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10. The Sage of St. Louis
- University of Missouri Press
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212 Once he had made his decision not to run for reelection, Tom Eagleton would leave the Senate and the Washington, D.C., area three years later with no regrets. Unlike many departing senators, he had never caught what Harry Truman called Potomac fever, and he had no desire to be a Washington lobbyist. “Ex-Senators are like ex–University Presidents,” he wrote in 1986. “They should go somewhere and get out of the way. I see too many of them floating around Washington dreaming of what once was. Sad.”1 Instead, he happily gravitated to the university classroom and to a law partnership with Thompson and Mitchell in downtown St. Louis. He would soon become involved with many other activities that occupied his attention into his seventies. The old Eagleton drive never completely left him, even when experiencing failing health in his final years. For good reason he can be called the sage of St. Louis. While looking forward to the classroom, he did so with some apprehension since he had little experience at it other than a summer teaching venture in 1977 when he, Gaylord Nelson, and Professor Kevin C. Gottlieb of Michigan State taught American students in London. As university professor at Washington University of St. Louis, he began his teaching career in the fall semester of 1987. Founded as a nondenominational private institution in 1853, “the Harvard of the Midwest,” as some referred to it, had managed to retain its lofty status. It attracted faculty from the elite private universities on both coasts as well as from the top public universities. Situated near Forest Park—the location of the 1903 World’s Fair—Clayton, University City, and St. Louis City bordered its attractive campuses, whose collegiate Gothic-style buildings resembled those of the English universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Towers and turrets adorned many of its redgranite structures located along a huge quadrangle on its main campus. Chapter 10 The sage of st. Louis 213 The sage of st. Louis Eagleton team-taught two courses there. The first, on the United States in Vietnam, was offered in the fall semester to upper-level students. Although cross-listed as a history and political science course, it attracted students from other disciplines as well. For thirteen years Henry Berger became Eagleton’s soul mate in what developed into a close relationship. Berger, whose fields were modern America and U.S. foreign policy, had received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and had successfully survived thirty years of teaching, twenty at Washington University, enabling Eagleton to ease into the classroom without difficulty. While a graduate student, Berger had been president of the Young Democrats and a big supporter of Gaylord Nelson for governor, which immediately endeared him to Eagleton.2 Eagleton and Berger employed the Socratic method whereby half of the course grade was based on class discussion and the other half on a major research paper. They deliberately played devil’s advocate in order to challenge students as well as one another—to stimulate discussion and thinking. “We also shot barbs at each other and made fun of each other to loosen up the class,” Berger remembered. Sometimes, Eagleton would ask Berger a question that the students could not answer to put him on the spot, and Berger did the same with him. Eagleton was always prepared and always asked the right questions. “Students were in awe of him,” according to Berger. “He had a commanding presence, but he did not attempt to exploit this.”3 In dealing with the Vietnam War, aside from being well read on its history, Eagleton used his experience in the Senate, especially on the war-powers issue in ways that fascinated students. Berger meanwhile compensated for Eagleton’s lack of interest in the cultural and social aspects of the war by assigning memoirs and novels that dealt with them, many of which were written by Vietnamese. He even reputedly delivered three lectures on medieval Vietnam. That invited a typical display of Eagleton humor in reference to Eagleton’s enjoyment of Athan Theoharis’s From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover: “I apologize for the subject being in the twentieth century,” he wrote Berger. “Next time, I’ll have something circa 1350.”4 Occasionally, Eagleton could show impatience and even “blow up” at Berger in class by responding, “bullshit” or “Jesus Christ, Henry.” When a guest North Vietnamese reporter appeared, Eagleton questioned her about freedom of the press in Vietnam...