By my senior year—1938-39—the winds of war were felt even in remotest Southboro, and in between trying (unsuccessfully) to get laid, and trying (successfully) to make admission into Harvard automatic, we talked nervously and hesitantly about Hitler, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and communism. At Princeton, someone had started the Veterans of Future Wars, which we felt was extremely sophisticated and convinced us that college would be cool. I participated in as many extracurricular activities as possible: I won four letters (in football, hockey, baseball, and tennis), was on the debating team, choir, and glee club—where I stayed even as my voice changed from alto to bass—and was yearbook editor and monitor. In retrospect, I seem to have been building a résumé without knowing what I needed a résumé for.
In any case, I got into Harvard with highest honors in English, French, and Greek, plus a pass in physics. There was never a question that I would get into Harvard, or go to Harvard. My father had gone there. My grandfather had gone there, and many generations of Bradlees before him, a total of fifty-one, all the way back to 1795 with Caleb Bradlee. No alternatives were suggested, or contemplated, much less encouraged. My brother, after being “asked to leave” St. Mark’s, and being kicked out of Brooks School for smoking two days before graduating, had just as naturally gone to Harvard.
But Freddy quit Harvard after only a few months. Unknown to any of us, he had gone to New York and landed a role in a Broadway play, by God. From his early years, he had play-acted, speaking aloud to himself in different accents, perfecting a talent for mimicry that astounded us all. He could then—and still can—make me cry with laughter imitating my mother, my grandmother, my Uncle Sargent, and later various in-laws, never mind Noel Coward, Mrs. Roosevelt, Tallulah Bankhead, and Katharine Hepburn. He had done summer stock in various locations on the East Coast while still in boarding school, and there he was on Broadway, barely nineteen. My mother, the “artistic” member of the family, was slightly uncomfortable with an actor son, while my father, the nature-loving jock, was proud as could be.
The impact of the new freedom at Harvard blew my mind. I was only a couple of miles across the river from the Beacon Street womb, but I might as well have been on a different planet. There was a story about the difference between the Ivy League colleges. At Princeton, they showed you where the swimming pool was and taught you how to swim. At Yale, they shoved you into the pool and watched you swim. At Harvard, they didn’t care if you swam—or sank. Even attendance was optional in all but a few classes. I didn’t attend a single class in Michael Karpovich’s course on the History of Russia (got a D). You could take as many—or as few—courses as you wanted to take in any semester. You could drink what you wanted, when you wanted to. As far as an innocent could see, the path ahead stretched invitingly toward discovery and excitement, without consequences.
Except that Hitler had sliced into the heart of Poland the week before we arrived on Harvard Yard. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, the week we registered as freshmen. We were the first class at Harvard to know, really know, that we would be going to war. That knowledge colored our every action, and our every reaction. It led me and many of my friends into the Naval ROTC, which had achieved elite status at Harvard by promising its cadets only the choicest assignments—destroyers or cruisers—once they were commissioned. We never even thought about what life might be like on a destroyer or a cruiser. We hadn’t even seen one, but the knowledge that we were headed for the glamorous and dangerous destroyers or cruisers put a spring in our step.
And so, before I really could enjoy my freedom not to have to do anything, I had to attend ROTC classes and Memorial Hall drills, or face the prospect of slogging my way through the mud of Europe as a GI.
The winds of war made it easy to succumb to an unattractive, self-pitying attitude of eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-go-to-war. Especially drink. I hadn’t taken another drink for two years, after winding up in the clink at Keene, New Hampshire. But the card games, the rathskellers, the coming-out parties, and whatever the hell it was that pulled us into the Ritz Bar so often, changed all that.
Late one night in the lobby of the Ritz in Boston, it seemed like a good idea to grab the firehose out of its glass-enclosed niche and hose down my pals just for the hell of it. I got the hose out, and was reaching for the release handle, when a member of Boston’s Finest reached for me, pulled me a foot off the floor, and carted me off to jail once more. After a night listening to my cellmate—a drunken, toothless Swede—vomiting again and again, I was taken before some magistrate, who apparently knew my old man. He took one look at me in my filthy tuxedo, and said, “My God, your father must be disappointed in you.”
I was driving my parents’ brand-new Plymouth four-door home from a date on Charles River Drive just across from Harvard Stadium when I went to sleep at the wheel and smashed into another car, head-on. Mercifully both cars were moving at exceptionally slow speed, probably because the driver of the other car, a baker on his way to work, was as drunk as I was. Neither of us was seriously hurt, although I was bleeding profusely from a broken nose, and a cut on my left knee.
I had another problem. I was in costume, coming home from the annual Hasty Pudding Club Dance. In fact, I was in a hula costume, complete with black wig, plus falsies under a Hawaiian shirt, and a grass skirt. At least I was in a grass skirt until I got out of the car. In doing that, the grass skirt caught on the window handle, and when the two cops walked up to me, I was in my skivvies.
This was obviously no prank, and I would have been in serious trouble had not the good sisters at St. Vincent’s Hospital come to my defense. When the cops took me there to get me sewed up, a small girl was in a rage of tears, defying the efforts of an intern to saw a ring that had become embedded in the swollen flesh of her finger. Her astonishment at the sight of me apparently outweighed her fear of the doctor, but in any case she wound up on my lap, stunned into silence, until the ring was off. In gratitude, the sisters later supplied me with a critically important note, stating that “no trace of alcohol was present” while I was being stitched up.
In addition to drinking, there were some moments when my mind was exercised. Not many, for I often got lost in the ponderous lectures of William Yandell Elliott and Frisky Merriman, and I missed the personal contact with the best of the teachers at St. Mark’s. But every so often contact was made and the rewards were wonderful. The great John Finley, making classical Greek literature as vivid as life itself. Ted Spencer taking three whole months to explore and explain Hamlet. Sam Beer refereeing fights between my hopeless, inherited and thoughtless conservatism and my soon-to-be longtime friend Adam Yarmolinsky’s equally hopeless and inherited and automatic liberalism, and teaching us both.
I had arrived at college without a single independent thought about politics or anything else in my head. My family was solidly Republican; they’d never voted for a Democrat. My father had worked for something called the Boston Finance Commission, a theoretically independent, but essentially Brahmin organization formed to rout out the considerable corruption in the office of the legendary Democrat, Mayor James Michael Curley. I’d also been taken by the hand at an early age down to Boston Common to listen to Curley speak. I remember “B” saying something like, “Listen to this guy. He can charm a bird right off the branch of a tree.”
I attended the Republican National Convention of 1940 in Philadelphia—by accident. My sister Connie had a boyfriend, Eckley B. Coxe IV, “Buzzy,” who asked us to stay with him on the Main Line during the convention. Buzzy had a sister, Betty, and she had a boyfriend who was working for the candidacy of Wendell Willkie. Her friend was in charge of trying to pack the gallery for the utility executive and darling of Wall Street, and that’s how I ended up in the gallery chanting, “We Want Willkie!” without wanting anything more than a good time. My first lesson in political manipulation was right there for the learning, and went sailing over my head.
I read the newspapers, but mostly to follow the Red Sox. My interest in sports—watching them and competing in them—was as strong then as it is now. In the fall of my freshman year, I had gone out for football, mostly because I thought it would please my father. I weighed only 165 pounds, and there was a little problem with my speed. The first week, the coach looked at me and said, “You better be fast, kid, because you aren’t big enough for this game”—even as it was played at Harvard. So my football career was over almost before it began, and I took up squash, which was being coached by the great Jack Barnaby, who had taught me some tennis at the Essex County Club near Beverly. I loved squash, perhaps because I could move 10 feet fast enough to be competitive. It was 10 yards that gave me trouble.
Baseball was what I was waiting for, and I was the starting first baseman when the freshman team set off to tour the South in the spring of 1940. It was a trip so out of control that when it was over Coach Dolph Samborski recommended that Harvard cancel all spring tours for the duration of the war. We started out by getting shellacked by Navy at Annapolis, after spending most of the previous evening at some joint on Baltimore’s famous Strip. By the time we left, the ladies were stripping to the strains of “Fair Harvard,” to give you an idea about our priorities. We did nothing right for ten days. I don’t remember winning a game.
We got beaten 23-2 by Staunton Military Academy, for example. A fly ball was hit to center field, where our captain, “Pooch” Haley, staggered around trying to decide which of the three balls he was seeing to catch. He guessed wrong, and when he reached down to pick the ball up, he kicked it by mistake. He did the same thing—with the other foot—when he tried again. This provoked our pitcher, Joe Phelan, into shouting, “Pick it up, Pooch. It ain’t shit.” Great laughter in the stands, filled by friends we had made during the previous evening’s peregrinations. I’ve never forgotten Pooch, who was killed in the war, or Joe’s admonition, when confronted with my own inability to get out of a jam.
When we finally got back to Cambridge, my baseball career was in trouble. First a pitcher named Mort Waldstein had thrown a baseball right at my head, almost killing me. Then I looked up from the dirt to hear the umpire calling it a strike. That was my introduction to the curve ball, and the curve ball was my introduction to the bench. The curve ball, and a reluctance on my part to follow Coach Samborski’s instructions. I was hitting lead-off one inning, and the coach had told me to “look at a couple,” but when the first pitch came up fat as a soccer ball, I crushed it to right field—long, but still an easy out. I have forgotten my excuse. I played in the Yale game, as a late inning substitute—and struck out against the son of “Smokey” Joe Wood, the legendary Red Sox pitcher. Curve balls.
In addition to baseball, I was trying out—heeling—for the Crimson. I remember more about the atmosphere in the seedy Crimson building on Plympton Street, wonderfully messy, hectic, and full of ink smells, than I remember the stories or the competition. My friend from St. Mark’s, Blair Clark, was president of the Crimson, and that spring he told me it looked like a two-way race between me and Paul Sheeline for the job that would lead three years later to the top. (Sheeline got it, and went on to become the chief financial officer of an international hotel chain.)
At the end of my freshman year I went on disciplinary probation for cutting too many classes, and that barred me from any kind of extracurricular activity. I was totally unfocused on anything involving my brain, and whatever I was learning came from the casual social experiences of someone marking time. I had learned something about gambling, from my father. We had pretty much a permanent black jack game going on in the rooms I shared in Wigglesworth Hall with Potter and Tuckerman. I forget the stakes, except that they were higher than I could afford. But I won—a few hundred dollars. In fact everyone won, except Bill Haskell, who couldn’t afford it either. And suddenly he owed everyone—a few thousand dollars. In varying degrees we began to feel sorry for him, but we had won it, and each felt sure we would have had to pay up had we lost it, or quit before our losses got too big.
Finally, my friends Potter, Tuckerman, and Dick Cutler decided that we creditors should ask someone older and wiser for advice. They chose my old man, and we all trooped into 267 Beacon Street early one evening to listen to the word. My father was as sore as he ever got. Quiet, but serious. First, he announced that I was no longer a creditor. Haskell owed me nothing, since I didn’t have the money to pay him if I had lost that much, and he would not have bailed me out. He told Dick Cutler that he knew the stakes were too high for him, too. Potter and Tuckerman were better off than we were, but he let them have it, asking them if they enjoyed watching a friend squirm just because he wanted to be part of our crowd. We were all enormously relieved, truth to tell. Someone called Haskell with the news, and we adjourned to the living room for a big pitcher of Martinis—unaware of the importance of the moment in our lives.
The pursuit of girls took an awful lot of time and energy, and my lack of success in this department was extraordinarily frustrating. I felt sure that the beautiful “H” would be the one to put me out of my misery, especially when she agreed to accompany me and some others on a ski weekend to Vermont. We had even discussed what the French call “la disposition des lits,” and the outlook seemed most promising. Pip Cutler told me his girl was going to spend the night with him, and we only had two rooms. . . . At the end of the day, Pip challenged me to a race down what was called—appropriately—Suicide Six. I thought I could beat him by going straight down, forgetting that a road crossed the slope about halfway down. At the last second I saw the road, and had to try to jump across it. SPLAT. I spreadeagled against the bank on the downhill side of the road, and ended up in the hospital. Two tendons torn. Nothing broken, except my spirit. I lay next to “H” all night, burning with desire, but immobilized by pain.
If this skiing weekend was a disaster, most of them were great adventures, as New England landowners finally found something useful to do with their rocky hills. Ski tows were simple jury-rigged contraptions using tractor PTOs and endless ropes. You could sleep in somebody’s barn for $1.50 a night. Even with the hot buttered rum recipe from Kenneth Roberts’s Northwest Passage (a fistful of butter, a handful of, cinnamon, and a ski boot filled with rum), weekends cost about ten bucks a day plus gas. Your mittens sometimes froze to the rope tow, but there was no waiting in line.
That first college summer all freshmen ROTC had to go to sea on a training cruise. I ended up on some old tub of an escort ship, tagging along with a convoy bound for Iceland. Not really dangerous, but the North Atlantic seas were rough enough, and the news from Europe was ominous enough. Hitler had invaded the Low Countries. Dunkirk had been evacuated at the cost of thirty thousand British dead and wounded. The Germans were marching in the streets of Paris. Rough enough to concentrate the mind of an eighteen-year-old still groping for a sense of purpose, and beginning to understand that this was the last summer of our lives without responsibility.
I started my sophomore year in trouble, still on probation, but taking five courses instead of four, vaguely planning to speed up the whole college process and get going on my career as a warrior. I lived in Eliot House with a lot of other preppies, and roomed with Thomas Johnston Livingston Redmond, a.k.a. Red Bird, or just plain Bird. We were an odd pair. Our mothers had been old school pals and insisted we look each other up. That should have guar anteed we avoid each other, but we had become friends. He had a quick mind, didn’t study too hard, played good bridge. And he had a car, which I didn’t, but which I needed desperately to wear down the continued resistance of the beautiful “H” and her successors.
The standout among the others was Jean Saltonstall, one of a handful of pretty “older women” (she was eight months older than I) who came from good Boston families and ran together in a Junior League pack, dominating the social scene, if only because none of them went to college. I liked her especially because she was so comfortable to be with, unthreatening where I didn’t want to be threatened . . . as in “When are you going to grow up?” . . . and uncritical. She passed muster with my parents, unlike any of her predecessors, and the Saltonstalls as a clan had it all over the Bradlees, financially and socially. The Brahmin politician was a special subdivision of the Massachusetts Yankee in those days: Lodge, Bradford, Peabody, Herter, but especially Leverett Saltonstall, a governor and a senator for a generation. With a face that was one of the great political assets of his time, Lev Saltonstall was said to be Irish on his chauffeur’s side by those looking to explain his great political success. Leverett Saltonstall was a second cousin of Jean’s father, John L. Saltonstall, who was wonderfully handsome, and a great shot from a duck blind. He had eight children, and no job, ever.
Jean and I slowly and clumsily groped our way from casual friendship to steady friendship and finally, despite incredible obstacles, to lovers. The obstacles began with three bratty stepsisters and a bratty stepbrother, and ended on the night in question with old John L. himself. Over the years he had established a signal—the loud flushing of the upstairs toilet, with door purposely left open to increase the sound—announcing that it was time for whoever was downstairs to leave the premises PDQ. And of course, on this fateful evening the toilet flushed noisily, just as our virginity finally ended, clumsily.
If Jean’s father epitomized the conventional Boston aristocrat, who clipped coupons and shot ducks, her mother, Gladys Rice Saltonstall (later Mrs. Henry Billings and finally Mrs. Van Wyck Brooks), personified an unconventional New York middle class which lived in a world of culture. She was the daughter of a doctor who treated the throats of New York’s top opera and concert singers, and artists. She walked into a kind of prison when she walked into John L. Saltonstall’s life in Brookline and Topsfield, Massachusetts, both bastions of the stuffy respectability that stifled Proper Bostonians. She gave him four children, and ran away to tryst in a garret in Paris with a disabled concert pianist—from Boston. Unfortunately for her—and Jean—she was followed to the Left Bank by private detectives in the employ of her abandoned and unforgiving husband. The private eyes came back with more than enough evidence for divorce on the grounds of adultery. All the seamy details came out during a custody trial in Salem, Massachusetts, where Jean, age nine, was forced to testify. The parents had reached one custody agreement, which awarded the three oldest children to John L. and his new wife, and Jean to her mother, then living in New York. But at the last minute, John L. reneged on the deal and went to court to keep Jean. He “won.”
I knew Gladys was going to be different when I first laid eyes on her—both of us naked as jaybirds—on Roger Baldwin’s stretch of South Beach on Martha’s Vineyard island. For days before we were to go to meet her mother and her new husband, Henry Billings, Jean had been saying there was something “awful” she had to tell me, but only after we were on the ferry. If she told me before, she said, I probably wouldn’t go. On the ferry, I had struck up a conversation with the “French Angel,” a professional wrestler billed as the world’s ugliest strongman, a completely cultured man named Maurice Tillet who had been a professional tiger hunter in Indochina. He had a huge underslung jaw at the bottom of a truly awesome head. I had seen him wrestle some years earlier, and was thrilled to meet him and talk to him in my schoolboy French. Jean interrupted us to finally tell me her great secret: in her Martha’s Vineyard crowd, all swimming was done on the “Nude Beach.” The custom started because there were so many small children swimming starkers, the parents had simply joined them.
I have not forgotten the sense of fear and adventure I felt descending a long, steep staircase to the beach and into the unknown. I could see a large group of nude swimmers and sunbathers off to one side, too far to be really threatening. As I took my bathing suit off, Jean announced she was keeping hers on, because she had just gotten her period. I could have brained her. But I couldn’t see myself putting my trunks back on, and so I pressed on, heart beating, to meet Gladys—plus Billings; Max Eastman, the writer and expert on Bolshevism, and his wife Eliena, a former ballerina; Tom Benton, the painter, and his wife; Roger Baldwin, head of the American Civil Liberties Union; Michael Straight, the editor of the New Republic, and his wife Belinda, a child psychiatrist. I had never met a child psychiatrist, a ballet dancer, a political magazine editor, a painter, a philosopher, or a civil libertarian with their clothes on—much less with their clothes off. This was a long way from 267 Beacon Street, farther than I had ever been, farther than I had thought I would ever get and survive.
I was battling my way through this interesting ordeal without major disaster when Jean’s older brother, Jock, joined the group, apparently determined to make my life hell. “Boy,” he said with a leer in his voice, and looking me straight in the balls, “we’ve never seen anything quite like that on the beach before.” My heart sank. The worst is happening. An erection is imminent. I am doomed.
But it was only my tattoos.
The previous year, for reasons that escaped me then, as now, I had been tattooed three times. First, really inexplicably, my initials—B over C over B on my right buttock. Then a snake, coiled through the initials. And finally, a rooster just under my left shoulder. I have always liked my tattoos, but I would have given anything at that moment to be rid of them, and stop what felt like hundreds of eyes staring at me.
After that opening episode, I had no idea what to expect, but Gladys and her much younger artist husband became joyous and important influences in my life, opening doors to new experiences. Their friends were artists, like Benton, and like Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the Japanese painter, Jo Davidson, the sculptor, and Willie Sea-brook, who had written books about Haitian voodoo. Seabrook was convinced that sexual pleasure could be greatly increased if the woman’s other senses were all shut down for a period of twelve hours prior to making love. Accordingly, he was said to suspend his girlfriend in a hammock off the ground (so her feet would not feel the earth), plug up her ears, blindfold her, tape her mouth shut, and allow her to breathe only through straws in her nostrils. That sounded weird, but different. He described the ensuing orgasm as cataclysmic. The thought of my father suspending my mother for twelve hours—ears plugged, mouth taped, and all that—was awesome.
My parents knew no artists, beyond Thelma Herrick, the lady who had painted sappy portraits of us children. And God knows they couldn’t even imagine anyone who would want to do anything like what Willie Seabrook was doing to his girlfriend. The politics of my in-laws-to-be were knee-jerk left. FDR certainly, but after him, Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, where many of their pals had landed. My parents never voted for a Democrat until JFK in 1960, and never again after that. Conversations that would make them shiver in discomfort—about relationships, behavior, people, and politics—enlivened dinner-table conversations from Martha’s Vineyard to Rhinebeck, in Dutchess County, New York, where the Billingses had a lovely small farm, to New York City.
Henry and I baled acres and acres of hay in Rhinebeck. In Martha’s Vineyard, we bought a silo, ordered from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue for $186 as I remember, and put it up on a concrete ring, a few feet from a small fishing cottage overlooking Menemsha Pond. It was 18 feet in diameter, and after we cut in one door and a lot of picture windows, we had a local carpenter build a curved staircase up into a fabulous room with drop-dead wrap-around views, and a pull-down ladder into a bedroom full of stars.
In my second year at college, I drifted into an involvement with the final clubs (I drifted everywhere in those days), even then one of the most pointless institutions on campus. Two of these clubs, the AD and the Porcellian, were the most exclusionary. But my father and grandfather had been members of the AD Club, and I had been selected by the AD brass to be what was called the “key man,” the person in the sophomore class who was told early that he would be admitted, to help recruit classmates thought to be desirable. I had agreed to do this, in the belief it would please and impress my old man. My pal, Peter Saltonstall, was the Porcellian’s key man, and we competed desultorily for a few chaps, who were thought to be qualified because they had gone to good prep schools.
Late one night, we came up with two modest ideas to ridicule the whole club system. First, we would get them their candidates, and then together refuse to join the clubs we had worked for. Alternatively, we could get them their candidates, and then join the other club, not our own. But at the last minute we ran out of nerve, citing our conviction that our fathers would have been disappointed. I wish we had stuck to our guns, as I wish I had told the AD Club that if they didn’t take my roommate Tommy Redmond, they wouldn’t get me. No guts. Small potatoes, but no guts.
I also drifted into a real jam with Dean Sargent Kennedy. I had settled on a combined English-Greek major, thanks to the only professors I had managed to get close to, John Finley and Ted Spencer. In those days, anyone involved in any way in an English major was required to take a special examination in the Bible, Shakespeare, and Greek Classics before graduating. I had gone to a church/boarding school where the Bible had been pounded into my brains once a day and twice on Sundays. I had taken one course already in Shakespeare, and I was all but majoring in Greek, so I felt no pressure to take this exam right away.
But my friend, and fellow AD Club member, George Endicott Putnam, later to become a high-ranking executive of some Boston bank, felt differently. Late one night at a party at the end of our sophomore year, he informed me casually that he had taken his Bible-Shakespeare exam earlier that day and it was a breeze. Such a breeze, he went on, still casual, that after he had turned in his own exam, he had returned to his seat, written another exam, and turned that one in under my name. I spent the worst weekend of my young life, knowing I was in trouble, and wondering how to get out of it without fingering my pal.
Dean Kennedy didn’t let me wonder too long; he summoned me to his office for what was advertised as a “career talk” bright and early a few days later. I knew better. After some minutes of how-are-yous and blah-blah-blah, he came quickly to the point. “Have you gotten your Bible-Shakespeare exam out of the way yet, Ben?” He had me in his sights, about to trigger me right out of school and into the Army. I said something like, “You obviously know that I haven’t, but I can explain.” He interrupted to say he didn’t think there was an explanation, and he guessed I wasn’t going to be around Harvard much longer. I told him the whole story, without coughing up Putnam’s name, but pleaded with him for a few hours to find “this guy” and get him to come forward. He gave me that, and I went looking for George, urgently. A few minutes after I found him, he was in Kennedy’s office, and somewhat to the dean’s surprise confirmed my story. To the dean’s surprise, because whereas I was plainly a marginally interesting Harvard sophomore, Putnam was by way of being a Big Man on Campus, on the Dean’s List, and all that.
In a few days, the verdict came in: Both of us would spend the next year on probation. It was tougher on Putnam than on me. I had already been on probation; in fact, I had just gotten off. As they say in my chosen profession, life was still pretty much on the come.
The evidence was piling up that I wasn’t accomplishing much at Harvard, not to put too fine a point on it. I was playing a lot harder than I was working, but even the playing showed not much energy, and little creativity. The embarrassment, I realize now, was that I was not embarrassed. I was cautious, and conservative—behavior-ally, if not politically. The modest impulses to change society that were stirring were internalized and became modest impulses to change myself, and the obvious change staring us all in the face was to get on with it and go to war . . . sooner rather than later. I had talked to a Royal Canadian Air Force recruiter, but he turned out to be a friend of my father, and they had both talked me into staying in Naval ROTC. I took two flying lessons, instead. But I did start exploring the possibilities of speeding up the process of getting a degree. If I took five and six courses per semester, instead of four; if I went to summer school; and finally, if the Navy would let me take Naval Science III and Naval Science IV more or less simultaneously, I could graduate in August 1942, one month less than three years after I started. If I didn’t collapse under the heavy courseload, and if I didn’t get too many Ds.
There wouldn’t be much elegance to the degree. It takes time to educate a late bloomer. But Potter and I—and ten other preppies, all bored, anxious, and in a hurry—decided to give it a shot. I moved out of the “rat house,” where Redmond and I had ended up. Rat houses were group houses (ours was at 52 Plympton Street) rented by a bunch of students with shared goals and interests. Our group’s goals and interests were pretty much limited to partying, trying to get laid, and beating Yale, and pretty much excluded the kind of studying I was thinking of getting involved in. Halfway through my junior year, I moved back into my parents’ house, and in fact was there on the fateful first Sunday in December 1941. All members of my generation know where they were and who they were with on Pearl Harbor Day. My mother and father and I were in the family living room, crouched over the same Atwater Kent radio—the one with the round speaker on top of the heavy oblong metal box of tubes and tuners—that had made us laugh so hard with Amos ’n’ Andy, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Ed Wynn, and Joe Penner.
The radio voice I remember was broadcasting from the roof of a hotel in Manila, describing bombers diving and bombs exploding. And I was trying to figure out what it meant for me. It really wasn’t an exaggeration to say that life as I had known it would never be the same. The “whether” had been pretty much out of the war equation for some time, but now it was totally gone, and the only real question was “when.” And the inevitability of it all became strangely comforting. Gone were all the choices that complicate young lives. Never mind “What am I going to do when I grow up?” but even “What am I going to do next summer?” was no longer a problem. I was going back to summer school and I was going to war; that’s what Benny the Boy Warrior was going to do. I was too close to a degree now, and to an ensign’s commission—only eight months and a day—to chuck it and run off to war overnight. So Harvard had to be completed, rather than experienced or enjoyed.
The last eight months of college still make me dizzy when I think of them. I was taking six courses, to get enough credits to graduate. I’d given up almost all forms of entertainment. No all-night bridge games. No piquette with Joe Reed at the AD Club, no extracurricular activity at Harvard, because even if I had a shot at graduating in eight months, I was still on probation. Jean and I were going steady, even though she spent that winter and spring in New York, vaguely studying and vaguely working as a kindergarten teacher. We were even talking about getting engaged, and wondering if it made any sense to get married before I went off to war. I was four months past my twentieth birthday, and Jean had turned twenty-one the month after Pearl Harbor.
More than fifty years later, I wonder what we were wondering about: getting married, when we knew I was going to war in a destroyer in a few months, almost surely to the Pacific where destroyers were sinking like stones, when we knew I would be gone for months, if not for good. Even as we discussed marriage, one of Jean’s best friends, Pat Cutler, had married a Harvard ROTC ensign named Bob Fowler and was carrying his child, when he was killed in action on a destroyer in the Pacific. We grieved, but we pushed on with innocent confidence, and, by God, one afternoon I walked into the Saltonstall house in Brookline, past a row of those bratty stepsisters chanting, “Benny’s going to marry Jeannie. Benny’s going to marry Jeannie,” and there I was standing alone in front of old John L., asking him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. No toilets flushing noisily in the night now. This was formal and scary. He knew all about the Bradlee finances, the way all proper Bostonians know about each other’s finances . . . common knowledge around the dining-room table at the Somerset Club.
My father was heading slowly back into the chips. Aunt Polly had finally died. Freddy, Connie, and I each had a trust fund with about $100,000 worth of blue-chip stocks, producing about $4,000 a year in income. This was slightly higher than the salary I would be receiving as an ensign. Jean had a little more, and I was headed for places where money was unspendable. John L. was gentleman enough not to bring up the fact that I was so young I would have to go down to City Hall with my father to get a marriage license. And after a few smiling, ritualistic questions, he gave his permission and offered his blessings. The bratty kids were informed, and Jean and I had a deal.
What was the hurry? What convinced either one of us that marriage would resolve any of the uncertainties we dared not admit to, much less face? Was there some vaguely glamorous, vaguely patriotic sense that marriage would make each life more meaningful? Who knows? No parent ever voiced a concern. No concern was ever shared between Jean and me.
We pushed forward, frantically juggling all the things that had to be done before graduation, commissioning, or marriage could take place. My problem was that to get married, I had to have my commission (or else scrap three years of officer’s training). To get commissioned, I had to graduate (ROTC commissions were for college graduates only). And to graduate, I had to overcome all the academic obstacles I had created for myself by screwing around for the first eighteen months.
By June 1942, the end of my junior year, I got off probation at last, with a minimum of As and Bs, a handful of Ds, and a slew of the most ungentlemanly Cs imaginable. It began to look as if I could make it if I took four courses in summer school, and passed them all, especially Naval Science IV. I moved into the Saltonstall mansion in Topsfield, Massachusetts, and commuted to Cambridge every morning along with all the businessmen in their Brooks Brothers seersuckers and straw hats. Jean’s stepmother, Margie (hard “g”), was a pain in the ass, domineering and demanding, and endlessly long-suffering about the difficulties of arranging a wedding in wartime. Gas rationing made it impossible for wedding guests to travel outside of Boston.
And finally it was August 8, 1942, a day which has defined hectic for me forever. At ten in the morning I graduated . . . ten months early. At noon I was commissioned, Ensign Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, 183735, D-VG (for Deck-Volunteer, General), along with eleven other preppies from those infamous WASP boarding schools, the first of our class to make it to war as naval officers. The wedding at Lindsey Memorial Chapel, next to the Ritz Hotel, and the reception at the Chilton Club, the female equivalent of that male bastion of respectability (and money) known as the Somerset Club, was still a few hours away, and they were difficult hours.
At command headquarters—267 Beacon Street—my mother was going not so quietly out of control, dressing herself and my sister, and worrying about whether my brother, the PFC, would show up in time from Fort Riley, Kansas, where he was stationed. Things got so tense around lunchtime that my father let out a loud “Jeezus,” and announced that he was going to rent a suite at the Ritz in search of a little peace and quiet, and he did. My mother screamed at him not to drink anything and “ruin the wedding,” and I decided to go along with him to keep him company, and sober. On the way down to the hotel in the cab, the old man screwed up his courage and asked me if there was anything I wanted to know about sex. The subject had never crossed his lips before. As a matter of fact, there was a whole lot I needed and wanted to know about sex, but I was as embarrassed as he was, and allowed as how I was pretty well checked out by now in that department.
August 8 was the hottest day of the year, maybe in history, and I remember sweltering in my new uniform—dress blues, because the dress whites were not ready. But the wedding was flawless, with trophy bridesmaids and ushers. Freddy made it. My mother smiled a lot, and got a pretty good grip on herself. The old man stayed sober. Jean’s mother was asked to the wedding, and came—but John L. refused to ask her to the reception.
Jean and I survived that day, too. I seem to remember ending up in the Hampshire House in New York, but have no memory of how we got there or when we got there. The wedding night was more significant in itself than in its detail. We were young, undereducated, unexperienced, a little afraid of both the known and the unknown, but we were under way on this wondrous voyage. We had been given a house on one of the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River for a honeymoon. We took the train from New York City to Clayton, New York. We were picked up in Clayton and taken to our honeymoon house in a boat by a caretaker, who promised to be back in five days . . . the first five days alone we’d ever had, and the last we were to spend alone for twenty-seven months.
Hanging over those five days were the orders I had received from the Chief of Naval Personnel:
If found physically qualified . . . you will further proceed to the Service Force, Atlantic Subordinate Command, Naval Operating Base, for temporary active duty awaiting first available transportation to the vicinity in which the U.S.S. Wyoming may be. Upon arrival proceed and report to the commanding officer of that vessel for further temporary active duty under instruction in 40 m.m. guns. Upon completion of this duty, when directed by the commanding officer of that vessel, you will regard yourself detached; proceed to a continental port of the United States via such transportation as may be arranged by the commanding officer, U.S.S. Wyoming. Upon arrival in the United States you will proceed to Kearny, New Jersey, and report to the supervisor of Shipbuilding, USN, Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, for active duty in connection with fitting out the U.S.S. Philip and on board when that vessel is placed in full commission, reporting by letter to the Commandant, Third Naval District.
That doesn’t sound so scary, now, fifty-two years later almost to the day as I write this. But then? Where was the Wyoming? Hell, what was the Wyoming? What was a 40mm gun? Where was Kearny, New Jersey, and above all what was the U.S.S. Philip?
Well, the Wyoming was an old tub of a World War I battleship, then in the Chesapeake Bay, fitted out with masses of 40 and 20mm anti-aircraft guns, so that people like me could learn how to shoot them, and especially how to teach others to shoot them. Kearny, New Jersey, was a long taxi ride from the East Side of Manhattan, and the U.S.S. Philip was a brand-new 2,100-ton Fletcher-class destroyer, headed for the Pacific battle area as soon as she was ready.