Other Yales, Other Americas

Other Yales, Other Americas

by Steve Sewall – 847-657-9343

12,728 words – 2/1/04

I.

First I must look backward. My father, Richard B. Sewall, taught English at Yale University for forty-

two years until his retirement in 1976. He died in April, 2003 at age 95. Devoted to Yale, he himself could look

back with satisfaction on many achievements there. As a scholar, his two-volume Life of Emily Dickenson

won the National Book Award for biography in 1975; it remains “much the best” work in its field, in the view of

literary luminary Harold Bloom. In the 1960’s, when George W. Bush, Howard Dean, John Kerry, Joe

Lieberman, and Bill and Hillary Clinton were all cracking books at Yale, he was the founding Master of Ezra

Stiles College, one of the university’s twelve residential hubs of undergraduate life. At Stiles, he and my

mother, Mathilde, a free-spirited artist known for her wry subversions of academic formality, built from scratch

a vibrant academic community whose signature informality and interest in students, chronicled in its time in

the New Yorker, is emulated to this day. From the outset, good things happened at Stiles. The arts flourished

and students somehow got better grades than at Yale’s other residential colleges. Even Stiles’ athletic teams

were perennial contenders or winners of the coveted Ting trophy for supremacy in Yale intramural sports. In

coming years, three of the eclectic group of forty professors who accepted Richard Sewall’s invitation to serve

as Stiles Fellows - physician Richard Selzer, law professor Charles Reich and classicist Eric Segal – would

publish books that made them national figures, out of the blue.

But it was as a teacher that Richard Sewall could take most satisfaction. John Howard Bennett (’60),

a student in English 68, his course on Shakespeare, recalls his teaching in its prime:

For lectures on the major plays (Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Richard II), it was a real struggle getting into the

lecture hall and into your seat because of the presence of huge numbers of undergraduates, grad

Sewall – Other Yales, Other Americas

students, unknown men in suits, and even females (this was 1959-60) who would crowd in well before the

lecture started and try to find a place to sit or stand where they could see the lectern and hear the Sterling

Professor of English modestly propound his analysis of the plays. Furthermore, this was no ordinary

classroom but rather Woolsey Hall, the largest (indoor) venue on campus, which was more like a theatre.

Despite its size, the hall overflowed: there were people lining the side stairs, completely filling the aisles,

standing in the back, pushing and jostling for a place. At the close of the last lecture on each major play,

there was standing applause and cheering. Not just polite applause, but rather more like a Grateful Dead

concert. I was astonished the first time it happened, although I was on my feet with the rest of the crowd

without even thinking of what I was doing. I remember my own reaction to the lecture on Lear. I sat there

with my mouth open and later discovered that I had uncharacteristically failed to take any notes after the

first few minutes.

This was Richard Sewall’s teaching in its public aspect. What prompted most of the cards, letters, and visits

he received from hundreds of former students after his retirement, however, was its personal touch. Students

recalled things like a saving word at a disciplinary hearing, a hospital visit made by no one else, an airplane

ticket arranged to attend a family funeral and, again and again, individual tutoring above and beyond the call

of duty, especially for public school students from small towns and distant states who weren’t ready for the

rigors of Yale. The Byrnes/Sewall Teaching Prize, created by one such student, David Atkinson (’42), is now

awarded annually to the teacher, selected by undergraduates, who takes the most “time, energy and effective

effort to help undergraduates learn”.

To say that Richard Sewall could take satisfaction from his achievements is not to say that he did so.

Something held him back. As a youth, he lacked confidence in his abilities, save for a tennis game so steady

that well into his fifties he outplayed taller and stronger players half his age. On graduating from Williams

College in 1929, he entered graduate school at Yale with teaching in mind because he felt he would at least

do no worse than most of those who had taught him. “Third raters,” he called them, men who had nothing to

say to their students. Hired at Yale in 1934, he excelled at the low-level English courses, like English 10, that

other faculty shunned as a distraction from scholarship (Appendix I). For years, he taught Daily Themes, a

“sadistically demanding” expository writing course, as the writer William F. Buckley once called it, that

© 2003, 2004 by Steve Sewall. All rights reserved.

2


exhausted students and instructors alike, but that Buckley credited with teaching him how to write for

deadline. In the 1950’s, as his confidence grew, Richard Sewall helped create Yale’s innovative Scholars of

the House program, which enabled a dozen self-motivated Yale juniors to devote their entire senior year to

independent study.

The course for which he is most remembered at Yale, however, took shape pretty much by accident.

During World War II, Yale’s undergraduate English curriculum – historical survey courses formed around

icons like Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton – was faring poorly with the servicemen who then populated the

campus. The English Department asked several faculty to make literature more interesting. Richard Sewall’s

response was English 61, Tragedy. Texts ranged from the Book of Job and the Greek tragedians to

Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Faulkner, Eugene O’Neil and Arthur Miller. The course was a hit with

students, and he never stopped teaching it. It approached tragedy not as tragedy had been taught since the

18th century - as a set of formal rules derived from Aristotle - but as a way of making sense of life. Its finest

students, my father maintained, were the World War II veterans returning to Yale on the G.I. Bill. Because he

re-read its texts and re-wrote his lectures each year to reflect the changing concerns of instructor and

students alike, English 61 took on a life of its own. And because he allowed it to tap deep into his own

religious roots – he was descended on his father’s side from an unbroken line of thirteen Congregational and

Presbyterian ministers and, on his mother’s, from a pastor to a Baptist theologian and pastor to John D.

Rockefeller whose 1,100-page Systematic Theology is read today at the theological seminary that he himself

founded – English 61 became the essential lens and forum through which Richard Sewall shared his ongoing

“wrestlings” with tragedy, as he called them, with nearly two generations of Yale undergraduates.

These wrestlings he distilled in The Vision of Tragedy, which finally won him tenure at Yale after a

failed 15 year struggle to wrest a publish-or-perish book from his 1934 Ph.D. dissertation on the reception of

Rousseau in mid-eighteenth century England (a hoary topic assigned him by his dissertation advisor, the

redoubtable Chauncey Brewster Tinker). The idea for the tragedy book did not occur to him. It came from his

friend Paul Weiss, a gadfly professor of philosophy at Yale – a modern Socrates - who saw that Richard

Sewall needed to write from his gut. And it came in the nick of time. Already the English Department had

terminated him not once but twice, reversing itself only at the intercession of William C. DeVane, the


3


legendary Yale College Dean for whom Richard Sewall worked as Dean of Freshmen in the early 1950’s.

“This man,” DeVane told the English Department Chairman, “leaves Yale over my dead body.”

In 1974, pancreatic cancer suddenly took my mother’s life. Never before had we seen her ill. For a year, my

father grieved inconsolably. Yet he stayed on in the wooded country house in Bethany, outside New Haven,

that my mother, a born decorator of country houses, had made indelibly her own. It kept her memory alive.

And like the New Englander he was, he loved every branch and twig of the place. Nothing made him happier

than a few runs down the 200 foot ski slope he had carved out of deep forest and painstakingly clipped and

trimmed each fall. In 1975, he revived and over the next fifteen years taught English at high schools and

colleges and lectured on Dickenson to almost anyone who invited him. Looking back in gratitude to Alec

Witherspoon, the Yale English professor whose informal weekly discussions of the Bible were a cherished

memory of his graduate school years, he spent a year recording Inside the Bible, a series of twenty Books-on-

Tape lectures – “chats”, he called them - on all of the Books of the Old Testament. In the late 1980’s, he wrote

his swan song: a thirteen-chapter book on teaching at Yale that thrilled the Editor of the Yale Press, but

which, to be marketable, needed a chapter on his own teaching. That chapter would have vexed Richard

Sewall in his prime. And now that his memory was failing him, he could not write it, despite our efforts to

assist him.

Yet these efforts bore their own fruit. One morning in 1996, with a tape recorder at hand, I was trying

to get him to talk about his tragedy course. Things were going poorly. He was recalling nothing: no favorite

lectures, no favorite texts, no exchanges with students. “Dad”, I finally said, “as a teacher, you were a pro.

Your lectures had a beginning, middle and end. You had routines, ways of getting through to your students.

Tell me one!” This struck a chord. In response, he said he liked to end a lecture by reading out loud a

passage from the author under study. “I wanted to give the students something to think about as they left the

classroom”, he added. Aha, I thought, an opening! Could he recall a favorite passage? “There’s a good one in

Moby Dick”, he said, and soon I was reading it to him, underlined in red and blue ink in his battered old

Modern Library copy of the novel. It occurs well into the book, as Ahab’s ill-starred Pequod finally enters the

warm South Pacific waters that are home to Moby Dick. It is half-hidden, tucked away at the end of one of the

digressive chapters on whaling wherein Melville so often admits us to the inner sanctum of his thinking. It is

about the intuition:


4


And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a

calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable

contemplations, and that vapor – as you will sometimes see it – glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself

had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate

vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then

shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but

doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some

things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them

both with equal eye. (last paragraph,

Chapter 85, “The Fountain”)

“A whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” Melville boasts in Moby Dick, and students exiting a

Yale lecture hall in the pre-coeducational 1940’s could compare his double view of manhood, skeptical and

divine, analytic and spiritual, with their own idea of what a Yale man can be. In the 1950’s, they could set this

double view against the searing charge of an unChristian Yale leveled by the recently graduated William F.

Buckley in God and Man at Yale. And always, English 61 students could see that Melville - who died destitute

and unread, buried in a pauper’s grave - was sending out luminous rays of prophetic insight to anyone who

took the time and trouble to read him with care.

Yale alumnus Don Gordon (’56), recalls hearing Richard Sewall read this passage at the end of an

English 61 lecture: “I just re-read - couldn’t resist - the selection from “The Fountain”, about intuition, and

found myself seeing him moving eloquently behind the podium in Harkness Hall, in faint twisting motions, as if

wrestling with the very urgency and pungency of the ideas he was presenting to us, forcing us almost to pay

riveted attention to their thrust, their importance for our very lives.”

In his last years, Richard Sewall’s memory would fall further prey to dementia, close cousin to full-

blown Alzheimer’s. He could no longer read or write. He took phone calls, but seldom made them. One

evening in 1999, I called from Chicago to find him utterly disoriented. “Steve,” he pleaded, “I don’t know where


5


I am. What are all these books doing on the walls?” He was speaking from the living room adjoining the cozy

study with the little wood-burning stove that had been his scholarly home for the past 35 years.

Though he seemed to be losing interest in the world, Richard Sewall was engaged in several worldly

quests. One, a duty-quest, related to Yale. After his afternoon nap, he would sometimes appear dressed up in

a jacket and tie. Glancing at his watch, he would tell us he had to be downtown in an hour to lecture at Yale.

“What about, Dad?’ I once asked. “I don’t know,” he responded in a voice edged with fatigue and annoyance,

“Whatever they want me to talk about”.

A more abiding quest was to reunite with his family of birth. Shortly before leaving Bethany in early

2000 to live with my brother Rick’s family near Boston, he said he was waiting to be picked up and driven

back to his childhood home in Rye, New York. His beloved country home in Bethany, with its splendid

prospect of the New Haven reservoir and, at sunset in the far distance, the sunlit 500 foot-tall geologic sill

known as West Rock, was now a mere way station in his search for a destination that always eluded him.

II.

One of the joys of being close to “senile” people is the discovery that not all of their quests are

imaginary. In June, 2002 my father flew from Boston to spend several months with me in the Chicago suburb

of Glenview. For months he had been asking me when he could visit. At O’Hare airport, the luminous look on

his face told me he had reached a destination.

And here he was now, in high spirits, sipping from a bowl of chicken noodle soup and munching on a

tuna fish salad sandwich at my sunlit, glass-top breakfast table in Glenview. I beheld him with amazement. He

had made the flight alone, without a hitch. And there he sat, bent over, utterly engrossed in the act of eating.

Later that summer, I would ask him what keeps him going. “Well,” he said, “I get to eat three square meals a

day. And I like being around you guys”.


6


We hadn’t been together for months. I yearned to talk with him about a book I wanted to write. Could

we still communicate? And if we could, how would our conversation go? And where would it lead us? I could

not say. But if we talked, our conversation would be the latest installment in the ongoing dialogue on Yale,

education and politics that we began in 1965, at the Ezra Stiles Master’s House, where I lived for a year while

completing a Master of Arts in Teaching degree at Yale.

That year at Stiles was formative for me. I studied Romantic poetry with Harold Bloom, sang with the

Original Golden Stars, a local gospel quartet, and watched, on the color TV set at the Law School dining hall,

the Vietnam War hearings conducted by Senator William Fulbright and his Senate Foreign Relations

Subcommittee. In the afternoons and evenings, fascinating people from all walks of life gathered for tea and

drinks in silk-padded, U-shaped conversation alcove at the Master’s House. One was Allard K. Lowenstein,

the Yale-trained lawyer, civil rights activist and future Congressman who then was traversing college

campuses nationwide and building the student antiwar movement that would eventually, in the New

Hampshire primary election, unseat a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson. My parents liked Al. Hearing of his

exhausting travel schedule, they told him he was welcome at Stiles at any hour, day or night. Happily, he took

up their offer. He would ring the doorbell at 2AM and in minutes be munching on a tuna fish sandwich of his

own, enthralling his pajama-clad listeners with tales of political daring and intrigue at the highest levels.

My parents’ open-door policy for Al Lowenstein was a departure from their longstanding practice, well

known at Yale, of turning in early. “Richard,” my mother would say from across the room, “It’s 9 o’clock”, and

their guests, getting the message, would wrap up the liveliest of conversations and be gone in minutes. Al’s

late night visits cost them sleep, but gave them a pipeline to the wartime concerns of Yale students. Students

were grateful. For two years running – 1965 and 1966 – Yale seniors dedicated the Yale Banner, their class

yearbook, to Richard Sewall (Appendix II). Unhappy with the second dedication, my father asked Stiles senior

Bob Woodward, the future Washington Post reporter and then Managing Editor of The Banner, why his staff

had to make it. “Because you’re the only faculty member who listens to us students”, he later recalled

Woodward telling him. Hearing this, I countered that a fair number of Yale professors listened to students in

the sixties. “I know,” he said, “that’s what I told Woodward.” But the deed was done.


7


Even more than Vietnam during my year at Stiles, my father and I discussed education. Our initial focal point

was not Yale, but the English class I taught, as part of Yale’s M.A.T. program, to thirty 9th grade boys at Troup

Junior High School in New Haven. They had been diagnosed as slow learners. Most were nothing of the sort.

They were the sons of hard-pressed African-American and Italian families, students in a broken school

system and residents of a failing city. A decade and a half later, the City of New Haven, ravaged by gangs

and drugs, would report the highest per capita homicide rate of any city in America.

On the first day of class at Troup, to see if my students could write, I assigned a one-page answer to

a simple question: “What happened in English class today?” The paper Joe McVety turned in next day began,

“At 9:27, Mr. Sewall walked into room 314 wearing his threadbare jacket.” This kid could write. But others

were. For much of the year, I thought it was personal problems that held them back. Take Dexter, a young

man with a bladder problem but no written permission to leave class to relieve himself. Normally well

behaved, Dexter would stand up at his desk and glare at me whenever I refused his pressing requests to go

to the bathroom. Go get permission from the main office, I would tell him, but he never did. Near the end of

the school year, I asked my students to write a story wherein they told me an enormous lie, something wild

and crazy. Joe McVety championed Dexter’s cause with a terrific stretcher about how Detective Dexter, after

a worldwide search, had finally tracked down the evil Mr. Sewall to the men’s room of the Seaview Hotel in

Paris, France and sent him flying clear through the skylight window with one tremendous punch. The class

howled with delight as I read Joe’s paper to them. It was good to see Joe stand up for his classmate. But it

had yet to dawn on me that maybe Dexter did need to go to the john. Just before school let out in June,

Dexter, feeling nature’s call, pulled a knife on me. Standing wide-eyed at his desk, he didn’t know what to do

next. For a moment, I didn’t either. The class froze. Finally, I told him to put away the knife, go take a leak,

and be back in two minutes. He did. But that year I never even out found out if Dexter could learn.

Then there was Anthony Tomasino, whose mom had a fresh-baked chocolate cake waiting for me

when I visited her 4-room apartment to find out why her son was acting up in class. When I asked about the

six locks that were unaccountably bolted to the front door, she explained that the sixth was there because

Anthony, who slept in her bed at age 15, had learned how to unlock the first five in his sleep.


8


Finally, there was David Johns, easily as bright as most people I met in my years at Harvard, Yale and U.C.

Berkeley. Though hamstrung by a deep and abiding anger, David wrote well and could think on his feet. He

struck me as fearless, perhaps even brave. One day in February, my supervising teacher at Troup, Dorothy

Himmelfarb, took over my class to give a standardized test to my test-resistant students. Miss Himmelfarb

was a stern veteran. A holdover from the 1950’s, when Troup had sent many of its mostly Jewish students on

to college, her face seemed frozen in a permanent scowl. Later would I learn that my students actually

respected her. And later still, when we had dinner after school let out, I saw her devotion to them. That day,

however, standing among my students in the middle of the room to give them a little pep talk, she made the

mistake of telling saying that students take standardized tests for the same reason that squirrels gather nuts

in the fall: to secure their futures. This advice prompted David Johns, from his front row seat behind her, to let

out a squirrel-like chirp. Other students followed suit and soon a chorus of squeaks and chirps filled the room.

For a moment, Miss Himmelfarb lost it. “You boys are acting like the monkeys I saw last week at the Central

Park Zoo,” she erupted, and then, when some hapless fellow squeaked again, her finger shot out with a

bitterly accusatory “There’s one now!” “There’s another!” David Johns shot back from behind her, his voice

and demeanor a brazen, brilliant parody of hers. Miss Himmelfarb whirled round to face her challenger. David

dropped his finger and glared at her, daring her to make the next move. The entire class gasped. For a

moment, time stood still. “I will see you today after school”, Miss Himmelfarb said coolly, but with ominous

finality, saving face for both parties as only a pro can. David, to his credit, kept his peace and the test went on

without a hitch.

At supper at Stiles that year, I regaled my parents with stories like these. Yet I struggled with my

teaching. My father couldn’t help me. Miss Himmelfarb spent all of ten minutes with me that year, five before

my first class and five after the last. Yet Troup was a fascinating place and, after my class most days I

roamed the school, taught as a substitute, or visited classes overseen by battle-scarred souls who had

stopped teaching years ago, or never started.


9


My most memorable moment at Troup was with my least memorable student. As a teacher, I like to

connect with something unique in my students. Yet nothing about Kenny Brown stood out. So here he was

one day in April, sullen and morose, sitting in my ’65 VW beetle after 45 minutes of after-school detention with

me. “You gonna drive me downtown to my bus?” he had asked, as if I owed him a ride. We weren’t talking.

But I was his teacher. To break the silence, I asked him the only question I could think of: “What will you do

when you got out of high school? “I just want to have a job”, he said in an altered voice, low and guttural.

Dead serious, yet despairing. We talked. What Kenny Jones, at age 15, wanted most in life but already knew

he might never get, was something his father had never been able to hold. And, I thought, something his

school was not preparing him to secure. From then on, we got along.

At graduation in June, Troup Principal Frank J. Carr opened my eyes to a harsh reality in public

education. “Mr. Sewall,” he said, “I see you’ve spent a lot of time at school this year. If you could change one

thing, what would it be?” Students, I said, need textbooks less than six years old. Mr. Carr then gave me two

numbers: $400,000 and $50,000. The first was the amount budgeted by the New Haven Board of Education

to renovate – unnecessarily, he said - the Troup cafeteria that summer. The second was the amount

budgeted for textbooks for all students in the system, grades 1 through 12, for the entire year.

That night, over supper at the long rustic wooden table my mother had designed for the Stiles dining

room, I said I now knew why my students had been diagnosed as slow learners. Fat cat contractors were

calling the shots at the Board of Education. In time, we came to feel that Yale bore responsibility as well. In

the 1950’s, Yale president Whitney Griswold had closed the university’s Graduate School of Education and

replaced it with the rickety teacher training program that granted me my M.A.T degree. Then, in the late

1960’s, Yale closed this program, replacing it with one that has made modest improvements in New Haven

schools, and, by example, in schools nationwide. But as the response of a torchbearing university to New

Haven’s education crisis – let alone America’s - Yale’s new program was a drop in the bucket.

Why is it, we began to ask, that great universities like Yale, in their quest to explore and master every

aspect of nature, were so slow to accept responsibility, as places of learning, for the education of young


10


people? Did Yale feel, with president Griswold, that the teaching of young people is not a profession but a

vocation and hence unworthy of graduate study at Yale (unlike law, medicine, business, music, theology and

forestry)? Had Yale concluded that no one knows how to train teachers? Did Yale’s major donors regard

public schools as holding stations for the unproductive? Or, finally, did Yale accept that all educational

institutions, itself included, exist to serve the existing social order, whatever that may be? For years we

wrestled with these questions and the defeatism – the lack of faith in human potential and democracy itself -

that underlies them. We found no easy answers. We did find, however, a lack of leadership. In 1993, I told a

large gathering of Yale alumni in Chicago that when future historians look back on the collapse of public

education in urban and rural America in the last half of the 20th century, one cause they find will be the

abandonment of education by torchbearing universities like Yale.

Truth be told, this lack of leadership was pervasive. Thomas Jefferson’s dream of universal education

had been abandoned not only by the City of New Haven and Yale University, its largest employer, but by

cities and universities nationwide - and by state and federal governments as well. Eventually we came to feel

that that this promise survived merely in the “Education President” and “no child left behind” platitudes of so-

called education mayors, governors and presidents, whose actual policies invariably sent tens of millions of

Kenny Browns into the world utterly unprepared to survive in it.

We discussed leadership at the university level. As I would later say in a Yale Herald op ed piece that

appeared four months after my father’s death, we envisioned a Yale School of Education rivaling Yale's

schools of law, management and medicine in size, quality and influence (Appendix III). A school that met the

needs of Arne Duncan, Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, who has said he can’t find a good

inner city high school principal to save his soul. Aware, however, that a Yale School of Education was a

pipedream even to educators, we took bittersweet comfort in T. S. Eliot’s account of the paradoxical

belatedness of all self-knowledge:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started


11


And know the place for the first time.

III.

Now, in Glenview, at the glass-top table with my father in June of 2002, the end of all our exploring

seemed nowhere in sight. America’s education crisis had taken a distant back seat to Enronitis, a plummeting

stock market and the War on Terror. Democracy itself, we were hearing, was under attack. It was hard to see

the future ahead.

My father had finished his soup and sandwich. We had discussed family matters. I fell silent,

wondering how best to resume our old dialogue. It wouldn’t be easy. I had a lot to say. And he was the very

image of old age: teeth missing, posture bent, joints hugely swollen. A line of drool flowing from his open

mouth was forming a little pool on the glass top table. Yet his eyes, sunken and watery, were fixed on mine.

Age be damned, I told myself, we’re gonna talk, full throttle, as we always have.

I began by saying I wanted to talk about Yale, but first I had to fill him in on what had happened in the

world since he stopped reading the New York Times. So I gave him a capsule history of the 1990’s, much as

if he had just returned from the planet Mars. I began with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the global

economy, continued with the booming and bursting of the tech bubble and concluded with the early months of

the War on Terror. He took it all in. I was getting through. For the next hour and a half, his eyes neither

wandered or nor wavered.

I turned then to a dominant trend in 1990’s America: the impact of Big Money as it relates to the three

issues of campaign finance, endemic financial corruptions epitomized in Enronitis and America’s post-Cold

War drift (or drive) toward towards global empire. These I would later discuss in a Yale Herald opinion piece

that appeared two months before his death (Appendix IV). I mentioned also a fourth issue of particular


12


importance to educators: the role of the CIA – of CIA covert operations - in advancing the global drug trade

that had decimated New Haven and cities nationwide, like Chicago, where I worked and taught for 25 years. I

showed him the quintessential book on this topic, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug

Trade, by Alfred W. McCoy, himself a Yale Ph.D. who teaches at the University of Wisconsin. And I reminded

him of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s blunt 1994 assessment to a group of high school student leaders

that “Drugs have cost Chicago two generations of young people”. Asserting that adults have failed to solve

the problem, Mayor Daley challenged students that day “to formulate a drug policy of their own”. For the next

five years I tried to help Chicago solve its drug problem. I worked with students, educators and police. And

with politicians, foundations and members of the media. The first group responded energetically. The second

group, for the most part, dropped the ball.

“They could stop it if they want to,” the first group would say, and I believe today that they were right.

“You’ll never stop drugs until you take the money out of it,” said the second, believing the problem to be

insoluble. There is of course big money in drugs. An illegal drug economy sustains many poor Chicago

neighborhoods. And legal profits from illegal drugs go to rehab centers, proscription drug companies, criminal

defense lawyers, the prison industry and banks that launder cash generated by the hundred billion dollar

global drug trade. Today, in the war zones of Chicago’s south and west sides, perhaps half of the city’s

420,000 public school students are afraid to walk to school for fear of crossing gang lines. This, I told my

father, was the net result in Chicago of the five failed drugs wars of presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush

’41 and Clinton. (Bush ’43 was letting the problem slide.)

At this point I brought it all home to Yale, so to speak, with a unifying thought - a shock of recognition

– that had dawned on me only after weeks of research: Yale graduates, I told my father, have occupied the

White House since 1988. Four terms and counting! This Yale succession was historic. Never had two, let

alone three, successive U.S. presidents studied at the same university. On the positive side, the Yale

succession gave the university a degree of political clout. As a “laboratory for future leaders”, in president

Richard Levin’s phrase, Yale was in a position to help train a new generation of political leaders, conceivably

with the support the Yale presidents themselves. On the negative side, however, the Yale succession

smacked of Ivy League oligarchy, especially in light of Yale’s $11 billion ($13 billion today) endowment, its


13


soaring tuition costs, and a bevy of Yale-trained presidential contenders that included John Kerry, Howard

Dean, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton.

”In your time, Dad, it wasn’t like this”, I said, “but today, you practically need a Yale degree to run for

president.” Then, adding that the university seems to like it this way, I handed him a copy of a full page

advertisement placed by the university in the Washington Post (and in the International Herald Tribune as

well) on January 21, 2001, the day after the inauguration of president George W. Bush, at a cost of some

$100,000. The text ran, “In its Tercentennial year Yale University salutes its alumnus GEORGE W. BUSH as

well as graduates William J. Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Gerald R. Ford, and Yale's 110,000 other alumni

around the world” (Appendix V).

“Dad, here’s why all this matters to me”, I said, placing on the glass-top table my copy of the

American Heritage Dictionary he had handed me in 1975 after receiving it, hot off the press, from a thoughtful

former student. “Take a look at the entry for perquisite," I told him, just as he had told me then: with a rare

note of undisguised pride in his voice. I read him the entry and its usage example, which credits him by name:

“Politics was the perquisite of the upper classes. (Richard B. Sewall)”. (Appendix VI)

“Is Yale helping to make politics a perquisite of the upper classes?” I asked. “And if not, why has

Yale’s vaunted community of scholars failed to examine something historic happening in its own back yard?” I

had discussed the Yale succession with Yale alumni. A few, I told my father, were aware and concerned. Yet

most had never thought about it. “Dad,” I said, “the Yale succession is hidden in plain view. It is shielded from

critical scrutiny by three hundred years of Ivy League venerability. Yet it is discretely affirmed within this

genteel tradition.” This account, however, only scratched the surface. I had now to take up a topic we had

never discussed at length: the covert Yale.

The wellsprings of this topic, as anyone at Yale knows, are in two secretive institutions with deep ties

to Yale: the Central Intelligence Agency and Skull & Bones, the first and foremost of Yale’s seven, fraternity-

like secret societies. We discussed Bones first. William Huntington Russell, valedictorian of the class of 1832,

had founded Bones in 1833, modeling it on his formative year at a university-based secret society in


14


Germany. This much was common knowledge. Recently, however, I had learned that Russell founded Bones

with drug money supplied by his uncle, Samuel Russell, a merchant entrepreneur whose fleet of speedy

Yankee Clippers had made him a fortune in the so-called China Trade: opium transported to Shanghai from

India, Burma and Turkey. For a number of reasons, I was curious to know more.

As Yale people never cease telling me, Richard Sewall was among the most patient and politic of men. For

this reason, the rare moments of anger I saw in him during my childhood years have stayed with me. One

such moment, a recurrent one, had to do with Skull & Bones. At tea with Yale people in our living room, the

mere mention of Bones would prompt him to declare it a “curse on the academic life of the university.” Having

thrown down this gauntlet, he would fall silent. His guests were free to pick it up or let it rest. Often as not,

someone picked it up. It was then that I heard about the Bones archive of old term papers covering much of

Yale’s undergraduate course offering. Bonesmen could select a paper, touch it up and resubmit it as their

own work. This, my father felt, was institutionalized plagiarism: a violation of the level playing field to which

students everywhere are entitled. In his low key way, he was protesting Yale’s refusal to put a stop to it.

In recent weeks, I had discovered weightier reasons for concern with Skull & Bones. Credit the

Internet. In overheated yet by no means unsubstantial online “outlaw” histories of Skull & Bones, writers like

Antony Sutton, Anton Chaitkin and Kris Millegan were saying alarming things about Bones. Much of what they

said could be independently corroborated or verified. Before turning to them, I wanted first to know if my

father could recall his old anger towards Bones.

“Sure I do,” he said, “but more than that, those guys were trying to run the whole damned university!”

This, to put it mildly, was news to me. It should not have been. Yale presidents had been Bonesmen, or

related to Bonesmen, for 84 of the 105 years until the time of my father’s retirement in 1976 (Appendix

VII). So how, I now asked him, was Bones trying to run Yale? His response, while an answer to a different

question, was passionate in its conviction.

“Skull and Bones will never succeed in running the university”, he insisted. “Yale is too big and too

diverse a place to be controlled by any one group.” Suddenly he was back at Yale, in a heated lunchtime


15


conversation at Freshman Commons, perhaps. Sensing my interest, he cautioned me: “Watch out. You can

never prove anything against those guys. They cover up everything they do.”

A queasy feeling of tilting at windmills came over me. Yet knowing that my father, even at 94, would

expect documentation, I had materials at hand: copies of U. S. Treasury Department vesting orders

unearthed from the Federal Register at the Government Documents Office at Northwestern University. A

staple of the outlaw historians, these documents identified three Bonesmen, of whom one, Prescott Bush

(’17), was the father and grandfather of two Bonesman who would be presidents.

I placed on the table four vesting orders issued in November and December, 1942, as American

troops fought Field Marshall Rommel, Hitler’s Desert Fox, in North Africa. These authorized the confiscation,

under the Trading with the Enemy Act, of all assets of four corporations created by W.A. Harriman & Co, the

investment firm of Bonesman Averell Harriman (’13) where Prescott Bush had signed on as Vice President in

1926.

Identified on the vesting order for the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) were Prescott Bush and his

Yale classmate and fellow Bonesman, Roland Harriman (’17), Averell’s younger brother and a partner at UBC

(Appendix VIII). It was not Roland who brought Prescott on board at USB, however, but George Herbert

Walker, Averell’s Senior Managing Partner and, since 1921, Prescott’s father-in-law. Walker is the Dubya in

Bush ’43 and the Herbert Walker in Bush ’41. The outlaw historians argued, with documentation, that from the

1920’s to late 1942, Walker, Bush and the Harriman brothers raised millions from American investors not to

build up Hitler’s transportation or agriculture infrastructures, but his military machine.

“Dad,” I said half seriously, “The Internet is a book of books. It’s changing the way knowledge is

organized, disseminated and applied. Spend a couple days on it and you may get the idea that the nation is

run by a bunch of Ivy League arms merchants!” In the past, an incendiary assertion like this - and I had made

one or two over the years - would have triggered a quietistic “yes, but . . . ” from him. But not now.


16


I paused. Our eyes met. His were sad. I had determined beforehand not to cause him pain. “Dad, you

know, we don’t have to go on with all this. It isn’t fun, and, believe me”, I said with mock exaggeration, “It only

gets worse!” “Go on”, he said, with a chuckle, and I did. We were on a quest.

Next I turned to early 1990’s stories from several mainstream sources – Time Magazine, the Wall

Street Journal, and the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post - that explored a topic seemingly unthinkable

after 9/11: possible business ties between the Bush and bin Laden families dating back to the late 1970’s.

These centered on James R. Bath, a Houston businessman and friend of both Bush presidents. They

established that Bath testified in court – at his divorce hearing - that he was a financial advisor to four wealthy

Saudis, including Salem bin Laden, half-brother to Osama, on whose behalf he made investments in his own

name. Bath testified also that he was an early investor in Arbusto Energy, the short-lived oil exploration

company founded by George W. Bush in 1978. He insisted, however, that his $50,000 investment in Arbusto

was not a Saudi investment but his alone. Perhaps so. But whoever was behind Bath’s $50,000 investment in

Arbusto, the record showed that petro-dollar rich Saudis were looking to James Bath and oil-rich Houston to

secure a toe-hold in America’s business and political establishment.

In this endeavor, I told my father, the Saudis had succeeded handsomely. Their toe-hold had become

a beach-head. In the days after 9/11, when America’s skies were emptied of airplanes by order of the Federal

Aviation Administration, scores of wealthy Saudi citizens - including a dozen or so members of the bin Laden

family of whom two, Abdullah and Omar, were being investigated by the FBI as possible funders of Al Qaeda

- had been flown from cities nationwide to Boston’s Logan Airport and thence whisked out of the United

States to Saudi Arabia by charter jet. Who had authorized these magic carpet flights? Attention focused on

the White House and the influence of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the jet-setting Saudi foreign minister and

longtime friend of the Bush family. Soon, the White House was saying that the bin Laden family members

evacuated from America were above suspicion.

The Saudi beachhead in American politics had another Bush/bin-Laden component. On September

11, 2001, Shafiq bin Laden, estranged half-brother of Osama, represented the bin Laden family’s financial

interests in the Carlyle Group at a conference of Carlyle investors in Washington. Present with bin Laden at


17


the same conference on September 10 had been president George H. W. Bush, a Senior Advisor to the firm

at the time. Carlyle, I told my father, is a private equity firm, worth $11 billion ($17 billion today) that buys up

and turns around ailing businesses, usually government-regulated ones, and often in the defense industry. In

just fifteen years, Carlyle has become the eleventh largest defense contractor in the United States. Its mission

“is to be the premier global private equity firm, leveraging the insight of Carlyle's team of investment

professionals to generate extraordinary returns across a range of investment choices, while maintaining our

good name and the good name of our investors.” Carlyle, I said, fulfills its mission by recruiting senior

American and foreign public officials, often just as they leave public office. Later I would learn from The Iron

Triangle, Dan Briody’s recent book on Carlyle, that president George W. Bush had been a board member of

CaterAir, a Carlyle-controlled company in need of regulatory assistance that it eventually secured with the

help of Bush family contacts developed in the early 1990’s.

Other Carlyle employees included four Bush ’41 Republicans (Secretary of State James Baker, Office

of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci and two Clinton

Democrats (Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Leavitt and Federal Communications

Commission Chairman William Kennard). George Soros, now fiercely opposed to president Bush, is a

substantial investor.

Just as not all (but most) Carlyle employees are Republicans, I told my father, not all (but most)

Bonesmen are Republicans. Averell Harriman, for instance, was not only a lifelong Democrat but a senior

advisor to presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. My father chuckled when I quoted one of the outlaw

historians to the effect that Skull & Bones likes to have a voice on both sides of the political debate. Indeed,

Harriman’s third wife and widow, the glorious and glamorous Britisher, Pamela Harriman, was instrumental in

the neo-liberal refashioning of the Democratic Party in the 1980’s, even to the point of advancing the young

Bill Clinton to prominence as the party’s chief fundraiser.

No arms deals for Bill Clinton, I said, and no direct ties to Bones. Yet Big Money everywhere. By now

my father was shaking his head. All three Yale succession presidents owed their White House tenures to


18


wealthy individuals who had somehow managed to keep their ties to the likes of Hitler, and Stalin as well,

from entering election year discourse. History itself was being nullified.

And nullified on a grand scale. In passing, I mentioned two well-received recent books documenting

the Nazi business dealings of Henry Ford and James Watson of IBM. General Motors, the du Ponts and the

Rockefellers, I was learning, had done likewise. Finally, I mentioned Western Technology and Soviet

Economic Development, (1971), Antony Sutton’s three-volume study of how Western firms, aided by the U. S.

Commerce Department, built up the industrial capacity of Stalin’s Russia from 1917 to 1945. In 1984, in a

book praised by senior public officials, Harvard historian Richard Bowman Pipes described Sutton’s

documented account of the dependence of the Soviets on Western technology well into the Cold War years –

Soviet boasts of self-sufficiency notwithstanding – as “uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists”.

Pipes added that “For this reason, [Sutton’s] work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as ‘extreme’ or,

more often, simply ignored.” Indeed, Sutton soon found himself no longer a Fellow at Stanford University’s

Hoover Institute. He became one of the first of the outlaw historians.

Sutton’s book on Skull & Bones, America’s Secret Establishment (1983) was the first in-depth look at

Bones, I believe, since Bones was founded a century earlier. It was inspired by Sutton’s receipt of a Bones

membership list from an anonymous Bonesman. The book is not an easy read: it struck me as a fevered

mishmash of bold-typed accusations, contemporary documents, conspiratorial charts, and eerie images,

piratical and Masonic. Yet it was full of probes and insights. Some, like the Bones/Hitler ties discussed above,

are glossed over in the otherwise useful recent book on Bones, Secrets of the Tomb (2001), by Yale-

educated journalist Alexandra Robbins (’99). Others, like Sutton’s analysis of Bones’ impact on the nation’s

two-party political system, resonate to politics today. With Skull and Bones, Sutton maintained, Russell

created a leadership cult whose 19th century Prussian statism had overwhelmed American individualism, and

whose money-driven Hegelian dialectic of left and right had wormed its way into upper reaches of the

Democratic and Republican parties. Sutton is nothing if not comprehensive in his thinking. Bones, in his view,

had used its base at Yale to manage America’s educational, cultural, mass communication and even religious

institutions so effectively as to create a national civic mindlessness, or “dumbing down of America”.


19


In twenty years of teaching in Chicago, I had seen educational failures of the kind described in

Dumbing us Down, the 1992 book by New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto. But even if

American education and culture as well do dumb us down, I told my father, it requires a most curious mindset

to trace responsibility for the entire mess back to a single secret society at Yale. Then again, Sutton’s thinking

anticipates the possibility, hard to conceive of in 1983, of an actual Bones versus Bones presidential race -

Kerry versus Bush - that surfaced in 2003. (Within weeks, John Kerry was eerily echoing George Bush’s

campaign 2000 assertion that Skull & Bones is “too secret to talk about”. Even Yale’s non-Bones presidential

contenders avoided mentioning the university by name.)

With such thoughts in mind, I mentioned my colleague Bob Back (GS ’60), a financial analyst with a

Yale Master’s degree in International Relations who worked for the CIA and Brown Brothers, Harriman, the

Wall Street investment firm that Averell founded in the 1930’s. Doubting the conclusions of the outlaw

historians, I had asked Bob how American industrialists could possibly have empowered the two tyrants who

would turn the world into a living hell during much of the 20th century. Himself a Bush Republican who sees a

need for open dialogue, Bob said simply, “Big money likes to play both sides of the game.”

IV.

By now, the glass top table was piled high with books and papers. We had yet, however, to discuss

Yale’s ties to America’s intelligence community, ties richly described in wonderful yet neglected books by

Burton Hersh and Yale historian Robin Winks. So strong were these ties in the 1950’s and 60’s that Yale

historian Gaddis Smith has likened a meeting of senior CIA staffers in these decades to a Yale class reunion.

I turned now to Joseph Trento’s Secret History of the CIA, an epic survey of American intelligence from World

War II to the end of the 20th century. So comprehensive is this account of the CIA’s global reach that the book

reads substantially as a history of American foreign and domestic affairs as well.

George Herbert Walker Bush, CIA Director under presidents Ford and Reagan, figures in Trento’s

startling contention that “starting in 1980 [with the election of Ronald Reagan], domestic political maneuvering


20


became the Agency’s main activity”. He cites Bush’s foreign policy expertise and his Yale and Skull & Bones

credentials to suggest that Bush “considered himself cut from the same cloth as the founders of the CIA” and

that “In many ways, Bush and the CIA were a marriage made in heaven.” President Carter’s decision to

remove Bush from CIA, Trento maintains, broke Bush’s heart and “gave momentum to the creation of a CIA in

exile. This was a group of out-of-work agents that started to form as a result of [CIA Director William] Colby

and [Henry] Kissinger’s 1975 cutbacks in Clandestine Services”. Its “unofficial leader” was Ted Shackley, a

veteran Clandestine Services operative whose “relationship to George Bush eventually resulted in the Iran-

Contra mess during the Reagan presidency”. The group’s numbers swelled in 1977 after Admiral Stansfield

Turner, Carter’s choice to succeed Bush at the CIA, made additional cutbacks in Clandestine Services.

Eventually, Trento says “the wolves in Clandestine Services . . . destroyed the presidency of Jimmy Carter”,

in part by holding secret meetings between Republicans and Iranians that succeeded in deferring the release

of America’s Tehran embassy hostages until after the Reagan/Carter election of November, 1980.

It is not George H. W. Bush, however, but another Yale man, James Jesus Angleton ’41, who is one

of the two central figures in Trento’s book. After Nathan Hale (1873), I told my father, Angleton is Yale’s most

famous spy. He is, for instance, the hero of Spytime, a 2000 novel by William F. Buckley, Jr. He was born in

Boise, Idaho in 1917, the only son of a breathtakingly beautiful, devoutly Catholic Mexican woman whom

Angleton’s father, a soldier and outdoorsman, met while fighting Pancho Villa in the Mexican border wars. At

Yale, he majored in English. My father remembered his name and said he thought he had taught him. A tall,

intense, chain-smoking aesthete, Angleton founded a poetry magazine that would deliver by hand to

subscribers at all hours of the night. Before the English critic William Empson and the poet Ezra Pound were

known at Yale, Angleton brought them there to lecture. He was a doer.

It was a Princeton man - CIA founder Allen Dulles – who hired Angleton and, in 1954, made him the

first Director of CIA Counterintelligence. Angleton’s primary Cold War responsibility was to protect the CIA

from penetration by Soviet spies. In fulfilling this task, he was brilliant, dedicated, ruthless, universally feared

and yet, bottom line, ineffective. Trento presents him as a tragic figure. In 1974, CIA Director William Colby

unceremoniously fired him for his failed 10-year effort to unearth a Soviet mole who Angleton, alone among

top CIA brass, was certain had penetrated the CIA and compromised all of its covert operations. Indeed, at


21


that time, Angleton’s agency-wide mole hunt had served only to destroy the careers of dozens of wrongly

accused agents, leaving the CIA utterly demoralized.

Time, however, proved Angleton right. The CIA now accepts that from the mid 1950’s through the late

1970’s, both CIA and FBI counterintelligence were penetrated by Soviet double agent Igor Orlov, the other,

somewhat Iago-like, central figure in Trento’s book. A supremely guileful womanizer “with the soul of a

sociopath”, as Trento describes him, the diminutive, dapper Orlov never flagged in his loyalty to the Soviets.

He was a born actor. Meticulously trained and groomed by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s equally sociopathic

spymaster, and dropped behind Nazi lines in 1942, Orlov used his cover as a high level soviet intelligence

officer disillusioned with communism to turn himself into a top anti-Soviet agent for the Nazi’s. In 1945, he

was one of hundreds of senior Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS officers whom Nazi anti-Soviet spymaster

General Reinhardt Gehlen, knowing that his men faced certain execution at the hands of the Soviets,

contrived to surrender en masse to Allen Dulles. Dulles, hungry for information about the Soviets in the

looming Cold War, promptly put these and thousands of other Nazi intelligence officers on the CIA payroll. As

he had with the Nazi’s, Orlov burrowed deep into the CIA, gaining the trust of his handlers by giving them the

names of (disposable) Soviet agents. His 1956 transfer from Berlin to the CIA’s Langley, Virginia

headquarters would prove fatal for the hundreds of American agents and foreign informants whose names he

professed to vet for the CIA but quietly passed on to his Soviet handlers over the next twenty years.

Angleton missed nabbing Orlov by a hairsbreadth. Convinced since the time of President’s Kennedy’s

assassination in 1963 that Orlov was the mole he dreaded, Angleton subjected him to a final set of polygraph

tests in the early 1970’s. But Orlov passed them and with this success put an end to the career of his only

ranking accuser at CIA. The CIA had dropped its guard. Trento writes:

Angleton’s departure meant an end to any semblance of counterintelligence in the CIA . . . At Gallery

Orlov, [the quaint picture framing store in Alexandria, Virginia that Orlov opened in the early sixties], Igor

continued to entertain new customers, many of whom came from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army

Intelligence, the Department of State and the CIA. His customers also included a handful of the KGB’s most

important and protected agents. Now that Angleton was out, the little man really was bullet-proof.


22


Years later, Trento says, the FBI finally got around to examining the client lists it had confiscated in

many raids it had conducted on Gallery Orlov at Angleton’s request in 1965. These lists, he writes, confirm

that “almost every major name in FBI and CIA counterintelligence and security had been a customer at

Gallery Orlov. Igor Orlov had the identities of almost the entire United States counterintelligence apparatus to

use as he wished. “Subsequently betrayed by his Soviet masters in order to advance the next generation of

Soviet spies, Antoly Golytsyn and Yuri Nosenko, and discarded also as useless by the CIA, Orlov died in

America in 1982, broken and paranoid - yet a free man.

Trento writes that Angleton, for his part, was “written off as a crank and a madman by his critics” after

his termination from the CIA. Two years before his death from lung cancer in 1982, Angleton granted Trento

an interview. By then, he was “a man estranged by his career from his wife and children and dying in total

emotional isolation.” Yet in person, Trento found him “not bitter – just uncomfortable” with the thought, as

Angleton put it, that “I have wasted my existence, my professional life”. I read from the interview:

Within the confines of [Angleton’s] remarkable life were most of America’s secrets. “You know how I

[Angleton] got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed

background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends . . . They were afraid that their own

business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the

Russians would discover it all. . . . You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people

killed. . . We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We - I - so misjudged what

happened."

I asked the dying man how it all went so wrong.

With no emotion in his voice, but with his hand trembling, Angleton replied: “Fundamentally, the

founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the

more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of


23


their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in

looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it. . . Allen Dulles, Richard

Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you

were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton slowly

sipped his tea and then said, “I guess I will see them there soon.”

I paused, re-read the last paragraph to my father, and placed Trento’s book on the table. He was with me,

eyes fixed on mine. Shifting gears, I said, "Dad, who can say for sure whether Allen Dulles and his pals were

liars? All I can say is that Angleton doesn’t sound crazy to me. That said, the world is a dangerous place. To

read diplomats like George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and Strobe Talbott, journalists like Arnaud de

Borchgrave and William Kristol and academic historians like Robert D. Kaplan or Yale’s own John Lewis

Gaddis, Donald Kagan and John Paul Kennedy, is to see why men like Allen Dulles and Averell Harriman felt

America was in danger. Yet how often do these writers hold up a mirror up to America and its part in

exacerbating or creating these dangers?”

Next I made a pitch for an idea that had concerned us since the mid 1980’s. ”America”, I said, “lacks

a mechanism – ongoing public forums - for distinguishing between dangers real, exaggerated and contrived.

Information-age America has indeed dumbed itself down even though it enjoys the finest communications

technologies the world has ever seen. Along with the world’s best schools, it should have the world’s finest

public communications system: a civic media, mandated by the Federal Communications Commission and

charged to make citizens and government responsive and accountable to each other. Funded by an array of

public, private and commercial sources, this lively, dialogic, problem-solving media should operate prime-time

and year-round in partnerships with existing media at local, state and national levels. The only antidote to the

mindlessness of attack ads is the flow of information and dialogue generated by civic media.

With this, I had spoken my piece. The sunlight had long since left the glass top table. After a moment,

sensing that I was waiting for him to speak, he looked down. He had to be tired after his flight to Chicago, I

thought, and indeed, at that moment, he looked to be the oldest man I’d seen outside of a wheelchair or a


24


hospital bed. Yet a slight forward lean in his posture told me that he was thinking.

“So,” he said at length, “What do you want to do with all this?”

“I want to write a book," I said. "An election year book. One that gives Yale and the nation as well a

chance to reflect, and act wisely. But I need a title. Dad, what do you think should I call it?”

Another moment passed. “How about Yale and the Modern World?”, he asked, rising to his feet and heading

for the bathroom. I was stunned. It was so simple, yet Olympian in its detachment. For a moment, I felt it was I

who was returning from Mars and he who had been here all along. Later I would recall the chapter in his book

on tragedy entitled “Tragedy and the Modern World”. Later still, I would read Robert D. Kaplan’s Warrior

Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos – a book read at the Pentagon – that approaches modern

geopolitics from the standpoint of the tragic outlook epitomized in the ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman

philosophers and historians. Kaplan says of Winston Churchill, for instance, that “like all wise men, he thought

tragically”. But I search Kaplan’s book in vain for concern with the hubris, or arrogance, that concerned the

Greek tragedians.

V.

My dialogue with my father continued throughout the hot, dry summer of 2002. We talked as we

relaxed. Wearing big old straw hats, we took early morning and late evening walks, measured now not in

miles covered, as in days gone by, but in houses passed. We dined alfresco at a Mexican restaurant on

Waukegan Road that overlooked a parking lot full of SUV’s. A splashing fountain there shot water ten feet into

the air and brought out the best in children. At twilight on June 20, my 61st birthday, four generations of

Sewalls – my father and I, my nephew Ethan (‘00), and my four year old son, Joseph Richard Sewall – took to

a big open field near our house and threw Frisbees.

That summer I gave my father baths and backrubs, shaves and haircuts. I played him "Open My Eyes

That I May See", a hymn he never tired of hearing. This, and spirituals by Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson,

and Marian Williams – especially "Jacob's Ladder" and "Old Man River" - moved him to tears. But his


25


spirituality never quelled his scepticism. Not long before his death, my brother Rick’s family played him the

Ave Maria. Even as the tears rolled down, he startled them with an extraordinary remark: “Isn’t it amazing that

so much beauty has been created in service of what is, essentially, a myth?” Melville’s double outlook to the

bitter end!

In Glenview that summer, some Yale alumni found that Richard Sewall could still spark lively

discussion. At one gathering, we related Moby Dick’s account of the 19th century quest for whale oil to the 20th

century quest for fossil fuels. We linked Melville’s concern with “the all grasping western world” to the dilemma

of American empire. Always, Richard Sewall was wrestling, looking to move the conversation forward. “Now

what?” he would say, in a flat, peremptory voice, whenever he sensed a break in the talk. This old age quirk

irked me then, but it has stayed with me, and cheers me now whenever it pops up. It recalls a special

moment. Early one morning in Chicago, in a high-rise elevator full of silent souls heading off to work, I saw my

father fidgeting with mounting discomfort as the elevator slowly descended to the ground floor. Something

was welling up in him. Finally it erupted. “Don’t you people ever talk to each other?” No one even looked up.

He was in his late seventies then, old enough to be ignored. To cover for him, I said, “Dad, this is Chicago. It’s

all business here.” But I loved him for his belief that man is a social animal, even among strangers.

Several weeks after his death, my brother Rick received a letter from Yale president Richard C. Levin,

the economist who is ably moving Yale into the 21st century as a global institution of learning, somewhat in the

manner of his counterpart at Harvard, economist Lawrence Summers. The letter moved us:

“So many remembrances of your father during the last few weeks have recalled him to me, and to all

of us, and have reminded us how lucky we are to have had his devoted and loyal service to Yale and

Yale students over so many years. What a remarkable man. If he had been one of Yale’s most

inspiring and caring teachers for forty years, that alone would have been enough to have merited

undying accolades. If he had written only his riveting book on tragedy, or his seminal biography of

Emily Dickenson, that would have been enough to make him one of his generation’s important

scholarly figures. If he had done nothing more than introduce generations of freshmen to Yale

through his Freshman talks, or start the tradition of the Stiles mastership with a grace and humanity


26


that still infuse Stiles, or advise hundreds up on hundreds of Yale undergraduates with care and

concern – those things would have been enough to earn him lasting recognition. But to his

everlasting honor, he did all of these. To my mind, and to the mind of many others, he is one of the

Yale Worthies for this century, a faculty member meriting special historical honor and praise.

At two memorial services for my father, the Rev. Thomas Howard read some of my father’s favorite passages

of scripture. Three surprised me. They should not have. They were from the Book of Amos, written by the

Israeli shepherd who some 2900 years ago was inspired to be the first in the long line of great Old Testament

prophets. In Amos, God condemns Israel’s upper classes for their luxury and short-sighted oppression of the

poor: “I hate, I despise your feasts”, God declares, “and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies”. And in

words that Martin Luther King would make famous in our time, God says, “let justice roll down like waters, and

righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. In 1959, Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (’49) – himself a

Bonesman and a CIA case officer, yet later a harsh critic of both organizations - brought Dr. King to Yale to

speak “truth to power” at Battell Chapel, sparking my father’s undying admiration for both men.

On my desk as I write is my favorite photograph of my father, taken in his mid-seventies. It keeps him

alive. One look reminds me that his wrestlings with tragedy – with the problem of evil, essentially - taught him

not to indict but to reflect. Where the God of Amos could indict Israel’s ruling class, a flawed modern

community, he believed, must heal itself: examine its history, learn from its mistakes, find ways to do better

next time. The healing process begins, ideally, at a time of calm following an internal calamity - a self-inflicted

wound – much as truth and reconciliation followed the evil of apartheid in South Africa. By contrast, America’s

recent calamity – the 9/11 attacks – was not self-inflicted, and the ensuing War on Terror may last, we are

told, for generations.

Hard as it is for a nation to heal itself at a time of war, the need for healing is widely felt in America

today. As the 2004 presidential election approaches, our political system is fanning the flames of divisions -

political, economic, educational, sexual and religious - whose intensity is arguably unprecedented in our

history. Our political system - media, press, civic institutions, attack ads - channels underinformed public

opinion about these divisions into hostile, polarized mindsets, left and right. These mindsets have come to


27


regard each other as little short of evil. Dangerous as this polarization may be, it is important to understand

that it is largely artificial and indeed substantially manufactured.

The rival ideologies that fuel it, for one thing, are based - symbolically at least - at one elite university:

in the Yale Law School neo-liberalism of the Clinton Democrats and the Skull & Bones conservatism of the

Bush Republicans. And they are underwritten, for another, by a small number of politically active

businessmen and financiers whose two overriding interests - low interest rates and a strong Dow Jones

average - have been the hallmarks of the Greenspan era that spans the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Even more than the home ownership that is fueled by low interest rates, however, it is stock ownership fueled

by a strong Dow that marks the "ownership society" that George W. Bush inherited full blown from Bill Clinton.

The critical importance of a strong Dow to the American agenda was confirmed by the $1.6 trillion investor-

centered reform of the tax system that president Bush announced in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Internationally respected economist David Hale describes this reform (whose centerpiece is the elimination of

the estate tax) as marking "the first time I can think of in the history of the United States that we have an

economic package which is focused overwhelmingly on the value of the stock market."

Democrats as well as Republicans must acknowledge, however, that this package has not only

caused the Dow to rise from 7,500 to 10,500 but triggered a global economic recovery. Hale, with other

economists, has long envisioned the emergence of a global stock market system, led by American markets,

that will have a billion shareholders by the year 2010. But can a stock market triumphant restore a unity to a

nation wherein the wealth of the top 27,000 taxpayers now equals that of the bottom 90 million, as New York

Times business writer David Cay Johnson said recently of the United States?

For the past decade, America’s presidents have insisted that strong stock markets are the best

guarantee of a healthy nation. Although this observation has helped win elections for Clinton and Bush ‘43, it

does not see the nation whole. On the watch of the Yale succession presidents - and especially during the

Greenspan “wealth creation” era - America has become a two-tier society of educated haves and uneducated

have-nots.


28


The logical remedy for this growing disparity, and for America’s ideological polarization as well, is a

new emphasis on classroom and civic education. As I have suggested above, America needs three things:

good schools for all children, a resolution of its illegal drug problem and a civic media dedicated to making

citizens and government responsive and accountable to each other. Big Money has not supported these

measures in the past, but might it do so now? After all, it can ill afford to kill the goose that continues to lay its

golden egg. And might Yale, for its part, think outside the money-buttressed, two-party box that prevents it

from seeing the nation whole? If so, the task of helping save democracy might possibly suit a university

where, as Yale says of itself, “knowledge is not being just transmitted but created, and where [students] can

be partners in the unfolding of a new understanding”.

Central to this new understanding will be a new emphasis on the teaching and writing of history. In

1946, a World War II intelligence officer and biographer of Thomas Jefferson named Saul K. Padover faulted

American schools for having “failed in their primary function, that of educating our citizens in the history and

significance of American democracy.” Today we live with consequences of this failure. The nation needs new

ways of processing critical problems, such as endemic financial corruption, of which citizens are painfully

aware. Should the outcome of this process be truth and reconciliation? Should it entail justice and restitution?

The answers to these questions are rooted in a knowledge of history, including economic history, that

Americans need to possess.

What wisdom can possibly bridge the divide that polarizes Americans today? Were Richard Sewall

alive, he might ground a new understanding of politics in an old wisdom: in the dark, blunt and yet ultimately

forgiving civic wisdom of the last lines of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:

The oldest hath borne most, we that are young,

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.


29


To obey the weight of a sad time, a society draws on a hard-earned wisdom that looks two ways:

back to the historical past, as the last couplet suggests, and inside to the self, as we see in Lear. Betrayed

and abandoned to the elements by two of his three daughters, the aged, impetuous (and hubristic) King Lear,

while “more sinned against than sinning”, wanders the heath and, in his solitude, makes the terrible but

ultimately redeeming discovery of his own substantial responsibility for his fate. In the 1950’s, Walt Kelley

voiced this discovery through his comic strip character, Pogo: “We have met the enemy and they is us.”

To wander the heath of American mass culture today is perforce, for most of us, to acknowledge our own

energetic participation in a commercial environment wherein advertising makes consumers of us all from

infancy on. While Richard Sewall shared Melville’s concerns about the “all grasping western world”, he

seldom spoke his mind on politics in public. “Speak the truth”, he would say, following Emily Dickenson, "but

speak it slant”. A curious exception was a talk about Vietnam he made at the height of the war. After his

death, I came across a startling quotation (or misquotation) from it in a 1967Yale Daily News clipping:

“Richard Sewall, master of Ezra Stiles College, condemns the war run by ‘the insane hierarchy of political

cancer’ before a group of about 75 at the United Church parish house yesterday”. Even my mother would

have been surprised at this language. After the 1970’s, politics saddened him increasingly, as politics has

saddened many who feel that power in a democracy resides in all the people, not just those with the money to

impose their will. If dementia is a way of escaping the woes of the world, politics, once a spur to glorious,

wide-ranging debate in our house, had become a woe.

To conclude: it is by chance or by design that “Four of the last six presidents of the United States

have Yale degrees,” as president Richard Levin told an audience at Peking University several years ago. In a

sense, the question hardly matters, for Yale, either way, is fashioning itself as a nexus of national and global

political power, as this genteel boast confirms. During its tercentennial anniversary year (2000-01), mother

Yale gathered all three Yale succession presidents back to New Haven for major addresses. In the Chicago

area, Yale recruiters now ask groups of high school students who wants to go into politics and then proclaim,

“Bush, Clinton, Bush”.


30


In the 2004 election year, however, the question of Yale’s four-term (and counting) lock on the White

House does matter. Now that three Yale graduates – Kerry, Dean and Bush – have emerged as the primary

contenders for presidency in the fall elections, the university itself will be subject to scrutiny. Once a private

university, Yale is now a semipublic institution. It is subject to the higher standards of transparency, openness

and accountability now required of for-profit and non-profit corporations alike. How will Yale respond to such

scrutiny? And how will Yale prepare its students to help advance democratic process in America? My father

and I could not foresee the future as we pondered these two questions during the summer of 2002. But we

felt certain that Richard Levin’s “laboratory for future leaders” could not to afford to take them lightly. At stake

is Yale’s fidelity to its mission, as stated by Levin himself during his 1993 inauguration as Yale’s 22nd

president:

At this time of looking forward, we reaffirm our past: to preserve and advance knowledge, to defend

free inquiry and free expression, to educate leaders and thinking citizens, to teach the world around

us, to give scope for human achievement, and to nurture human potential. We reaffirm these

commitments not merely as ends in themselves, but as a means to improve the human condition and

elevate the human spirit.

- - 30 - -


31

Other Yales, Other Americas

Documents

lecture hall

richard sewalls teaching

richard sewalls invitation

yale university

grad sewall

steve sewall

stiles athletic teams

taught english