My life

“awk” for awkward, “ugh,” “rather dull, pathetic.” On one paper I saved, he finally wrote “clever and thoughtful,” only to follow it by asking me to “next time be a sport” and write my essay on “better paper”! One day Dr. Irving read aloud an essay one of his former students had written on Marvell to illustrate the importance of using language with care. The student noted that Marvell loved his wife even after she died, then added the unfortunate sentence, “Of course physical love, for the most part, ends after death.” Irving roared, “For the most part! For the most part! I suppose to some people, there’s nothing better on a warm day than a nice cold corpse!” That was a little rich for a bunch of eighteenyear-old Catholic school kids and one Southern Baptist. Wherever he is today, I dread the thought of Dr. Irving reading this book, and can only imagine the scorching comments he’s scribbling in the margins. The most legendary class at Georgetown was Professor Carroll Quigley’s Development of Civilizations, a requirement for all freshmen, with more than two hundred people in each class. Though difficult, the class was wildly popular because of Quigley’s intellect, opinions, and antics. The antics included his discourse on the reality of paranormal phenomena, including his claim to have seen a table rise off the floor and a woman take flight at a séance, and his lecture condemning Plato’s elevation of absolute rationality over observed experience, which he delivered every year at the end of the course. He always closed the lecture by ripping apart a paperback copy of Plato’s Republic, then throwing it across the room, shouting, “Plato is a fascist!”

The exams were filled with mind-bending questions like “Write a brief but well-organized history of the Balkan Peninsula from the start of the Würm Glacier to the time of Homer” and “What is the relationship between the process of cosmic evolution and the dimension of abstraction?”

Two of Quigley’s insights had a particularly lasting impact. First, he said that societies have to develop organized instruments to achieve their military, political, economic, social, religious, and intellectual objectives. The problem, according to Quigley, is that all instruments eventually become

“institutionalized”—that is, vested interests more committed to preserving their own prerogatives than to meeting the needs for which they were created. Once this happens, change can come only through reform or circumvention of the institutions. If these fail, reaction and decline set in. His second lasting insight concerned the key to the greatness of Western civilization, and its continuing capacity for reform and renewal. He said our civilization’s success is rooted in unique religious and philosophical convictions: that man is basically good; that there is truth, but no finite mortal has it; that we can get closer to the truth only by working together; and that through faith and good works, we can have a better life in this world and a reward in the next. According to Quigley, these ideas gave our civilization its optimistic, pragmatic character and an unwavering belief in the possibility of positive change. He summed up our ideology with the term “future preference,” the belief that “the future can be better than the past, and each individual has a personal, moral obligation to make it so.” From the 1992

campaign through my two terms in office, I quoted Professor Quigley’s line often, hoping it would spur my fellow Americans, and me, to practice what he preached.

By the end of my first year, I had been dating my first long-term girlfriend for a few months. Denise Hyland was a tall, freckle-faced Irish girl with kind, beautiful eyes and an infectious smile. She was from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, the second of six children of a doctor who was studying to be a priest before he met her mother. Denise and I broke up at the end of our junior year, but our friendship has endured.