Besides my work for the committee and my occasional excursions, I took three courses in summer school—in philosophy, ethics, and U.S. Diplomacy in the Far East. For the first time I read Kant and Kierkegaard, Hegel and Nietzsche. In the ethics class I took good notes, and one day in August another student, who was smart as a whip but seldom attended class, asked me if I’d take a few hours and go over my notes with him before the final exam. On August 19, my twenty-first birthday, I spent about four hours doing that, and the guy got a B on the test. Twenty-five years later, when I became President, my old study partner Turki al-Faisal, son of the late Saudi king, was head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, a position he held for twenty-four years. I doubt his philosophy grade had much to do with his success in life, but we enjoyed joking about it.
The professor for U.S. Diplomacy, Jules Davids, was a distinguished academic who later helped Averell Harriman write his memoirs. My paper was on Congress and the Southeast Asia resolution. The resolution, more commonly known as the Tonkin Gulf resolution, was passed on August 7, 1964, at the request of President Johnson, after two U.S. destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS C. Turner Joy, allegedly were attacked by North Vietnamese vessels on August 2 and 4, 1964, and the United States retaliated with attacks on North Vietnamese naval bases and an oil storage depot. It authorized the President to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression,” and “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force,” to assist any nation covered by the SEATO Treaty “in defense of its freedom.”
The main point of my paper was that, except for Senator Wayne Morse, no one had seriously examined or even questioned the constitutionality, or even the wisdom, of the resolution. The country and the Congress were hopping mad and wanted to show we wouldn’t be pushed around or run out of Southeast Asia. Dr. Davids liked my paper and said it was worthy of publication. I wasn’t so sure; there were too many unanswered questions. Beyond the constitutional ones, some distinguished journalists had questioned whether the attacks had even occurred, and at the time I finished the paper, Fulbright was asking the Pentagon for more information on the incidents. The committee’s review of Tonkin Gulf ran into 1968, and the investigations seemed to confirm that at least on the second date, August 4, the U.S. destroyers were not fired upon. Seldom in history has a non-event led to such huge consequences. Within a few months, those consequences would come crashing down on Lyndon Johnson. The swift and nearly unanimous passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution became a painful example of the old proverb that life’s greatest curse is the answered prayer.
THIRTEEN
My senior year was a strange combination of interesting college life and cataclysmic personal and political events. As I look back on it, it seems weird that anyone could be absorbed in so many big and little things at the same time, but people inevitably search for the pleasures and deal with the pain of normal life under difficult, even bizarre circumstances.
I took two particularly interesting courses, an international law seminar and a European history colloquium. Dr. William O’Brien taught the international law course, and he permitted me to do a paper on the subject of selective conscientious objection to the draft, examining other nations’ conscription systems as well as America’s, and exploring the legal and philosophical roots of the conscientiousobjection allowances. I argued that conscientious objection should not be confined to those with a religious opposition to all wars, because the exception was grounded not in theological doctrine but in personal moral opposition to military service. Therefore, though judging individual cases would be difficult, the government should allow selective conscientious objection if its assertion was determined to be genuine. The end of the draft in the 1970s made the point moot. The European history colloquium was essentially a survey of European intellectual history. The professor was Hisham Sharabi, a brilliant, erudite Lebanese who was passionately committed to the Palestinian cause. There were, as I recall, fourteen students in a course that ran fourteen weeks each semester and met for two hours once a week. We read all the books, but each week a student would lead off the discussion with a ten-minute presentation about the book of the week. You could do what you wanted with the ten minutes—summarize the book, talk about its central idea, or discuss an aspect of particular interest—but you had to do it in these ten minutes. Sharabi believed that if you couldn’t, you didn’t understand the book, and he strictly enforced the limit. He did make one exception, for a philosophy major, the first person I ever heard use the word “ontological”—for all I knew, it was a medical specialty. He ran on well past the ten-minute limit, and when he finally ran out of gas, Sharabi stared at him with his big, expressive eyes and said, “If I had a gun, I would shoot you.” Ouch. I made my presentation on Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. I’m not sure how good it was, but I used simple words and, believe it or not, finished in just over nine minutes. I spent much of the fall of 1967 preparing for November’s Conference on the Atlantic Community (CONTAC). As chairman of CONTAC’s nine seminars, my job was to place the delegates, assign paper topics, and recruit experts for a total of eighty-one sessions. Georgetown brought students from Europe, Canada, and the United States together in a series of seminars and lectures to examine issues facing the community. I had participated in the conference two years earlier, where the most impressive student I met was a West Point cadet from Arkansas who was first in his class and a Rhodes scholar, Wes Clark. Our relations with some European countries were strained by European opposition to the Vietnam War, but the importance of NATO to European security in the Cold War made a serious rupture out of the question. The conference was a great success, thanks largely to the quality of the students. Later in the fall, Daddy had gotten sick again. The cancer had spread, and it was clear that further treatment wouldn’t help. He was in the hospital for a while, but he wanted to come home to die. He told Mother he didn’t want me to miss too much school, so they didn’t call me right away. One day he said,