I would emerge into the Square, eyes darting around the lively scene. There were the teenage punks, their expressions just a little too bored to be menacing, who loitered with skateboards off the entrance to the station. Always, someone would be passing out flyers, usually for something edgy like a Lyndon LaRouche for President rally or a Chomsky talk down at MIT. Nearby, at Au Bon Pain, lingered a mix of postdocs, autodidact geniuses, and drifters. Some of the outdoor tables had chessboards built into them, one permanently occupied by a man with a little sign inviting you to PLAY THE CHESS MISTER. Looking up overhead, I could note the time on a lighted display over the Cambridge Savings Bank building. I felt that telling the time by reading it off a building, instead of a watch, affirmed that I was now in a bustling place of consequence, as downtown South Bend had perhaps once been.
Past Out of Town News, where you could get exotic newspapers like La Repubblica or Le Monde, I would cross the street, where, unlike home, cars would actually yield to pedestrians. Across Massachusetts Avenue and through a gate, the loose energy of the Square suddenly gave way to the serene precincts of Harvard Yard. The darkening quadrangle bespoke a kind of meaningful silence (Henry Adams would say, “If Harvard College gave nothing else, it gave calm”) as I trekked across it to my red-brick dorm, Holworthy Hall.
My room on the fourth floor was itself a wonder. It had hardwood floors and a wall of exposed brick, a style I’d only seen in fashionable restaurants and occasionally on television. There was even a fireplace (bricked up, but still), and a fire escape that, with some imagination and well-meaning disregard for rules, could serve as a balcony. A letter on your pillow had a list of everyone who had ever lived in your room, which in my case included Ulysses Grant Jr., Cornel West, and Horatio Alger.
No less impressive were the present occupants living up and down that staircase. They all seemed easygoing and normal enough at first, but soon it began to feel like the academy of X-Men: everyone had some concealed special power. Cate, on the second floor, could read books at four or five times the normal pace. Andrew, on the ground floor, could do a Rubik’s Cube from any starting point in about a minute. Steve, my roommate, was like a science fiction telepath; he could dissect social interactions and predict with remarkable accuracy how the relationships among other freshmen we knew would play out with time. Pretty much everyone expertly played musical instruments, sports, or both. I had gone from the top of my high school class to wondering how I would measure up.
From out the big green door of our Holworthy Hall entryway, I could look into the faint fog of history that blankets Harvard Yard, knowing which dorms had housed which U.S. presidents, from Adams (Massachusetts Hall) to Kennedy (Weld). Subtle cues everywhere linked history with expectation. A stone lintel over one of the gates read ENTER TO GROW IN WISDOM, and on the other side DEPART TO SERVE BETTER THY COUNTRY AND THY KIND. Though the seventeenth century Puritans who founded the place wouldn’t exactly recognize it these days, the basic message had not changed: you are among a select few admitted to this place, for the rare privilege of a fine education. And you had better put it to good use.
There were daily reminders that you were expected to be part of history, if not magnificently, then tragically. In Memorial Hall, after filling your belly with scrambled eggs, you emerged into a churchlike transept lit through stained glass and lined with marble panels bearing the memories of Harvard’s Civil War dead by name, date, and place, each punctuated by a grave period.
The names all seemed characteristically Harvard. The place names seemed apt, too, almost as if those places had originally been named in the foreknowledge that a great many men would one day die there. I sometimes paused to recite a few of them, under my breath, between eating breakfast and going to class:
Peter Augustus Porter. 3 June, 1864. Cold Harbor.
Richard Chapman Goodwin. 9 August, 1862. Cedar Mountain.
George Whittemore. 17 September, 1862. Antietam.
William Oliver Stevens. 4 May, 1863. Chancellorsville.
I tried to envision being part of the Civil War generation of Harvard students—or for that matter the World War I and II soldiers remembered at nearby Memorial Church. What would it be like to wrestle with college education at the same time a nation was at war? In that fall of 2000, it was hard to picture; war seemed unimaginably remote and theoretical, something that happened only to populations of a different time and place. Still less could I imagine that, after graduating, I would ever have occasion to carry a weapon on foreign soil.
AS SOON AS I ARRIVED on campus, I started hanging around the Institute of Politics, better known as the IOP, a center for undergraduates that brought speakers and fellows from government, policy, and journalism for the purpose of inspiring young people to pursue public service. At various events, you would munch on cheese or pepperoni pizza with impressive fellows; that fall’s slate included Rick Davis, fresh off managing John McCain’s first presidential campaign, and Jamil Mahuad, the ex-president of Ecuador who had just been deposed in a coup. More formal events in the forum would host a Cabinet member or foreign prime minister, there to give a speech containing some significant policy pivot that would make headlines the next day.
At first the proximity of these figures was one more shot in the arm for an already healthy Ivy League student ego. But the more attention you paid to the leaders who came through, especially the most accomplished ones, the more you sensed that their effectiveness did not come from the playing-up of prestige. The IOP’s director, the retired Senator David Pryor of Arkansas, embodied this: he specialized in putting you at ease. Slow-talking and plain-spoken, he cultivated the demeanor of a kindly bumpkin. Not very tall and just a little hunched, he would look at you with wide and gentle eyes and greet you in the Southern drawl you might expect of a former senator from Arkansas. Listening as you spoke, he would first furrow his eyebrows in concentration, then they would rise and his face would slowly open, as he took in whatever you had to say with interest and pleasure. Interacting with him, you would feel special—and disarmed, forgetting that you were face-to-face with the man who had outmaneuvered the segregationist former Governor Orval Faubus, mentored a young Bill Clinton, and dominated the politics of his home state for a generation.
This was the political education we really needed—the realization that success in politics was not necessarily about impressing people with your pedigree or intellect. Pryor’s successor at the IOP, former Agriculture Secretary and Kansas Congressman Dan Glickman, had a similar humble streak, only with a Midwestern flavor. At a function or meeting with students, he would never fail to open by joking that he never could have gotten into Harvard, and I suppose we took that at face value rather than as flattery. In fact, Glickman had a law degree from George Washington University, had chaired the House Intelligence Committee, and was an authority on the modern role of Congress. As a freshman, you might have been lulled into thinking that you really were deserving of such compliments from this Cabinet secretary. By junior year, hearing the same sort of thing, you would have matured enough to realize you were the recipient of a kindness, the treatment that is instinctual to a politician who knows that you will be best to work with if you have first been made to feel good about yourself.