At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

9 Summer Vacation in Washington, D.C.

sible to preach our many messages to at least some students as they entered the university grounds. Politics might be kept off campus, but it could hang out around the edges. 9 Summer Vacation in Washington, D.C. As I entered my second semester, I decided it would be great to get a summer job in Washington, D.C., where I could see all the politicians I had read about. With three aunts and two cousins in the D.C. area I wouldn’t be going there cold. The federal government hired students for summer jobs as a way of interesting them in government service. Helen asked Aunt Leslie to ¤nd a job for me and, as a civilian administrator in the Navy Department, she arranged for me to become a GS-3 clerk-typist at an annual salary of $3,760. I had to take the typing test twice before I passed and got a security clearance. I learned that there were three levels of clearance and every employee of the Navy Department had to pass at least the ¤rst one. Leslie was cleared for top secret. I don’t know what investigation was done, but I had no trouble getting the low-level clearance necessary to be a clerk-typist; at 16 I hadn’t done anything yet. Leslie kindly allowed me to stay with her in her studio apartment at 1629 Columbia Road. As she was a middle-aged spinster used to living alone, I’m sure my mere presence was something of an imposition, but she never let on. Every day we took the Number 42 Mt. Pleasant bus to and from work in temporary buildings built during World War II. I never¤gured out exactly what Leslie did for the Navy. I typed. I met my ¤rst electric typewriter at the Navy Department. Selectrics hadn’t been invented yet, nor had White-Out or CorrecType; when I made errors, I had to erase them. Copying machines were in their infancy; the copies created by Thermofaxes were lousy and expensive. Each typo meant erasing an 46 l At Berkeley in the Sixties original and ¤fteen carbons. Fifteen carbons. The incentive system de¤nitely favored accuracy over speed. Some weekends Aunts Peggy and Patsy took me and their daughters, Kathy and Lee, to different tourist spots or entertainments in Virginia, where they lived. The tourist sights in Washington I saw on my own, with a little help from Congressman Corman’s of¤ce. Leslie wanted me to go out at night; she preferred to stay home and read. My idea of fun was to volunteer at the Democratic National Committee or Corman’s of-¤ce, whichever was open after 5:00 p.m. Here too I only typed, but at least the copy was more interesting than that at the Navy Department and I could pick up some political gossip. At the DNC I met one other Californian, a senior at Stanford on whom I developed a minor crush. I later learned he was quite the BMOC, already known as Stanford’s living legend. He was kind to me; making me feel a little more important than just another typist. I encountered him one more time, in 1975, at Arlie House in Virginia, when we were both ¤nalists in the White House Fellows competition. I remembered him; he did not remember me. In the intervening years, his basic personality had shifted from nice to nasty. I quickly learned what a ¤ne family he had married into and what an important job he had teaching international relations at a major eastern university. He tormented me with caustic asides and cutting public comments on how preposterous it was that we were both ¤nalists in the same competition. After all, I was only an assistant professor at a minor state college. Surprised, shocked, and rather uncomfortable by his public put-downs, I declined to return tit for tat, even though I had inherited Helen’s acid tongue and could well defend myself in verbal repartee. Surely politeness was more politic when we were all being closely scrutinized. Since he was chosen as a White House Fellow and I wasn’t, perhaps he was right to believe that cruelty got you further than kindness. The most interesting thing I did that summer was go to the White House Seminars, which was a fancy name for lectures to the summer workers by Washington VIPs. Cabinet members and congressional leaders spoke to us...