Background

Tom, welcome back to Berkeley.

Wonderful being back, Harry.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I moved at seven up to New Hampshire and I grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, where I attended primary and secondary school.

How do you think your parents shaped your character, looking back?

They certainly shaped my values. They weren't political people, they were never involved in political campaigns, but they came out of the world of Jewish social democratic thought. They were classical twentieth-century liberals and great sympathizers with underdogs and felt very strongly, felt very badly about the treatment of blacks in this country. I think they were very representative of a strain of thought in the Jewish community, particularly in the urban and particularly the New York Jewish community in which they grew up. They were definitely not "movement" kinds of people, but in their conversation, in the books that they read ... more important -- because what influences you about your parents is not what they say but what they do -- in their quotidian lives, they expressed an unselfconscious passion for fair play.

I still remember living in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a few months when I was seven. My sister was just a year old and we had what one used to call then a "colored girl." She was a young black girl who had just come South from the North. She had never experienced the very rigidly segregated world of the pre-'60s South, and happened to arrive at the same time we did. She was looking after my sister one day shortly after our arrival, and my mother asked her to go down to a local store and buy some ice cream -- it was the biggest store in St. Petersburg at the time, Webb's Drugstore. And she came back in tears, this young woman, because they wouldn't wait on her. She was told she had to ask a white person to ask for the ice cream. And my mother, who was about five feet tall and actually quite a shy person ... well, I can still picture her tugging on her hat and going off to this store. She came back and told me she demanded to see the manager of the store, and told him what a horrible human being she thought he was. And apparently he said, "Well, this is the way it is down here. I have nothing against colored people myself. It's not personal, but that's just the way things are." The fact that someone so shy, because I think she was at heart shy, would go off and do that ... well, it's what you do and not what you say. So the sense of anger about injustice, about baseless discrimination, I guess that rubbed off.

What about books? You said your parents read a lot. Any books that you remember reading when you were younger that set a similar kind of example, or any kind of example?

I read very indiscriminately, picking books off their shelves, and some of them carried this same message of concern for injustice. But then I was also introduced to Flaubert. I picked up one of his least known works, Salambo, which is an historical novel set in Carthage, and it had incredibly sexy sketches done by Rockwell Kent, I think. I still remember this picture of the daughter of the great Carthaginian general, Hamilcar. She was nude and very elegantly presented with a snake wrapped around her. I think I was only about ten years old then and it was an early awakening of sensuality, the sensuality of literature as much as flesh. So it was a quite eclectic upbringing. Unintentionally eclectic because in many ways we were a very ordinary, middle-middle-class family.

Were you active in clubs or any athletics when you were young?

My father had been a great athlete. As a sophomore at City College he played for Nat Holman, and he was their first All-American. Then he went on to dental school. In those days you could go to dental school after two years of college, and he still retained his eligibility, so he played in the Ivy League. He was leading the league in scoring when he had a fight with the coach because the coach thought he should concentrate on basketball and he was trying to get through dental school. So I had this father who was a wonderful natural athlete. And I loved sports, but I wasn't a very good athlete then. I was the kind of guy when they're choosing up sides, after they've selected all the teams they'd say, "Oh, and Farer, you're on that team." I've gotten to be a better athlete as I've gotten older, maybe because my age group is deteriorating. I was saying to my wife the other day that I'm reliving my childhood and getting it right this time.

That's great. So you went off to Princeton to do your undergraduate work?

Yes. I went to a public high school and then to Princeton. A lot of my primary school classmates went off to private school, but I liked girls and I didn't want to be in an all-male environment, plus I'm sure we couldn't have afforded it very easily. After prep school most of the local elite would go on to Dartmouth or sometimes to Harvard. Rarely to Yale. Almost no one in New Hampshire went to Princeton, which is I think was one of the reasons I went. Maybe that was a sign of potentially benign contrariness. I went for some not very attractive reasons. Princeton had a lot of social glamour then. Perhaps among the Ivy League schools it was the most glamorous socially. Dick Kazmaier had just been an All-American there. Princeton has this gorgeous neo-Gothic campus, and I think I must have gone down on one of the few good days of the year, that is, when it's not either cold or raining. So anyway, I went down there and I felt very much the way F. Scott Fitzgerald felt, like a clumsy provincial even though he came, I think, from a relatively wealthy family. I felt very undereducated and socially maladroit. Princeton in those days was a very conservative place with a pronounced and savage sense of what and who should be deemed inferior.

This would be in the fifties?

This was '53 to '57. For instance, there was a great deal of open anti-Semitism at Princeton then. The administration wasn't anti-Semitic, but it didn't take any particular steps to try to curb it. The bigotry was in the club system which was autonomous, but not totally beyond the capacity of the administration to influence. It was a different era.

One of the most extraordinary things about the United States is that everyone who is not a person of color is now kind of lumped together in the category of white majority. In New Mexico, where I spent some time as president of the university, there are only three categories of people. You're either an Anglo, an Hispanic, or a Native American, that's all. So all the millimeters of ethnic distinction that existed when I was growing up [are gone]. Manchester, New Hampshire, was a very ethnically self-conscious town; it had a Greek community and equally self-conscious Jewish, Polish, Irish, French Canadian, and German communities.

So it was very diverse.

Very, very diverse. Not in contemporary terms, because there were no African Americans there, no Asians, no Hispanics. But this tells you something about the world at that time, that to be Italian rather than Greek, or Irish rather than French Canadian or Jewish or whatever, meant a lot. Still, it was a more relaxed, more tolerant environment than Princeton, [where] I felt discrimination much more keenly. To be fair, Princeton has changed. The whole country has changed. After all, when I got out of law school in '61 there were still many law firms that didn't take Jews. That's inconceivable today. In this respect, U.S. society has changed dramatically over the past forty years.

Did you have any mentors along the way, any courses at Princeton or elsewhere that put you in the direction that you finally went, namely, international law?

Not at Princeton, really, although the professors of literature and history, particularly the historians, did have a strong cumulative impact on my sense of myself in relation to the world. If I have had a core course, that is, a course related to my deepest feelings, it has been history. Princeton had a very fine history department. But I didn't have a guru.

The closest thing I had to a guru was a man much like myself, a Jewish fellow a generation older, who grew up in Manchester and went to Harvard law school. He came back to Manchester, and later on, when I was deciding after law school whether to come back -- because I was very interested in politics and I could see the advantages of returning to my home base where I knew a great many people (I had been a student politician and thought I might want to run for office eventually) -- I asked him how did he feel about coming back, because he'd had a chance to practice in New York or Boston. He had held many appointed positions in New Hampshire. He said that if he were doing it again, he might practice in one of the great metropolitan centers. He underscored what I knew, namely that there were other ambitious guys going back to New Hampshire, and no one could guarantee that I'd be a Senator or a Congressman.

He may have marginally influenced me; still, I have to say I never had a guru, even a vicarious one, that is, someone who had written something that proved transformative for me.

So why did you decide to become a lawyer, not a historian?

I didn't see myself as an intellectual, first of all; so therefore I didn't see myself as an academic. To the extent I thought I had some gifts, I thought it was in debating, in expressing ideas in a way which made them accessible to ordinary people. And I identified with ordinary people. I liked sports, I was a sports fan. I was an ordinary kind of guy. I thought that perhaps I was a little more introspective. I thought I had a sense of what made people function, what made them like or dislike things. I wouldn't have put it in these terms before, but people react to words, words are symbols, and I thought I had some talent for using those symbols in ways that evoked agreement. Probably I overestimated the degree to which people would agree with me once I helped them discover their true preferences. I didn't see it as manipulation, I saw it as making people understand public issues more clearly. And this is why I thought of having a political/legal career. Of course, the political careers tended to go with a legal career so it seemed like a natural step for me. And finally, what else was I good at? I didn't want to be a doctor. I wasn't interested in or any good at science. I wasn't an engineer. I couldn't sketch anything so I couldn't see myself as an architect, although I admired architects. What was left? Law. It was the default drive.

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