While religion and prayer were very much a part of our family life, they were essentially personal and private. Perhaps because of this I never fell into the common practice of quoting the Bible in the speeches I made during my school years or later in my political life. When I was Vice President, President Eisenhower urged me to refer to God from time to time in my speeches, but I did not feel comfortable doing so.
I suffered my first political defeat in my junior year at Whittier High School, when I lost the election for president of the student body. I was appointed student body manager by the faculty, and it was my responsibility to handle the sale of tickets to football games and to persuade local businessmen to advertise in the school yearbook.
Our senior year, 1930, was the 2000th anniversary of the poet Vergil’s birth, and the Latin teachers at school decided to put on a special dramatization of the Aeneid to commemorate the event. I was chosen to play Aeneas, and my girl friend, Ola Florence Welch, was his beloved Dido. It was my first experience in dramatics, and it is amazing that it was not my last.
The performance was sheer torture. First, the audience was bored stiff—Vergil obviously had not written the Aeneid for a high school assembly in Whittier, California. Second, the dramatically tender scene in which I embraced Dido evoked such catcalls, whistles, and uproarious laughter that we had to wait until they subsided before we could continue. Third, whoever rented the costumes had not taken into account the size of my feet—11D! I would guess that the silver boots I had to wear with my costume were no bigger than size 9. It took both Latin teachers and me several minutes to get them on and almost as long to get them off, and the hour on stage in them was agony beyond description and almost beyond endurance.
I had dreamed of going to college in the East. I finished third in my high school class, won the constitutional oratorical contests in my junior and senior years, and received the Harvard Club of California’s award for outstanding all-around student. There was also a possibility of a tuition scholarship to Yale, but travel and living expenses would amount to even more than tuition, and by 1930 the Depression and the enormous expenses of Harold’s illness had stripped our family finances to the bone. I had no choice but to live at home, and that meant that I would have to attend Whittier College. I was not disappointed, because the idea of college was so exciting that nothing could have dimmed it for me.
In college, as in high school, I continued to plug away at my studies. For the first time I met students who were able to get good grades without working very hard for them, but I needed the steady discipline of nightly study to keep up with all the courses and reading.
Each of my teachers made a great impression on me, but a few in particular touched my mind and changed my life.
Dr. Paul Smith was probably the greatest intellectual inspiration of my early years. I took his courses in British and American civilization, the American Constitution, and international relations and law. He was a brilliant lecturer, who always spoke without notes. His doctorate was from the University of Wisconsin, where he had studied under the great Progressive historian Glenn Frank. Dr. Smith’s approach to history and politics was strongly influenced by the Progressive outlook, and it came as a revelation to me that history could be more than a chronicle of past events—that it could be a tool of analysis and criticism.
Albert Upton, who taught English and was the director of the drama club, was an iconoclast. Nothing was sacred to him, and he stimulated us by his outspoken unorthodoxy.
At the end of my junior year he told me that my education would not be complete until I read Tolstoy and the other great Russian novelists. That summer I read little else. My favorite was Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last major novel. I was even more deeply affected by the philosophical works of his later years. His program for a peaceful revolution for the downtrodden Russian masses, his passionate opposition to war, and his emphasis on the spiritual elements in all aspects of life left a more lasting impression on me than his novels. At that time in my life I became a Tolstoyan.
Dr. J. Herschel Coffin influenced me in a different way. He taught a course called “The Philosophy of Christian Reconstruction,” which I took in my senior year. This course was better known by its subtitle, “What Can I Believe?” It involved a weekly written self-analysis based on questions raised in class. We studied the theory of evolution, the literal authenticity of the Bible, and the nature of democracy, and at the beginning, middle, and end of the course, we had to write an essay answering the question, “What Can I Believe?”
On October 9, 1933, I described some of my impressions and problems at the beginning of the course. This composition gives a clearer picture of my beliefs, questions, and uncertainties as a college student than anything I could reconstruct today.
Years of training in the home and church have had their effect on my thinking. . . . My parents, “fundamental Quakers,” had ground into me, with the aid of the church, all the fundamental ideas in their strictest interpretation. The infallibility and literal correctness of the Bible, the miracles, even the whale story, all these I accepted as facts when I entered college four years ago. Even then I could not forget the admonition to not be misled by college professors who might be a little too liberal in their views! Many of those childhood ideas have been destroyed but there are some which I cannot bring myself to drop. To me, the greatness of the universe is too much for man to explain. I still believe that God is the creator, the first cause of all that exists. I still believe that He lives today, in some form, directing the destinies of the cosmos. How can I reconcile this idea with my scientific method? It is of course an unanswerable question. However, for the time being I shall accept the solution offered by Kant: that man can go only so far in his research and explanations; from that point on we must accept God. What is unknown to man, God knows.
I thought that Jesus was the Son of God, but not necessarily in the physical sense of the term: “He reached the highest conception of God and of value that the world has ever seen. He lived a life which radiated those values. He taught a philosophy which revealed those values to men. I even go so far as to say Jesus and God are one, because Jesus set the great example which is forever pulling men upward to the ideal life. His life was so perfect that he ‘mingled’ his soul with God’s.”
I wrote that the literal accuracy of the story of the resurrection was not as important as its profound symbolism: “The important fact is that Jesus lived and taught a life so perfect that he continued to live and grow after his death—in the hearts of men. It may be true that the resurrection story is a myth, but symbolically it teaches the great lesson that men who achieve the highest values in their lives may gain immortality. . . . Orthodox teachers have always insisted that the physical resurrection of Jesus is the most important cornerstone in the Christian religion. I believe that the modern world will find a real resurrection in the life and teachings of Jesus.”
The populist elements of my father’s politics, the Progressive influence of Paul Smith, the iconoclasm of Albert Upton, and the Christian humanism of Dr. Coffin gave my early thinking a very liberal, almost populist, tinge.
Thanks to my teachers I studied hard and received a first-rate education at Whittier. But academic pursuits were by no means the only—or the most important—part of my four years there. From the first week of school on, I was involved in extracurricular activities.
Whittier did not have any fraternities, but there was one social club, the Franklin Society, whose members had high social status on campus. One of the first students I met at college was Dean Triggs, who had just transferred to Whittier after two years at Colorado College, where he had belonged to a fraternity. He thought it undemocratic to have only one such club at Whittier, and he suggested that we start another. Albert Upton agreed to be our sponsor, and we decided to call ourselves the Orthogonian Society—the “Square Shooters.”
While the Franklins were socially oriented, the Orthogonians recruited mostly athletes and me
n who were working their way through school. The Franklins posed for their yearbook pictures wearing tuxedos; we posed for our pictures wearing open-necked shirts. We were officially dedicated to what, with our collegiate exuberance, we called the Four B’s: Beans, Brawn, Brain, and Bowels. Our motto was Écrasons l’infame—“Stamp out evil”—and our symbol was a boar’s head. Although only a freshman, I was elected the first president of the Orthogonians, and I wrote our constitution and our song.
College debating in those days was a serious pursuit and a highly developed art, and to me it provided not only experience with techniques of argument but also an intensive introduction to the substance of some issues I would deal with in later years.
Because of the way our college debates were organized, the team had to be prepared to argue either side of a question. This sort of exercise turned out to be a healthy antidote to certainty, and a good lesson in seeing the other person’s point of view. Because of this debate training I became used to speaking without notes, a practice that was of great importance to me later in my political career. During my senior year I won the intercollegiate extemporaneous speaking contest of Southern California.
One of the topics we debated was free trade versus protectionism. Once I had thoroughly researched—and argued—both sides, I became a convinced free-trader and remain so to this day. Another topic was whether the Allied war debts should be canceled. Although once again I debated both sides, I became convinced that the economic recovery of Europe was more important than our insisting on payment of war debts. We also debated whether a free economy was more efficient than a managed economy. Though this was at the height of the early enthusiasm for the experiments of the New Deal, I surfaced from my immersion in both sides of that topic thoroughly persuaded of the superior merits of a free economy.
During the winter of my second year in college, the debate team made a 3,500-mile tour through the Pacific Northwest. My father let us take our family’s eight-year-old, seven-passenger Packard for the trip. The leader of our debating team was Joe Sweeney, a red-headed Irishman with loads of self-assurance.
One of our stops was San Francisco. In those days shortly before the repeal of Prohibition, San Francisco was a wide-open town. We followed Sweeney down winding, colorful streets to a drugstore. He showed the man behind the counter a card one of the bellboys at the hotel had given him, and the man led us over to a wall covered with shelves of drugs. He pushed the wall and it opened like a door into a speakeasy. It was not a particularly boisterous place, although the smoky air and the casual attitude of the patrons made us feel that we had wandered into a veritable den of iniquity. I did not have the slightest idea what to drink, so Sweeney ordered a Tom Collins for me. Except for him, none of us had been in a speakeasy before, and I had never tasted alcohol, so it was a lark just to sit there watching the people, listening to their conversation, and admiring the barmaid who served our drinks.
I tried out for several plays in college, and I was usually given the character parts. I was the dithering Mr. Ingoldsby in Booth Tarkington’s The Trysting Place, the Innkeeper in John Drinkwater’s Bird in Hand, an old Scottish miner in a grim one-act play, The Price of Coal, and a rather flaky comic character in George M. Cohan’s The Tavern. I also served as stage manager for the college productions of The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance.
Student politics was necessarily low-keyed in a small school where everyone knew one another. My only major “campaign” was for president of the student body at the end of my third year. I was the candidate of the Orthogonian Society, and my opponent was Dick Thomson of the Franklin Society. We were good friends and did not feel much enthusiasm for running against each other.
I based my campaign on the controversial issue of allowing dancing on campus. I had no personal stake in it since I had not even known how to dance until Ola Florence forced me to learn a few steps at a party. My argument was strictly pragmatic: whether or not one approved of dancing—and most of the members of Whittier’s board of trustees did not, as a matter of religious principle—most of the students were going to dance. Surely, I argued, it would be better to have dances on campus where they could be supervised, rather than off campus in some second-rate dance hall.
I won the election and then had to deliver on my promise. Herbert Harris, acting president of the college, helped me work out a compromise with the board of trustees whereby the board would rent the nearby Whittier Women’s Club building, which had a fine ballroom. We held eight successful dances there during the year. The only problem now was that I had to attend. Ola Florence and several other coeds were very patient with me, but I fear that many new pairs of slippers were scuffed as a result of my attempts to lead my partners around the dance floor.
My happiest memories of those college days involve sports. In freshman year I played on the Poetlings basketball team, and we had a perfect record for the year: we lost every game. In fact, the only trophy I have to show for having played basketball is a porcelain dental bridge. In one game, jumping for a rebound, a forward from La Verne College hit me in the mouth with his elbow and broke my top front teeth in half.
Two factors have always motivated my great interest in sports. First, sports have provided necessary relief from the heavy burdens of work and study that I have assumed at every stage of my life. Second, I have a highly competitive instinct, and I find it stimulating to follow the great sports events in which one team’s or one man’s skill and discipline and brains are pitted against another’s in the most exciting kind of combat imaginable.
Ever since I first played in high school, football has been my favorite sport. As a 150-pound seventeen-year-old freshman I hardly cut a formidable figure on the field, but I loved the game—the spirit, the teamwork, the friendship. There were only eleven eligible men on the freshman team, so despite my size and weight I got to play in every game and to wear a team numeral on my sweater. But for the rest of my college years, the only times I got to play were in the last few minutes of a game that was already safely won or hopelessly lost.
College football at Whittier gave me a chance to get to know the coach, Wallace “Chief” Newman. I think that I admired him more and learned more from him than from any man I have ever known aside from my father.
Newman was an American Indian, and tremendously proud of his heritage. Tall and ramrod-straight, with sharp features and copper skin, from his youngest days he was nicknamed Chief. He inspired in us the idea that if we worked hard enough and played hard enough, we could beat anybody. He had no tolerance for the view that how you play the game counts more than whether you win or lose. He believed in always playing cleanly, but he also believed that there is a great difference between winning and losing. He used to say, “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.” He also said, “When you lose, get mad—but get mad at yourself, not at your opponent.”
There is no way I can adequately describe Chief Newman’s influence on me. He drilled into me a competitive spirit and the determination to come back after you have been knocked down or after you lose. He also gave me an acute understanding that what really matters is not a man’s background, his color, his race, or his religion, but only his character.
One day during my last year at Whittier I saw a notice on the bulletin board announcing twenty-five $250 tuition scholarships to the new Duke University Law School in Durham, North Carolina. I applied, and only after I had won and accepted one did I learn that the students called this offer the “meat grinder,” because of the twenty-five scholarships available for the first year, only twelve were renewed for the second.
When I arrived in Durham in September 1934, the photographs I had seen had not prepared me for the size and beauty of the Duke campus. For someone accustomed to California architecture and a small college like Whittier, Duke was like a medieval cathedral town. There were spires and towers and stained glass everywhere. Dozens of buildings were set in clusters amid acres of woods and gardens.
From the first day I knew that I was on a fast competitive track. Over half the members of my class were Phi Beta Kappas. Duke had adopted the Harvard case method, which involved memorizing the facts and points of law in hundreds of different cases and being able to stand up in class, recite them, and respond to sharp questioning. My memory was a great asset here, but I had never been faced with such an overwhelming mass of material. I sometimes despaired of pulling the memorized facts together into any meaningful knowledge of the law.
One night when I was studying in the library I poured out my fears and doubts to an upperclassman, Bill Adelson, who had noted the long hours I spent studying in the law library. He heard me out, sat back, looked me in the eye, and told me something I shall never forget: “You don’t have to worry. You have what it takes to learn the law—an iron butt.”
During my first two years at Duke I lived in a $5-a-month rented room; for my third year I joined three friends and moved into a small house in Duke Forest, about two miles from the campus. “Small house” is really an overstatement: it was a one-room clapboard shack without heat or inside plumbing, in which the four of us shared two large brass beds. As I look back, I am amazed that we lived so long and so contentedly in such primitive conditions, but at the time it seemed exciting and adventurous. We called the place Whippoorwill Manor, and we had a great time there.
There was a metal stove in the middle of the room, which we stuffed with paper at night; the first one up in the morning lighted it. While the paper burned, we pulled on our clothes by the fire’s warmth. In order to save money, for breakfast I usually had a Milky Way candy bar. I left my razor behind some books in the law school library and shaved each morning in the men’s room, enjoying the luxury of central heating and hot and cold running water. Each afternoon I played handball and then took a shower in the gym.
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