My life

Near the end of the term, we heard that Frank Aller had decided to return to America. He moved back to the Boston area and went home to Spokane to face the draft music. He was arrested, arraigned, then released pending trial. Frank had decided that whatever impact he’d had by resisting had been achieved, and he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life out of America, looking forward to a cold, bitter middle age in some Canadian or British university, forever defined by Vietnam. One night in December, Bob Reich said it seemed foolish for Frank to risk jail when there was so much he could do out of the country. My diary notes my reply: “A man is more than the sum of all the things he can do.” Frank’s decision was about who he was, not what he could do. I thought it was the right one. Not long after he got back, Frank had a psychiatric exam in which the doctor found him depressed and unfit for military service. He took his draft physical and, like Strobe, was declared 1-Y, draftable only in a national emergency.

On Christmas Day, I was back home in Hot Springs, a long way from Helsinki Bay, where I’d walked on the ice the previous Christmas. Instead, I walked the grounds of my old elementary school, counted my blessings, and marked the changes in my life. Several of my close friends were getting married. I wished them well and wondered whether I would ever do so.

I was thinking a lot about the past and my roots. On New Year’s Day, I finished C. Vann Woodward’s The Burden of Southern History, in which he noted southerners’ “peculiar historical consciousness,”

what Eudora Welty called “the sense of place.” Arkansas was my place. Unlike Thomas Wolfe, whose cascading prose I so admired, I knew I could go home again. Indeed, I had to. But first, I had to finish law school.

I got to spend my second term at Yale as a proper law student with the heaviest class load of my stay there. My Business Law professor was John Baker, Yale Law’s first black faculty member. He was very good to me, gave me some research work to supplement my meager income, and invited me to his house for dinner. John and his wife had gone to Fisk University, a black school in Nashville, Tennessee, in the early sixties, when the civil rights movement was in full flower. He told me fascinating stories about the fear they lived with and the joy he and his classmates found in the work of the movement. I took Constitutional Law with Charles Reich, who was as liberal as Bob Bork was conservative, and the author of one of the seminal “countercultural” books about the 1960s, The Greening of America. My Criminal Law professor, Steve Duke, was a witty, acerbic man and a fine teacher with whom I later did a seminar on white-collar crime. I really enjoyed Political and Civil Rights, taught by Tom Emerson, a dapper little man who had been in FDR’s administration and whose textbook we used. I also took Professor William Leon McBride’s National Law and Philosophy, did some legal services work, and got a part-time job. For a few months, I drove to Hartford four times a week to help Dick Suisman, a Democratic businessman I’d met in the Duffey campaign, with his work on the city council. Dick knew I needed the work, and I think I was some help to him.

In late February, I flew to California for a few days to be with Frank Aller, Strobe Talbott, and Strobe’s girlfriend, Brooke Shearer. We met in Los Angeles at the home of Brooke’s extraordinarily welcoming and generous parents, Marva and Lloyd Shearer, who, for many years, wrote America’s most widely read celebrity gossip column, Walter Scott’s Personality Parade. Then in March I went up to Boston, where Frank was living and looking for work as a journalist, to see him and Strobe again. We walked in the woods behind Frank’s house and along the New Hampshire coast nearby. Frank seemed glad to be home, but still sad. Even though he had escaped the draft and prison, he seemed caught in the throes of a depression, like that which Turgenev said “only the very young know and which has no apparent reason.” I thought he’d get over it.