In My Time - Dick Cheney [14]
I’D NEVER SEEN YALE before I showed up in the fall of 1959 to begin my freshman year. In fact, I’d never been farther east than Chicago, and when I got off the train in New Haven, Connecticut, it felt a little like arriving in another country. At home in Wyoming, I had a great sense of wide-open spaces. You could see for miles in any direction. In New Haven everything was jammed together—people, buildings, trees. The most distant horizon was no farther than a few blocks away.
Many of my fellow students had gone to prep school. They had had experiences very different from mine and knew things I did not. I sometimes felt they were speaking another language—and they certainly played at least one sport I found strange. Students arriving at Yale took a series of physical tests, one of which involved going through a door so small you had to stoop over. On the other side, a fellow handed me a racquet like the one he was holding and immediately began smacking a small, hard rubber ball against the wall. I had no idea what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to score. And that was my introduction to squash.
I was no longer a big fish in a small pond. Instead of being president of my class and hanging out in the student council office, I was waiting on my classmates in the dining hall. Most of all, I missed Lynne. I spent most of my time thinking about the next time I would see her and trying to scrape together a couple of bucks so that I could afford a long-distance call to Colorado Springs.
Lynne and me on a scooter in front of my mom and dad’s house in Casper, Wyoming in the early 1960s.
Plenty of scholarship students, finding themselves in a totally new environment, manage to get themselves together, apply themselves to their studies, and succeed. Instead, I found some kindred souls, young men like me, who were not adjusting very well and shared my opinion that beer was one of the essentials of life. At the beginning of our second year, twelve of us roomed together in Berkeley College, which with the benefit of hindsight I understand wasn’t a great idea. We created a critical mass that led to several encounters with the dean. My parents began to get letters, one of which began, “Dick has fallen in with a group of very high-spirited young men.”
I wasn’t entirely unaware of Yale’s intellectual attractions. One professor in particular stood out: H. Bradford Westerfield, who taught a political science course on the diplomatic history of the Cold War. It covered the foundation of NATO and the Marshall Plan, the war in Korea, the creation of post–World War II foreign policy. It was absolutely intriguing—probably more history than political science, though I didn’t understand that at the time. But even though the course was fascinating, I didn’t exert myself to get more than a C in it.
The university tried to motivate me by shifting the terms of my scholarship and making me financially responsible for my education. Beginning with my sophomore year, I was to consider all future financial aid as a loan. When that failed to get my attention, the dean asked me to take a year off and come back only if I was willing to pay my own way. I managed to do that for one semester, during which I continued to