Outside Looking In Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Reading Greek in Jail

  Chapter 2 - “They’ve Killed Dr. King”

  Chapter 3 - Dallas

  Chapter 4 - Turbulent Times

  Chapter 5 - Baltimore

  Chapter 6 - Movies

  Chapter 7 - Voices

  Chapter 8 - Nixon

  Chapter 9 - Carter and Others

  Chapter 10 - Clintons

  Chapter 11 - Jack

  Chapter 12 - Studs

  Chapter 13 - Bill

  Chapter 14 - Natalie

  Index

  ALSO BY GARRY WILLS

  Bomb Power

  Martial’s Epigrams

  What the Gospels Meant

  Head and Heart

  What Paul Meant

  What Jesus Meant

  The Rosary

  Why I Am a Catholic

  Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Translation)

  Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit

  Saint Augustine (A Penguin Lives Biography)

  Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Garry Wills, 2010

  All rights reserved

  A portion of this book appeared as “Daredevil” in The Atlantic.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING—IN—PUBLICATION DATA

  Wills, Garry, 1934-

  Outside looking in: adventures of an observer / by Garry Wills.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44441-2

  1. Wills, Garry, 1934- 2. Wills, Garry, 1934-—Political and social

  views. 3. Journalists—United States—Biography. 4. Historians—

  United States—Biography. I. Title.

  JC251.W555 2010

  973.92092—dc22

  [B] 2010005323

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  TO NATALIE

  (who else?)

  Introduction

  A Bookworm’s Confession

  A reviewer of one of my books in the 1960s said that I did not really belong to the intellectual circles of that time. Though I seemed to be educated, I showed no influence from Freud or Marx, Nietzsche or Sartre, the stars of the fashionable intelligentsia. That was true enough. I had, of course, read them, as was expected from a teacher in secular universities. But they had not entered early or deeply into my mental formation, which did set me apart from my contemporaries in the academy. I can understand why that might make me less interesting to readers, less part of the vital currents of my day. But I did not expect to be interesting. My attention was directed elsewhere, and largely to the past.

  The earliest influence on me was that of Gilbert Chesterton, the Edwardian journalist, the subject of my first book, and not a usual figure in intellectual circles. Chesterton’s heroes became my early heroes: Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, John Ruskin, William Cobbett, Robert Louis Stevenson—again, not hot items in the period’s literary world. These figures made me a kind of Anglophile, but not a snobbish one. Chesterton was far from elitist. He was a populist, a man who said that democracy is like blowing your nose—you may not do it very well, but you ought to do it yourself. He also said that democracy means that when someone is drowning, your first instinct is not to say that “a Ph.D. is drowning” but that “a man is drowning.” And he said that the ordinary person should not be found guilty of a crime but by a jury of fellow ordinary persons.

  Some thought that because I began by writing for William Buckley’s National Review, I must be a conservative. But Buckley denied that. When he asked me, at our first meeting, if I was a conservative, I said, “Is a Distributist a conservative?” He said, “Alas, no.” Philip Burnham, a Commonweal editor and the brother of Buckley’s National Review colleague James Burnham, had assured Bill that Distributism was far from the free-market capitalism that Buckley considered the basis of modern conservatism. Distributism was the politics of Chesterton, neither capitalist nor socialist, arguing for the preservation of private property but for its wider distribution. Liberals, on the other hand, would soon be telling me that I could not belong to them either, since they were secularists—my religiosity disqualified me.

  Born in 1934, I grew up in the 1940s, when being a Catholic still set one somewhat outside the national mainstream, ready to look inside without going there. I continued being an outsider when I was an academic looking in on journalism, or a journalist looking in on the academy, not joining professional organizations, not attending their meetings. For eighteen years I taught at Johns Hopkins University, and for twenty-five years at Northwestern University, sometimes full-time, sometimes part-time. When teaching part-time I did a fair amount of journalism, mainly for Esquire under its brilliant editor, Harold Hayes, or for the New York Review of Books under its brilliant editor, Robert Silvers. Throughout, I was a classicist (Yale Ph.D.) observing modern politics, or a political observer looking back at history.

  My father thought I was guaranteeing my inability to make a living when I got my doctorate in classical Greek. That, he thought, would make me a perpetual sideliner. He had always feared that my bookworm ways guaranteed that life would pass me by. It bothered him that, when caddying for him as a boy, I carried a book in the golf bag and pulled it out whenever his party was held up by those playing ahead. One summer when I was in grade school, he paid me money (I think five dollars) if I would go a whole week without reading anything. I took the offer, and used the money to buy a new book.

  Far from keeping me out from life, books opened door after door, not so much for me to go through the door as to look through. The most important event in my life occurred only because I was reading a book at the time (Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion). In my home as a child, I
read books by flashlight under the bedcovers. This so worried my mother that she asked a doctor if I were not ruining my eyes by reading too much. In the Jesuit prep school I attended, I read in the john at night, the only place where lights were kept on. I was devouring Dostoyevsky novels, which my friend Lew Ellingham had pressed on me. I saved weekends for books I especially hoped to savor, beginning them under a favorite tree. One reading feast I was able to indulge when a traveling statue of Our Lady of Fatima came to the school, as part of Catholic prayers for the conversion of Russia. For three days and nights, an around-the-clock vigil was held before the statue, each student kneeling for a half hour. The lights were on everywhere all night, so I plunged into War and Peace and read nonstop for three days and three nights, with only short catnaps, until I finished it. Lew told me it was the greatest novel ever written—and he was right. It is still the novel I most often reread (in various translations)—even more than David Copperfield or Waugh’s Sword of Honor.

  In summers, when I was not caddying or mowing lawns, I worked as a stock boy in a men’s garment store, unpacking shipments, hanging suits, packing purchased items. In spare time at the back of the store, I read in a cheap volume of all Shakespeare’s plays (its print so small I could not read it now without a magnifying glass). At lunchtime I would read the book as I walked to a hamburger joint owned by some relatives by marriage, where I would continue reading as I ate. Over several summers, and with some time in the school year, I finished the entire book, not understanding many of the words but marveling at the music. In school I had been assigned to memorize Mark Antony’s funeral oration and Shylock’s speech. I also had to memorize other poems as punishment for what the Jesuits called “jugs,” for misconduct. Some of those poems I can still recite, though I do not even know who wrote them.

  As a wordaholic, I was blessed by my schooling—Catholic grade school, high school, college (St. Louis University), and graduate school (Xavier of Cincinnati). That deprived me of scientific training (I am still an ignoramus on that), but it made me grammatical. One of the false ways to praise a classical education is to say that only those who study Latin really learn English grammar. Nonsense. The way to learn grammar is to diagram sentences, as the Dominican sisters of Adrian, Michigan, taught me—subject, verb, object on the principal line, with dependent phrases or clauses, adjectives or adverbs, on ramifying parts of the structure. Now I constantly read in newspapers or hear on television things like “The body of consultants are agreed,” though we Catholic kids of that era knew that “body” was on the main line and “of consultants” was on a subsidiary hook under the subject, so “body . . . is” must be proper. We had no problem with “who” or “whom.” No problem with “dangling” constructions—we knew just where they fit on the stemma of the sentence as we plotted it. When I went to a Jesuit high school, I learned to diagram Latin and Greek sentences in the same way, but English came first, not vice versa.

  My father was right in one way. Reading has made me not so much a participant in life around me as an observer. I have stood to the side of events. I covered many student protests and antiwar demonstrations, and had many marijuana joints passed to me, but never tried one. I never tried tobacco either. I always hated the smell of cigarettes—my father said he would pay me a hundred dollars if I did not smoke till I was twenty-one, and I won that money easily. Alas, he did not follow his own advice—he and my mother were chain smokers. To get out of the smoky house, I early formed the habit of reading while I walked outside.

  I covered as a journalist many political campaigns, but never joined one, worked for one, or wrote a politician’s speeches (though I was asked to). When I was on Jimmy Carter’s campaign plane in 1976, his speechwriter James Fallows asked me if I did not want to see a campaign from within—I answered that one can be an entomologist without becoming a bug. I have been able to look in on places and events where I hardly belonged—jails, police raids, opera singers’ backstage dressing rooms, strippers’ changing areas, church rectories, Pentagon offices.

  I stayed outside looking in. I was thought by some to be on the right wing or the left wing because I was closely observant of people there—I was, for instance, a friend of Karl Hess in both his libertarian right-wing days as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater and in his anarchist left-wing days as an antiwar protester. But I have mainly been a conventional person, a churchgoer, one whom Lutheran scholar Martin Marty called “incurably Catholic,” saying the rosary every day. I have also been incurably (in a term of the time) square—middle-class, never bohemian or avant-garde (no James Joyce or Beckett, just Evelyn Waugh; no Pollock or Rothko, just Tintoretto; no John Cage or Alban Berg, just Verdi). I have been “stodgy” in my children’s eyes, puttering around my midwestern neighborhood unrecognized. (I am normally so unnoticeable that I have trouble getting waited on in stores.) Since I was often writing at home, my children’s friends asked, “Why doesn’t your daddy go to work?” On the other hand, my daughter, when she was a child, said of a lawyer friend of mine, “He must be a professor.” Why? her mother asked. “Because he dresses like a bum, like Dad.” I remain old-fashioned to this day. I was very slow to come to the computer and the cell phone, and I have never had any traffic with Palm Pilot, BlackBerry, iPhone, personal blog, texting, Twittering, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, or other modern tools.

  I am so square that I have been married for fifty years to one woman, Natalie, the only person with whom I have ever had sex. I agree with Hilaire Belloc: “It is well to have loved one woman from a child.” I have been “faithful” in other ways, teaching classes for forty-three years in two long stretches at only two universities, working with only three literary agents over half a century, in a profession where writers jump about frenetically. As someone so colorless, I am not interesting in myself, but I have been able to meet many interesting people and observe fascinating events, partly by being unobtrusive. My wife says that, because I am so unthreatening, dogs and old ladies loved me. Until I became old myself, old ladies did often mother me, and dogs followed me home (sometimes to embarrassing consequences with their owners). This book presents some of the figures, neither dogs nor old ladies, who fascinated, amused, or educated me. Call it the confessions of a conventional bookworm.

  1

  Reading Greek in Jail

  The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was a swirl of action. I ran in the night from police sweeping demonstrators out of Lincoln Park. I stopped only in a doorway to help my friend Wilfrid Sheed, who had to use a cane from his young polio days. Later, I wiped away tears with other people at Grant Park as Mark Lane, a conspiracy theorist on the Kennedy assassination, flopped dramatically on the ground while his own camera crew treated him as a martyr to tear gas. I had known him since he sued me for an article challenging his conspiracy theories. On a later occasion, coming across me in jail, he would urge me to stay there while he defended me as a protester against the Vietnam War.

  It was a mad and noisy scene that night in Chicago, but one quiet event was the most riveting for me. I was talking with a friend, the journalist Murray Kempton, at a checkpoint sealing off approaches to the convention center. High wire fences shunted even those with press credentials to another entrance. The comic and activist Dick Gregory was arguing with the police, saying his home was on the other side of the fence. The police said he could come in, but no one else. “But these are my friends,” Gregory said, gesturing to all those around, “and I have invited them to my house for dinner.” Kempton snapped shut his reporter’s notebook and said, “I never turn down an invitation from Dick Gregory.” He went through the gate and was instantly arrested—he would write a beautiful piece that night from jail.

  I was tempted to follow Kempton, who was a hero to me. But I was determined to be an outsider looking in, not a participant. I would keep to that standard as I covered other antiwar actions in Berkeley and Toronto, at Kent State, and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But events caught up with me in 1972. A rec
ent acquaintance called me at my home in Baltimore and said, “You have written about many antiwar demonstrations. Isn’t it time to put the rest of your body where your mouth is?” I resisted, saying how feckless most demonstrations turned out to be. He said that this one would be different. Lawyers were drawing up the constitutional grounds of the action. It would be a First Amendment petition for redress of grievance—a demand that Congress recognize the illegitimacy of funding an undeclared war. Some in Congress had agreed to present the petition on the floor, and we would block the entrance to the chamber until it granted our request. I thought of watching Kempton go through the gate in Chicago and shrugged. “I guess it’s my turn.”

  People I respected had already agreed to take part in this action, and they had been joined by a hundred or so others. So I went to Dupont Circle, to the hotel across from the Institute for Policy Studies, where I was a board member. A strategy session was convened there the night before we were to swarm like bees at the door of the House. The session broke into factional disputes over what to do if and when our petition was not met. We could refuse to leave when the Capitol Police tried to clear the entrance. We could resist arrest. We could move away from the door but hover near to chant our protests. The arguments droned in circles, going nowhere.

  Joseph Papp, the director of New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, said it was pointless to get arrested once our demand was rejected. Besides, he had business back in New York—he could not afford to stay overnight in jail. Others demanded a more determined course. Weary of the back-and-forth, I went into the hotel bar. Eva Coffin followed me—I knew her from Yale, where she had been the wife of the chaplain, William Sloan Coffin. Though divorced from him now, she admired the spirited activist he still was. She said, “We need Bill here now.”