My life

Rick Stearns threw me for a loop one night when he told me I was unsuited for politics. He said Huey Long and I both had great southern political styles, but Long was a political genius who understood how to get and use power. He said my gifts were more literary, that I should be a writer because I wrote better than I spoke, and besides, I wasn’t tough enough for politics. A lot of people have thought that over the years. Rick was close to right, though. I never loved power for power’s sake, but whenever I got hit by my opponents, I usually mustered enough toughness to survive. Besides, I didn’t think I could do anything else as well.

In early 1970, having received Jeff Dwire’s tape recounting his conversation with Colonel Holmes and the high lottery number, I knew I was out of ROTC and wouldn’t be drafted at least until late in the year. If I wasn’t called, I was torn between coming back to Oxford for a third year, which the Rhodes scholarship would cover, or going to Yale Law School, if I was accepted. I loved Oxford, maybe too much. I was afraid if I came back for a third year, I might drift into a comfortable but aimless academic life that would disappoint me in the end. Given my feelings about the war, I wasn’t at all sure I’d ever make it in politics, but I was inclined to go back home to America and give it a chance.

In April, during the break between second and third terms, I took one last trip—to Spain, with Rick Stearns. I had been reading up on Spain and was totally mesmerized by it, thanks to André Malraux’s Man’s Hope, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and Hugh Thomas’s masterly The Spanish Civil War. Malraux explored the dilemma war presents to intellectuals, many of whom were drawn to the fight against Franco. He said the intellectual wants to make distinctions, to know precisely what he is fighting for and how he must fight, an attitude that is by definition anti-Manichean, but every warrior is by definition a Manichean. To kill and stay alive he must see things starkly as black and white, evil and good. I recognized the same thing in politics years later when the Far Right took over the Republican Party and the Congress. Politics to them was simply war by other means. They needed an enemy and I was the demon on the other side of the Manichean divide.

I never got over the romantic pull of Spain, the raw pulse of the land, the expansive, rugged spirit of the people, the haunting memories of the lost civil war, the Prado, the beauty of the Alhambra. When I was President, Hillary and I became friends with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. (On my last trip to Spain, President Juan Carlos had remembered my telling him of my nostalgia about Granada and took Hillary and me back there. After thirty years I walked through the Alhambra again, in a Spain now democratic and free of Francoism, thanks in no small part to him.)

At the end of April when I got back to Oxford, Mother called to tell me that David Leopoulos’s mother, Evelyn, had been murdered, stabbed four times in the heart in her antique store. The crime was never solved. I was reading Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan at the time and I remember thinking he might be right that life is “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” David came to see me a few weeks later on his way back to army duty in Italy, and I tried to lift his spirits. His loss finally provoked me to finish a short story on Daddy’s last year and a half and his death. It got pretty good reviews from my friends, provoking me to write in my diary, “Perhaps I can write instead of be a doorman when my political career is in shambles.” I had fantasized from time to time about being a doorman at New York’s Plaza Hotel, at the south end of Central Park. Plaza doormen had nice uniforms and met interesting people from all over the world. I imagined garnering large tips from guests who thought that, despite my strange southern accent, I made good conversation.