Another Boomer autobiography

 At the library just two days ago, I picked up the autobiography of one-time Secretary of Labor (under Bill Clinton) Robert Reich, Coming Up Short.  A rare genetic disorder stopped Reich's growth when he was just 4' 11" inches tall--short enough to keep him out of the draft--and he argues that his stature shaped his world view from a very early age.  He was frequently bullied in elementary school, at one time by older kids who wouldn't let him use the Boys' Room, and he has sided with the "bullied against the bullies" ever since.  Reich is just a year older than I am, and he also spent most of his adult life as an academic, most recently at UC Berkeley, where he just retired.  His parents were middle-class Jews--his father ran a series of women's clothing stores in the outer suburbs of New York.  His family did well enough to summer in the Adirondacks, and one summer he met a somewhat older boy named Mickey Schwerner, who treated him kindly.  Ten years later Schwerner went to Mississippi to help run a voter registration drive and became a particular target of the KKK, that lynched him and two other volunteers with the cooperation of the local sheriff.  That impacted Reich deeply.  The book is oddly erratic in its coverage of Reich's life.  It includes nothing at all about his high school years, or about how he wound up at Dartmouth--the most isolated of the Ivy League schools--in the fall of 1964.  It is at that moment that his story merges with the broader story of the intellectual elite of my generation, like the autobiography of his exact contemporary Michael Ansara, a leader of the Harvard SDS, The Hard Work of Hope, which I read just a few months ago.

Reich was evidently something of  a go-getter from an early age, and he rapidly became a leader of the student government at Dartmouth.  As such, he tells us, he sat on a disciplinary board that had to punish students (all men, of course), for serious infractions.  One of those, I was amazed to learn, was "fornication," that is, having sex with an unmarried woman.  Having a woman in one's room outside of particular hours was a disciplinary offense at Harvard in those days, but I never heard of a specific punishment for "going all the way."  At Dartmouth, Reich claims, fornication was punished by expulsion--whether temporary or permanent is not clear.  Meanwhile, as class president, he arranged for more busloads of students from surrounding women's colleges to show up on weekends.  I can't imagine how the Dartmouth administration imagined how those weekends would turn out, just as I was shocked in the late 1970s to find that sexual intercourse was an expulsable offense at Exeter Academy, which had gone co-ed just a few years earlier, apparently without coming to grips with the inevitable consequences of that step.

Meanwhile, Reich joined the great leftist movement of the mid-1960s that began at Berkeley in the fall of his freshman year. His parents were good New Deal liberal Democrats and his father was a small businessman, but by his own account, he, like Drew Faust, fell for Tom Hayden's Port Huron statement hook, line and sinker.  That dry, overlong diatribe against an oppressive American state--written in 1962--seems to have convinced him that the US needed some kind of revolution.  Yet he pursued it rather moderately.  He doesn't seem to have joined SDS himself, and at Dartmouth--no hotbed of protest--he simply founded an "experimental college" where students and some faculty could discuss advanced ideas.  He also met a slightly younger leader of the student movement at Wellesley College, a certain Hillary Rodham, with whom he had one date. In the summer of 1967 he landed a job as an intern in the Washington office of Senator Robert Kennedy--who called him into his office and chewed him out after Reich affixed his signature to a petition opposing the Vietnam War, which RFK had yet to condemn publicly. He joined Eugene McCarthy's primary campaign in the midst of his senior year and then worked for him in various states across the country.  Meanwhile, he was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship--a process he tells us nothing about--and on the boat to England he met a fellow Rhodes from Arkansas and Georgetown, Bill Clinton, the start of an association that changed his life.  Reich does seem to be a man with a knack for making the right connection at the right time.

I am still scratching my head that Reich, who spends the last part of his book talking about his love for college teacher, doesn't spend a single sentence on his academic experience at Oxford, even to tell us what subject he studied.  The chapter about Oxford deals with the feelings of several Oxford students, including himself, Bill Clinton, and another classmate who eventually committed suicide, about how to deal with the military draft.  He quotes the entire letter that Clinton wrote to the head of an ROTC program at the University of Arkansas that he had signed up for, only to pull out of it in early 1970 after drawing a fortunately high draft number in the lottery of December 1969.  That letter caused quite a stir when it was made public in the 1992 presidential campaign, and the young man who wrote it was obviously determined to stay out of Vietnam, avoid offending any important constituency, and get on with his real plans as soon as possible, all in that particular order.  Reich, as he knew he would, failed his draft physical in Oakland in the summer of 1969 after his first year at Oxford because he fell below the height limit.  He  unblushingly describes how terrified he was when the sergeant who was examining him gave the impression that he might not be quite short enough to be exempt after all.  This leads me to one of my strongest reactions to his book.

A few pages later, Reich describes how he happened to be in New York City, just returned from Oxford, in May 1970, when Kent State took place, and how he stumbled into the Hard Hat Riot which I blogged about at length last week.  He apparently has read the book upon which the PBS documentary about that event was based, a book which I am still waiting for the local library consortium to disgorge. Reich makes a number of debatable claims in the book, and in one, he says that Nixon aide Charles Colson actually brought that riot about in a conversation with New York union leaders on May 5, several days before it happened.  The documentary made no such claim, documenting Colson's interest in the riot only after it happened, and I shall report what the book said after it arrives.  But my real quarrel with him lies elsewhere.

As Coming Up Short moves into the late 20th century and then the 21st, it focuses more and more on the changing ethos of American life, and the increasing supremacy of the idea of every person for him- or herself over any idea of the common good.  He mentions, of course, that the hard hats resented the college protesters' deferments from the war that they and some of their sons had to fight, but it doesn't seem ever to have occurred to him that his friends' attitude towards the war--that the government had no right to make them fight in it because it was wrong--was itself a spectacular refusal to admit that a common obligation to serve the country might trump one's own personal views.  Nor has it ever occurred to him, as it has to me--thanks to my service in the Army Reserve from 1970 to 1976--that the end the draft which our generation successfully demanded eliminated a critical arena in which the working class and educated classes had worked together and gotten to know each other, while also teaching a lot of less educated young men of wildly differing backgrounds the basic skills they needed to get along in the modern world.  The willingness of young men to serve went along with all the other public-spirited aspects of mid-century America, and we began losing them all at once, thanks in part to the pressure of the Boom generation.

Reich went from Oxford to Yale Law school, where Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, and Clarence Thomas were fellow students.  He takes credit for introducing the first two, although they clearly were very likely to meet in any case.  One of the funniest passages in the book--and there are many--describes the classroom styles of these four now-famous students. Hillary, he says, was always perfectly prepared and spoke in clear, knowledgeable paragraphs.  Reich says that he himself spoke adequately, but that was all.  He does not remember Thomas opening his mouth--just as I don't remember Al Gore opening his in the first-year economics section we shared--and Bill Clinton never bothered to show up in class at all.    Then Reich got a federal clerkship, and moved from there into the office of then-Solicitor General Robert Bork.  He went to work a the Federal Trade Commission under Jimmy Carter, and went from there to the Kennedy School at Harvard. In 1992, to his amazement, his old friend Bill Clinton became president, and he became Secretary of Labor in the first Clinton administration.

His frank account of the Clinton years is perhaps the most revealing and depressing part of the book.  Reich, like me, had remained a New Dealer, although he doesn't describe himself that way.  He wanted to reverse the growing trend towards inequality and invest more in the future of  US workers.  He makes it sound as if he realized that NAFTA, which Clinton had ratified, was probably a mistake and a setback for American workers, but he loyally lobbied for its passage at the time.  He wanted higher taxes for the wealthy.  On this point he is not entirely fair: both George H. W. Bush and then Clinton did increase taxes on the wealthy and other Americans, and both took big political hits for doing do. But Clinton, Reich says, was terrified of running afoul of Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, making him a fiscal conservative. That was how the budget balanced towards the end of Clinton's second term.  But even then, Clinton preferred to spend the surplus on reducing the national debt, and perhaps on protecting Social Security, rather than putting it into social programs. Reich lost many arguments on these issues with Clinton's Treasury Secretaries Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers. Rubin and Summers pushed ruthlessly and successfully to deregulate the financial sector, including the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that had separated commercial and investment banking, and turning Wall Street loose, with terrible consequences a decade later.  Reich writes effectively about the extent to which finance, rather than industry, has come to dominate our economy.  Reich had been away too long to go back to Harvard in 1997, but he landed a job at Brandeis and eventually moved to UC Berkeley, where he spent 20 years before retiring.  He is a prolific writer.  

Reich briefly narrates the events of the Obama Administration as well, in which new Fed chair William Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and White House adviser Larry Summers went all in on the idea that bailing out Wall Street was the only way to get out of the financial crisis that Wall Street had created.  Obama survived the slow economic recovery in 2012, but Hillary Clinton did not in 2016.  Reich treats the emerging Republican Party with contempt, as most of us do, and he understands that Democratic failure on the economic front did a lot to bring Trump into the White House.  He also however describes himself as a fighter for social justice and pursues a policy of no enemies on the Left, often echoing the rhetoric of feminism, antiracism, and the LBGTQ+ movement.  He never acknowledges that the majority of Americans do not agree with the most extreme aspects of those ideologies.

Reich is an engaging figure, and that also emerged from the documentary he made recently about the end of his teaching career, The Last Class.  I agreed with the substance of most of his policy positions and I wish he could have had more influence.  I think, though, that he hasn't come to terms with the negative aspects of the late sixties revolt in which he participated, and he shares the conviction of so many of our contemporaries that his views on key subjects should have prevailed simply because they were so right. I think I have learned better.