In the fall of 1971, when I was a senior at Harvard College, I lived in a suite that housed five people, each of us with our own bedroom that opened on a common area. One of my four roommates had grown up in another western state, but our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. When I was born, our family was living in company housing at the Triumph Mine, on the East Fork of the Wood River in Idaho, halfway between the towns of Hailey and Ketchum-Sun Valley. My father was earning around forty dollars a week in dangerous and brutal conditions underground. My mother was earning a little more as a nurse at the Sun Valley Hospital. Things changed for the better when my father changed occupations and joined a union. They saved enough to put a down payment on a house. I was raised by parents who viewed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as the bedrock of a decent life in this country.
My western roommate’s father was a housing developer in one of the expanding cities in the American West. He built whole subdivisions on cheap agricultural land, and sold them, house by house, to Californians fleeing L.A., Texans fleeing Dallas and Fort Worth, and Easterners fleeing civilization for the long-vanished romance of the frontier.
As a result, my roommate was a rich kid, one who was used to looking at property, building on it, and selling it as the way to make money. I remember him telling me about his summer job in the family business: he guarded construction materials once they had been delivered to homesites, staying up all night with a shotgun, waiting for thieves to show up with their pickups. His big regret was that he had never caught anyone stealing and therefore hadn’t been able to kill anyone.
I didn’t question this story or its premise that you could kill anyone stealing your property and their death would be their fault and not yours.
Since my father’s mining days, we had prospered. It had taken an enormous amount of honest hard work, risk-taking, planning, luck and patience, but our family had become small landowners. Their life in mine company housing had left a deep impression on my parents, and they viewed owning their own place as a matter of achieving an identity as complete human beings. They had been renters once, and never would be again, if they could help it.
So I believed in the sanctity of owning your own place. But our family didn’t have stacks of construction materials or cattle to rustle or cash hidden in mattresses, so I never had to engage in the moral ugliness that came from imagining what you would do to anyone who tried to take your stuff.
As I said, my roommate was a rich kid, but at Harvard, being rich wasn’t enough. He had tried joining several of the eating clubs, which were Harvard’s version of fraternities—the Porcellian Club being the most famous—and was not invited into any of them. He was furious about it. He said he had the money and should have been allowed in. He said he was discriminated against because he was a westerner.
I remember asking him why he would want to hang out with people who didn’t want to hang out with him, and he told me I didn’t understand the system. You had to belong to a club. Another way of putting it, he said, was that if you had belonged to the Porcellian and hadn’t made a million dollars by the time you were thirty, they would just give it to you. That would be a nice club to be in, I said. But knowing who did get in, I said, I doubted if they ever had to make a payout.
His parents and sister visited once that fall. I remember his sister was beautiful and worried about him. His mother, a devout Christian, took him to his room, where they knelt beside his bed and prayed for his success in school and life. His father, who appeared to be a hard self-made man, inspected his suite and roommates, and found it and us wanting.
I wasn’t bothered. At that age I thought I understood the system and thought it could be navigated. I was putting myself through school by working summers for the Forest Service, volunteering to fight fire when I could because that was the way you got lots of overtime. At the end of every summer I gave my wages to the Harvard registrar. During the school year I worked in college dining halls and libraries, and I worked Christmas vacations at Sun Valley. Harvard kicked in an equal amount in scholarship money. I got by, but I remember getting a Valentine’s Day letter from my mother my first year in the East. She included a five-dollar bill and told me she hoped I would use it to take a nice girl on a date. Five dollars, even then, wasn’t enough to take out nice girls, even if it had taken my mother an hour of her time to earn it.
I didn’t mind being poor. I had been raised to work hard, not steal construction materials, and make the best of what life threw my way. Life had already thrown a lot of things my way, most of them good, starting with my parents and a brain that seemed to work reasonably well. What I had would be more than enough, I thought.
My SAT scores had gotten me into Harvard, but I knew that a goodly number of my fellow students had gotten in by other means: they were legacies, the offspring of old and rich families who had gone to Harvard for generations.
Among the scholarship students, it was common knowledge that we were the smart ones, leavened into the student body to raise the intellectual quality of the whole, and thus provide the dull, stolid, not-so-bright legacy students a better educational experience, a vision of intelligence they could remember as they came into sinecures in the family firm or trust funds that would allow them careers in the State Department or international charities or art history. That was our reverse-snobbery consolation for long hours of mopping floors or reshelving books or digging fire line. It was a consolation that would have aged better in a perfectly just world, but even now it has its comforts.
About the time my roommate was trying to get into a club, I was taking a course in the 19th century American novel and reading Henry James on the subject of wealthy Americans looking across the Atlantic, toward old European families, and trying to use their wealth to gain admission to clubs considerably older and more prestigious than the Porcellian. James noted that the Americans were welcomed for their money, but not accepted as complete human beings. I saw my roommate as just as foolish and misguided as any of James’s American characters. I wondered why anyone would look east when they could look west.
Foolish or not, my roommate was not a legacy student. He had high SAT scores too, and he had been the valedictorian of his high school and had been the Boy’s State Governor of his state.
He was going into politics. He told me that he was smarter and had more ambition than most presidents of the United States. I asked him if he was going to be president when he turned thirty-five. He said he didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t be. Harvard, he said, was a good start.
I wasn’t so sure. It was 1971. It was a fortunate time to be a poor kid at Harvard, because the Vietnam war was raging and if you stayed in school you didn’t get drafted. But there had been shifts in the culture as well. The counterculture had disavowed material wealth as a worthy goal in life. My shabby denim wardrobe was imitated by people who gave off-the-rack blue jeans and work shirts to their tailors for subtle alteration.
Demonstrations were turning into window-breaking riots. It was no longer a point of pride to have been accepted to Harvard because your family had gone there since the 1700s. It was vaguely shameful to be rich, and dangerous to be recognized as rich. If your folks had given you a new Mercedes 280 SL for your college transportation, you didn’t park it on the streets of Cambridge. You rented garage space, and only took it out at night for trips to Wellesley.
My roommate gave up on the idea of joining an eating club. He bought a waterbed instead.
In 1971, waterbeds were a new thing, and they had caused a flurry of concern among the building managers of the Harvard houses who consulted architectural engineers to see how many fifteen-hundred-pound beds it would take to collapse their buildings. My roommate and I were in the newest of these buildings, an eighteen-story high rise, and it was deemed sturdy enough for the residents to have as many waterbeds as they wanted.
Early on, waterbeds were being advertised as erotic aids, but that wasn’t exactly what my roommate used his for. He had assembled a cabal of fellow students who would meet in his room to discuss politics. He was already planning his presidential campaign and was sounding out people about being his chief of staff, Secretary of Defense, White House chef, and so on.
One guy was a dead ringer for Steve Bannon. Another was a slight skinny kid with a Prince Arthur pageboy, who wore tights and riding boots and a long sweater woven out of silver wool that looked like chain mail. He wore that outfit constantly, sometimes with a sword I initially thought was plastic but turned out to be steel. There were people with patchy, flyaway adolescent beards and a cultivated resemblance to Leon Trotsky. One person wore second-hand store suits. Another, who hung out with the sword guy, wore bits and pieces of 19th century military uniforms and spoke stilted, formal English with a middle European accent.
I wasn’t bothered too much when they all appeared at the door. It was easy to go to my own room and close the door when the group met. Those of us in the other rooms began to refer to my roommate as the President. We called his room the Oval Office.
I was far less political than I had been early in my college career. I had found a nice girl to go on dates with, one who didn’t seem to mind my poverty. We fell in love and probably would have gotten married if I’d consented to stay in Massachusetts or she’d been willing to move to Idaho.
Not that I’m not happy with the way things have worked out. I’m nonetheless grateful to my old girlfriend for turning my attention away from politics.
Here’s what eventually happened. My roommate’s discussion group, not content with the intoxications of politics, got seriously into amphetamines as an aid to creative thinking. They’d all swallow a pill or two and find a spot on the waterbed and start planning my roommate’s administration.
Somewhere in the trajectory of addiction, they all decided that what had happened in Germany in 1933 was what should happen in the United States when my roommate became president. After all, Hitler had begun with a small group and had almost taken over the world, simply by daring to do the unthinkable time and again.
They would learn from Hitler’s mistakes. They would improve on his techniques. Before my roommate could lead a new, nation-reviving movement championing the traditional genocidal values of the American West, there was much planning to do.
I think this is where I say, “Kids, don’t try this at home,” even if you’re planning to be a future president of the United States. Amphetamines are addictive and will turn you into an asshole. If you’re not a pathological narcissist to begin with, you’ll end up as one. Whatever restraint your still-developing frontal lobes exert on your actions and judgment will go away. Keep it up and you’ll become psychotic. You will want to kill people who get in your way, and you’ll think you can do whatever you want.
I know all this because my roommate came to me one day and told me that the waterbed fellows had disbanded in a burst of bitter factionalism. He seemed deeply upset.
I had asked him earlier about the sword guy, who had taken to wearing authentic Nazi paraphernalia with his chain mail. “He’s going to get himself killed,” I had said. My roommate had shrugged and said it was a free country.
But he had changed his mind after their next meeting. They had been discussing lebensraum and the Nazi plan to eliminate the Slavs so Germany could expand all the way to the Urals and beyond. They were deciding which groups to kill when they took power, according to progressively finer Nietzschean moral distinctions. First the mentally and physically defective. Then Jews, Slavs, Blacks, Arabs, Mexicans, Indians, southern Europeans, Pacific Islanders and so on. Finally, they got to the Christians, because Christians held to a creed that promoted kindness and charity and blessed the meek. The idea of Christ enraged them, there on the waterbed. They were mostly into Odin, Thor, and Loki by that time.
Later, after the group had left and he had calmed down, my roommate came to the awful realization that his mother was a Christian. All the careful plans, all the deep manipulations of the American polity, all the planned riots and street fighting and careful wooing of multinational corporate heads came down to one thing: killing Mom.
His world collapsed around him. He picked up the phone and called the Boston office of the FBI. (I am not making this up.)
“I want to report a plot to overthrow the government of the United States,” he told the receptionist.
They gave him an appointment, and he got on the MTA the next day, went down to the FBI office, and was interviewed.
“Students at Harvard are plotting a right-wing coup,” he told them. “I’ve been attending their meetings.” There was silence.
Then the FBI agent across the desk from him said, “Don’t you mean a left-wing coup?”
“Right-wing. Hitler. Nazis.”
“Not Mao? Marx? Lenin?”
“They were only interested in a left-wing coup,” my roommate told me. “The agent patted me on the head and told me to go back to Harvard, and to let them know if I discovered any communists. When I got back to the room, I called everybody together and told them what I’d done.”
It was not a pleasant last meeting. The group disbanded with a lot of acrimony, a lot of accusations of treason and, because this is the way these things end, loud wonderings about who had stolen the drugs. I never saw any of them again, except my roommate and the guy who looked like Steve Bannon. He hung around the suite, promoting to anyone who would listen a nihilistic organization called The Church of the SubGenius. That church is still out there, so maybe he’s running it.
When Steve Bannon showed up during the 2016 presidential campaign, I had to check his birthday to make sure it wasn’t the same guy. It wasn’t, which meant that there are at least two of them.
My roommate had been scheduled to go into the Marines—part of his presidential strategy—that summer of 1972, but the Marines had a change of heart and wouldn’t take him. He returned west and joined the family business.
I like to imagine that the Porcellian would embrace him now if he weren’t too old. He wasn’t on the list for our 50th reunion this summer. Neither was I. I didn’t personally know anybody who was going to be there, and although some of our class ascended to high positions in the executive branch, my old roommate wasn’t one of them.
This incident was but one of many at Harvard that destroyed my confidence that I understood the world and was well-educated enough to succeed in it. Instead, I put my faith in good luck, and I intuited that there were people who went through the world in ways incomprehensible to me, seeing things I couldn’t see.
I knew my education wasn’t over when I finally received my diploma. I could spend my life studying literature for its insights into human nature, and still wouldn’t know what I needed to know.
I’m sure that in the years after I left Harvard there were still Harvard students getting together in dorm rooms and planning coups. It’s what students did and do, especially if they’re Political Science majors. There’s a Steve Bannon in every class, and maybe someone like my roommate if they’re still letting in kids from western states. They might think about that, especially if those western kids are still getting together with other kids, pulling the master switch on everyone’s frontal lobes, and talking politics.