BEFORE THE END OF THE DECADE I would see Iraq for myself, visiting Baghdad as a civilian economic adviser, but back then all I knew was what I learned in class and read in the paper. I saw our president declare that Saddam Hussein must disarm his chemical and biological weapons, and vow, “If he won’t do so voluntarily we will disarm him.”
The tough talk was rousing, but it made no strategic sense. Saddam was a notoriously sinister dictator whose top priority, as with all dictators, was his own survival. It followed that he viewed his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons (as most of us believed he had) as an insurance policy to keep him in power. He would only part with them voluntarily if it would benefit his personal security—an unlikely course for someone who did not trust America. But actually using them would almost certainly lead to his destruction, so he had every reason to sit on his weapons if he had them. The only scenario where he might use them would be if he had nothing to lose by doing so—and now, by invading, we were poised to create that very situation. Logically, this meant that an invasion would be very costly and bloody for American troops. Invited to represent the College Democrats at a rally outside the Science Center at Harvard, I spoke of the difference between necessary wars, like those memorialized in the church nearby, and unnecessary wars that could take young lives for no purpose at all.
It turns out that most of us, for and against the war, were wrong about the weapons. He didn’t have any—and so they were not there to be used against American troops. Iraq fell quickly, and for a moment it seemed that the invasion was a vindication of American intervention abroad. Protesters like me looked foolish. Sure, the pretext for war was actually false, but who would quibble over that, as a brutal dictatorship was being turned into a model democracy at relatively little cost to America?
Then the suicide bombings began. We were not, as the administration had promised, “greeted as liberators.” A well-functioning democracy did not emerge. And the ensuing chaos made it clear that the administration had not planned for the aftermath of the invasion, as Iraqi cities became a kill zone for our troops. We who were against the invasion had been wrong about the weapons, but right about the war. The administration had been wrong about both.
AS ALL THIS UNRAVELED, I was spending my senior year mostly absorbed in a different war—Vietnam, the focus of my thesis on the influence of Puritan thought. In an unused seminar room that a few of us had taken over, I sat surrounded by Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups and books, immersed in the recent past while its parallels with the present became impossible to ignore. I studied the way America’s government in the 1970s told its people an increasingly improbable story of mission and moral clarity, trying to defy a reality on the ground that could no longer be denied amid a rising American body count.
I remember very little about Senior Week or graduation, other than that it rained, and that we had a sense of graduating into a darkening world where we would need to make ourselves useful. We had arrived on campus during the final months of the Clinton presidency, on the heels of the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history. Now we were wartime graduates. It felt like a kind of memorial service for our vanishing college life as we filed in our black gowns into the expanse of the open quadrangle known as Tercentenary Theater and sat facing Memorial Church while the massive structure of Widener Library towered behind us under the warm rain clouds. I listened vaguely as the U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, gave a speech about three simultaneous global crises of security, solidarity, and cultural division. Meanwhile, at William & Mary’s commencement address, Jon Stewart treated the graduates to a cheeky but rueful commentary on the “real world,” on behalf of the generation in charge: “I don’t really know how to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it. . . . But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next Greatest Generation, people.”
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Analytics
The education that began at Harvard continued in one form or another for the next ten years. First came Campaigns 101, for which my classroom was a cubicle in a windowless office in downtown Phoenix, where I did research and press work for the Kerry-Edwards presidential run of 2004. After that defeat I followed my boss, Doug Wilson, back to Washington, where he worked for the former defense secretary, William Cohen. The winter and spring amounted to Washington 101, an education in the mechanics of our capital, which I navigated as a sort of gofer for Doug, helping him to organize a conference of American and Muslim leaders. (This included an early lesson in the whims of political fortune after we invited the three Republicans then deemed most likely to become president: George Allen, Lindsey Graham, and Mark Sanford.) The summer of 2005 saw me back in an actual classroom, this time in Tunis, where a highly affordable language program gave me the chance to improve my Arabic.
Formal education continued that fall: a Rhodes Scholarship took me to Oxford for two years in large halls and small professors’ rooms in the ancient colleges learning philosophy, politics, and economics. Back to the U.S. in 2007, I landed a job in Chicago at McKinsey & Company, and my classroom was everywhere—a conference room, a serene corporate office, the break room of a retail store, a safe house in Iraq, or an airplane seat—any place that could accommodate me and my laptop. The capstone on my decade of education was in 2010, when I left McKinsey for a tough but priceless year-long political crash course in which I challenged the state treasurer of Indiana, and was overwhelmingly defeated in my first experience on the ballot.
Geographically, the arc of these years was a sort of looped boomerang, a first departure from home that took me east, then farther west, then back east; then across the Atlantic; and then at last closer to home, to Chicago, less than a hundred miles from South Bend, and finally all the way back to the neighborhood where I grew up. In retrospect it was a homeward spiral all along: the more my worldly education grew with lessons from abroad, the clearer it became that this long and winding road was leading me back home, to find belonging by making myself useful there. Now it’s obvious, but in the midst of that education it felt like just one step at a time. A Tunisian souk, an Oxford exam room, and a Great Lakes office park all had something to teach me, and each place nudged me closer to home.
EDUCATION CAN COME BY DRUDGERY or by adventure, and I had my share of both. Sometimes they’re interwoven. In Washington, days spent mostly arranging other people’s airline tickets were occasionally punctuated by the chance to tag along and meet some foreign ambassador as part of the conference preparations (adventure enough, for a twenty-two-year-old interested in policy). In Tunis, where air-conditioning was as rare as a summer day below a hundred degrees, mornings in the sweaty classroom gave way to afternoons walking through hookah smoke and perfume in the markets of the old city and trying, in vain, to get Tunisian acquaintances to reveal over coffee how they felt about living under a dictatorship. (A few years later, the Arab Spring would tell us things that the friendly yet circumspect young Tunisians would not discuss openly with foreign students, no matter how many prying and dangerous questions we na?vely asked.)