Lucy went back to school herself, finishing the final two years of her bachelor degree by going part-time to Princeton University, where I was then teaching, finishing in 1975. While I was serving as president of Tulane University, and Lucy was being the “charming-wife-of,” she was also going to law school full time, receiving her J.D. in 1979 from Tulane. She started her career in New Orleans, as a staff attorney for Advocates for the Developmentally Disabled, a public-interest law group that represented people with disabilities, children among them, and worked on issues of public policy.
When I went to the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 as president, Lucy first took some time to get us settled into the new president’s residence on campus and then went to work as a staff lawyer in the excellent public interest law group in Philadelphia, the Juvenile Law Center (JLC). After an eight year mutual tutorial with the remarkable founder and director of the JLC, Robert Schwartz, Lucy left in 1990 and set up a statewide research, resource, and advocacy organization, headquartered in Harrisburg, called Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC). It is a state-level version of Marion Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), on whose board Lucy served. The chair of the CDF Board was Hillary Clinton.
I first saw the Clintons in action at a planning retreat for CDF held at the summer home of Laura Chasin on Chappaquidick a couple of years earlier. Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas and a presidential hopeful, accompanied his wife. What impressed me about Bill Clinton then was not only his legendary warmth and intelligence, but the fact that he did not “take over” the meeting. He behaved as simply another interested observer of the Board’s discussions. His wife led those discussions and was clearly in charge. That, I thought, was impressive; few of the rich and powerful with whom I dealt could have done that.
Not only did I admire that ability to play a subordinate role, but I liked the other things that I knew about Bill Clinton. He was a progressive Southern governor, liberal on race and social issues, conservative on economic and fiscal policy, and pragmatic about politics. He was a founder and leader of the Democratic Leadership Forum, a faction that was attempting to move the Democratic Party to the center of the political spectrum. In broad terms, his politics were my own. Lucy and I had contributed the maximum allowed by the law and our budget as soon as there was a Clinton Campaign organization in existence. A year later, in the fall of 1992, I joined a group of university presidents in the unusual act of endorsing Clinton for the presidency. Looking back, I am sorry I did that, not because of any judgments about Clinton’s performance but because it is not a good idea for university presidents to endorse political candidates. It is fine to speak out on public issues having to do with education, and I have done that throughout my career, but engaging in partisan politics risks politicizing the university in an unhealthy way.
Nevertheless, when I was poking through the woods of the Farm Neck golf course with Vernon Jordan just before Labor Day in 1992 looking for our errant tee shots, I was already a firm supporter of Bill Clinton. At the urging of our playing companion, Don Brown, with whom I had been talking about my future, I explained my “what next?” problem to Vernon. During a previous round of golf at Farm Neck, he had told me that under no circumstances would he take a position in a Clinton administration, but I nevertheless told him that working in Washington in a Clinton administration was something that might interest me.
As usual, Vernon gave me very good advice. While acknowledging that there might be a chance for me to do something interesting in Washington, he told me to think carefully about two things. Did I want to make the financial sacrifice a tour in government would entail, and did I want to live under the heightened scrutiny that public service at my level would certainly bring? Washington was getting to be a mean place, Vernon said, implying that he was not sure that I could survive in that atmosphere. He was right to worry. Nevertheless, he said he imagined that he and Warren Christopher would be involved in the talent search, if Clinton were elected, and that he would be glad to look after my interests.
I told the Trustee Executive Committee at its September meeting that I intended to leave by June 30, 1994, and that I thought I should announce this publicly at some time between January and June 1993. The tail end of any college presidency is always tricky. On the one hand, it is desirable to provide enough public lead time for a careful search for the next president and then for a smooth transition. On the other hand, it would be good to minimize the resulting “lame duck” period of inevitably slowing rates of progress. I hoped we could get it right. The departure of the executive vice president was a blow, of course, but my chief-of-staff, John Gould, had moved over to serve as acting executive vice president while the search for a permanent EVP proceeded. John was doing extremely well in a challenging situation. I had also kept Mike Aiken, the provost, fully informed of my thinking, so I could expect him and perhaps Rick Nahm, the vice president for planning and development, to be open to job possibilities elsewhere. I worried about the appearance of my administration “unraveling.” On the other hand, there were several deans who could serve as interim provost or even interim president, and the development staff was deep in talent.
The fall was packed with problems both routine and unusual; I was also teaching my undergraduate seminar on the history of the 1960s. While juggling the crammed agenda with as much of the outer appearance of inner serenity as I could muster, Lucy and I went to Korea and Japan to make connections with alumni/ae and to cultivate fund-raising possibilities. I got through the meetings of the full Board of Trustees in late October with no damage, and Lucy and I were elated when Bill Clinton won the election on November 5. I was particularly pleased that I had invited Hillary Clinton well before the election to be Penn’s Commencement speaker in May 1993 whether or not her husband won the election. Lucy and I went to Washington for the CDF gala in November soon after the election. The President-elect and Hillary attended. Hillary spoke after dinner and was impressive. Lucy and I exchanged pleasantries with the Clintons at the reception, and it was interesting to discover how thrilled we both were with that simple and inconsequential event. Even though we have lived lives that have brought us into frequent contact with the rich, famous, and powerful, so that we are no longer excited by the prospect of meeting a celebrity, the aura of the American presidency affected us, just as it does most Americans.
Some time between the election and Thanksgiving, I worked up my courage and called Vernon Jordan. He and Warren Christopher were indeed deeply involved in managing the transition. At Vernon’s suggestion, but without any expectations or any particular position in mind, I sent him my curriculum vitae, the first of several that disappeared aimlessly into the great maw of Washington. More purposefully, I wanted to get a delegation of college presidents in to see the President-elect to emphasize the importance to higher education of the student-aid programs and the research budgets administered by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and various cabinet departments. Indirect cost recovery on research contracts was an especially hot topic then, and I hoped we could explain its mysteries to the President-elect in a more sympathetic light than was being shed by Representative John Dingell or the daily press.
Realizing that every other organized sector with things at stake in Washington would be pressing for a similar audience, I was prepared to be shunted aside to see Johnetta Cole, the president of Spelman College who had just been named to head the transition “cluster” that included higher education. I knew Johnetta only slightly, but favorably, from our service together on the Board of the American Council on Education, the “umbrella” organization for all post-secondary education. She would be a friendly face and sympathetic voice.
Vernon told me that he would see what he could do about getting an audience of some kind for me, but he warned that my delegation could not look just like me. He meant that it could not consist entirely of white males representing elite research universities. This hint from a friend alerted me to the importance of the “politics of perception,” the ruling ethos of the public world with which I was about to collide, and it made me think again of the disjunction between the way I think of myself and the thing that I sometimes symbolize to others.
With that warning tucked into my subconscious, I continued to chip away at the year’s agenda for
