Living History (8 page)

The speech was, as I admitted, an attempt to “come to grasp with some of the inarticulate, maybe even inarticulable things that we’re feeling” as we are “exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty.” This speech may not have been the most coherent one I have ever delivered, but it struck a chord with my class, which gave me an enthusiastic standing ovation, partly, I believe, because my efforts to make sense of our time and place―played out on a stage in front of two thousand spectators―reflected the countless conversations, questions, doubts and hopes each of us brought to that moment, not just as Wellesley graduates, but also as women and Americans whose lives would exemplify the changes and choices facing our generation at the end of the twentieth century.

Later that afternoon, I took one last swim in Lake Waban. Instead of going to the little beach by the boathouse, I decided to wade in near my dorm, an area officially off-limits to swimming. I stripped down to my bathing suit and left my cut-off jeans and T-shirt in a pile on the shore with my aviator-like eyeglasses on top. I didn’t have a care in the world as I swam out toward the middle, and because of my nearsightedness, my surroundings looked like an Impressionist painting. I had loved being at Wellesley and had taken great solace in all seasons from its natural beauty. The swim was a final goodbye. When I got back to shore, I couldn’t find my clothes or my glasses.

I finally had to ask a campus security officer if he had seen my belongings. He told me that President Adams had seen me swimming from her house and directed him to confiscate them. Apparently, she was sorry she had ever let me speak. Dripping wet, I followed him, somewhat blindly, to retrieve my possessions.

I had no idea that my speech would generate interest far beyond Wellesley. I had only hoped that my friends thought I had been true to their hopes, and their positive reaction heartened me. When I called home, however, my mother told me that she had been fielding phone calls from reporters and television shows asking me for interviews and appearances.

I appeared on Irv Kupcinet’s interview show on a local Chicago channel, and Life magazine featured me and a student activist named Ira Magaziner, who addressed his graduating class at Brown University. My mother reported that opinion about my speech seemed to be divided between the overly effusive―“she spoke for a generation”―to the exceedingly negative―“who does she think she is?” The accolades and attacks turned out to be a preview of things to come: I have never been as good as or as bad as my most fervid supporters and opponents claimed.

With a big sigh of relief I took off for a summer of working my way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mt. McKinley National Park (now known as Denali National Park and Preserve) and sliming fish in Valdez in a temporary salmon factory on a pier. My job required me to wear knee-high boots and stand in bloody water while removing guts from the salmon with a spoon. When I didn’t slime fast enough, the supervisors yelled at me to speed up. Then I was moved to the assembly packing line, where I helped pack the salmon in boxes for shipping to the large floating processing plant offshore. I noticed that some of the fish looked bad. When I told the manager, he fired me and told me to come back the next afternoon to pick up my last check. When I showed up, the entire operation was gone. During a visit to Alaska when I was First Lady, I joked to an audience that of all the jobs I’ve had, sliming fish was pretty good preparation for life in Washington.

When I entered Yale Law School in the Fall of 1969, I was one of twenty-seven women out of 235 students to matriculate. This seems like a paltry number now, but it was a breakthrough at the time and meant that women would no longer be token students at Yale.

While women’s rights appeared to be gaining some traction as the 1960s skittered to an end, everything else seemed out of kilter and uncertain. Unless you lived through those times, it is hard to imagine how polarized America’s political landscape had become.

Professor Charles Reich, who became best known to the general public for his book The Greening of America, was camping out with some students in a shantytown in the middle of the law school’s courtyard, to protest the “establishment,” which, of course, included Yale Law School. The shantytown lasted a few weeks before being peacefully disassembled. Other protests, however, were not so peaceful. The decade of the 1960s that had begun with so much hope ended in a convulsion of protest and violence. White, middle-class antiwar activists were found plotting to build bombs in their basements.

The nonviolent, largely black civil rights movement splintered into factions, and new voices emerged among urban blacks belonging to the Black Muslims and Black Panther Party. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI infiltrated dissident groups and, in some cases, broke the law in order to disrupt them. Law enforcement sometimes failed to distinguish between constitutionally protected, legitimate opposition and criminal behavior. As domestic spying and counterintelligence operations expanded under the Nixon Administration, it seemed, at times, that our government was at war with its own people.

Yale Law School historically attracted students interested in public service and our conversations inside and outside the classroom reflected a deep concern about the events enveloping the country. Yale also encouraged its students to get out in the world and apply the theories they learned in the classroom. That world and its realities came crashing down on Yale in April 1970, when eight Black Panthers, including party leader Bobby Seale, were put on trial for murder in New Haven. Thousands of angry protesters, convinced the Panthers had been set up by the FBI and government prosecutors, swarmed into the city. Demonstrations broke out in and around campus. The campus was bracing for a huge May Day rally to support the Panthers when I learned, late on the night of April 27, that the International Law Library, which was in the basement of the law school, was on fire. Horrified, I rushed to join a bucket brigade of faculty, staff and students to put out the fire and to rescue books damaged by flames and water. After the fire was out, the law school’s Dean, Louis Pollak, asked everyone to gather in the largest classroom. Dean Pollak, a gentleman scholar with a ready smile and an open door, asked us to organize roundthe-clock security patrols for the remainder of the school year.

On April 30, President Nixon announced that he was sending U.S. troops into Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam War. The May Day protests became a larger demonstration, not only to support a fair trial for the Panthers, but also to oppose Nixon’s actions in the war. Throughout the era of student protests, Yale’s President, Kingman Brewster, and the university chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, had taken a conciliatory approach, which helped Yale avoid the problems occurring elsewhere. Rev. Coffin became a national leader of the antiwar movement through his articulate moral critique of American involvement.

President Brewster addressed student concerns and appreciated the anguish felt by many. He had even said he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries”

to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States. Faced with the prospect of violent demonstrators, Brewster suspended classes and announced that the dorms would be open to serve meals to anyone who came. His actions and statements inflamed alumni, as well as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Then, on May 4, National Guard troops opened fire on students protesting at Kent State University in Ohio. Four students were killed. The photograph of a young woman kneeling over the body of a dead student represented all that I and many others feared and hated about what was happening in our country. I remember rushing out the door of the law school in tears and running into Professor Fritz Kessler, a refugee who fled Hitler’s Germany. He asked me what the matter was and I told him I couldn’t believe what was happening; he chilled me by saying that, for him, it was all too familiar.

True to my upbringing, I advocated engagement, not disruption or “revolution.” On May 7, I kept a previously planned obligation to speak at the convention banquet of the fiftieth anniversary of the League of Women Voters in Washington, D.C., an invitation stemming from my college commencement address. I wore a black armband in memory of the students who had been killed. My emotions, once again, were close to the surface as I argued that the extension of America’s Vietnam War into Cambodia was illegal and unconstitutional. I tried to explain the context in which protests occurred and the impact that the Kent State shootings had on Yale law students, who had voted 239-12 to join more than three hundred schools in a national strike to protest “the unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” I had moderated the mass meeting where the vote took place, and I knew how seriously my fellow students took both the law and their responsibilities as citizens. The law students, who had not previously joined other parts of the university in protest actions, debated the issues in a thoughtful, albeit lawyerly, fashion. They were not the “bums” that Nixon labeled all student protesters.

The keynote speaker at the League convention was Marian Wright Edelman, whose example helped direct me into my lifelong advocacy for children. Marian had graduated from Yale Law School in 1963 and became the first black woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi. She spent the mid-sixties running the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, traveling throughout the state setting up Head Start programs and risking her neck to advance civil rights in the South. I had first heard about Marian from her husband, Peter Edelman, a Harvard Law School graduate who had clerked on the Supreme Court for Arthur J. Goldberg and had worked for Bobby Kennedy.

Peter had accompanied Senator Kennedy to Mississippi in 1967 on a fact-finding trip to expose the extent of poverty and hunger in the Deep South. Marian was one of the Senator’s guides for his travels around Mississippi. After that trip, Marian continued working with Peter, and after Senator Kennedy’s assassination, they married.

I first met Peter Edelman at a national conference on youth and community development held in October of 1969 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and sponsored by the League. The League had invited a cross section of activists from around the country to discuss ways in which young people could become more positively involved in government and politics. I was invited to serve on the Steering Committee along with Peter, who was then the Associate Director of the Robert E Kennedy Memorial; David Mixner, of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee; and Martin Slate, a fellow Yale law student who had been a friend of mine from the days he was at Harvard and I was at Wellesley. One of the issues that united us was our belief that the Constitution should be amended to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. If young people were old enough to fight, they were entitled to vote. The 26th Amendment finally passed in 1971, but young people between the ages of eighteen and twentyfour did not choose to vote in the numbers many of us then anticipated, and that group today still has the lowest registration and voter turnout of any age group. Their apathy makes it less likely that our national politics will reflect their concerns and safeguard their future.

During a break in the conference, I was sitting on a bench talking with Peter Edelman when our conversation was interrupted by a tall, elegantly dressed man.

“Well, Peter, aren’t you going to introduce me to this earnest young lady?” he asked.

That was my first encounter with Vernon Jordan, then the Director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta and an advocate of the lower voting age. Vernon, a smart and charismatic veteran lawyer of the civil rights movement, became my friend that day, and later, my husband’s. He and his accomplished wife, Ann, can always be counted on for good company and wise counsel.

Peter told me about Marian’s plans to start an anti-poverty advocacy organization and urged me to meet her as soon as I could. A few months later, Marian spoke at Yale. I introduced myself to her after wards and asked for a summer job. She told me I could have a job, but she couldn’t pay me. That was a problem since I had to earn enough money to supplement the scholarship Wellesley had awarded me for law school and the loans I had taken out. The Law Student Civil Rights Research Council gave me a grant, which I used to support my work during the summer of 1970 at the Washington Research Project Marian had started in Washington, D.C.

Senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale of Minnesota, later Vice President under Jimmy Carter, decided to hold Senate hearings to investigate the living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers. The 1970 hearings coincided with the ten-year anniversary of Edward R. Morrow’s famous television documentary Harvest of Shame, which had shocked Americans in 1960 with its expose of the deplorable treatment migrants endured.

Marian assigned me to do research on the education and health of migrant children. I had some limited experience with migrant children who had attended my elementary school for a few months each year and with others my church had arranged for me to babysit when I was about fourteen years old. Every Saturday morning during harvest season, I went with several of my Sunday school friends to the migrant camp, where we took care of the children under ten while their older brothers and sisters worked in the fields with their parents.

I got to know one seven-year-old girl, Maria, who was preparing to receive her First Communion when her family returned to Mexico at the end of the harvest. But she wouldn’t be able to mark that passage unless her family saved enough money to buy her a proper white dress. I told my mother about Maria, and she took me to buy a beautiful dress. When we presented it to Maria’s mother, she started crying and dropped to her knees to kiss my mother’s hands. My embarrassed mother kept saying she knew how important it was for a little girl to feel special on such an occasion. Years later, I realized that my mother must have identified with Maria.