Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment. You can find the introduction and Chapter 1 here.
Atheism to Radicalism
In May 1968, a socialist-leaning Newton High history teacher nominates me for a role in a series produced by Boston’s public television station, WGBH. After a casting call, I become the Soviet Union’s Minister of Defense in a role-playing international politics game that students at high schools throughout the northeast will watch for five weeks. My assignment to play a Russian plotting against the United States seems ironic. All my grandparents emigrated from Russia shortly before World War I: they loved America and scorned Russia.
To prepare, I head to Fenway Park with a copy of Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done—a book also influential among North Vietnamese Communists. Lenin’s combination of romanticism and concrete action is appealing: “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighboring marsh.”
Courage! No retreat! Lenin seems more trustworthy than Washington officials. He places blame for World War I on “monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination . . . of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations.” Isn’t the war in Vietnam the same, an “imperialist war for the division of the world”?
Once my WGBH fun is over, these Leninist thoughts stick in the back of my mind. In the front is Sirhan Sirhan’s shooting of Robert F. Kennedy just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Two days later Kennedy’s corpse lies in Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral as I sit on a school basketball court alongside forty-five brown boxes, each containing twenty copies of the just-printed high-school yearbook. On the cover is a psychedelic portrait of the face of a student in agony. Inside are photos of Newton High School’s old buildings, one with fire damage. Cracked windows shot through chain link fences suggest imprisonment and decrepitude.
As students scurry around getting classmate autographs and messages, a “see me right away” message comes from the principal’s office. Reprimand? No, the principal has a huge desk covered with blueprints. He shakes my hand and thanks me for including so much ugliness in the yearbook. He says my negativism will help him make the case for a new, more expensive high-school building. (Soon, he has one.)
My summer job at a nearby ice cream shop beckons. I’m a soda jerk—and not a good one. I give an oversized scoop to one of my first customers, a little girl. It immediately falls off the cone and onto the floor. Embarrassed, I give the girl a replacement scoop. The girl and her dad are happy, and we chat for a minute. Then the manager pulls me aside and says, “Waste more and it will come out of your paycheck.”
Before the girl and her dad leave, he asks me, “Where are you going to school in the fall?”
I answer, “Yale.”
“Yale? How come you don’t have some ritzy summer job instead of working here?”
“I don’t have ritzy parents, and I need the money.”
The father smiles and sticks in my shirt pocket a folded two-dollar bill. “You’ll need some cash there.”
He’s right. I’m able to go via a partial scholarship, money from summer work, student loans, and two thousand dollars from my parents. I don’t thank them for their sacrifice and instead resent my lack of spending money. In September I bring to New Haven books, biases, and two polyester sweaters. One of my roommates arrives bearing a dresser solely to hold all his sweaters. Unable to compete in a clothes race, on most days I wear a gray sweatshirt.
The other roommate, son of a Virginia banker, has an IV after his name and contributes to our suite a great stereo system. He sits for hours in the corner of the living room next to a high intensity lamp that he focuses away from himself, so he is invisible and everyone else has to squint. Instead of being thankful for expensive sound, I turn a paper about Plato’s Republic into a screed about the rich gaining expensive sweaters (or togas) and stereos (or singers) by stealing from the poor.
Half a block away is Yale’s Battell Chapel, the preaching point for Yale’s celebrity chaplain, William Sloane Coffin. He’s in the headlines as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. He’s also a quintessential Yale Man—a member of the Skull and Bones secret society and a former CIA officer.
Battell is an imposing building with solid oak pews and stained-glass windows. Scanning the audience and sometimes looking up to the ceiling with its wooden beams painted blue with gold leafing, Coffin speaks of God as “the eternal disseminator of freedom.” According to Coffin, God “wants to help us grow up, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God’s universe.” Sounds good.
Coffin says, “It is man’s natural, proper role to rebel against God.” Yes! Since I’ve never read the New Testament, his interpretations of Jesus’s miracles seem sensible. He says a crippled man purportedly healed by Jesus wasn’t really crippled but “was quite literally scared sick. He failed to dare to be himself.” The story of a woman who bled for twelve years is a metaphor for our current situation: America is bleeding. The Vietnam War is “not only murderous but suicidal. . . . Everybody has had their integrity violated, so this internal bleeding has gone on.”
My first full feature story as a staff writer for the Yale Daily News is about Agent Orange, a defoliant developed via research during World War II by Yale biology professor Arthur Galston. US planes drop it on Vietnam’s forests to make North Vietnamese troop movements visible from above. My calls to the Pentagon about chemical-caused miscarriages and birth defects, along with cancer and other diseases, finally gain a spokesperson’s “no cause for alarm” response.
When I relay that message to Galston, he calls the Pentagon response “baloney.” Other publications pick up my reporting and puff me up. Two anti-war journalists who become famous, David Halberstam and Seymour Hersh, come for dinner. They take risks in their reporting, and I want to do the same, following Coffin’s preaching that “all of life is the exercise of risk. . . . You can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions. . . . Worry not about the unexamined life but the uncommitted life.”
I particularly like the emphasis on my values, my passions. No longer caring about the Bible’s values and God’s passion, I want to turn my own covetousness into a matter of high principle. Marxism’s emphasis on economic and social class helps me think I’m reasonable rather than resentful.
My focus on class leads to memorable wins and losses. First, I learn to play squash because it’s a game for the social elite—and I become a decent player, beating preppies. Second, a basement storage room near the squash court proves to contain hundreds of books abandoned by previous residents. They’re there for the taking, and I take some, along with a scarred bookcase.
Then, a notice in the Yale Daily News alerts me to cash prizes available for the best undergraduate book collection. I type up a list of my books with strange juxtapositions—The Autobiography of Malcolm X next to Dante’s Inferno—and submit it. The following week a letter from the book prize committee chairman informs me the committee will come for a visit.
At two on the agreed-upon afternoon, four suited gentlemen arrive. One compliments me for melding old and new. They stand in front of my salvaged bookcase. The chairman, clearly puzzled, asks where my collection is. I stammer and point: “Right in front of you.” Another committee member presses his hand to his mouth, trying to squelch a laugh. The chairman says, “Ah, I see.” He hesitates, then offers advice: “Perhaps a few prime first editions, with good binding, would be better than . . . a mass of paperbacks.”
That episode and others like it fuel my resentment—but I want to believe it’s all a matter of principle. My radicalism is an idealistic response to the war in Vietnam and not a product of covetousness, I like to believe.