My life

“The Dodge Rebellion,” the slogan of the automobile company. He and his supporters portrayed themselves in white hats fighting against the Jesuit administration and me. Because of my good relations with the school administrators, my job and car, my orthodox campaign, and my glad-handing manner, I became the establishment candidate. I worked hard, and so did my friends, but I could tell we were in trouble from the intensity of Modglin and his workers. For example, our signs were disappearing at an alarming rate. In retaliation, one night close to the election, some of my guys tore down Modglin’s signs, put them in the back of a car, then drove off and dumped them. They would be caught and reprimanded. That sealed it. Modglin beat the hell out of me, 717–570. He deserved to win. He had outthought, outorganized, and outworked me. He also wanted it more. Looking back, I see I probably shouldn’t have run in the first place. I disagreed with the majority of my classmates about the need for relaxing the required curriculum; I liked it the way it was. I had lost the singular focus on campus life that had provided the energy for my victories in the earlier races for class president. And my daily absence from campus made it easier to portray me as an establishment backslapper gliding his way through the turmoil of the time. I got over the loss soon enough and by the end of the year was looking forward to staying in Washington for the summer, working for the committee and taking some courses. I couldn’t know that the summer of ’67 was the calm before the storm, for me and for America. Things slow down in the summer in Washington, and the Congress is usually in recess all of August. It’s a good time to be there if you’re young, interested in politics, and don’t mind the heat. Kit Ashby and another of my classmates, Jim Moore, had rented an old house at 4513 Potomac Avenue, just off MacArthur Boulevard, a mile or so behind the Georgetown campus. They invited me to live with them and to stay on for senior year, when we would be joined by Tom Campbell and Tommy Caplan. The house overlooked the Potomac River. It had five bedrooms, a small living room, and a decent kitchen. It also had two decks off the second-floor bedrooms, where we could catch some sun in the daytime and, on occasion, sleep at night in the soft summer air. The house had belonged to a man who wrote the national plumbing code back in the early 1950s. There was still a set of those fascinating volumes on the living-room bookshelves, incongruously kept upright by a bookend of Beethoven at his piano. It was the only interesting artifact in the whole house. My roommates bequeathed it to me, and I still have it. Kit Ashby was a doctor’s son from Dallas. When I worked for Senator Fulbright, he worked for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington State, who, like LBJ, was a domestic liberal and a Vietnam hawk. Kit shared his views and we had a lot of good arguments. Jim Moore was an army brat who had grown up all over. He was a serious historian and genuine intellectual whose views on Vietnam fell somewhere between Kit’s and mine. In that summer and the senior year that followed, I formed a lasting friendship with both of them. After Georgetown, Kit went into the Marine Corps, then became an international banker. When I was President, I appointed him ambassador to Uruguay. Jim Moore followed his father into the army, then had a very successful career managing state pension investments. When a lot of states got in trouble with them in the 1980s, I got some good free advice from him on what we should do in Arkansas.