CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY Madame de Pompadour’s apartment so as to render more difficult the entrance of Louis XV to her bedchamber, for which, among other peccadillos, they were kicked out of court. In addition to such mandatory instructions in theology, the Jesuits insisted that their students at the University of San Francisco, locally known by the call letters USF, learn about “ the warped logic of Lenin.” This study came under the academic category of political science, and everyone was required to take Poli Sci 140: “ The Philosophy, Dynamicsand Tactics of International Communism.” The text for the course was J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters o f Deceit, and the FBI Director was said to be kindly disposed toward the Jesuit Fathers for unloading so many thousands of copies right there in the USF bookstore. The ringmaster of Political Science 140 was Raymond T. Feeley, S.J., a bulldog-faced padre known as the “ waterfront priest” for his activities in the 1930’s on the labor-strife-torn San Francisco docks in the cause of anti-communism and responsible Catholic unionism, a phrase some of Fr. Feeley’s critics translated as meaning pro-management. Fr. Feeley was a tough man, said to have single-handedly tossed several Reds into the chill waters of the San Francisco Bay. He stared a good deal when in the classroom, constantly peering up and down the rows of , wooden chairs as if he expected to find a red herring underneath. He called the attendance role in a way that made you feel you should answer “ Not Guilty” instead of “ Present.” We took notes from a scratchy recording of the “ confession” of Whittaker Chambers. Our guest professors included an exiled Russian Jesuit named Urusov and the visiting Irish O /no lic heads of the intelli- gence units called “ Red Squads” in metropolitan police departments. , Fr. Feeley’s lectures ran red with the blood of bolshevik history. He established a peculiar sense of authority by never referring to the great figures in Russian history by their common political names, reverting instead to their original Russian names, enunciating each syllable as if it were one count in an indictment: Not Stalin, but Jos-if Vis-sar-iono- vich Dju-gash-vi-li. Not Lenin, but Vla-dim-ir lll-ich Ul-yan-ov. Those four Ivory Tower years were therefore spent in a sort of Charlie Chaplin waltz, learning what 1 was forced to learn to stay in the place, then unlearning it from the original sources. Those academic activities I carried on in my spare time, most waking hours being devoted to playing with the school newspaper, the Foghorn, and its necessary corollary of engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Jesuits. I had but one eye so I was excused from the fangs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps known otherwise as ROTC. (My left eye had been blanked out in an automobile accident when I was eight.) I, nevertheless, received plenty of military training in actual combat with the Jesuits. When you are on the offensive against them the Jesuits work man to man rather than employing a zone defense. The Jesuit assigned to do me in was the Rev. Francis A. Moore, the Dean of Students, a tall, suntanned, cobra-eyed Jesuit with the stock smile of a hired assassin. Moore did not like me, possibly because of an unfortunate incident in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1957 when I threw up all over him. I was drunk as only a college freshman can get, wandering aimlessly in the bowels of a basketball stadium, when two sportsmen from the rival college asked if I wanted some creme de menthe; 1 thought that was terrific of them and slugged the green substance down, which turned out to be liquid hand soap. This inconvenienced a number of USF rooters shortly after, when I staggered into the crowded stands and became violently ill. One of the unfortunate few within range was the Dean of Students, who I doubt ever forgave me that vile cascade of green slime and vomit down his black back. He threw the book at me for the putative crime of being drunk and disgraceful in a public rooting place. That was the first — but the only one that stuck — in a relentless string of prosecutions and entrapments, the others of which I somehow escaped in the cliffhanger tradition of “ Daredevils of the Red Circle” — a stubborn pin left standing in a 24-hour Jesuit bowling alley. I survived attempted firings, suspensions, and expulsions, and those failing or being preempted, Jesuit threats and attempts to use the lend-lease power of the civil authorities for the prosecution of various offenses to the commonweal such as arson. An impartial observer of this extended combat once likened the relationship between “Seniors were required to take a Last Chance course in the Catholic dos and do nots about sex. When a married student would raise a practical objection, such as how could a priest know what gives with sexual foreplay, the answer would invariably come, in the manner o f the Jesuits, in another question: Did a doctor have to endure cancer in order to treat it?, ’ the Dean of Students and me as that of Cardinal Richelieu to D’Artagnan — but if the truth be told we were both more Lady de Winter. The Dean especially held against me the m atter of the Jesuit President’s niece, a flower of Irish Catholic girlhood whom I dated during my stormy career as Casey Crime Photographer at USF, which courtship Fr. Moore apparently assumed made it more difficult to whip me at the pillory lest she get upset; he was outraged, wrongly considering it a high card of knavery on my part, refusing to accept the relationship for the coincidence of honest affection that it was. His loathing rose to a new boiling point on the occasion, in the midst of an especially dull news week, when my friend Brennan Newsom and I burned down a wooden guard house protecting the entrance to the campus — all so I would have something to headline in the Foghorn, which I then edited. I produced an inflammatory frontpage editorial denouncing the arsonist as having no respect for private property and called upon the Dean of Students to get off his ordained duff, find the maniac responsible, and “ root this evil from our midst.” 1 recommended expulsion for the guilty party. The Dean knew, by intuition and stool pigeons, that 1 had done it, but he had no proof; the San Francisco Police arson inspectors only added fuel to his slow burn when, at his suggestion, they asked me my whereabouts at the time of the crime, and 1 replied that 1had spent the night with the President’s niece. At the age of 18 I fell into the practice, having somewhere read that Gogol used to write in taverns, of working in bars, a habit of industry that I have maintained with religious consistency since. There is little in the job description of an editor that cannot be accomplished in a good saloon. Such tasks as reading, thinking, editing, interviewing, writing, laying out pages, conferring with colleagues, and general plotting and inventing lend themselves to the calming environment of a proper pub, particularly as opposed to the busy work, artificality, social climbing, and general beadledom of an office. You can be telephoned at a bar if people must, but the very distance from an office discourages trivia; and, as you are escaping the tyranny of your own institution, you can tell the bartender to say that you have left; a professional bartender is an infinitely more effective liar than the most efficient secretary. I have consequently maintained offices for the necessary evils that they encompass but have gone to them as infrequently as possible; over the years I have been the more productive, if in some dry minds the more notorious, for it. The Jesuits recklessly struck down a technical improvement I had ordered — the installation of a telephone extension from the university switchboard to a bar I frequented some ten blocks distant. 1 retaliated by sawing up Fr. Moore’s favorite table, a round rostrum of golden wood at which he sat in kangaroo court judgment of truant students, fashioning from the remains a horseshoe-shaped copy desk for the Foghorn office. I was indignant that these black pimpernels of the Pope would deign to be holier than thou about my right to drink. I vowed to spill as much Jesuit liquor as was humanly possible, and launched a blitzkrieg against temperance by a series of soirees, conferences and dinners on campus to which 1 invited important citizens of the town whose favor the Jesuits curried, so the Fathers could not but acquiesce in the serving of drinks. The result each time was that the staff of the student paper got thoroughly swacked. Such activities led to my becoming known, in an analogy not always used in a completely complimentary sense, as the Elsa Maxwell of USF. The grandest party of all was hosted at Jesuit expense when I turned the Foghorn into a daily newspaper. It was a surprise party for the Jesuits, as they did not know it was happening. I had laid cunning plans to make the paper a daily, keeping them strictly to myself, as does a prisoner on Devil’s Island an escape plan. This was a politic thing to do as even those minority Jesuits favorably disposed to me considered me a young Dr. Strangelove of journalism. So I secretly wrote an inch-thick white paper explaining the new daily publishing schedule in which, in the sacred tradition of white papers, I rationalized the increased work load as actually less work for everyone. For security, I had that classified document printed and bound at Stanford University Press and sent the bill to the Jesuits. I distributed it after dark to a clandestine gathering of the newspaper staff a week before D (daily) Day, all reporters pledging not to let it fall into any Jesuit hands. I wrote a press release — “ New Era of Journalism at USF, Foghorn Becomes First Catholic College Daily Newspaper.in U.S.” — and handed it to the university publicity man with exact instructions on how to distribute it to the news media. Carl Nolte, the flack, was'a former Foghorn man so I thought I could trust him. But he turned out a journalistic Judas and sent the press release to the Dean for approval. The morning the first edition was secretly scheduled to go to press I called Nolte to see if the announcement had gone out on time. The flack admitted that he had shown it to Fr. Moore, and Fr. Moore had ripped it up. “ He said you’re not going daily,” Nolte said. “ He said you didn’t get permission, and he’s not going to let you do it, anyway.” I began screaming in the general direction of the receiver, banging it on the table with such fury that the instrument broke in half and further communication was thereby ended, so I never did get to tell Nolte what I thought. When I could walk again, I went directly to the nearest bar and composed a telegram announcing the daily publication of the Foghorn, which I sent to every newspaper in the state. I then sent out another telegram to various judges and city officials, prominent alumni, former Foghorn editors, and a goodly number of San Francisco reporters who would cross the Sahara itself for a free drink, inviting them all to a grand party that night to celebrate the Foghorn becoming a daily newspaper. I also invited many congressmen and senators in Washington, who of course would not come, but I knew someone on their staff would draft a routine telegram of congratulations. I told every Jesuit with whom I was on speaking terms to come to a party, neglecting to say what for. Fr. Moore walked belatedly into campus banquet hall that night and found it as packed as a Breughel people-scape with drunken newspapermen, students, Jesuits, San Francisco politicians, and fat cat alumni, all raising toasts and singing hosannas to the grand event of the Foghorn becoming a daily. Six girls wearing white tee-shirts with “DA ILY FOGHORN” emblazoned across the front — and otherwise skimpily costumed in the tradition of the old Paris Herald Tribune newsgirls — were dancing through the crowd distributing copies fresh off the press of the next morning’s edition of the Foghorn, with red headlines across the top of the front page: “ CITY’S FOURTH DAILY IS BORN.” I walked up to Fr. Moore and handed him two telegrams of congratulations — from Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy. He looked pale and I suggested he break his fast and have a drink. The next day the San Francisco newspapers all carried editorials congratulating the University of San Francisco on its great journalistic leap forward. It was a great victory for the doctrine of fa it accompli. Excerpted from If You Have A Lemon, Make Lemonade by permission o f Warren Hinckle, former editor o f Ramparts Magazine. 22
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