“What does he have in mind?”
“Well, he’ll be singing a number of songs, but the most important, the one to which Sue and I will be walking down the aisle, is ‘And This Is My Beloved.’”
“It’s a nice song,” he said. “Have the kid give me a call.”
The wedding was held on an August weekend in 1962 at a Reform synagogue that Sue had selected. Her rabbi officiated with my rabbi, who was Orthodox. My brother was best man. I had a number of friends there from college as well as from growing up. My family and some neighbors were there, of course, as were Sue’s family and friends.
It was warm out, but I think not hot. I cannot quite remember the weather, nor do I recall events of the wedding in any particular order. I do remember feeling wonderfully accomplished, even though we were about to embark on a difficult period of life. One of the greatest accomplishments was finally being wedded to the love of my life.
I remember that as the rabbis were reading the religious marriage contract, the ketubah, which they did in Aramaic, I felt anointed and sanctified. I felt that something spiritual was transpiring, something sacred and holy. I felt buoyant, transcendent, filled with color and light. I was probably somewhat worried before and after the wedding. But during the event, I was beyond that. I had my wife by my side.
The reception was held in a lovely garden adjacent to the synagogue. Arthur sang beautifully. There was lots of dancing. As the band played the “Horah,” the guests lifted Sue and me up on chairs and bounced us up and down until we got dizzy. Then they picked up my mother and father and twirled them around, then Sue’s parents. The old-timers smiled and probably wondered how they had arrived at this point.
I thought about how far we had come. Not so many years earlier, Sue was a girl I desperately wanted to know. We were still kids now, but initiated and anointed and ready to start our real lives. I was going to be in school, with a certain handicap, and she was going to be working and helping me out. We did not have firm ideas about what we were going to do in the long term, but we hoped it would be something important, something great. I knew I was going to be with the person for whom I felt an unlimited, unabashed love.
After our wedding, Sue and I moved into an apartment at 19 Wendell Street in Cambridge, a tiny fourth-floor walk-up barely large enough for the furniture we had scraped together. Sue began working at a school for special-needs kids, some of whom were children of Harvard professors.
There was a great deal of apprehension among us new grad students as classes began. They were taught by men and women of enormous accomplishment. Those in my field, government, had all consulted with the White House at various times. One, a famous figure during the Vietnam War period and now thought of by many people as a war criminal, was a criminal in at least one sense. He borrowed my tape recorder to use for a book he was writing—and broke it. I spent a lot of money to replace it. Eventually, after plenty of prodding on my part, he compensated me for the loss, but without an apology. Another professor—Louis Hartz, the great theorist on American politics—became so excited during his lecture one day that at its conclusion he slumped over the lectern in exhaustion.
The Cuban missile crisis boiled up while I was at Harvard. I first got wind of the whole terrifying episode not from radio or television but from a professor of government, Richard Neustadt, another of my Columbia mentors who had moved on to Harvard. He was always professorial-looking—tweed jacket and pipe, very neat. He stood totally erect, as if he were a Roman orator, and all that was important to him lay not just in the Forum but in the heavens. I was walking across campus one day when, as usual, he stopped to chat. This time he seemed distracted. There was no pipe. He told me he had just gotten back from Washington, where he had been meeting with President Kennedy, and that things were not going well there. I asked him what was wrong. He only said that I should stay close to the television for the next few days.
I recall being uneasy following that chance meeting. That night the TV commentators were talking about what might turn out to be the end of the world. There was deep anxiety, even fear of the catastrophic. Yet in the back of most people’s minds was the hope, the belief that the president was in control and knew what to do. We had parked our missiles in Turkey, and now the Soviets had theirs in Cuba.
There were otherwise both good and terribly bleak days for us in Cambridge. It is a rare thing to be among brilliant people all the time, to study under them—and I believe even rarer among students to appreciate the privilege as fully as I think I did. And then there were the friendships I made with the people who read to me, many of whom would go on to do great things in their fields.
On the downside was the little money we had, even with the generous support of our parents. Luckily, with fellowships and scholarships, I was soon earning most of what we needed. Of course, I practically had to kill myself to keep up the necessary grades (no mulligans for blind boys). And there was always the interminable work: the hours spent at night—when I ought to have been sleeping—learning all that I could, not
