As my new friends and I would sit basking in sunlight, chattering around the sundial on College Walk, I often felt uneasy, perhaps a bit disheartened. Hamilton and his colleagues at the college had fought physically and intellectually for the freedom of which we were mere passive beneficiaries. Other than the future of America itself, was there any ideal or objective to which I could harness the same zeal that Hamilton had brought to his life’s ambitions? This question became everything for me. Why else had I come as far as I had, if not to pursue some great aspiration for myself, and even for my country and the world?
In its own offhand way, Columbia kept feeding this budding sense that I was somehow in destiny’s grip. One sunny day in April 1959, I met with one of my professors, sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his Hamilton Hall office. Dressed casually in a brown tweed sport coat and an open-collared plaid shirt, and possessing a pronounced cleft chin, he sat facing me on a swivel chair. I knew that he rode a motorcycle to his office every day and that he had written, among other books, The Power Elite, which fascinated me because of its detailed analysis of the country’s oligarchy. I dared to ask the great thinker how one could produce a great book. He instantly responded, “Write one thousand words each and every day—it’s that simple.”
As he went on to discuss his course subjects and his philosophy, we could hear the cheering of a crowd outside. Suddenly, he grabbed my arm, and as we flew down the stairs, he said, “You’re now going to meet a great man—Fidel Castro has come to town.”
Breathless, Mills introduced us to a bearded young man with bushy sideburns who was wearing a green military uniform and a crumpled, short-brimmed, baseball-type cap perched atop his black hair. Mills had somehow maneuvered us through the barricades on College Walk so that we could talk with him. When the cordial conversation ended, Mills, gripping my elbow, described the thirty-one-year-old Cuban as “a great revolutionary leader who will bring needed change to Cuba.”
The next day I was back in Hamilton Hall talking to a fellow Buffalonian. He happened to be Richard Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and influential commentator on American politics. He was recognized on campus for his bow tie and his friendly, unpretentious manner. I told him of meeting Castro and shared my concerns about the Cuban leader. I expressed doubt, for example, that Castro meant to hold the free elections he had promised. That led Hofstadter to a lengthy comparison of Castro to the leadership of our own revolution, and then on to an equally lengthy disquisition on American political history in general. While appropriately attentive and intrigued, I was also awaiting the moment to interject a naïve question and wondering whether I should ask it. Finally, when he had completed a thoroughgoing account of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, I blurted out, “Professor, how do you become president of the United States?”
Hofstadter seemed taken aback by the question. He placed his elbow on his desk, then tilted his head and rested his cheek on his fist, and for the longest time said nothing. I shifted nervously in my chair, hoping that there would soon be a response of some sort—but short of ridicule. Finally, he said, “Put yourself in the stream of history.”
I left his office wondering what he meant. But I was to continue to honor my intense interest in the American political tradition for the rest of my life, inspired above all by my appreciation for what the country meant to my family, including some who had barely escaped the fascist tyrannies abroad—and others who had not.
I passed by Butler Library and looked up at the names chiseled around its fascia, as I did every day. Homer—top left, most prominent—followed by the university’s century-old judgment as to which of Western civilization’s other intellects were the greatest: Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Milton. I understood the veneration in which they were held in my new world within the university gates. It was almost as if we students, our professors, and the most supreme masters of thought of all time were mingling together at a big party within these few acres on the island of Manhattan. The Olympians became my revered guides, and they were a more diverse pantheon than I had ever expected to meet.
John Schnorrenberg, our fine-arts professor, young and intensely passionate about teaching, taught us the Parthenon for a full month. As he moved on to Rembrandt and later to Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Jackson Pollock, he became ever more enthusiastic. Schnorrenberg, a Princeton graduate, would often strut around the classroom, his Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from a gold chain on his belt, as he described, say, the glories of 1950s modernist art. He regularly suggested that we students purchase paintings by a fellow Princetonian, a young artist named Frank Stella. Schnorrenberg was convinced that Stella would eventually be considered a major artist. I came to share Schnorrenberg’s view but could not afford even a Stella print.
Schnorrenberg also trained us to take a blank sheet with a small hole in the middle and move it so that we could follow individual lines or sections in various great drawings. Doing this line by line or section by section, we learned to be able to “reintegrate,” or reconstitute, each drawing from its parts by
