Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty-four

In 1985 I had applied for both the Hoover fellowship and a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations. I was awarded both but asked the Council if I could defer for a year. The Council on Foreign Relations is a think tank that includes among its members all major American figures in international politics. Founded in 1921 and located in New York, it is arguably the most prestigious organization in the field.

The Council’s International Affairs Fellowship is thus highly coveted. Young faculty and other midcareer professionals who are awarded the fellowship are given a yearlong appointment working for the federal government. I was offered positions in the National Security Council (NSC), the State Department, and the Pentagon. I wanted to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reasoning that I might have other opportunities to work in civilian agencies but would find it difficult to land on a military staff again. Thanks in part to a Stanford colleague’s successful tenure with the Joint Chiefs the year before, the military agreed to take me on. I told my colleague that they had gotten used to having a civilian around thanks to him; now we would see whether they were ready for a civilian black woman.

Stanford readily granted me a second year of sabbatical, though a few faculty friends wondered if leaving during the year when I would be considered for tenure was really wise. “Out of sight,” one said, “out of mind.”

For my part, I was more concerned about leaving my father yet again. He had lived in Palo Alto for ten months, and I’d been gone for three of them. I asked him to meet me for dinner at a local restaurant and started to talk about why it was so important for me to work for the Joint Chiefs. Then I just stopped and said, “Do you mind if I move to Washington for a year?”

“No,” he replied, and then went on to ask if I could afford it financially. It was clear from his demeanor that he really didn’t mind. He wanted me to go.

As it turned out, my year with the Joint Chiefs of Staff was one of the best of my life. I worked for the Nuclear and Chemical Division, which analyzed situations in which the United States would use its nuclear forces. As a Soviet specialist, I helped to develop guidance for the type of war that everyone thought unthinkable. As difficult as it was to contemplate such a scenario, this particular unit had to plan for it anyway. This led to black humor like the bottle of champagne that the division chief stashed in his drawer in the event of pending nuclear annihilation. When the missiles were on their way to Moscow and Moscow’s were on their way to Washington, the plan was to pop the cork and kiss your “expletive” goodbye.

I loved working with these officers, who all held the rank of lieutenant colonel or naval commander. They were dedicated, smart, and relegated temporarily to office duty in the Pentagon: I could tell they all looked forward anxiously to the day when they could leave Washington and go command a ship or an air wing.

Truthfully, my officemates didn’t know quite what to make of me when I arrived in the summer of 1986. On the first day, they informed me that it was the responsibility of the rookie to make the coffee. They probably thought I’d make a fuss or maybe even claim gender discrimination. I just made the coffee—really, really strong. I was never asked to make the coffee again. (It helped, too, that I won the first football pool of the year.)

It was also during this time that I first met General Colin Powell, then the deputy national security advisor. My meeting with him in his corner office in the West Wing of the White House was the start of our friendship. And by meeting with me, Colin had sent an important message throughout Washington that I was someone to keep an eye on. I never forgot that act of mentorship and kindness.

My time in Washington was interrupted in the fall by a health crisis of my own. One evening, while riding the metro from the Pentagon to my Van Ness Street apartment, I started to experience excruciating stomach pains. At first I chalked it up to stomach flu, but it simply got worse as the week went on. Fearing appendicitis, I took the next day off from work and went to a doctor. After a few questions and an exam, he told me it was likely that I had uterine fibroids—a nasty condition that can afflict as many as 80 percent of women. He arranged a consult with an obstetrician-gynecologist, who recommended that I have a hysterectomy.

This was terrible news. In the back of my mind I had always assumed that I would get married and have kids. I wanted to find that special man because I had been inspired by the wonderful example my parents had provided through their marriage. I was not at all concerned that marriage might hold me back professionally. Again, both of my parents had managed careers and family life quite well. But as I told (and still tell) my friends, you don’t get married in the abstract; you have to want to marry a particular person. And frankly, I’d always hoped to marry within my race. If the right man does not come along, it is better to enjoy a fulfilling and happy life as a single person. But in 1986, at the age of thirty, the prospect of not even having the option to have kids was devastating.

That night, I called my ob-gyn back in Palo Alto and asked whether there were other approaches. She suggested that I come back and see a young doctor who was doing pioneering work in alternatives for women with my condition. I called the physician, who said that he couldn’t be certain until he examined me, but he was having great success with myomectomy, which removed the fibroids and left the uterus intact. I immediately felt better and more in control of the situation. The next day, I informed my division chief that I needed to go home for a few weeks. It was just after Thanksgiving. I told him that I would likely return in January.

My father met me at the airport two days later. At his apartment I calmly went through the diagnosis that I had been given.

“Are they ever malignant?” Daddy asked.

“Only in about one percent of the cases,” I said, relating what I had been told.

“I’m sure you will be all right,” he said. I thought he was correct, but I was nonetheless very apprehensive: one percent seems a lot bigger when you are the daughter of a breast cancer victim. But a couple of nights before the surgery, I had a dream about my mother in which she affirmed that everything would indeed be all right. I’d never before had a premonition and have never had one since.

Several days later I had the surgery, which took more than seven hours. When I woke up in my room, I heard the doctor say that everything had gone fine. I looked around and saw my father and one or two friends, including John Lewis, who was smiling broadly. In my semidrugged state he looked a bit like one of those distorted faces in a horror movie. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

Though the surgery had been successful, the recovery was difficult. My digestive system shut down, which required that I undergo an extremely uncomfortable procedure to insert a tube through my nose and down my throat. After enduring two days of this, I called for my doctor. “If you don’t remove this thing, I’m going to die,” I told him. Fortunately, I got better and he decided to remove the tube—a little prematurely. He told me he was worried that I was so strong-willed I might die just to spite him.

All of this medical drama had been extremely wearing on my father. He practically lived at the hospital for that entire week. Finally on Friday, seven days after I’d had the surgery, I told him to go home and get some rest. I was to be discharged on Saturday and was feeling just fine. Shortly after Daddy left, the doctor came in and said that I could go home that night instead. Because I had rented my Stanford condo to another faculty member when I left for Washington, I went back to Daddy’s apartment to recuperate.

At about three in the morning Daddy came in and woke me up. “Something isn’t right with me,” he said. “I’ve called 911.”

Still groggy from pain medication, I got up and went into the living room, where Daddy had been sleeping on the pull-out sofa. He had thrown up, and he told me he was experiencing pain in his chest. An ambulance arrived moments later and rushed him to the hospital. I got dressed and called a friend, who took me there about thirty minutes later.

A young resident met me in the emergency room when I arrived at the Stanford Medical Center. He said Daddy was undergoing some tests and that he’d get back to me when he knew what had happened. After what seemed like an eternity, the doctor emerged to say that Daddy had indeed suffered what he described as a major heart attack. “The next twenty four hours are crucial,” he said.

I called my friend Randy, who came over immediately and sat with me for the rest of the night. Finally they let me see Daddy, who was weak but in surprisingly good spirits. “This is a wake-up call,” he said. “I’ve been tempting fate for a long time.” I was relieved to see him talking and upbeat, but I was still very worried that I was going to lose him. I told Randy that I couldn’t bear to lose my father just over a year after Mother’s death.

Daddy had lost considerable heart function and would from then on suffer from congestive heart failure. Given that he also had diabetes and high blood pressure, his long-term prospects were not very good. But at least he was alive. He’d tempted fate, but at least for the time being, he’d won.

After the first of the year, I returned to Washington and resumed working for the Joint Chiefs. I felt more and more integrated into the daily life of the office, taking on my share of assignments, ranging from exciting ones to the more routine. One highlight was the opportunity to do a presentation in “the Tank,” assessing President Reagan’s idea of a world without ballistic missiles for the chairman and the Joint Chiefs. Although it’s little more than a large conference room, the Tank carries a certain mystique in the military since it’s the place where all-important decisions are made. I was so excited that I quite literally forgot to be nervous until the presentation was over. Frankly, it’s not unusual for me to put the consequences of failure out of my mind until an event has finished. After my presentation in the Tank, I woke up in the middle of the night. It was risky for you to come here and work for the military, I thought. This could have really backfired. Then I went back to sleep.

A few days after the presentation, I received a phone call from the chair of the Political Science Department back at Stanford.

“The department has voted to recommend you for tenure,” one of my colleagues, Steve Krasner, told me.

“Oh. I thought the vote was next week,” I said clumsily and without a sense of how ungrateful that must have sounded.

Fortunately, Steve is an easygoing guy. “No, it was this week,” he said, chuckling slightly.

Stanford’s dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, the university provost, and the Advisory Board (an elected body of seven senior faculty) still had to approve the department’s recommendation, but I knew that they rarely overturned such decisions. I was pretty sure that I was about to receive tenure at Stanford. I called my father and my friend Chip. The truth is that I had been so busy preparing for my opportunity in the Tank that I’d forgotten all about the departmental vote. For that I was grateful; it turns out that it’s far better to be out of sight during that awkward time when your colleagues are deciding your future.

The remainder of my time in Washington seemed to fly by. In addition to my work at the Pentagon, I was tapped in the spring of 1987 to do national television commentary for the first time. Out of the blue one day, the office secretary passed through a call from ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. I was a little stunned when this famous newsman said he’d like to meet for lunch. They were looking for “fresh faces,” he said, and Bob Legvold, professor of Soviet studies at Columbia and an ABC News consultant, had recommended me. Peter and I met, and after getting permission from my boss at the Joint Chiefs, I agreed to do some on-air commentary concerning U.S.-Soviet relations. This gave me my first national exposure and invaluable media experience. It also gave me a lifelong and dear friend in the late Peter Jennings.

I returned to Palo Alto in September 1987 and took up the duties of a tenured associate professor. I started new research activities that drew on my experiences in Washington and began taking new graduate students. I also took on some administrative duties, such as overseeing the graduate student admissions process for the Political Science Department. I even served on the search committee to select a new football coach for Stanford. It was great fun, and I especially enjoyed surprising the candidates with detailed questions about what kind of offense they’d run. Even the candidate who called me “sweetie” during the interview process was impressed that I knew Stanford was not an option offense team. (By the way, he didn’t get the job.)