representing Latvia. She was a few years older than I, and I had the feeling that going to these kinds of meetings was her career. She spoke with conviction about her belief that one day Soviet Communism would fail and Latvia would again be free. At the time I thought she was three bricks shy of a full load. Instead, she turned out to be as prophetic as Al Lowenstein.
Besides my work for the committee and my occasional excursions, I took three courses in summer school—in philosophy, ethics, and U.S. Diplomacy in the Far East. For the first time I read Kant and Kierkegaard, Hegel and Nietzsche. In the ethics class I took good notes, and one day in August another student, who was smart as a whip but seldom attended class, asked me if I’d take a few hours and go over my notes with him before the final exam. On August 19, my twenty-first birthday, I spent about four hours doing that, and the guy got a B on the test. Twenty-five years later, when I became President, my old study partner Turki al-Faisal, son of the late Saudi king, was head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, a position he held for twenty-four years. I doubt his philosophy grade had much to do with his success in life, but we enjoyed joking about it.
The professor for U.S. Diplomacy, Jules Davids, was a distinguished academic who later helped Averell Harriman write his memoirs. My paper was on Congress and the Southeast Asia resolution. The resolution, more commonly known as the Tonkin Gulf resolution, was passed on August 7, 1964, at the request of President Johnson, after two U.S. destroyers, the USS
The main point of my paper was that, except for Senator Wayne Morse, no one had seriously examined or even questioned the constitutionality, or even the wisdom, of the resolution. The country and the Congress were hopping mad and wanted to show we wouldn’t be pushed around or run out of Southeast Asia. Dr. Davids liked my paper and said it was worthy of publication. I wasn’t so sure; there were too many unanswered questions. Beyond the constitutional ones, some distinguished journalists had questioned whether the attacks had even occurred, and at the time I finished the paper, Fulbright was asking the Pentagon for more information on the incidents. The committee’s review of Tonkin Gulf ran into 1968, and the investigations seemed to confirm that at least on the second date, August 4, the U.S. destroyers were not fired upon. Seldom in history has a non-event led to such huge consequences. Within a few months, those consequences would come crashing down on Lyndon Johnson. The swift and nearly unanimous passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution became a painful example of the old proverb that life’s greatest curse is the answered prayer.
THIRTEEN
My senior year was a strange combination of interesting college life and cataclysmic personal and political events. As I look back on it, it seems weird that anyone could be absorbed in so many big and little things at the same time, but people inevitably search for the pleasures and deal with the pain of normal life under difficult, even bizarre circumstances.
I took two particularly interesting courses, an international law seminar and a European history colloquium. Dr. William O’Brien taught the international law course, and he permitted me to do a paper on the subject of selective conscientious objection to the draft, examining other nations’ conscription systems as well as America’s, and exploring the legal and philosophical roots of the conscientiousobjection allowances. I argued that conscientious objection should not be confined to those with a religious opposition to all wars, because the exception was grounded not in theological doctrine but in personal moral opposition to military service. Therefore, though judging individual cases would be difficult, the government should allow selective conscientious objection if its assertion was determined to be genuine. The end of the draft in the 1970s made the point moot. The European history colloquium was essentially a survey of European intellectual history. The professor was Hisham Sharabi, a brilliant, erudite Lebanese who was passionately committed to the Palestinian cause. There were, as I recall, fourteen students in a course that ran fourteen weeks each semester and met for two hours once a week. We read all the books, but each week a student would lead off the discussion with a ten-minute presentation about the book of the week. You could do what you wanted with the ten minutes—summarize the book, talk about its central idea, or discuss an aspect of particular interest—but you had to do it in these ten minutes. Sharabi believed that if you couldn’t, you didn’t understand the book, and he strictly enforced the limit. He did make one exception, for a philosophy major, the first person I ever heard use the word “ontological”—for all I knew, it was a medical specialty. He ran on well past the ten-minute limit, and when he finally ran out of gas, Sharabi stared at him with his big, expressive eyes and said, “If I had a gun, I would shoot you.” Ouch. I made my presentation on Joseph Schumpeter’s
“It’s time.” Mother sent for me and I flew home. I knew it was coming, and I just hoped he would still know me when I got there, so that I could tell him I loved him.
By the time I arrived, Daddy had gone to bed for good, getting up only to go to the bathroom, and then only with help. He had lost a lot of weight and was weak. Every time he tried to get up, his knees buckled repeatedly; he was like a puppet whose strings were being pulled by jerking hands. He seemed to like it when Roger and I helped him. I guess taking him back and forth to the toilet was the last thing I ever did for him. He took it all in good humor, laughing and saying, wasn’t it a hell of a mess and wasn’t it good that it would be over soon. When he became so weak and unstrung he couldn’t walk even with help, he had to give up the bathroom and use a bedpan, which he hated doing in front of the nurses—
friends of Mother’s who had come to help.
Though he was fast losing control of his body, his mind and voice were clear for about three days after I got home, and we had some good talks. He said we would be all right when he was gone and he was sure I would win a Rhodes scholarship when the interviews came in about a month. After a week, he was seldom more than half conscious, though he had surges of mental activity almost to the end. Twice he woke to tell Mother and me he was still there. Twice when he should have been too far gone or too drugged to think or speak (the cancer was way down in his chest cavity now, and there was no point in letting him suffer on aspirin, which is all he would take until then), he amazed us all by asking me if I was sure I could take all this time away from school, and if not, it wasn’t really necessary for me to stay, since there wasn’t much left to happen and we had had our last good talks. When he couldn’t speak at all anymore, he would still wake and focus on someone and make sounds so that we could understand simple things like when he wanted to be turned over in the bed. I could only wonder at what else was passing through his mind.
After his final attempt to communicate, he lasted one and a half horrible days. It was awful, hearing the hard, sharp thrusts of his breathing and seeing his body bloat into disfigurement that did not look like anything I’d ever seen. Somewhere near the end, Mother came in and saw him, burst into tears, and told him she loved him. After all he had put her through, I hoped she meant it, more for her sake than for his. Daddy’s last days brought a classic country deathwatch into our house. Family and friends streamed in and out to offer their sympathy. Most of them brought food so we wouldn’t have to cook, and so we could feed the other visitors. Since I hardly slept, and ate with
