I suppose anyone who ever attended an Ivy League school has had classmates or college acquaintances who made good. In my case, I can claim minimal distance to both Bill and Hillary Clinton (separately!) and thus to everyone in the first Clinton cabinet, through Robert Reich, who was a year ahead of me at Dartmouth.
Here’s the story: One of the first things I did as a freshman at Dartmouth was to join WDCR, the college radio station. (Just sixty years ago, as it happens — it was the fall of 1965.) For most of my time at the station I was a classical music DJ, and a very active one, and I eventually became director of classical music programming. One of my programs was the Sunday morning classical broadcast, and because no one else on the station wanted to get up that early on Sundays, I was not only the DJ, I was the engineer on duty. The FCC required that someone with at least a second-class radio license had to be in charge at all times when the station was on the air. So I dutifully studied the materials, went to Boston, took the exam (in the Custom House Tower), and got my license. (My license has expired, in case you were thinking of hiring me, and in any case the second-class license has been abolished.)
My second-class license didn’t mean much. It was the Chief Engineer, who presumably had a first-class license, who was responsible for making sure that our transmitter worked properly and didn’t exceed the FCC’s regulations for broadcast power. But once I was licensed, I could perform any routine engineering task, including being in charge of the control room during the evening newscast. And thus I later found myself in a control room on a regular basis, turning Robert Reich’s microphone on and off and queuing tapes for him, while he delivered the nightly news.
The business about “queuing tapes” comes from the fact that we had a daily audio feed from United Press International, which we taped, made extracts from, and played at appropriate times during newscasts. This is how, back in the sixties, local radio stations were able to inject on-the-scene reports from remote locations into their newscasts (“This is John Johnson, reporting from London … “)
Reich and I never had any closer relationship than this, and most of our interaction was over a mike and through a glass wall. Nevertheless, we were something of a team for a while — for how long, though, I can’t remember. More than a few weeks, I’m pretty sure. Maybe a semester? Maybe two?
Reich dated Hillary Rodham while he was at Dartmouth. He met Bill Clinton at Oxford when they were both Rhodes Scholars. Eventually he was Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. This is certainly as close as I will ever get to the corridors of power.
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