CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Change of Direction
AFTER THE housing incident we did indeed stay in a university-owned home for another year. Mother was hired by the university as an admissions officer and threw herself into this new opportunity with great enthusiasm. She was good at it too, receiving reams of thank-you letters from prospective candidates and their parents whom she had helped. I was so happy for her because finally she had her professional life back.
Daddy earned accolades for his work at the university as well, becoming at Denver, as he had at Stillman, one of the best-known figures on campus. He was a magnet for students—including David Ayers, soon to become the comedian Sinbad. But many of his students were white and considered Daddy essential to their success. My father’s touch with young people easily translated across racial boundaries.
The university administration relied on Daddy for difficult tasks. When the shootings of students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State took place in 1970, Denver, like virtually every other campus, erupted in protests and sit-ins. My father became the university’s liaison to the students, helping to calm the situation. I wasn’t particularly caught up in the political fervor but did attend one rally on Carnegie Field where my father proclaimed to the crowd, “It seems to me as if we need a demonstration to end all demonstrations!” Somewhere there is a picture of me sitting with the student demonstrators looking up at him on the stage. Ironically, these were exactly the kinds of campus incidents I dreaded as provost at Stanford.
The truth is that music majors were so busy with practice, rigorous and difficult theory classes, and performance demands that there wasn’t much time for anything else. I can remember distinctly sitting in the music building lounge reading about Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. I mentioned it to another student, who apparently was not aware that the events in Cambodia were connected to America’s involvement in Vietnam.
I found the insularity of the music school terribly stifling. When I tried to break out by accepting a post as news editor of DU’s student newspaper, the Clarion, I quickly learned that I simply didn’t have enough time for extracurricular activities. I couldn’t stay at the paper all night with my colleagues, reading copy and producing the paper. Eventually I quit, or perhaps I was fired. I quite honestly can no longer remember the circumstances.
I constantly clashed with the music faculty, which, rightly, didn’t think me singular enough in my devotion to piano. After one fairly poor jury performance (the final exam, in which a student plays for the entire piano faculty), Mr. Lichtmann suggested that I rededicate myself to the piano by going to the Aspen Music Festival School the summer of my sophomore year.
I applied and was accepted, studying with great pedagogues such as Edith Oppens. I knew that I’d become a far better pianist that summer. And I also knew that no matter how much better I became or how hard I worked, I’d never be good enough. The many prodigies studying there, some not yet into their teens, gave me a glimpse of the barriers to a concert career. I left Aspen having experienced a crisis of confidence and returned home to Denver set on finding a new path.
I asked to talk to my parents. We sat in the living room, they on the sofa and I on the piano bench. I told them that I wanted to change my major. I hated the single-minded focus of the piano program and had determined that I’d never be good enough to rise to the top of the profession. “It’s not good enough to have a career teaching thirteen-year-olds to murder Beethoven,” I told them.
They knew me better than anyone else, but they hadn’t seen this coming. At first, my dad suggested that I change my major from the very demanding bachelor of music (the performance degree) to the broader bachelor of arts in music, which meant that I could take a number of courses in other departments. I explained that this wasn’t just about the narrowness of the degree. “I’ve played the piano since I was three,” I said. “But I don’t love it enough to end up as a music teacher, and that’s where I’m headed.”
“What are you changing your major to?” Daddy asked.
“I don’t know. Just not music,” I said.
“You’re going to end up as a waitress at Howard Johnson’s because you don’t know what you want to do with your life,” he responded. I don’t know why he picked on Howard Johnson’s, and after all, he’d once waited tables himself, but this was as powerful a rebuke as he could muster. I was accustomed to my parents supporting me in everything that I did, so my father’s response was truly shocking.
“I’d rather be a waitress at Howard Johnson’s than teach piano. And after all, it’s my life.”
“It’s our money,” Daddy retorted.
Mother intervened. “Come on, Rice, that’s not fair.” She looked back at me. “What your father is saying is that you’re already a junior in college and you don’t know what you want to do. You need to find a major or you won’t graduate on time,” she said calmly.
That evening I asked Mother why she wasn’t upset about my decision. More than anyone she’d been responsible for my love of music and my pursuit of a career in it. I would never fulfill that dream. Mother just smiled and said, “Do you remember when I told you that you weren’t old enough or good enough to quit.” I laughed, recalling that moment. “Now you are old enough and good enough. For the rest of your life your piano will always be there for you.” When I had the chance many years later as national security advisor to play with Yo-Yo Ma and as secretary of state for the Queen of England, I knew how wise my mother had been.
I did eventually find a major. After false starts in English literature and political science with a focus on state and local government, I was getting pretty desperate by the spring of my junior year. That’s when I wandered into an introductory course on international politics taught by a man named Josef Korbel. Korbel had been a Czech diplomat during World War II and had successfully mediated the 1948 Kashmir crisis for the United Nations before settling in Denver and founding the Graduate School of International Studies. He opened up an entirely new world to me. I loved his stories about the work of diplomats. He was a specialist on the Soviet Union, and I was quickly drawn into his tales of the byzantine intrigue of Josef Stalin. At the end of the quarter I asked to see him and told him that I wanted to be a Soviet specialist and study international politics. He encouraged me to do so, saying that he had a daughter who was studying at Columbia. Her name was Madeleine Albright and perhaps we could meet someday.
When I went home and told my parents that I’d found what I wanted to do, they were really happy. If they had any doubts about the wisdom of a nice black girl from Alabama studying the Soviet Union, they didn’t express them, though in retrospect I’m sure they had plenty. “Jump on it with four feet,” my father said. And I did. I declared myself a political science major and started studying the Russian language. I had found my passion, or more accurately, it had found me. In any case, I finally knew what I loved, though I didn’t know, frankly, where it would lead me. I remember being very conscious of starting down a path that was different from anything in my parents’ experience. They had always been there for me and always would be. But I would have to navigate my professional life on my own. That brought an unexpected sense of maturity and newfound freedom.
The remainder of my college time seemed to fly by. I worked in the summer of my junior year and during Christmas break as a temporary secretary at the university. I took a job typing purchasing requisitions, which required six carbon copies. If you made a mistake, you had to start all over again, since there was no way to correct the carbons. As awful as the job was, it allowed me finally to help with the financial demands on the family. Thus, in the fall of my senior year, my parents and I agreed that I could move into the sorority house. I’d live apart from them for the first time in my life. That Saturday in mid-September when we loaded up the car with my clothes, a new bedspread for my room, and several other personal items, it seemed like a huge step—this despite the fact that the sorority house was located
about five minutes from where my parents lived.
Of course, the distance seemed much greater. I felt a good deal of personal freedom and exercised it. There were some constraints because Daddy was so well known on campus. Yet I managed to allow tendencies toward procrastination and even a little sloughing off to take full flight. Fortunately, the political science classes were much easier than music and I didn’t need to work as hard.
EARLY IN the year, I learned that I needed surgery on my hand to remove a ganglion cyst, which meant that I couldn’t study piano for several months. I quit skating altogether and gained thirty pounds due to the lack of exercise and a sudden affinity for the International House of Pancakes. This time, despite the extra pounds, when I needed a date for the sorority formal, I didn’t have to rely on my father to find one. Rich Preston, the captain of the hockey team and my first real crush, took me to the dance. The night turned out to be a little tense, though, since the hockey game in which Rich was playing went into overtime while I sat at the sorority house waiting. I was relieved when my father called to say that the game had ended and that Rich was on his way.
I also used my expanded free time to become deeply involved in student government and service activities with the sorority, resulting in my selection that spring as Denver University’s Outstanding Senior Woman. A few years before, the award had carried the politically incorrect title of Miss DU.
Throughout this period, my parents and I were developing a new kind of relationship. We still met every Saturday night for dinner followed by the hockey game. And I found it useful to drop in on them during the week, bringing my laundry with me. We also established a pattern that we kept until the end of their lives: we talked on the telephone every night.
That fall, I started to think seriously about the next chapter in my life. My parents and I were in complete agreement that at age nineteen, I was probably too young to do anything but continue in school. In any case, I had come to political science so late that I needed another year of academic training to pursue my interest in the Soviet Union.
I applied to several graduate schools to study politics and economics and was accepted everywhere except Penn State. Denver was on my list as a fallback, but I never intended to stay at the university. I wanted to go to Notre Dame, which offered a very good program in Soviet studies and encouraged a strong concentration in economics as well. We’d visited Father Hesburgh in South Bend when I was a sophomore in college and I’d loved it. My parents wanted me to stay in Denver, but if that was not possible, they said Notre Dame was a great choice. I’ve always suspected that my father, in particular, thought that Notre Dame was a protected space for his daughter in the raucous decade of the 1970s. Moreover, his friend Father Hesburgh was there and could keep an eye on me.
One afternoon in April, my father drove up in his red Ford as I came out of the sorority house on my way to class. He stopped at the corner and said, “I have something for you.” Daddy handed me the letter from Notre Dame graduate school admissions, which had come to my parents’ house. I took a deep breath and opened the letter. The news was good. I was in. Daddy started to get out of the car, so excited that he forgot to put it in park. After quickly securing the brake, my father, all six feet two inches and 260 pounds of him, leapt out and hugged me. I think he was prouder of me than I was of myself and to this day that is one of my fondest memories of him.
After I was admitted to Notre Dame, I relaxed and enjoyed the remainder of my senior year. I loved hanging out with my friends, such as Debbie Byrnes, who gave me my first experience as “maid of honor” when she married Rich Griffin. (I had introduced them.)
The spring and summer were dominated by the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s subsequent resignation. My friends in the sorority, unlike the music majors I’d left behind, were also riveted by the proceedings. We’d sprint home from class every day to watch the testimony on TV.
One of the jobs that I had taken on at the university was director of the student speakers bureau. We had invited Bob Woodward, the crusading young Washington Post reporter, to speak one evening in May. After returning home from class for lunch, I received a call from Woodward. He was very sorry but something had come up in Washington and he could not make the speech that night. I was angry with him but mostly consumed with managing the fallout, including cancelling the event and refunding tickets. Later that day, another student showed me a headline: “President Hands over Transcripts: Initial Reaction on Hill Divided Along Party Lines.” For the first time, all 1,254 pages of the Nixon Watergate papers were made public to the Congress and the American people. I subsequently related this story to Woodward and reminded him of the trouble he’d caused in my life (not for the last time) when I was a senior at DU.
Finally it was graduation day and as the Outstanding Senior Woman, aka Miss DU, I led the processional. My father, who’d been promoted to assistant vice chancellor that year, marched with the faculty not too far behind. After a drawn-out ceremony, my parents and some of their friends took my friends and me out to dinner. The celebration was very nice but not very memorable. There was so much ahead. I was just starting my life. Thinking back, I’m reminded of that wonderful line in the Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford movie The Way We Were when Streisand says, “Commencement. What a funny thing to call the end.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Rally, Sons (and Daughters) of Notre Dame”
THROUGHOUT THE summer of 1974, my parents and I were consumed with preparations for my impending move to South Bend. As part of that, I went back to skating and ballet to lose the thirty pounds that I’d put on during my senior year. My mother helped by cooking only healthy foods, leading my father to complain that he didn’t really like dinners where “green things were the centerpiece of the meal.”
I could tell, though, that the prospect of my really leaving home for the first time, perhaps never to return, was starting to trouble my mother. Tensions would rise between us over the smallest things. One such incident still bothers me to this day. I’d gone to a sorority sister’s wedding on Father’s Day of that year. My parents and I had planned to have dinner together to celebrate the holiday, but the wedding reception ran very long and it was far away in the outskirts of Denver. When I finally returned home, well after dinnertime, my mother was furious, declaring that I was showing a lack of respect for their feelings. I countered that I’d called to say that I would be late and couldn’t do anything about my sisters—and hence my ride—wanting to stay until the bridal bouquet was thrown.
My father called me into my bedroom, said that he fully understood what had happened but that this was a new phase for the whole family, and asked if I could be “a little more sensitive” to my mother’s feelings. It occurred to me that my mother and father had grown up very differently in this regard. My father had left home at eighteen, never to return. My mother, on the other hand, had lived at home until she married at twenty-nine. She didn’t know what it was like to go off to college, and she was having a difficult time watching her daughter break up the family group—even if it was a perfectly natural thing to do.
The day of my departure for Notre Dame finally came. My parents took me to the airport and waved goodbye at the gate. Mother was, as expected, very emotional. Daddy was mostly worried about whether I would be able to navigate the change of planes in Chicago—not a crazy concern given the complications of O’Hare even in that day. He was reassured when I told him that I was planning to meet my college roommates, Chris, Cindy, and their mothers, during the layover and that Mrs. Buschbach and Mrs. Bailey could help me get the plane to South Bend.
When I called the next day, I told my parents that all had gone well. In fact, it hadn’t, and I got off to a rocky start. I arrived at the tiny South Bend airport after it had closed down for the night. The plane from Chicago had been late and South Bend wasn’t, in those days, a hub of activity. There was no one at the desk and no apparent means of transportation to the university. I was pani
cked, but then I saw another young woman who looked lost too and asked if she might by any chance be trying to get to Notre Dame. “Yes,” she said, obviously relieved to have found a companion. We tracked down the only cab driver still at the airport. He took pity on us despite the fact that he was preparing to go home for the night. He drove us to Notre Dame. There was never a more welcome sight than that of the Golden Dome in the distance.
The next day I went out to find a few things to furnish my room. My parents had given me a new car for graduation, an Oldsmobile Omega, which I’d named Boris, after my favorite Russian opera, Boris Godunov. Boris had a tendency to overheat and did so that day in the August heat and humidity of South Bend. I pulled to the side and walked across the street to the service station. The attendant said sharply, “You’ll have to bring it over here.” I took offense. When I asked even more pointedly why he couldn’t go across the street and fix it, he said very meekly. “I thought it might cool off quicker in the shade over here.”
I’d reacted in this way because South Bend in particular, but also Indiana, had a reputation for racism. My father had reminded me that the emergence of the modern-day Ku Klux Klan had occurred in Indiana, not Dixie. To avoid problems, a fellow student at Notre Dame had told me to find the biggest Fighting Irish sticker I could and put it on my car’s rear window. “They leave Notre Dame students alone,” he said. I was conditioned to expect trouble and viewed the gas station attendant’s response through that prism. After that incident, however, I decided that I was going to give people in South Bend the benefit of the doubt. And thankfully, I never had another problem with anyone. To this day, I think back on that rush to judgment whenever I am tempted to see racism in a rebuff.
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