Outside Looking In

by Garry Wills

  Arrived, she found that the woman was a black lay preacher who shouted about Jesus on the street corner of the little hamlet. Her arrest was for disturbing the peace. Hillary went to talk to the judge, then visited the woman. She asked where she came from. “California.” “Don’t you figure there are souls to be saved in California?” Oh, yeah. “If I got you a ticket back to California, would you want to go there?” Yeah. Hillary went to the judge and said, “If I get the money to send her to California, will you drop the charges against her?” He said yes. What fascinated me was the way she spoke in character, both as the judge and as the woman preacher. It is a natural tendency that got her into trouble when she said she was not just standing by her man, like Tammy Wynette—people thought her accent was mocking Wynette.

  Her humor came out when she told me how Bill and Taylor Branch worked for the McGovern campaign in Texas. She later joined them, taking leave from her work in Washington, but she had not gone there yet. Bill’s director in Texas was Gary Hart. At one point Bill said he wanted to take a weekend off to go see his girlfriend in Washington. Hart was indignant: “How can you think of girlfriends in the heat of a campaign?” Considering Hart’s hanky-panky in the midst of his own later campaign for the presidency, this amused Hillary no end. (She probably found it less funny after the Monica Lewinsky episode.)

  We talked about religion, of which she is a sincere practitioner. And she was also humble. She told me she did not like her speaking style, and asked me what I would do to improve my speaking if I had trouble with it. “I suppose,” I said, “I would pay attention to good speakers and try to figure out how they do it.” Like who? she asked. I said I thought black Baptists were the best speakers alive, but she could not imitate them without looking as if she caricatured them. Who else? she asked. I suggested Mario Cuomo, and she later told me she was paying attention to his style.

  When the Clintons were in the White House, Hillary invited me to the Millennium dinners she threw to prepare for the year 2000, but they all took place on days when I had an afternoon class, so I did not get to any of them. Then along came the Monica scandal. When Bill finally owned up to his dalliance, Walter Isaacson, then the editor of Time, called and asked me if I could write something about it overnight. I agreed to, and wrote that Clinton should resign and turn the White House over to his vice president, Al Gore—otherwise he would spend the rest of his term fending off legal and political challenges. When I did this, my wife said, “You know, he is supposed to be giving you a medal in a few weeks” (the National Endowment for the Humanities award). I said I knew.

  At the NEH event, we met with the Clintons before going out into the Rose Garden for the ceremony. I did not know how the Clintons would treat me. I stuck out my hand to shake Hillary’s. She said: “Don’t I get a hug?” As we hugged, she said, “You’re sitting next to me at dinner tonight.” Bill told me he had been reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I don’t think this was because he remembered my interest in the book. I had read that the preachers brought in to counsel him in his remorseful period after Monica were giving him penitential readings.

  I knew the White House speechwriter who had composed the citation Clinton had to read before giving me the medal—Ted Widmer, who was serving a year there after getting his doctorate from Harvard. He told me it was a flattering document, as all such texts must be, and he was not sure that Clinton would read it as he wrote it, after I had called for his resignation. In fact, Clinton soldiered through it as written—but he stopped to interject one comment. Widmer had written something about my having incisive things to say across a broad spectrum of subjects. Here Clinton paused and said, “Sometimes I have a little problem with that”—which was, of course, the perfect way to handle the situation.

  That night at dinner, I said to Hillary, “You are a poor planner. You have me at the same table with Gregory Peck. You could have put him beside you.” No, she said, she had planned well. “This way I get to talk with you and look at him.”

  My wife and I were invited to one more dinner at the White House. This one occurred after George Bush’s election but before his inauguration. Hillary said, “This time Bill gets you.” I was at the president’s round table, and was conducted over to it before most people came in. I found my place card, and read the name on the next card: Stewart. My friend Susan Manilow, who was to sit across from me, came around and looked at it. “Who is that?” I asked. “Must be Martha,” she said. And it was. I asked Martha Stewart, when she arrived, to critique the table setting. “Oh, cut it out,” she said. After we sat down, she brought up Greek and Latin books. She knew I am a classicist from her son-in-law, a lawyer with a great interest in the classics. She told me she had bought him the Loeb Library as a gift. I was stunned—there are several hundred bilingual volumes of classical authors in the Loeb Library. After the dinner was over, he wandered by from a different table and I said I had heard about the Loeb—she nudged me. The gift, not yet given, was supposed to be a surprise. With a blank look, he said, “What?” I improvised in panic: “We were talking about the Leopold-Loeb trial at dinner.” He was still looking blank when he went off. I told her, “I hope I didn’t blow it for you.” “No,” she said, “you just confused him. At least, you confused the hell out of me.”

  Stewart was seated to my right. To my left, three seats over from the president, was singer Denise Rich, whom I had never heard of. At one point in the meal, she said, “You know, Nostradamus predicted the victory of Bush.” I nodded, to avoid getting further into that wacky subject. “What did she say?” Stewart whispered to me. “That Nostradamus predicted the election.” She laughed: “I don’t think Nostradamus is in the Loeb Library.”

  I learned who Denise Rich was after the Clintons left the White House. The pardon for her ex-husband Marc was the last scandal of the Clinton years. Some reporters who found out the seating arrangement at Clinton’s table on that night called me up to ask if the pardon was discussed at the meal. I said, “Of course not.” Clinton came around after dinner and talked to Rich and me, but only about the election Gore had just lost (his was a non-Nostradamus version of it).

  I kept my record for political prescience when talk arose about Hillary running for the Senate in New York after leaving Washington. I told her friend Sidney Blumenthal that I did not think she would (or should). I felt she needed some time to get free of the White House controversies. When she did run, I thought she would lose. In 2008 I was asked if she would be appointed as Obama’s vice president if he won the primaries. I said no. Then, would she be secretary of state? No. My predicting record cannot match that of Nostradamus.

  11

  Jack

  I was often an outsider in my family. Neither of my parents went to college or read books. I mentioned earlier that they felt my reading was abnormal. My mother humored me without understanding my bookworm ways. I admired my father, Jack, and I didn’t. I disliked him, and I didn’t. I pleaded with my mother not to remarry him after a sad and draining divorce. But she did, and I was finally glad. He was hard to resist.

  After that remarriage, we were vacationing on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, my parents and my own young family. Out in a field, my father saw a horse roaming free. He had ridden horses as a boy in Arizona and Cuba, where his father was an engineer, but he was now in his forties and the horse had no bridle or saddle. Nonetheless, he tried to vault onto its back. It easily flicked him aside. I checked to see if he had broken anything, and told him, “Don’t try that again.” Of course he did, unsuccessfully. As he told me several times, “There is no such word as ‘cannot’ in the Wills dictionary.”

  One of his many business ventures was a debt-consolidation scheme, when that was a new invention to keep creditors from garnishing wages. Jack would collect his clients’ monthly wages and portion them out to creditors. One man kept trying to evade my father, to keep his wages. As Jack was pestering him, the man hit him. My father had been a Golden Gloves boxer, a college boxing coach,
and camp champion in the army during World War II. He rarely resisted a fight. But this man was so big that he easily beat my father. Nonetheless, Jack went back and back to him, getting beaten every time, until the man finally said, “Shit, Jack, I have to pay you or kill you—so I’ll pay you.” They became good friends after that, and the man was at Jack’s funeral years later (where he reminded me that he had not killed him).

  Jack was small and wiry—he admired actors and athletes who were just as small, Bob Steele in movie westerns, James Cagney in crime films, Alan Ladd in mysteries. Jack was a natural athlete who lettered in four sports at his high school (Georgia Military Academy). I read his school paper, which said he did everything on the football field, quarterbacking, punting, drop-kicking (when there was still such a thing). He played without a helmet, claiming that a helmet reduced his peripheral vision. Later, he refused to wear seat belts in a car, claiming that his quick reflexes would let him dodge any trouble.

  He won golf prizes until his street fights broke so many bones in his hand that his grip was hard to manage—it bothered him that I hated golf, thinking it a waste of golden daylight hours when I could be reading. His older brother, Bob, with whom he never got along, knew that he was not only a good golfer but a natural teacher (a thing he proved in his days as a boxing coach), and Bob came back from California to Michigan to take golf lessons from him. I was sent out to shag balls until descending darkness made the balls unfindable. Jack’s natural teaching skills made him show me how to serve a tennis ball and punt a football, the only (isolated) sport skills I ever acquired. He dearly wanted to show me how to drive a golf ball, but I resisted that evil knowledge.

  Jack hoped to play football for Georgia Tech, but he was too small to get a scholarship when he graduated from high school in the depths of the Depression (1934). My mother, pregnant with me, had to drop out of high school, and Jack could not find work in the hard-hit South. My Irish grandmother was a locally famed baker, and for a while he peddled her bread from door to door. But then he headed north looking for a job. He had a small used convertible his father had given him. My mother was in the front seat, his Great Dane was in the backseat (Danes were a fixture in his life), and I, newborn, was in a dresser-drawer crib in the rumble seat. When he rammed into a halted car, the drawer was jolted out onto the road behind, but I rode it out safely.

  Women always loved Jack, including my mother’s mother, Rose Collins. Rose’s own Irish mother (a Meehan) was crippled and could never leave the second-floor flat they lived in. When my father came to visit, he always carried Grandmother Meehan downstairs and took her for rare outings in the convertible, to a park or a movie or the church bingo game. That endeared him forever to Rose. In 1937, the Collinses had moved from Atlanta to Louisville when the great flood of the Ohio River hit Kentucky. Jack, then working in Michigan, instantly rented an outboard-motor boat, hitched it to the back of his car, and drove to Louisville. Parking the car at the edge of the flood, he took the boat to get Grandmother Meehan and my mother’s two sisters (as much as the boat would carry). After taking them to safety, he went back and got my grandparents, Rose and Con.

  This Irish side of the family welcomed Jack warmly into its midst. His own family, the English Willses from Virginia, had aristocratic pretensions—he was christened John Hopkins Wills, named (approximately) after the founder of the university. His prim mother, a Christian Scientist, always favored the older, more staid son, Bob. Jack’s father, after whom I am named, was a bit of a rogue and always favored Jack, who was a lifelong hunting buddy. When Jack, at GMA, climbed up to the tower of a nearby girls’ school and rang its bell in the middle of the night, the GMA authorities wrote a harsh letter to Garry Wills threatening Jack with expulsion. His father telegraphed back, “I did not know I was sending you to a kindergarten. Come home immediately.” That made the school back off. Later, when the two were hunting, they circled a copse and Garry inadvertently sprayed Jack with shotgun pellets. My father was rushed to the hospital to have the pellets removed. When he took his army physical in World War II, an X-ray showed he still had a pellet in his jaw.

  My mother put up with my father’s affairs for years, even offering to raise one of the children born to a mistress. But one night as I was up reading, I heard her weeping as she took a phone call from a young woman’s mother, who said that he had begun an affair with her daughter, who worked as a waitress in the hunting lodge where Jack was staying with his father. That was the end, she thought. And though Jack pleaded with her not to divorce him, even getting her priest to say Catholics cannot divorce, no matter how a husband may stray, she threw him out of the house. My younger sister did not realize what was happening, and resented my mother for turning him away. My mother, with saintly forbearance, did not tell her the real reason—and when, years later, my sister found out the truth, she was so angry at Jack that I had a hard time persuading her to come to his funeral.

  Jack went with the young waitress to California, where she became a television model—they were married on the TV wedding show where she worked. In 1951, when I graduated from high school, a friend and I qualified for the national finals of an oratory contest in Los Angeles. We drove out there in the car my friend had been given as a graduation present, and we stayed with my father, his wife, and his young daughter. When my friend went back east, my father asked me to stay and work for his new business, selling ranges and refrigerators. He showed me around Los Angeles, and tried to dissuade me from going back to the Midwest, where I was scheduled to enter a Jesuit seminary.

  Jack owned a vacant lot next to his appliance store. It was too overgrown and briary to be mowed, so he decided to burn the brush away—always a dangerous thing in California. On the other side of the lot was a fancy restaurant, where patrons could catch fish in a stocked pond for their meal. The fire began to race toward the restaurant, and Jack gave me an ineffectual hose to head it off while he went to call the fire department. Luckily, the fire engines arrived just in time. Another close call for Jack.

  One day, I had to deliver a refrigerator across town while he was staying for an appointment with buyers in the store. He did not yet have a delivery truck, so he hitched a trailer behind his car and sent me off to deliver the appliance. I was seventeen and had not had my driver’s license for long. Jack, in his teacher mode, gave me a quick lesson on how to back up a trailer (turn one way to go the other way). How, I asked, was I to unload the refrigerator? He said, “Find someone standing by and offer him five dollars to help you.” “Cannot” was a word absent from Jack’s dictionary. Years later, when he had remarried my mother, he bought a lot next to their house on Lake Lansing and turned it into a remunerative garbage dump (to the disgust of lake property owners). He had an old used earthmover to bulldoze the garbage with, and he gave me a quick lesson on how to drive it. It brought back memories of my first navigation of the Los Angeles streets with his trailer.

  Jack was an ingenious inventor of business schemes. Unfortunately, he was easily bored with them after they began to make money. Also, he was a heavy gambler. On the night before he went into the army, he got into a high-stakes poker game at the Elks Club, and I, as an eight-year-old, watched him lose all his ready cash. My mother had to rent our best house and move into a rental one that we had lived in when Jack first reached Michigan. That first house was large, but he met its monthly payments by renting its upstairs floors to students from nearby Albion College. The student boarders adopted me as a kind of mascot (I was four at the time). They rode me around on their bikes, taught me to tie my shoelaces, and made me think the life of a student the most wonderful thing imaginable.

  Jack was coaching the college boxers and judging Golden Gloves matches (where he took me to ringside seats). Jack, like the rest of my family, southern on both sides, was a racist. He always bet against Joe Louis, and when I got a little older I made money from those bets. He claimed that the white men who went against Louis lost only because they tried to hit him in the head—
blacks have iron heads—instead of hacking him down with midsection blows.

  Jack was fearless—but that was because he felt he could never die. He was superstitious about hospitals. He did not want to admit to human limits. To his credit, he went to the hospital and gave my mother a blood transfusion when she bled badly after delivering me—she was a teenager and I had weighed almost twelve pounds. But he could not bring himself to visit my mother after she went into a coma in her final bout with cancer. Not because he did not love her—he just could not face the thought of losing her. My sister and I had to make the decision to remove her life support after the doctor said she could not revive.

  Jack had an infectious sense of fun, and an extraordinary resilience after business setbacks. He always invented some way out of his troubles. At his funeral, the man who’d said he had to pay him or kill him came up to me as the military salute was being fired, over the hill, dim in the wind, a faint pop-pop-pop. “Leave it to Jack,” the man said, “to get the popcorn concession at his own funeral.”

  One of the reasons I am a conservative is that I do not believe that “cannot” should be removed from the dictionary. A recognition of limits is important to human life, and especially to human politics. On the other hand, a defiance of human limits is an exhilarating prospect, and it explains why Jack fascinated people. There is, I suppose, a little bit of Jack in me—very little—that I would not remove, even if I could.

  12

  Studs

  In 2008, Studs Terkel had a new book coming out—the fourth one he had produced since turning ninety.1I was writing a review of the new book when his son called to tell me he had died (at age ninety-six). Terkel’s astonishing late productivity came from what would seem a crippling development, the fact that he lost most of his hearing during those late years, despite the best efforts of doctors and hearing-aid technicians. Bad as this would be for any of us, it was a special blow to Terkel, whose specialty was hearing others tell about themselves. I had been in cabs with him and wondered at his ability to elicit the driver’s whole life story before we reached our destination.