Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (32 page)

The original New Trier High School had won four state championships in thirty years. New Trier West had won twice in the six years since it had been opened. Pictures of the winners hung on the wall of the team’s tiny office, and the competition for a spot on the squad, and the chance to be immortalized on the wall, was fierce.

Our debate coach, Bill Sanders, took an unconventional approach to organizing his team. Others accepted every freshman who applied and used the novice-level competitions to identify the “keepers.” Sanders wouldn’t let any freshmen onto the novice teams. Instead, students
who were interested in debate had to enroll in academic classes in public speaking and communication. The best students from those courses tried out for the debate team and were selected to be debate team novices as sophomores. This approach meant that New Trier West’s novices were one year older than their opponents, and had formal public speaking training before their first debate. Consequently, their novice year was always filled with lots of winning. The benefits of this approach continued as they joined the junior varsity and varsity squads. Add Sanders’s excellent but subtle coaching and you get a program that was highly competitive year in and year out.

You might think that our devotion to academics was somehow a Jewish thing but it wasn’t. Among my friends and classmates were Doug Berger, a Mormon, and Brian Ziv and Suzanne Nora, who were both Catholic. The three of them all came from families who prized achievement and they were motivated to excel at everything they tried.

In my sophomore year I won a spot on the debate team, where I began to learn the differences between arguing at the Emanuel kitchen table and a real debate. Ray Agran, my partner, and I threw ourselves into research, spending hours at the Northwestern University library. For reasons I cannot explain, I loved spending endless hours in the government documents room and reading the testimony and exchanges from congressional hearings, looking for those unexpected quotes that we could use to make our case. We filled thousands of four-by-six cards with facts and quotes. The cards went into little metal boxes. Ray—now a Philadelphia litigator—and I carried six of them into debates like they were crates of ammunition. The intention—and the effect—was to intimidate our opponents.

I further intimidated with my style, which tended toward rapid-fire attacks, plenty of quotes and statistics, and development of unexpected arguments. This approach lacked the appeal of the quiet confidence—Bill Sanders called it “QC”—that our coach tried to instill in us. When I was grown and could absorb what he had to say, Bill Sanders said, “You had an aggressiveness that wasn’t mean-spirited, but it was so intense that you didn’t notice how it affected other people.”

To reach us, Sanders’s technique was just the opposite of aggressiveness and volume. A case in point arose during my first major tournament, which was held three hundred and fifty miles from Wilmette, at Southern Illinois University. Ray Agran and I did well in our first debate. We packed up our file cards and left our room. While waiting in the hall we ran into novice debate teams from neighboring schools. We began socializing, which at debate tournaments means arguing at a high volume about which arguments are better and which sources more authoritative.

As the hallway was filled with our voices, Bill Sanders silently approached my side and firmly squeezed my arm. I was so hyped up that I continued the debate without pause. To get my attention, Sanders squeezed harder until it hurt. He said nothing but just gestured me down the hall to the New Trier West room.

“But I want to talk.”

“Go to the room,” he said almost in a whisper.

Annoyed, I obeyed his instructions. Sanders stayed at my side, never uttering another word. When we arrived at the room I demanded to know why we couldn’t talk to the other teams. Sanders would not be drawn into arguing or negotiating. In a quiet tone he simply said, “Quiet confidence,” and escorted me to a seat.

Bill Sanders never raised his voice, never argued. Debate tournaments lasted two days, and doing your best and winning was not a sprint, but a marathon. You had to conserve mental and physical energy. Most important, quiet confidence was about showing your talents in the quality of your debate, not trash talking, proclaiming yourself the best, or thumping your chest when you won. What Bill Sanders taught us was Ted Williams, not Muhammad Ali.

Sanders was the first person who ever made a determined effort to smooth some of the rougher edges of my Emanuel personality. Before matches he would talk to me about controlling my tendency toward sarcasm and condescension. It was slow going. I would listen, and grasp it in the abstract, but when the battle was joined I often could not help myself.

When Coach Sanders wasn’t allowed to communicate with me,
my partner would try to signal me by tapping his pencil on his desk whenever I seemed to be veering into the aggressive almost-bully role. Even this technique was not very helpful. My senior year, my partner Arnie Grant and I made it to the state quarterfinals, where our opponents were two young women. An excellent debater named Christine Madden had contradicted herself in her arguments, and I used my cross-examination time to rattle off fierce questions. I didn’t give her adequate time to respond, instead cutting her answers off. As Arnie tapped his pencil, Christine’s face reddened, and several times she seemed on the verge of tears. Turned off by me, and taking pity on Christine, the judges voted two to one for her side even though we had made the better arguments on the merits. My last chance at a state championship was lost.

I was outraged, naturally, but as time passed I came to understand what I had gained from the experience. Where else could I learn, without more serious consequences, about the nuances of public conflict and the limits of sheer aggressiveness? Within the controlled environment of the competition, my excesses were indulged in ways that were instructive to me, and everyone else. In between matches Coach Sanders taught us how to let go of what happened the previous week and focus on the next challenge. We had a tendency to rehash our experiences, dwelling on mistakes made by the judges or the peaks and valleys of our own performances. Bill Sanders helped us learn from the past and then quickly turn to the future.

Another formative academic experience was the Great Books seminar taught by a young English teacher named Raissa Landor. Her class on the great books of Western civilization was conducted as a seminar in a room where the desks were arranged in a circle. She refused to give us letter grades. Instead she wrote detailed evaluations for each of her students and offered suggestions for ways they could improve their reading, reasoning, and writing.

Raissa encouraged us to read deeply and speak our minds about what we read. My classmates and I took her direction to heart. We were excited to compare Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of America with the country we knew and determined to apply Thorstein Veblen’s
Theory of the Leisure Class
to understand the local wealthy enclave of Indian Hill.

I was also blessed to have great science teachers at New Trier. The best was Robert Koonz, who taught chemistry. He was a nervous type with a coughing tic. He assigned weekly, graded problem sheets and had a test every Friday. We always groaned about the constant work and testing, but you couldn’t help but learn the material. Koonz was always nervous about the unpredictability of lab experiments. He scrupulously insisted we take every precaution, such as goggles and rubber gloves. He had his hands full with my class. In our very first laboratory session he had us apply a little electricity to water in order to separate oxygen and hydrogen and collect the hydrogen to determine how much was created given the energy input. My partner Ray Agran and I promptly used a Bunsen burner to ignite the hydrogen, which caused a nice little
Hindenburg
-type explosion and sent glass from the flasks flying. After scurrying around the room in high anxiety, confirming that we were all safe and unhurt, Koonz flailed his arms into the air: “No more labs. Laboratory is canceled for the rest of the year.” Maybe this is why I didn’t become an experimental research scientist?

Then, and now, Arnie would say that I was not as intellectually gifted as Brian or Ray Agran but I compensated by outworking them. He was right. On most school nights I spent at least three and a half hours—7 to 10:30
P.M
.—on homework and never needed to be reminded about it. Ari and Rahm considered this monkish devotion to books quite strange, but it felt natural to me. While today this amount of nightly homework seems little for students from the best high schools, and is much less than what my own daughters spent, then it was what the best students at the best high schools devoted to their studies. It was also part of my response to the pressure my parents put on me to get top grades so I could be accepted at an elite college and then go to medical school. These expectations had been such a constant
in my life that I had accepted them with little complaint. Indeed, I liked excelling at schoolwork, so the hours of studying were not onerous, the way practice is not burdensome for great high school sport stars.

Bill Sanders listened sympathetically when I told him I was not sure I wanted to be a doctor. He also encouraged me to push for admission to my first-choice college, Amherst, even though my father preferred that I attend a college he had heard of like Harvard or Yale. My mother preferred that I stay in the city and go to the University of Chicago, which was close by and where the competitive intensity of the undergraduate program fit well with my personality. But I drew a thousand-mile circle around Chicago and determined I would go somewhere beyond that circle. With Sanders’s encouragement I zeroed in on Amherst, in part because one of the smartest New Trier students ever went there, and if it was good enough for him I figured it would be good enough for me. Plus, after having a high school class of nearly seven hundred kids, I thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that I would prefer a smaller institution. I applied early-decision to Amherst, the only college I applied to. By December of my senior year I knew which college I was going to, which relieved a lot of the senior year tension.

Sanders was also instrumental in getting me out of the only serious trouble I ever encountered at New Trier. After our college applications were complete and our first semester finals were over—and so the last grades the college would see were determined—three of us nerds, Brian, Arnie, and I, decided to celebrate by going to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a week of skiing. It was early February and we would miss a week at the start of the last semester of senior year. While missing classes might affect our final high school grades, it would have no impact on our college acceptance. Our parents considered us responsible and, more important, deserving of a special treat after long and successful school careers. We had a blast.

Raissa Landor, Bill Sanders, and Robert Koonz were willing to indulge our truancy. However, our gym and calculus teachers did not
find our absence amusing, or tolerable. They decided to flunk us and dismiss us from their classes. We could survive F’s in calculus, although we wanted the college credits that came with completing the course and scoring well on the AP tests. But, because we needed to complete four years of physical education for graduation, failing gym would actually prevent us from graduating from high school and thus would endanger college admissions. Sensing an opportunity to take some revenge on the haughty nerds, our gym teacher would not let us off easy. We were required to devote many hours to extra PE, which we did by playing endless doubles badminton in order to earn the credit. The calculus teacher, Walter Dodge, presented a more difficult challenge, and was of a mind to simply kick us out of the class.

Thankfully, it wasn’t for nothing that Bill Sanders was the debate coach. He convened a nighttime conference at the school involving Mr. Dodge and our parents. Mr. Dodge admonished us that we were throwing away our chance to earn college credit, plus he was disappointed in us because we failed to live up to our role as the classroom’s leaders. After much heated discussion, we settled the matter by making a bet that we would earn 5’s—the top grade—on the AP test. If we did, we would be forgiven and receive credit. If we did not, he could fail us. Mr. Dodge accepted the wager. We won the bet, and thanks to Bill Sanders’s intercessions we were able to graduate and our records remained spotless.

Besides the members of the debate team, Sanders paid special attention to the students in his advisory group, who were in his charge for their full four years at the high school. Before my brother Ari started his freshman year, our mother went to the school and negotiated for him to be placed in Bill Sanders’s advisory. The administration agreed to do it and Ari could not have been in better hands.