And all of it, thought Will, was why he had come to Harvard: to hear opinions at the center of things, to hear the man who invented the term
conventional wisdom
pontificate on the wisdom of the moment, to hear the wisdom of the ages from Harvard’s resident Papist, to hear an irreligious young scientist challenge any wisdom but scientific truth, and then to go back to his room and think it all through for himself, and then to think about the girls.
Will’s freshman year should have been a time to enjoy a sumptuous course catalog buffet and satisfy his intellectual appetites, just as Eliot had intended, all within academic boundaries that Lowell had drawn. But this was 1968, so the joy of learning, of dropping H-bombs, of growing up, was tempered by other things.
Including Will’s brother, Franklin.
After Neustadt’s class, Will usually crossed paths with his brother on the Delta, in the gloomy shadow of Memorial Hall, which had seen better days before a fire destroyed its wooden clock tower. Now, thought Will, it resembled nothing so much as a man who was depressed because his hat had blown away. And the buildings weren’t the only things that looked depressed the day after Nixon was elected. There were long faces everywhere.
But as Franklin came out of Sanders Theater, he had a cheerful greeting for his brother. “Nixon’s the one, Willie. New president, same old bullshit.”
“Yeah. Dad voted for Humphrey. You want to have lunch with me in the Union?”
“No. Lunch at Adams House. Then I’m caucusing with the WSA. After yesterday, I think the Worker-Student Alliance will be the power group in the SDS. So we need to have a response to this fucking election.”
“As if the world gives a shit about your opinions.”
“I might get pissed at a remark like that, but I just scored this.” Franklin pulled a little Baggie from the pocket of his military fatigues. “No stems, no seeds.”
Will looked around furtively, then whispered, “Where did you get that?”
“A kid from South Boston. He doesn’t rip me off like the locals do. Fifteen bucks an ounce, instead of sixteen.”
“Dad would kill you for that.”
“Yet another reason. Come on. We’ll have lunch, caucus, get stoned. It’s time to loosen you up. Then we’ll go to a section of Soc. Rel. one forty-eight.”
“The course with no lectures, no grades, and half the section leaders are SDS undergraduates?”
“The best new course at Harvard. ‘Social Change in America.’ We teach ourselves . . . just the way it ought to be.”
“Jesus,” said Will.
“Did you know that Jesus was a communist?” said Franklin. “There’s a section on that, too. Along with sections on racism, the role of women in an oppressive society, César Chávez . . . I’m taking the imperialism section.”
“You mean, like the British in India.”
“No, dickhead. Like the fucking United States in fucking
everywhere.
”
“But you have to get stoned before you go?”
“Shit, yeah. It’s too depressing otherwise.”
At least his brother showed a flash of humor once in a while. Most campus radicals never even smiled. So Will decided to have lunch with him. As for caucuses, dope, and Soc. Rel. 148, he’d pass.
They were walking through the Yard, passing directly under the gaze of John Harvard’s statue. Coming toward them were two young men, one wearing a raincoat, the other a windbreaker, but beneath these, they were both wearing navy blue trousers, navy blue shirts and ties, and one of them was carrying a white officer’s hat under his arm, as though he was embarrassed to put it on in Harvard Yard.
“Fucking ROTCies,” whispered Franklin to his brother. “Watch this.”
Will didn’t want a fight, and certainly not with a pair of students who spent afternoons honing military skills as part of their naval ROTC training.
As Franklin passed, he made the sound of a pig, a loud snorting noise that caused the two young reserve officers to stop and turn. But the Wedge brothers kept walking, Will because he was too frightened to stop, Franklin because he knew enough to turn his snorting into a theatrical cough.
When they reached the Porcellian Gate, Will said to Franklin, “I think I’ll pass on lunch.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a jerk . . . treating those guys like fascist pigs. They’re here on ROTC scholarships. It may be the only way they can come. They take a few extra courses and when they get out, they give their time to the military. Maybe we all should.”
“Maybe we all
will,
” said Franklin, “if somebody doesn’t stand up to the military-industrial complex and stop this fucking war.”
Will made a face. They were brothers. A face was all it took.
Franklin said, “Listen, you skinny prep school snot in your blazer and your loafers, this place is married to the government. Half the professors are on the take—”
“Like Uncle George?”
“At least he knows what a mistake he made in 1945, but yeah. Prof. G. . . . all those fucking scientists. All the eggheads, ridin’ the Harvard shuttle twice a week, tellin’ the government how to fuck up the world.”
“Dad rode the shuttle for years,” said Will.
“Yeah, and he helped start a war.”
“He didn’t work for Defense. He worked in the Treasury Department.”
“You mean the
money
department, and it’s all about the money. Now he can stay home and make some real dough at Wedge, Fleming, and Royce. But if we can stop the Harvard shuttle and break the grip of the government around here, we should do it.”
“ROTC is a scholarship program.”
“If the army doesn’t have any officers, it can’t go and murder Vietnamese, so we shouldn’t train officers.” Then he turned on his heels and stalked off.
And that, thought Will Wedge, was Harvard 1968.
Students who had come to study met students who took Soc. Rel. 148. Students who wore coats and ties to the Union because it was an “immutable law” met students who wore jeans and military fatigues. Students taught that Thomas Jefferson was the greatest of political philosophers met students who had actually memorized passages from Mao’s
Little Red Book.
Students who had never tasted beer met students who could tell the difference between Thai stick and Acapulco gold just by smelling the smoke. Students who went to football games for the football met students who went because the halftime show ended when the band played the Mickey Mouse Club March to spoof the college, the game, the government, and just about any tradition in sight.
And students who had been the shining lights of their public high schools, kids who had lived at home until they went to Cambridge, met students who had lived for years at New England prep schools, where they often developed a sense of social importance and intellectual superiority all out of proportion to any accomplishment or acquired skill, except the ability to study little and late and still pull a B.
Will Wedge had gone to Andover. So his first reaction when he met his freshman roommate had been to ask himself what had he done to warrant a public school wonk from Cleveland.
On a Sunday in late September, Will had moved into Thayer 22, then he had gone to dinner with his parents at the Wursthaus, said good-bye to them in the Square, and returned to find a small bust of Shakespeare looking at him from the windowsill.
Sitting beside it, flipping through the course catalog, had been Charlie Price. He had thick glasses, a new mustache, and a nervous laugh. His first words: “It’s a fourteen-hour bus ride from Cleveland. I’m starving.”
Most of his prep school friends had requested specific roommates or been put with other preppies, so, if their fathers didn’t know each other, at least they were professional men. But Will’s parents had suggested that a roommate from a different background could be broadening. Will had not been happy to find that Charlie’s father worked at a tire plant.
But Charlie was a Shakespeare-loving, Groucho-quoting math whiz who impressed Will’s friends by doing handstands on the arm of a ratty sofa. So Will had decided to cut some slack for the kid from Cleveland, even if the only club he aspired to was the chess club.
ii
Ned loved the Wedge Woody. It reminded him of better times.
Whenever he backed it out of the garage on an autumn Saturday, he would think of his parents before their divorce, packing the car with food and beer and bottles of booze, loading the blankets and banners and two old raccoon coats, gathering up the two little boys, and heading down Route 1 to Cambridge.
And whenever Ned smelled the old leather upholstery, he would remember his father, sitting motionless behind the wheel on the first football Saturday after the divorce, sitting there as the sun warmed the car and heated the interior, his hands wrapped tight around the wheel, his chin on his chest, and the tears streaming down his cheeks.
Victor Wedge had devoted himself to Harvard after his divorce, like a man who marries his mistress once the wife has left. The food and drink grew more elaborate at the Wedge Woody, the old-boy laughter louder at the Harvard Club, and the Wedge Charitable Trust supported the new wife in style. And none of it could ever do anything to erase the truth: that Barbara Abbott Wedge had left Victor and disappeared with her easel and her paints in the desert Southwest, never to be heard from again.
So, thought Ned on that bright Saturday in November of 1968, maybe times hadn’t been better back then . . . just different.
But some traditions persisted. The car was packed with food and beer and bottles of booze, lap blankets were folded up, a ratty old raccoon coat was flopped in the backseat like a dead bear. And Harriet was hurrying out now, wearing wool slacks and tweed jacket, looking as good as the day he first laid eyes on her.
“The Yale game in your twenty-fifth reunion year,” she said. “And it’s one of the biggest in history.”
“Two undefeated teams. Let’s go.”
“Just do me one favor. Don’t drink too much.”
There was an alumni spread in the field house that afternoon, but most everyone in the Class of ’44 stopped at the famous Wedge Woody for a drink.
Will came with a girl he had met at a Wellesley mixer, the prettiest girl he had ever seen, at least that week, a tall, dark-haired freshman from California named Alana Juteau. He also brought half a dozen friends who had been hearing all semester about the Wedge tailgate parties, including Charlie Price.
And about fifteen minutes before game time, with the laughter loud, the drinks flowing, the hamburgers sizzling, the excitement of the biggest game in years hanging in the air, Franklin showed up, wearing fatigue jacket, denim shirt, and jeans. He brought a dark-haired girl who wore a fatigue jacket and jeans, too, and half a dozen friends of his own.
Harriet greeted them like the perfect hostess and pointed them toward the food.
“Even the SDS likes hamburgers,” Will whispered to Alana.
“Look at them,” Ned whispered to Harriet, “hair down to the shoulders, all dressed like they were ready for a military campaign. Boys and girls both. What frauds. And isn’t the girl Jewish?”
Harriet held a plate of shrimp under his nose. “Put one of these in your mouth before you put your foot in it. And smile, because here comes Franklin.”
“Hi, Mom.” Franklin introduced his girlfriend, “Cheryl G. Lappen, from Radcliffe. I called her Sherry.”
Ned put out his hand and gave her the Wedge grin and greeting. “Welcome to the Wedge Woody. My father bought it in ’thirty-four. We’ve been bringing it to games ever since.”
“Wow,” said the girl. “That’s like a tradition . . . or something.”
This remark, to which Ned and Harriet answered with polite nods, brought giggles from Franklin’s friends, who were taking to the food as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Alana whispered to Will, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. They’re just stoned. The munchies at midday.”
“Fuckin’ A,” said a skinny guy with reddish hair and a pimple on his chin and a mouthful of potato chips. “Doesn’t anybody around here know what a woody is?”
More snickers from the newcomers.
“And who might you be?” asked Ned. Anyone who heard the tone of his voice knew that the mood of the day was about to turn.
Franklin stepped in. “This is my friend, Jim Keegan.”
Harriet said, “Well, Jim, it’s nice to meet you.” She shook his hand, and then tried to make some typical Harvard conversation. “What house are you in?”
Keegan grinned. “The House of the Rising Sun.”
“Rising sun?” snapped Ned. “Where the hell is that?”
“In New Orl-e-unssss.”
This brought another round of explosive laughter.
Will noticed people putting their drinks down, checking their tickets, finishing their hamburgers, and moving off. He did not know if Franklin’s next remark was intended to distract from Keegan or make things worse:
“So tell me, Dad, what do you think of ROTC?”
And everyone within earshot held their breath.
“I think it’s excellent. If you look around at some of our guests”—Ned stopped a moment, as if surprised that so many people had drifted away—“they remember that at our commencement in ’forty-four, there was a sea of officers’ hats in Tercentenary Theater. Only nineteen students received regular degrees.”
“The last good war,” said Sherry Lappen. “That’s what my father calls it.”
And Prof. G. took some of the heat onto himself. “Remember what Ben Franklin said about wars.”
“Yeah,” said Keegan. “‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!’”
“Hey,” said Charlie Price to Will. “He just quoted Shakespeare. Very cool.”
“Yeah,” whispered Will, “for the local supplier. He’s like a mascot for the Worker-Student Alliance.”
Ned looked at Keegan. “Ben Franklin said, ‘There’s no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.’ I happen to agree.”
Franklin said, “Does that mean you won’t mind if we drive ROTC off campus?”
“Have a shrimp.” Harriet put the plate under Ned’s nose.
“Better yet”—Keegan put a Budweiser in front of Ned—“have a beer.”
Ned aimed a finger at Franklin. “I don’t know who your wiseass friend is, but remind him that you were admonished last year over Dow Chemical. You have no right to be forcing a legitimate group like ROTC off campus, just because you and your radical friends don’t like them.”