On November 3, I forgot about the election for a while during a lunch with George Cawkwell, the dean of graduates at Univ. He was a big, imposing man who still looked every inch the rugby star he once had been, as a Rhodes scholar from New Zealand. At our first meeting, Professor Cawkwell had really dressed me down about my decision to change my course of studies. Soon after I arrived in Oxford, I had transferred out of the undergraduate program in politics, philosophy, and economics, called PPE, and into the B.Litt. in politics, which required a fifty thousand–word dissertation. I had covered virtually all the first year’s work in PPE at Georgetown, and because of the draft, I didn’t expect to have a second year at Oxford. Cawkwell thought I’d made a terrible mistake in passing up the weekly tutorials, in which essays are read, criticized, and defended. Largely because of Cawkwell’s argument, I switched courses again, to the B.Phil. in politics, which does include tutorials, essays, exams, and a shorter thesis. Election day, November 5, was also Guy Fawkes Day in England, the observance of his attempt to burn down Parliament in 1605. My diary says: “Everyone in England celebrates the occasion; some because Fawkes failed, some because he tried.” That night we Americans had an election-watch party at Rhodes House. The largely pro-Humphrey crowd was cheering him on. We went to bed not knowing what happened, but we did know that Fulbright had won handily, a relief, since he had prevailed in the primary over Jim Johnson and two little-known contenders with only 52 percent of the vote. A great cheer went up at Rhodes House when his victory was announced.
On November 6, we learned that Nixon had won and that, as I wrote, “Uncle Raymond and his cronies carried Arkansas for Wallace, our first deviation from the national (Democratic) ticket since achieving statehood in 1836…. I must send my ten dollars to Uncle Raymond, for I bet him last November that Arkansas, the most ‘liberal’ of the Southern states, would never go for Wallace, which just goes to show how wrong these pseudo-intellectuals can be!” (“Pseudo-intellectual” was a favorite Wallace epithet for anyone with a college degree who disagreed with him.) I noted that, unlike the South Vietnamese government, I was terribly disappointed that “after all that has occurred, after Humphrey’s remarkable recovery, it has come to the end I sensed last January: Nixon in the White House.”
Adding insult to injury, my absentee ballot never arrived and I missed my first chance to vote for President. The county clerk had mailed it by surface mail, not airmail. It was cheaper but it took three weeks, arriving long after the election.
The next day, I got back to my life. I called Mother, who had by then decided to marry Jeff Dwire and was so blissfully happy she made me feel good, too. And I mailed that ten-dollar check to Uncle Raymond, suggesting that the United States establish a national George Wallace Day, similar to Guy Fawkes Day. Everyone could celebrate: some because he ran for President, the rest of us because he ran so poorly.
The rest of the month was a blizzard of activity that pushed politics and Vietnam to the back of my brain for a while. One Friday, Rick Stearns and I hitchhiked and rode buses to Wales and back, while Rick read Dylan Thomas poems to me. It was the first time I had heard “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” I loved it, and love it still when brave souls “rage against the dying of the light.”
I also took several trips with Tom Williamson. Once we decided to do a role reversal on the bad stereotypes of subservient blacks and racist southern overlords. When the nice English driver stopped to pick us up, Tom said, “Boy, get in the backseat.” “Yes suh,” I replied. The English driver thought we were nuts.
Two weeks after the election I scored my first touchdown, called a “try,” for Univ’s rugby team. It was a big thing for a former band boy. Though I never really understood its subtleties, I liked rugby. I was bigger than most English boys and could normally make an acceptable contribution by running to the ball and getting in the opposition’s way, or pushing hard in the second row of the “scrum,” a strange formation in which the two sides push against each other for control of the ball, which is placed on the ground between them. Once, we went to Cambridge for a match. Though Cambridge is more serene than Oxford, which is larger and more industrialized, the opposing team played hard and rough. I got a blow on the head and probably sustained a minor concussion. When I told the coach I was dizzy, he reminded me that there were no substitutes and our side would be one man short if I came out: “Just get back on the field and get in someone’s way.” We lost anyway, but I was glad I hadn’t quit the field. As long as you don’t quit, you’ve always got a chance.
In late November, I wrote my first essay for my tutor, Dr. Zbigniew Pelczynski, a Polish émigré, on the role of terror in Soviet totalitarianism (“a sterile knife cutting into the collective body, removing hard growths of diversity and independence”), attended my first tutorial, and went to my first academic seminar. Apart from those meager efforts, I spent the rest of the month sort of wandering around. I went twice to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s home, to see plays of his; to London twice, to see Ann Markusen’s former Georgetown housemates Dru Bachman and Ellen McPeake, who were living and working there; to Birmingham to play basketball badly; and to Derby to speak to high school students and answer their questions about America on the fifth anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. As December began, I made plans for my surprise homecoming for Mother’s wedding, filled with foreboding about my future and hers. A lot of Mother’s friends were dead set against her marrying Jeff Dwire, because he had been to prison and because they thought he was still untrustworthy. To make things worse, he hadn’t been able to finalize his divorce from his long-estranged wife. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of my own life was reinforced when my friend Frank Aller, a Rhodes scholar at Queen’s College, just across High Street from Univ, received his draft notice from his hometown selective-service board in Spokane, Washington. He told me he was going home to prepare his parents and girlfriend for his decision to refuse induction and to stay in England indefinitely to avoid going to jail. Frank was a China scholar who understood Vietnam well, and thought our policy was both wrong and immoral. He was also a good middle-class boy who loved his country. He was miserable on the horns of his dilemma. Strobe Talbott, who lived just down the street in Magdalen College, and I tried to console and support him. Frank was a good-hearted man who knew we were as opposed to the war as he was, and he tried to console us in return. He was particularly forceful with me, telling me that, unlike him, I had the desire and ability to make a difference in politics and it would be wrong to throw my opportunities away by resisting the draft. His generosity only made me feel more guilty, as the angstridden pages of my diary show. He was cutting me more slack than I could allow myself. On December 19, I landed in a huge snowfall in Minneapolis for a reunion with Ann Markusen. She was home from her Ph.D. studies at Michigan State and as uncertain about her future, and ours, as I was. I loved her, but I was too uncertain of myself at that point in my life to make a commitment to anyone else.