At the urging of my teachers, I had submitted an entry to an essay contest sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library as part of their annual Profile in Courage Award. Around South Bend, President Kennedy was on par with Lincoln. As the first Catholic president, he had won the undying loyalty of the white ethnic working class, and as the man who had invited America to shoot for the moon, he was the first example of presidential leadership that I had understood as a child. Participating in the contest seemed almost like a duty.
I worked for days on an essay about Carolyn McCarthy, who had run for Congress on gun policy issues after her husband was shot and killed on the Long Island Rail Road. I had nearly finished the essay when I went online to research a couple last details—and found out that the previous year’s winner had written about the same person. I would have to start from scratch.
Rushing to come up with an alternate plan, I decided to write about someone I had found even more interesting, if a little more edgy politically. An obscure Vermont congressman, Bernie Sanders, had been reelected for years as a socialist—in a (then) generally Republican state. At a time when vagueness and opportunism in politics seemed to be the order of the day, here was an elected official who succeeded by being totally transparent and relentless about his values. “Socialist” was the dirtiest word in politics, yet he won because people saw that he came by his values honestly. Regardless of whether you agreed politically, it certainly seemed like a profile in courage to me.
Years later, when I was running for mayor, I would check my mailbox one morning and find a mass mailing from the local Republican Party (I guess I was still on the list) warning that Pete Buttigieg was dangerously leftist, citing the high school essay as proof. I wasn’t too worried about it—by then even many local Republicans were supporting me—but it prompted me to go back and find the essay.
It definitely reads like something written by a high schooler, starting with the opening sentence: “In this new century, there are a daunting number of important issues which are to be confronted if we are to progress as a nation.” Other comments fit the times then but no longer ring true—such as when I lamented that a strong conservative like Pat Buchanan “has been driven off the ideological edge” of an increasingly centrist Republican Party. But the basic premise still holds: that candidates for office can easily develop “an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power,” and that Sanders was an inspiring exception.
Also impressive to me then was the fact that Sanders often worked across the aisle, collaborating with Republicans when possible and using his position as the only independent in Congress to drive dialogue on issues like trade. The lesson here, which Sanders himself would demonstrate some twenty years later when he ran for president, was that bipartisanship and appeal to independents was not the same thing as ideological centrism. I wrote that Sanders’s “real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system.”
I had forgotten about the contest until one day in March, when one of my teachers appeared, beaming, in the hall and pulled me aside after class. I had won first prize, she said, and would be flown to the library in Boston to meet the award committee and accept the scholarship money that went along with it.
A few weeks later, wearing a newly purchased suit (my first), I stepped into the soaring atrium of the JFK Library in Boston Harbor. Beneath its giant American flag, flanked by my parents, our principal Mr. Cassidy, and two teachers from Saint Joe, I was ushered to an elevator and up to a reception room commanding views of the Boston skyline, with planes descending toward the airport and ships crossing the harbor. It was unlike anything in Indiana.
My eyes widened as people I had only read about in the news milled about, holding soft drinks. The lanky and cheerful Senator Al Simpson, Republican from Wyoming, widely known as one of the wittiest members of Congress, began talking to me as if we’d known each other for years. (I was too new around politics to realize that for him this was a professional skill as well as a personal quality.) “You have to keep a sense of humor, otherwise they’ll chew your ass and it’ll get you down,” he advised. A distinguished-looking journalist named John Seigenthaler casually mentioned that he had launched USA Today, while another elderly patrician gentleman dropped that he had once chaired the Democratic National Committee.
Dignified and quiet, Caroline Kennedy was standing a little apart from the other guests with her three children at her side, looking as much like an attentive mother as like the American political royalty she was. Then, I had my first experience of the feeling in a room when a very famous person walks in. The energy of the room shifted perceptibly, and I turned to see the arrival of Senator Ted Kennedy, “the Lion of the Senate.” Moving slowly but with a kind of fire in his crisp blue eyes that made him all at the same time seem fierce and warm, he was heralded by the kids yelling, “Uncle Teddy!” as they rushed from Caroline’s side into his enormous embrace.
Feeling at once elevated and humbled, I was suddenly aware of looking like an Indiana hayseed, a schoolboy shaking hands with an icon. I have no recollection of what either of us said, until the end of the conversation, when he offered me an internship the following summer in his Washington office. His voice, full of Boston ah’s, sounded just like that of President Kennedy challenging America to go to the moon and do other great things, “naht because they are easy, but because they ah hahd.” In my mind, listening to the senator speak, I heard the strains of historic presidential leadership.
It felt like I had been handed a ticket to the major leagues.
2
City on a Hill
On the underground platform at the stop for Harvard Square, the approaching Red Line train made itself felt as well as heard. A breeze of air would push out of the darkness of the curving tunnel, a beat ahead of the rumble and the light from the lead car. Each time I sensed that little gust during my freshman fall, it brought with it the thrill of knowing I now lived in a city.
I know now that, by the standards of major global cities, Boston is mid-sized. Cambridge itself might be considered quaint. But to an eighteen-year-old freshman out of northern Indiana, navigating a subway unsupervised seemed nothing less than an initiation into the ways of the metropolis. I made an effort to blend in, entering the station weekly to catch the train for an internship at the JFK Library. As I trotted down the crowded steps, I would try to mimic the worldly and jaded affect of the commuters around me. But as I returned later in the evening, hustling past the florist and the Dunkin’ Donuts and on up the stairs into the Square, my face would still have stood out amid the grumpy Bostonians, betraying the fact that I was as exhilarated by the idea of being in a “big” city as I was by the new marvels of college life.