You never know when a life-altering moment is going to happen. A former law partner of mine loved to tell about an acquaintance, John Filo, who snapped the iconic picture of the Kent State shooting in 1970. Filo, a junior, drove the picture to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette instead of waiting to publish it in his college paper. He talked them into running it, and he won the Pulitzer Prize.
I spent Spring 1968, my junior year in college, in the Washington Semester Program at American University in Washington, D.C. with students from across the country. It was a heady time to be there given the Vietnam War, Gene McCarthy’s Presidential candidacy and the prospect that Bobby Kennedy might also challenge the President in ’68.
I was primed for my own life-altering moment, and for good reason. We had almost daily seminars with Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Congressmen, agency heads, journalists and the like.
My semester project was a study of Robert Kennedy’s staff. I interviewed 25 or more of his staff, the largest on the Hill, working my way up to Joe Dolan who ran the operation. I wanted to hear from him and interview Kennedy’s highly publicized legislative assistants, Peter Edelman and Adam Walinsky. Dolan got wind of my project and invited me on the spur of the moment into the Senator’s office. There I was, google-eying his children’s drawings on the wall, imagining I might even get a chance to interview RFK. But, then, instead of answering my questions, Dolan cut off further staff contact, fearing I would release my findings to the press. He didn’t buy my “I’m just a student doing a term paper” argument. He called me at the end of the semester, asking for a copy. I refused.
Back at Wesleyan in the fall I was chagrined to learn from government professor David Adamany (later President of Temple University) that he knew Dolan, Edelman and Walinsky and could have helped me get those interviews. The “B” I was lucky to get on my incomplete paper could have been an “A+”.
Called Strike One!
Half-way through a seminar with Joseph Califano at the White House he abruptly invited us to join him on the South Portico to greet Vice President Humphrey who was arriving by helicopter to report to President Johnson on his trip to Europe. There I was again, in the midst of power, surrounded by the entire cabinet and Congressional leadership. The President marched out to the portico, reached out his hand and … somehow missed mine in favor of Hubert’s.
Foul tip, Strike Two!!
I became fast friends with another Washington Semester student who lived in Cincinnati. We both worked part-time for our home town Congressmen. Mine was Peter Rodino who later ran the Judiciary Committee’s Watergate hearings. As a reward, Rodino invited me to join him on the floor of Congress to hear General Westmoreland, home from Vietnam, address a joint session of Congress. I wore the only sports jacket I had with me, a red silk one my mother had imported from the Orient. When we arrived at our seats, Rodino introduced me to Wright Patman, powerful Chairman of the House Banking Committee. Before I could say anything, Patman barked, “that coat sticks out like a sore thumb” and banished me from the floor to sit “back with the ambassadors”.
Swing and a miss, Strike Three!!!
My friend Dick fared better. He and I drove to Charlottesville on a Friday afternoon to visit another friend of mine for “Easters”, the party weekend at the University of Virginia. Early that evening as we were walking from frat house to frat house, beers in hand, Dick’s Congressman’s staff somehow tracked him down. If Dick could get back to D.C. in time, the Congressman – Robert Taft, Jr. of Ohio, President Taft’s grandson – wanted Dick to accompany him to breakfast on Saturday morning with President Johnson.
Well, we did what all red-blooded college students would do: we continued to party. I drove Dick back to Washington in the middle of the night, just in time to change and meet Congressman Taft for The Breakfast.
When he walked in with Taft to see the President, Johnson sized up Dick, poked his face towards him, paused and said, “Son, you look like shit!”
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What have I learned from this story?
Stay Cool: When Joe Dolan called me asking for a copy of my paper, why did I tell him to “pound sand”? I lost a great opportunity to ask him for a personal meeting to deliver the paper and discuss my findings. That would have shown my good intentions. Who knows, it might have led to a summer internship working with Edelman and Walinsky.
Think Critically: It never occurred to me to touch base with my professors back at Wesleyan to see if any of them knew the Senator or high-level members of his staff. Instead, I had networked through a family member on the Hill who had low level contacts. And, I never thought about asking another student to borrow a sport coat appropriate to sitting among Senators and Congressmen at the august seat of our nation’s government.
Fact Check: I emailed Dick, managing partner of a big law firm in Cincinnati, a few years ago to fact check this story, thinking it would be a good yarn to write someday. His reply: “I have no recollection of that”. It’s highly unlikely that my friend blocked the incident out of his mind. I have no idea how I made up the story or came to believe it. Once it got laughs, I retold it and then kept telling it. People believed it. Fortunately, the story hurt no one. It just made me feel good. Now, when I tell it, I add Dick’s denial.