Arthur put his finger directly on this when, during that walk on Saranac Avenue in Buffalo so long ago, he reminded me that the words of the greats we were studying at Columbia were far more than mere words. The libraries at Columbia, the Bodleian at Oxford, the Widener at Harvard, and the main New York Public Library on 42nd Street: these have all been for me an extension of the great wisdom underlying the Acropolis and the Temple Mount and Jabneh. How I love dropping the names of the great thinkers and innovators of history who made it possible for me to come back from that hospital bed in Detroit. And the names of the teachers who enabled my learning. Why not? This is my account, and I owe so much to them all.
I was a good teacher myself. I might have made a career out of that, might have become like one of those scholars I so admired throughout all those years. But that was not to be my way. I applied for one of the fellowship posts in the White House. After extensive interviews and other checks, I was offered a slot. The one-year post in the White House was a prestigious, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a young person. It would require that I take a leave of absence from Harvard Law School. (I never returned, I should add.)
I also had a wife. That was a major consideration. There are times when life can come before love, but it never did for us. Sue and I were in agreement on the White House fellowship. Late in the summer of 1966, we arrived in Washington—to stay, as it turned out. The Watergate would become our home in spite of the fact that the rent would eat up more than two-thirds of my salary. The spacious lobby seemed to welcome us in such a way as to say, “You are now living a different life.”
In retrospect, I think my arrival at the Watergate apartments was a reprise of the swell of excitement I had experienced on the day my family moved to the house on Saranac Avenue in Buffalo. Here at last, in Washington and at the White House, was where I would be able to prove myself. The sacrifice of a hypothetical far better salary at some company or educational institution mattered little to me. That apartment, that location, was to my mind a confirmation of all Sue and I had struggled so hard to achieve, and her decision to stay with me meant everything in the world.
The White House, if you see it from a distance, looks like an ordinary mansion. But inside, it is in every way colossal. That was my perception when I was twenty-five years old, beginning my 1966–1967 service as a White House Fellow. There were seventeen of us—sixteen young men and one young woman—all serving in different capacities. We came from all over the country. Some of us were married, some not. When we arrived, all of us were hopeful, all eager—and not a one of us was cynical. It was a sacred place: the White House. You may call it the “old-boy network” or the inner circle or whatever, but one is indeed an insider when one works there. One is witness to how decisions are being made—the most important decisions, I would venture to say, anywhere.
Not only was the White House itself colossal, but I, and everyone else there, was working for a colossus. Except that he was the leader of the free world, President Lyndon B. Johnson reminded me of my father Carl—the rough exterior did not reflect the quality of the man inside.
President Johnson had thick arms and hands. But when you shook his hand, you discovered that there was nothing behind it. With all the handshaking they have to do, politicians apparently learn to save their grip. We shook hands with President Johnson many times, my wife and I.
A reception in the White House was arranged for us new Fellows. We were introduced to the president’s cabinet officers. We met the First Lady, a warm and gracious woman. I felt right at home but, at the same time, off the planet. I also felt a great deal of ecstasy mixed with a tiny bit of dread. The parquet floors were gleaming. Servers stood around in crisp white uniforms. We could have whatever we wanted. The chandeliers were like diamonds, sparkling in the summer night. Sue wore a white dress. The red carpeting in the rear of the reception room was like a river. We introduced ourselves, trying to be humble and at the same time trying to make clear we were worthy.
We laughed. Oh, how hard we laughed at the jokes President Johnson told. Not that he was particularly funny, but we were young and awestruck. And power will make you do things you might not ordinarily do.
One day the president’s secretary called me in my office. The president wanted to see me. I thought I was done for. I tried to think about what I might have said or done wrong. When I went in to see him, he took me by the shoulders and brought me close. He had a way of doing this, like an uncle. He said he was very proud of me. I had been voted something or other, one of the best something, and he had heard about it. He was pleased that I was serving on his staff. To be touched by him, to please him—it was better than pleasing your father.
Sue thought I was becoming unhinged. I told her, no, no, this sort of thing happens all the time. The White House was a strange, haunting, magical place.
We Fellows wanted to stay neck deep in all this—to arrange ourselves near the president. More than that, we also wanted him to like to have us near him, to be listened to by him. Access to the president was the point, the purpose. Was the development of our own power part of it? I would be lying if I said it was not. It has been said about people like us Fellows that the common ingredients are pluck and purpose. To which might be added ambition.
I was a Kennedy man walking into a Johnson house—and as was widely known then, there was no love lost between President Johnson and President Kennedy’s brother Bobby, then a United States senator from New York. But working for President Johnson was a very big deal. This was the man who created an enduring legacy in civil rights and in Medicare and Medicaid. And yet…there was the war in Vietnam. During my time in the Johnson White House, my head was spinning, but my stomach was churning. It was a dreadful personal conflict for me.
In the White House, I worked with the Departments of Defense, State, Commerce, and others; with NASA; with information systems and biomedical research. I called leaders in various fields and set up meetings with them and then wrote up reports that might prove useful to the White House. I went on trips to Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, France, Germany, England, and Italy.
I had to muster all the knowledge I had ever acquired. I discussed physics, especially the physics of sound; hospital technology; proprietary technological processes; the Belgian fair-trade agreements; a national software network. I drove with the head of a major American computer interest down the Amalfi Coast at reckless speeds, feeling the sea air on my face. I stayed at the Hotel des Indes, the Hôtel de Crillon, Hotel Königshof, Hotel Europa, and other hotels in which I could not have imagined I would ever find myself.
We Fellows attended formal dinners, informal dinners, and parties. At one party, a man did a burlesque dance; he went on to become Secretary of the Army. Everyone danced bawdily that night. The woman with the wig that flew off while dancing was my wife. She laughed, and everyone thought she was simply the greatest. (She would later work at the White House herself.) The man who was drinking Scotch had called an air raid down on his own position in Vietnam. The man with a gin and tonic is now the managing director of an investment banking house. The man holding a beer was a physicist who would later become a newspaper executive. Several would go on to be lawyers and businessmen. One would run a museum and another, an oil company. We knew how to let off steam, but when we worked, we worked hard. We were responsible, we were fresh, we brought something new to the table. We thought all that, anyway, and perhaps it was true.
When you work in the White House, people are likely to listen to you and want to talk with you, because, again, it is all about access. This was a real life, not a scholarly life, not a theoretical life. I was done with that. If you did not perform in the White House, then all that had come before in your life was worth nothing. You would go home having lost all you might have built yourself up to be.
But you also lose a certain innocence in the White House. You see things you do not want to see. You see people behaving in an untoward manner, such as a staffer rifling throug
h another staffer’s desk. If the president says, “Let us sit down and reason together,” it means you’ve already lost.
I had come into the White House believing everything. I left believing half, or three-fourths, which means that I had lost the comfort of uncritical belief. One needs to believe in one’s country and in one’s president. For most young men my age, even back then, loss of belief did not mean so much. But it meant a lot to me. I lost, well, a certain softness. I had knowledge about the war in Vietnam that was not much discussed then, but we Fellows knew that America was into some very bad things. One thing we knew a year before the New York Times and others blew it open was that the war was a disaster for the United States. It was hard to accept.
We Fellows also lost interest in life beyond the White House. Nothing seemed so good or important out there. We lost sleep. We lost time to jog or swim or pay bills or pick up our dry cleaning or see the dentist. We lost visits home to our families. We lost the money we might have been making had we not taken the fellowship in the first place—for our salaries were unremarkable. We all wondered whether our posts were leading us to the very subtle shift from faith to cynicism. We knew only that we would not be the same people as when we started. We did not move from the outer prefectures into the heart of the kingdom only to discover that the emperor resembled our old neighbors. But we saw that he was, in fact, just a man.
On December 15, 1966, an unexpected political shock occurred. Bill Moyers, White House press secretary and special assistant to the president, abruptly resigned. At the age of thirty-two, he was widely considered the most powerful figure in the administration after the president, and he was a man I greatly respected and admired. No one except Bill, who was exceptionally close to President Johnson, knows definitely whether the resignation was forced or not. Bill, to his great credit, has so far as I know steadfastly refused to talk or write about the event or about any of his private conversations with the president. But what was known was that Bill opposed escalation of the war, while President Johnson was torn about it. A defensive president was not a pretty sight to those of us inside his house.
One incident during my White House days stands out in vivid relief. I arranged to meet with Wernher von Braun during the summer of 1967. He was fifty-five years old. Everybody knew about him, but Jewish people knew about him in a special way. Von Braun had worked with the Nazis at the infamous rocketry base at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea in northern Germany. He was working there when my Aunt Bertha and her family were hiding under a windmill in Holland.
There is debate about whether he, the architect of the Nazi V-2 rocket program, believed in Hitler’s cause. He was an officer of the Schutzstaffel, the SS. He worked alongside slaves, though he later said that the whole slave-labor thing repulsed him. The only thing certain is that his true passion in life was space and space travel.
No one told me I had to go see von Braun to report to my boss about the status of NASA and our space efforts. I wanted to meet von Braun for a personal reason. He was then the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Having become a naturalized citizen of the United States after the war, he had restarted his life in Alabama. I met him at his office there.
It was a bright and humid summer day. Sweat spread like an oil stain around the trench of my back. His handshake was strong, and I could not help thinking übermensch. If Hitler had wanted to design an Aryan, it would surely have been in the image of this rocketeer.
Behind his desk were plastic models of different kinds of rockets. Our conversation was terribly banal. He answered all the questions I put to him—about vertical takeoff and landing designs, the moon program, the space program—in a concise engineer’s way. Indeed, he had done great things for the advancement of our space program.
Our meeting lasted about an hour. It still seems implausible: a Jewish man meeting on a friendly basis in the American South with a former officer of the SS. Toward the end of the meeting, I asked him about the evolution of rocketry, a veiled attempt to get him to tell me about his own evolution. He did not go into that.
He might have launched into a soliloquy about the terrible decisions he had made, about his being an accomplice to horrors. Then I would have described how my own family had nearly been drawn back into Germany to be eliminated and might very well have wound up in the same concentration camp where he had worked. He might have asked me to forgive him, and of course, I would not have.
When he talked about rocketry, I tried to pay attention, tried to avoid thinking about the Nazis. On his desk were pencils sitting in what resembled a wooden canoe. (Remember, I create mental images of the places and people I encounter.) The desk itself was wood and was polished so sharply that it shone. A white phone. A brown leather calendar and a dark brown desk blotter. Closed manila folders. A white kerchief stuck out of his breast pocket. He spoke with an unmistakable German accent, one I had heard frequently back in Buffalo.
Von Braun would be celebrated as the person primarily responsible for our country’s putting a man on the moon. He also worked at Peenemünde, where more slaves died making the V-2 than were killed by the rocket in England, its target. We concluded the meeting. I stood up, and we shook hands. His hand had shaken that of President Kennedy. His hand had grasped the hand of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. His hand had buttoned the tunic of a black SS uniform, had risen to hail Hitler. On his way back to the officers’ quarters after dinner, might he have paused one night to look up at the starry sky he loved so much and seen the souls of Jewish people passing into the heavens?
I left and got on a plane back to Washington.
As my fellowship drew to a close, I had multiple offers to continue in the Johnson administration or elsewhere in government, but I had a desire to start my own technology company and was fortunate enough to attract considerable financial support from Wall Street investors for the enterprise. What’s more, having established many relationships at Harvard with participants in President Kennedy’s New Frontier program and similar connections with figures in Washington, I also had a large pool of extraordinary talent to draw from. Some of those people, including Bill Moyers and various former cabinet officials, would soon join me. Not long afterwards, I also sold (for a handsome sum) the technology behind my compressed-speech machine and thus was blessed with considerable resources of my own that I could direct toward later businesses.
More about those companies in future chapters, but this first one was wonderfully aligned with what had so inspired me back in my college days: President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Even when I was newly blind, I felt the thrill of that challenge. Now, my company would be helping design the computer system for the initial lunar excursion module.
Almost two full years after that triumphal moment—on June 28, 1971—I happened to be back in Buffalo. My little sister Brenda’s high-school graduation ceremony was that weekend. The whole family was going. Then an urgent call was put through to me from Washington to say that someone was trying to reach me. It was my mother, right there in Buffalo. When I spoke with her, she told me to go to the emergency room at Columbus Hospital. My father, Carl, had been in an accident at his shop.
After having lost all his money in the scrap-metal business, Carl had fallen back on selling rags—far less profitable than metal. For months, I had been asking him to retire, and he had finally agreed. I told him that I would take care of him.
It was the day before his retirement. He was driving a forklift around his warehouse, moving bales of rags from one place to another, and he accidentally drove the forklift into a brick wall. The forks pierced the wall, which fell upon Carl and crushed his chest. How long he had lain there, how he had gotten to the hospital, what it had smelled like among the rags and dust and old brick and ammonia and creosote, and how the broken sternum and the punctured lungs must have felt—these were things I would think about later.
The doctor came out and signaled for me t
o follow. “How is he?” I asked.
Doctors and nurses brushed by, intent on their various duties.
“Your father expired, Mr. Greenberg.”
I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. Of course, I knew this was a possibility, but it took my breath away. I didn’t hear much else of what the doctor said.
Later that day I made the funeral arrangements and contacted family members. The following day, I gave the eulogy at the service. I settled Carl’s debts and other financial liabilities, including a payment of $14,000 that needed to be made to the city because of his responsibility for the collapse of the brick wall—he had been operating in a condemned building. People rested their heads on my shoulders in their grief. I grieved, too, although in a way different from the others, I think. As I have explained, after my biological father, Albert, passed away it was as if I had become the leader of the family. I felt comfortable in the role: I was a son but also a father—to my brother and sisters.
So it was that at night, and for brief moments during the day in Buffalo after Carl’s passing, I thought about our family’s various burdens, but also of our blessings. The hard ride our family had had, but also that we were a family—that my family before, as well as my family now, understood completely what it really meant to be a family. That it meant something to us to have our religion: that, too, we knew very clearly. One cares for one’s brethren—one gives, that is all one can do, and one gives even when one has nothing to give. Carl, for example, had cosigned for houses for other people. And as we would discover only after her death, our mother had given to charities at the very times when she herself had almost nothing.
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend Page 15
