In the meantime, Arthur had been paying us visits in Cambridge, driving up from New York City on his motorcycle. One time he took off its front wheel to keep it from getting stolen and put it in our apartment bathtub. He thought this was reasonable. When Sue came home, she was not happy about it, and she let him know.
Those demanding years in Cambridge and Oxford may suggest that I was suffering from a kind of compulsion. I was. For what reason did it all have to be done with such urgency? It would have been reasonable in everyone’s eyes for me to have taken my time about it, or to have foregone one or two of my degrees.
But I was bitten by some kind of bug. Once someone gets his or her resolve up and running, and gets it focused in a direction, it is hard to put on the brakes. In a word, there is momentum. Also, aggressive work habits form. For us blind people, it is especially hard to hold back because we are always concerned about security. Like those who survived and prospered long after the Great Depression but could never shake the habit of stockpiling food and cash for a rainy day, we never feel comfortable, in our guts, about sitting back and saying, “Okay, that’s it. I’ve done enough.”
So there was this hunger, but a hunger for what precisely? Surely not security alone, for even after Columbia I might have gotten decent employment of some sort. I have devoted a lot of thought to this question over the years, and I have come to realize that I had an endless hunger for ideas. Living an informed life within the mind, a mind in which thoughts proliferate and assemble, requires a steady diet of thought. The busyness in my mind, in the so-called darkness, is undisturbed by the constant flow of visual sense images. Picture thoughts as stars; during the daytime, sunlight obscures them. But not for me. When I listen to music, for example, my mind is at the ready—ready to be surprised and delighted by every note, every chord. This is one of the compensations for the loss of eyesight.
At Harvard, I had studied political science with Stanley Hoffmann, the author of many books on international politics and American foreign policy and later the founder of Harvard’s Center for European Studies. At Oxford, I had the good fortune to come under the spell of Sir Arthur Goodhart. Sir Arthur, an American who had been granted an honorary British knighthood, was investigating how, in the post–World War II era, world leaders might create effective international legal institutions.
Surrounding those two scholars—and there were many, many others—lay a realm of ideas of the very highest importance for mankind. Within the work of these scholars shone, among other things, the nature of the rule of law. That central concept of today’s liberal democracies is, on the one hand, a term of art, an abstraction within the scholar’s field of study. On the other hand, the rule of law, built on principles of justice, is far from theoretical. It underlay the very real and practical salvation of my family.
After a half century of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only really worthwhile things in the world are people and ideas. That is why the Western intellectual tradition, the tradition for which the Parthenon stands as a symbol, has meant more to me than merely collecting an array of intellectual concepts. It is the substance of that work, the collective force of the content, that has helped save me from slumping on a porch in the western New York hinterlands.
Arthur put his finger directly on this when, during that walk on Saranac Avenue in Buffalo so long ago, he reminded me that the words of the greats we were studying at Columbia were far more than mere words. The libraries at Columbia, the Bodleian at Oxford, the Widener at Harvard, and the main New York Public Library on 42nd Street: these have all been for me an extension of the great wisdom underlying the Acropolis and the Temple Mount and Jabneh. How I love dropping the names of the great thinkers and innovators of history who made it possible for me to come back from that hospital bed in Detroit. And the names of the teachers who enabled my learning. Why not? This is my account, and I owe so much to them all.
I was a good teacher myself. I might have made a career out of that, might have become like one of those scholars I so admired throughout all those years. But that was not to be my way. I applied for one of the fellowship posts in the White House. After extensive interviews and other checks, I was offered a slot. The one-year post in the White House was a prestigious, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a young person. It would require that I take a leave of absence from Harvard Law School. (I never returned, I should add.)
I also had a wife. That was a major consideration. There are times when life can come before love, but it never did for us. Sue and I were in agreement on the White House fellowship. Late in the summer of 1966, we arrived in Washington—to stay, as it turned out. The Watergate would become our home in spite of the fact that the rent would eat up more than two-thirds of my salary. The spacious lobby seemed to welcome us in such a way as to say, “You are now living a different life.”
In retrospect, I think my arrival at the Watergate apartments was a reprise of the
