration ever actually agreed to such shenanigans is rather dubious. Regardless, each year, some freshmen valiantly attempted to scale the high bell tower and remove the heavy metal bell clapper. Almost always, they would get caught, and classes commenced as scheduled. The problem was, of course, that everyone knew about the tradition, and there were relatively few ways to ascend to the top of the tower without being seen. Making matters worse, the proctors—as the campus police were called—kept a wary eye on the tower, lest some wild-eyed freshman should get too close.

  Nevertheless, three of my newfound friends and I waited until about 2:00 A.M., then launched our assault on the bell. A couple of guys staged a distraction near where we knew the proctors stood guard, while my buddies and I scaled the back side of Nassau Hall like a group of commandos, taking advantage of a lightning ground wire that ran from the roof to the ground. Rather than traverse the roof where we certainly could be seen, our idea was to ascend within. We got in a window on the third floor, somehow found the trap door in the ceiling to the bell tower in the darkness, pried it open, and scurried through, closing it securely behind us. We climbed an old wooden ladder up through the dark musty tower, shadows playing on the walls, carrying the wrenches and hacksaw necessary to cut the clapper from its base in the huge cast-iron bell. We’d been successful at being admitted to Princeton, so surely we would be successful in our first caper there! We were almost there, just a couple of minutes to go. Just as I began to saw through the clapper, I heard rustling from below, penetrating flashlights flooded the area, and a proctor grasped my ankle. “You’re busted, boys,” he called with feigned anger.

  We’d been on campus two days, and we were already in trouble.

  We didn’t get punished, perhaps because the prank was such a part of the Princeton tradition. And although I hate to admit it, another group of students succeeded two nights later; to this day, they remind me with gentle ribbing that they were successful where we had failed! The tradition of trying to steal the bell clapper has since been outlawed at Princeton for liability reasons.

  As anyone who lived through the late 1960s and early 1970s can tell you, the mood on campuses across the nation was anything but tranquil. The campus unrest that accompanied the anti–Vietnam War movement had died down a bit by the time I arrived. Then in May 1970, President Nixon announced the United States would expand the war into Cambodia, and renewed protests erupted, the most inf
amous resulting in four students’ deaths and nine others’ being wounded during a confrontation with the Ohio National Guard serving as riot police on the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. In the aftermath, students staged sit-ins on campuses around the nation; millions of others went on strike, refusing to attend classes; more than nine hundred colleges and universities shut down for a cooling-off period as protests continued.

  The pastoral campus of Princeton was not immune to campus protests. We had our share of campus radicals, but I was not one of them. My only concessions to the radicalism of the times were my long hair and jeans, consistent with the times. Of course, being a southerner, in the minds of the more liberal elements at Princeton, I was suspect already. We talked differently in the South; we had mistakenly tolerated racial divisions much longer than other areas of the country; we remained the bastion of conservatism, a not-so-popular image often evoked by mention of President Richard Nixon’s term, “the silent majority.”

  For all these reasons and more, I felt slightly out of sync when I began my academic career. While no one ever expressed anti-southern prejudice toward me, snubbed me, or denigrated my cultural roots, I felt different. I hailed from a strong, conservative Christian family; I avoided the drug culture that was popular at the time and was not drawn into the party scene. I didn’t feel I needed to do those things to get along. What’s more, although I lamented the Vietnam War and the turmoil it had caused, I was not alienated from my country. I loved America and I respected our flag and all the values for which it stands.

  The inevitable result, I suppose, was that I shunned social involvement in campus life those first few months, all of which led to a terrible case of freshman loneliness. As an autumn chill wrapped around Princeton, painting the campus with a spectacular palette of colors, deadness seemed to wrap around my spirit. I vividly recall listening wistfully to the clanging Nassau Hall bell as I walked through the grand arches of old East Pyne Hall, shuffling through the fallen leaves at eleven o’clock at night on my way back from the library to my tiny dorm room across campus in Holder. The loneliness was almost palpable. Maybe my parents were right. Why hadn’t I just stayed at home for college?

  Feeling inferior academically to my fellow students who had gone to the elite prep schools of Andover and Choate and St. Paul’s (“What does MBA stand for?” they’d ask), I threw myself into my studies, primarily out of fear that I wouldn’t keep up with my fellow students, pursuing both a premed curriculum and a full course load of political science and economics courses. Part of the reason I’d decided to attend Princeton was that I was interested in policy issues and public affairs, a field in which Princeton was preeminent, as suggested by the school’s famous motto, “In the Nation’s Service.” All along, I knew I would become a doctor, just like my brothers Bobby and Tommy, cousin Johnny, and of course my father, but I was also attracted to how public policy just might be used as a means to better the lives of others.

  There was also the world of writing. Toward the end of my freshman year, I became more acclimated to the Princeton culture and began writing for the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian. To this day, I remember the lessons shared with me by my senior editors—what to get in the first two paragraphs as a hook, the importance of anecdote, just one memorable statistic, the expansive final paragraph. Working on the newspaper also gave me a ready outlet to express my opinions, which caught the attention of the few like-minded students and were excoriated by those of other persuasions.

  In those days, we had to write our articles and then physically set the type by hand. At least one night each week it was my responsibility to go to the printing press office off Nassau Street around 10:00 P.M. to do the layout and help set the hot metal type, stacked line by line, column by column in well-worn small wooden boxes for the next morning’s paper. I’d leave about three or four o’clock in the morning, the oily-smelling black ink heavily staining the old T-shirt that I had purposely worn for the task. During the fall of my sophomore year, I was an assistant editor—one of about ten sophomores given this lofty title as a reward for all of the T-shirt-stained nights of hard work—which entailed more late nights at the newspaper office.

  You never know in life when something you invested yourself in and worked hard to be good at might suddenly come in handy years later for an entirely different reason. One night I was covering a story down at the newly named Forbes College, an old hotel on the edge of campus recently converted to a dorm to handle the expansion for women who just two years before had been admitted to Princeton for the first time. I was on the brick patio just back of the college building when three young men, clearly not Princeton students, aggressively approached me as I was writing on a pad, beneath a lamppost on the otherwise dark porch.

  “How about your wallet, fella?” the one standing just in front of me said, as his two friends positioned themselves behind me.

  From hanging around the news desk, I knew that there had been reports of small gangs from nearby Trenton coming onto campus and robbing students. It didn’t take me long to put two and two together.

  “My wallet is mine,” I said a lot more confidently than I probably should have. But I did know that I was just thirty feet from the open door to the dorms, and that I had spent three years training and practicing karate after I’d lost my kneecap in the accident.

  One of the thugs behind me pushed my back as he reached for my wallet, just as the one in front of me thrust forward to grab my arms. In karate, the real secret is simply the repetition that makes moves become reflex. The reflex here was striking the assailant’s outreached arm behind me forcefully with a right arm sweep, and almost simultaneously doing a side kick forward to the other assailant’s chest. One down and one hurting. But as I looked to the left and behind me, I saw a tall shadow lifting a heavy black iron chair above his head. Another reflex—a roundhouse kick to his head. The iron chair tumbled to the side, and this assailant did not get up.

  The police came, and indeed these three were young punks from the Trenton area who had come to Princeton to prey on the easy targets, especially unassuming southern boys like me. It ended there, or so I thought.

  About a week later, I got a call in the middle of the day from Frances Carter, the revered traditional headmaster back at my Nashville high school MBA.

  “Bill, you did everything right while you were at MBA. But someone just sent me the report that you are getting in fights at Princeton. That is not what we taught you here. Our motto is ‘Gentleman, Scholar, Athlete.’ Remember that.”

  To this day, I don’t know if he was chiding me in a friendly or a scolding way. What I do know is that to make his point he read the report in front of the daily MBA assembly, and from there the word traveled to my mother, who called the next day to say, “Stay out of trouble! That is not why we let you go to Princeton; that would not have happened if you’d stayed in Nashville to go to school.” But before she finished her admonition, she, in her always supportive and optimistic and sunny way, said, “I’m sure glad you took all that karate stuff in high school when everyone thought you were a nut for choosing such an offbeat sport!” Even in the negative she would stress the bright spot—and find humor where others didn’t.

  At the end of my sophomore year, I had to choose a major. Most students in that day planning a medical career majored in a science. But consistent with a pattern that I would follow through life, I wanted to follow a road less traveled—a major in public policy. Princeton had developed a unique institution called the Woodrow Wilson School (WWS) of Public Policy and International Affairs. Founded with an endowment by Charles and Marie Robertson in 1961, the school’s purpose was to train students to enter government service. The WWS is predominantly a graduate school, but sophomores could apply to the program, which provided a two-year multidisciplinary undergraduate curriculum in politics, economics, history, and public policy.

  I was admitted to the WWS, where I would be a lone premed student in a sea of
future lawyers and policymakers for the next two years. It was a glimpse of the world I would enter in earnest twenty-five years later, when I became the only medical doctor among a sea of lawyers in the U.S. Senate.

  For the rest of my undergraduate career, I was living in two very different worlds. After a full day of studying basic economics and politics at the distinctive “Woody Woo” building (which critics say looks like a giant bicycle rack), I’d walk across the stone patio for a three-hour wet chemistry lab in the Frick Chemistry Building. These disparate groups of students and faculty rarely interacted—the prelaw set discussing and debating the great political issues of yesteryear and today, and the premed set intently and competitively focused on pure basic science and how to elevate their class rank in order to get into a top med school. I loved them both and enjoyed shifting gears each day, shuffling back and forth. Being equally comfortable in these contrasting worlds required a lot of work on my part—but I thrived on it.

  While most people saw me on campus as a conservative, probably because of my traditional southern values, I was not among the most conservative students at Princeton. The more hard-line conservative group of about thirty students on campus was led by Andy Napolitano, who later became a New Jersey judge and is best known today as an articulate and amiable judicial analyst on Fox News. Although I was sympathetic with their conservative philosophies, my views were more centrist; many would characterize me as more of a bleeding heart. I’d rather spend my late afternoons with my ten-year-old “little brother” in the community Big Brother volunteer program than attend an organizational meeting for the hardcore Conservative Alumni of Princeton (CAP).