Michael Waters

Interviewee: Mike Waters (Alabama & Merton 1973) [hereafter ‘MW’] 

Moderator:  Jamie Byron Geller [hereafter ‘JBG’]  

Date of interview: 16 October 2024 

[file begins 00:04] 

JBG: This is Jamie Byron Geller on behalf of the Rhodes Trust, and I am here with Mike Waters (Alabama & Merton 1973) to record Mike’s Rhodes Scholar oral history interview, which will help us to launch the first ever comprehensive Rhodes Scholar oral history project. Today’s date is 16 October 2024. Thank you so much, Mike, for joining us in this project. Would you mind saying your full name for the recording, please? 

MW: Sure, I’d be glad to. My full name is Michael David Waters and I’m from Cullman, Alabama. 

JBG: Great. Do I have, Mike, your permission to record audio and video of this interview? 

MW: Yes, you do. You have my permission. 

JBG: Wonderful. Thank you. So, Mike, we’re having this conversation on Zoom, but where are you joining from today? 

MW: I’m joining from my law office in Birmingham, Alabama. 

JBG: Great. And how long has Birmingham been home for you? 

MW: I’ve actually practised in Birmingham two different times, but I’ve been in Birmingham for 20 years. I’ve also practised in Montgomery and in Mobile, with various firms, or with the same firm that wanted me to move to a different town because of client relationships. But I’ve been in Birmingham now for a little over 20 years. 

JBG: Wonderful. And I know you mentioned at the top of our conversation that you were from Cullman. Were you born in Cullman? 

MW: I was born in Cullman, Alabama, which is a small town: 17,000 people. It’s about 40 miles north of Birmingham. I grew up there, went to high school there, then went to college, and really only came back to Cullman over the next 50 years to see relatives, but technically, now, five years ago, I moved back to Cullman, because I got remarried with someone who had been living in Cullman all her life. So, I now live in Cullman and commute. It’s about a 40-minute drive to Birmingham, and I commute to Birmingham. 

JBG: Lovely. And when were you born, Mike? 

MW: I was born 7 April 1950, and I have a twin sister born on the same day, but two minutes ahead of me, so, I joke that she’s my older sister. She doesn’t like that. 

JBG: Do you have any other siblings? 

MW: No other siblings. 

JBG: And what was your childhood like, growing up in Cullman? 

MW: Yes. Cullman was, frankly, a great place to grow up. Cullman was a German settlement, founded in 1873 by German immigrants who were looking for a place to settle, and they were led by a gentleman named John Cullmann, which is why the town is named Cullman. And my grandfather on my mother’s side was born in Indiana. He was German. But his father was killed in an accident when my grandfather was six years old, and his mother had a sister living in Cullman as part of the German settlement, and so, she moved her children, including my grandfather, to Cullman, and he only spoke German until he started grammar school, and then he learned English. He had only a fourth-grade education – he was a blacksmith – but he would speak German most of his life, and my wife, who I married five years ago, her mother’s parents came from Germany, as part of the German settlement in Cullman. I grew up Catholic. It’s a huge Catholic town, because of the German background. My wife grew up Lutheran, because there was a big Lutheran settlement in Cullman, with the German community. And so, I grew up really interested in German, and I was a German minor in college, which was part of my education. 

JBG: Wonderful. And I would love to know a little bit about your earliest educational experiences, what primary and high school were like.  

MW: Yes. Primary school-, I went to Catholic school first grade through eighth grade and, again, unlike most small towns in the South, there’s a huge Catholic centre in my home town. There’s a convent for nuns, and there’s an abbey for Benedictine monks, and a Catholic private school. I went to a Catholic grammar school first grade through eighth grade, and then went to Cullman High School, a public high school, which, for me, was a very interesting and, frankly, sort of, initial education-type event, because in grammar school, I knew everybody in the school, because it was a small Catholic school, and I really didn’t know anybody who went to public schools, with just one or two exceptions. So, when I got to public high school, a lot of people thought that I had moved in from out of town, and I have a Southern accent, but I don’t have an extreme Southern accent, so, a lot of people thought I was from somewhere outside of the South. So, I had to, kind of, reintroduce myself to people in high school. But that went very well. I played high school football, and I got involved in a high school service organisation, Key Club International. That, along with my father’s background, sort of, you might say, opened up the world for me. I’d be glad to comment on that as we go along. 

JBG: Yes. I would love to talk about that. I’m curious if there are particular subjects you gravitated towards academically. 

MW: Yes: history. I was a history major in college, and even today, I love to read biographies, kind of, historical biographies about historical figures, biographies on US presidents, Winston Churchill, some of the prime ministers of Great Britain: William Gladstone, for example, and Disraeli. I was a German minor, and spent a summer before my senior year in college in Münster, Germany, living with a German family and going to school in Münster taught me to speak conversational German, not just learning German in a textbook. But I was a history major and I’ve always had an interest in history and typically, when I’m reading, I’m reading books that relate in some way to my history major.  

JBG: And in high school, as you were gravitating towards history, did you have a sense of the direction that you thought your career might take at that point? 

MW: Yes and no. There was actually a change in direction. Growing up, when I was in junior high and, really, starting high school, I wanted to be an airplane pilot. I wanted to go into the service, become a pilot and then be a commercial airline pilot. I was always fascinated with flying. Later in life, I did get a private pilot’s licence, so, I am a pilot now. But I wanted to be a commercial airline pilot. But my junior year in high school, and this was when I was getting involved in the Key Club, two things happened: playing football, I tore my knee up and had to have knee surgery; I had to get glasses. Both of those things, my glasses and the knee surgery, would have kept me out of pilot training in the military, and so, I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’d better start thinking about other things.’ And the assistant principal of my high school, named Stanley Johnson, who actually came to Cullman because, on his mother’s side, his great-great-uncle was Colonel Cullmann, the founder of our town-,  

JBG: Wow. 

MW: And he was a state director of Key Club, and he encouraged me to be involved in the Key Club politics outside of Cullman, because it’s an international organisation. And he started encouraging me to think about becoming a lawyer, because of just, sort of, my academics. So, he was a tremendous influence on me, and the more I thought about it and the more I got interested in history in high school, and the more I got involved in Key Club, the more I thought I wanted to be a history major and a lawyer, and with that, Mr Johnson [10:00], his encouragement was not just ‘Be a lawyer.’ His encouragement was ‘Be a lawyer and then do something useful in the community.’ That was very much his approach. It wasn’t just ‘Be a lawyer to make money.’ ‘Whatever you do, contribute to the community,’ and he as a high school teacher did that by his extreme service in Key Club, encouraging young people to be active in a service organisation and think about serving the community.  

JBG: That’s really lovely. 

MW: Yes. 

JBG: And I know that you did your undergraduate work at Duke. Did you go right from high school to college? 

MW: I did, but I was, in a sense, a little bit of a roamer, because I had originally wanted to go to Duke. I, for some reason, got fascinated with Duke, when I was in the eighth or ninth grade, about Duke’s academic reputation. But Duke was very expensive, and so, I just decided on my own I wasn’t going to ask my parents to spend that much money, and I said, ‘I’ll go to the University of Alabama.’ And I love Alabama, I love Alabama football, so, I went to the University of Alabama, my freshman year. And I enjoyed it, but my first semester at Alabama, I made all As, and on the one hand, I was delighted, but on the other hand, I was aggravated, because I thought, ‘My goodness, college is supposed to be more difficult and more challenging than this,’ and you show up in the first semester and you make all As, well, what else can you do? And so, I rethought about Duke, and I asked my parents, if I could be admitted, could I transfer to Duke? And they said ‘Yes.’ And I had a good friend who then was in law school at Alabama, who I had met through Key Club, the Key Club organisation, and he had been a Duke graduate and was at Alabama law school, and he and I had gotten to be friends. And so, he put me in contact with some of the folks at Duke University, one of the deans that dealt with transfers, and I went up and got interviewed, made an application and was accepted for transfer. So, I started Duke as a sophomore. 

JBG: Okay. And did you find the academic experience to be more in alignment with what you were hoping for, perhaps? 

MW: Yes, very much so. Duke was very challenging, and there were a number of things. At Alabama-, I think it’s changed a bit in recent years, because the University of Alabama and the law school, where I went to law school, has really brought in more students from out of Alabama. But when I was at the University of Alabama in the fall of 1968, it was mostly Alabama students, so, it was kind of like a big high school. When I got to Duke, there were students from all over the country, and although Duke was in the South, in North Carolina, when you were on the Duke campus, you didn’t know you were in the South, because there were people from New York and Pennsylvania and California, Texas and Michigan, people from all over the country, number one. Number two, the academics were more challenging, just what the professors expected, the status of the student body. There were more competitors, and I liked it. I enjoyed the challenge, and that’s when I decided to be a history major.  

And the other thing about Duke, two things about Duke that, sort of, opened my perspective to a bigger world, was not just being there and being on a campus where there were students from all over the country, but Terry Sanford, who had been governor of North Carolina, elected in 1960 when Kennedy was elected president-, so, Mr. Sanford was governor of North Carolina through 1961 to 1965. He was basically the first governor of what was then called the New South governors, governors who were progressive and moving away from racial discrimination, and Terry Sanford was an extraordinarily progressive governor in North Carolina. When he finished his term, he went back to law practice, but in 1970, when I was at Duke as a sophomore, he became president of Duke University. He was president for 15 years and then he became US senator for North Carolina. Well, Mr Sanford opened things up in Duke in terms of public policy. There’s now a public policy school at Duke, named the Sanford Public Policy School. He brought in additional teachers and professors. He focused on public policy. He was open to students.  

One of the things about Mr Sanford, and this was really an eye-opener-, there was a lot of student protest during the late 1960s, early 1970s, because of the Vietnam War, protests all over the country, in various colleges, and a lot of presidents and senior officials at colleges and universities where there were protests, they ignored the protests. They viewed the protests as a disruption and something that was not good for the university, and they would be critical of the protesters. Mr Sanford had been president of Duke for two weeks, only two weeks, and there was a huge anti-war protest on the main quadrangle at Duke, by the students. Well, I didn’t participate in the protest, but I was out there just, sort of, watching it, and the huge crowd of students sitting on the quadrangle, not going to class, and it was just 20 yards from the administration building where Mr Sanford was. And I was standing there, and all of a sudden, here comes Mr Sanford, walking out of the office building to the quadrangle. He went out to the middle of the students and sat on the grass and said, ‘Let’s talk.’ 

JBG: Wow. 

MW: ‘I want you to tell me what your concern is,’ and he said, ‘And I want everybody here to know that they have an open appointment in my office to come in and talk.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is different,’ I think, in part, because he had been governor, and he had been used to dealing with critical people in the legislature, and he wasn’t an academician, and he was comfortable dealing with controversy. And the students told him on that day-, there’s a book on Mr Sanford that I read recently that has all of this in it. A lot of it, I knew myself from the experience. But several of the students said, ‘Well, we’re going to go take over your administration building,’ because that was one of the things that students did around campuses, they would take over. And they said, ‘We’re going to go take over your office and your administration building,’ and he said, ‘Good. I’m having a hard time getting in there myself. Come help me take it over,’ and he just got them, sort of, off-balance, but that’s the way he was. And it really was, kind of, a way of teaching me, ‘Look, there are different ways to deal with controversy,’ and ways to deal with it can be to sit down in it and try to see what the other side is and see what they have to say, as opposed to drawing a line and saying, ‘They’re opponents. We don’t deal with them. We have our own point of view.’ Mr Sanford just demonstrated that in an extraordinary way. 

JBG: Wow. That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that. 

MW: Yes. 

JBG: I’m curious, Mike, about at what point in your time at Duke, or perhaps before, you started to think about the Rhodes Scholarship. 

MW: That’s very interesting, and I’m not sure, maybe I was typical, or maybe I was not. I had heard of the Rhodes Scholarship. I knew generally what it was. It never occurred to me that I would apply for it. I never thought, ‘Oh, I would like to apply for it.’ I just had heard of it. And starting my senior year at Duke, my favourite professor at Duke was Sydney Nathans, a history professor. I took three of his classes, I made good grades in his class. After I took his first class, I made an A, and our main grade was on a term paper, and he put ‘A+ Superior,’ and then he said, ‘Come talk to me.’ In my first semester with Dr Nathans I didn’t really speak up much in class, but in the second semester, I was the first person he called on in class, and after class he called me in to his office, and he said, [20:00] ‘Who taught you to write like this?’ and I said, ‘I had good teachers in high school.’ So, we talked about my term paper, and, as I say, I took three of his classes.  

But my senior year, in the fall, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, the US senator who had been Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952 for vice president, when Stevenson ran against Eisenhower, Sparkman was the senior senator from Alabama, and my friend, who had been at Alabama, I mentioned earlier, who was older than me, was putting together a young group to organise what was called Young Alabamians for Sparkman in his re-election campaign in 1972. And he called me at Duke and said, ‘Why don’t you come down in January and spend the next six months running the Young Alabamians for Sparkman campaign, focusing on young people for the state of Alabama?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s my last semester at Duke.’ He said, ‘Yes, I know, but come help John Sparkman get re-elected to the Senate.’ And I checked, and I only needed one more course to graduate from Duke in the spring, and so, I checked with my academic adviser and he said, ‘Yes, you’ll take another course,’ and I moved to Mobile and took a course at Spring Hill college, in political science.  

So, I actually left Duke at my last semester, took that course in Mobile and worked full-time at Alabama, putting together, along with one other person, the Young Alabamians for Sparkman campaign, focusing on young professionals, young lawyers, young doctors, people who had just graduated from college, and I got to know people all over the state. The interesting thing is that my history professor, Sydney Nathans, who I mentioned was my favourite, was Duke’s chairman that year of Duke’s Rhodes nominating committee, and I had written him a letter, told him what I was doing for Senator Sparkman, and I would be back for graduation in May, but I was working in Alabama, and he wrote me back and he said, ‘I’m glad you’re doing that. I grew up in Texas and my parents were Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman advocates in 1952 when they were running for president and vice president.’ And he said, ‘I’m the chairman of Duke’s Rhodes nominating committee for the Rhodes Scholarship. With your grades and with your activity in the Sparkman campaign, I think you ought to interview at Duke for a Rhodes Scholarship, for Duke’s nomination.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, okay, there’s nothing to lose on that,’ so, I wrote back and said, ‘Sure, I’d be glad to.’ And he said, ‘The interviews will be in the fall,’ so, in the fall, after I had started law school at the University of Alabama, I went to Duke for the interview and got Duke’s nomination. But without Sydney Nathans and my favourite professor and, really, without being in the Sparkman campaign and skipping, basically, my spring senior semester at Duke, I would never have gotten involved in the Scholarship. It was just good fortune. 

JBG: Wow. Wow. Mike, you kindly shared, the last time we talked, a little bit about the moment of learning that you’d been selected for the Scholarship, and I was wondering if you would mind sharing that story. 

MW: Sure. So, back then, of course, for the Scholarship, you went through two interviews. You went through your state nomination and then you went to the regional. That’s been changed now. After I had gotten Duke’s nomination, I went to the state interview in Birmingham in early December, and there were, I think, 12 or 14 students interviewing. I was the first interviewee on state. So, I went for the first interview and it seemed to go well. I don’t remember a whole lot about the first interview. I just remember that it seemed to go well. The mistake I made is that when I finished, I came back and sat in the waiting room. Well, there were 12 or 13 more interviews, through lunch, and I just sat there and watched everybody go in and out and in and out and in and out, and I should have gone out and walked around the city in Birmingham. But the longer I sat there, the more nervous I got.  

So, at the end of all the interviews, the committee came out and said, ‘Well, we haven’t made a decision. We’re going to call four people back for a second interview,’ and I was one of the four called back. I don’t remember what order. But by the time they called me back, I was extremely nervous. I was a history major and the secretary of the committee, Barney Monaghan (Alabama & New College 1937), who was also on the regional committee-, and I got to know Mr Monaghan very well, but he could be a rough person, and he started the interview with me saying, ‘Mr Waters, I know you’re interested in history, you’ve had a lot of political science courses, you are in law school, you seem to be interested in politics, you’ve worked in Senator Sparkman’s campaign. I’m going to give you a hypothetical question’ – a very typical Rhodes Scholar interview. This was 1972, and he said, ‘The war in Vietnam is still raging, and I want you to assume you’re secretary of defense of the United States and there’s a new Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese. What would you recommend to the president?’ Well, I, kind of, froze, and I didn’t know what I would-, so, I was trying to give myself time to come up with an answer, and so, I said, ‘Well, I can’t really give the advice to the president until certain assumptions are made.’ I was trying to think of what I might say. He said, ‘I’m not interested in assumptions. I want to know what your answer is.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I know,’ I said, ‘but in terms of laying down the groundwork for a policy, you have to have some assumptions. You have to have some basic-,’ ‘No, I’m not interested in assumptions. Don’t tell me assumptions. Tell me an answer.’  

So, I repeated it, four or five times: ‘Well, you have to have certain assumptions.’ And finally, he let me go, and I gave him two or three assumptions, and answered, and I don’t really know how my answer was. Maybe he was impressed that I insisted on answering it my way. I don’t know. But when I walked out, I thought, ‘Well, I have no chance. That was awful.’ But when they came out after the four interviews, they said, ‘The two nominees are Ralph Smith [(Alabama & Corpus Christi 1973) and Mike Waters.’ So, now I was shocked, absolutely shocked. But Mr Monaghan took his business plane two days later and flew us down to New Orleans for the regional interview, and he, kind of, joked with us. He said, ‘We called four people back for second interviews. They were all terrible. We just relied on the first interview.’ I thought, ‘Okay. Nice.’ So, in the interview in New Orleans, I was the fourth one to interview, but before I went to New Orleans, I mentioned to a friend of mine what the Alabama interview was like and, sort of, how I got hung up on the foreign policy questions. And I had been trying, during those two days before the regional interview, to catch up on public affairs, so I read LIFE magazine, Newsweek, TIME, and the friend said, ‘Look, there’s an article in the Foreign Affairs quarterly, written by Hamilton Fish Armstrong. You need to go to the library and read it.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I will,’ and I went to the library and I got it, and I actually bought it. This is actually the Foreign Affairs quarterly with the- [holds up copy of journal] 

JBG: Wow. 

MW: Written by Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and the title of the article is called, ‘Isolated America,’ and it was published in October of 1972, still at the raging of the Vietnam War, and the article said, ‘America is isolated, just as it was isolated after World War One, but this isolation is different. After World War One, America wanted to return to normalcy. America did not want to be involved in foreign policy issues. It wanted to go back to being normal. The article went on to say that as a result of the Vietnam War, America was also isolated, but not because the isolation was self-imposed. America was isolated because other countries were withdrawing from American influence, said Mr Armstrong, and following the influence of the Soviet Union or the influence of developing nations in Africa. The article continued, ‘A lot of countries are just ignoring the American influence.’ And so, I read the article. I thought, ‘Yes, that makes sense.’ I put it down, and didn’t think about it anymore.  

When we got to New Orleans, David Boren, who was the US representative [30:00] from Oklahoma – went on to be governor and the US senator and then president of Oklahoma University – David Boren was asking me questions-, he was the principal person asking me questions, and it seemed to be going very well. I felt comfortable. I thought, ‘I’m not going to get hyped up the way I was in Alabama.’ I was comfortable and I felt real good about things, and about halfway through, another committee member asked me another open-ended question, like I received in the second Alabama interview. It was even more open-ended. He said, ‘Well, what do you think about things in the US today? What’s going on today?’ I said, ‘Well, America is isolated, just as it was isolated after World War One, but the difference is this,’ and then I explained, you know, what I’d learned from the article, and the secretary of the committee, Pat Murphy, slammed his hand down on the desk, because he had not asked any questions, and he said, ‘Mr Waters, did you read Hamilton Fish Armstrong’s article in Foreign Affairs?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I did.’ He said, ‘I thought it was an excellent article. You must have thought it was good too.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I thought it had a lot of insight about where we are in foreign policy today.’ He said, ‘Do you read Foreign Affairs?’ I said, ‘I like to read it whenever I get the chance.’  

So, the rest of the interview, no matter what I said, Pat Murphy never asked any more questions. He just sat there, and did this [nodding his head] the whole time. So, when I walked out, I thought, ‘Well, I couldn’t do any better.’ Much better than the Alabama interview, but I didn’t know. But when the committee came out and announced the winners, you know, they thanked everybody and complimented everybody, of course, but they said, ‘And so, the recipients are Jackson [Phillip Jackson (Oklahoma & Merton 1973)], Lindner [Ray Lindner (Texas & Exeter 1973)], Smith,’ and when he was calling out the names, that’s about how fast he was going, but I thought, ‘He’s going alphabetically. I’m not sure there’s anybody after Smith-, there’s me, at W,’ and he said ‘Waters,’ and I was shocked. Even though the interview went well, I was shocked, and it was an exciting situation.  

I had put in my application that I had planned to do law at Oxford, because I was then in law school at Alabama. I graduated from Duke and was in my first year of law school, and I figured, ‘Well, if I do go to Oxford, I might as well stay in law,’ so, I put jurisprudence down. Mr Monaghan, who had been the tough examiner of me in Alabama, the Alabama secretary – and he was a lawyer as well – said, ‘Don’t go over there and study law. You’re going to come back here and finish law school. Go over there and do something exciting. Go over there and do something new. Do something you haven’t done before. Look at PPE. Expand yourself.’ I mean, that’s literally what he said, and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ So, I put on my application to Oxford ‘PPE’, and I put PPE because I’d only had one economics course in college and I’d only had one philosophy course in college. Of course, I’d had a lot of politics. But I thought, ‘Okay,’ PPE would give me a broad picture in economics and philosophy, and so, that’s what I chose, and that’s, kind of, how I ended up in New Orleans when it was announced. I was nervous when they were calling out the winners, but it was odd: by the time they got to ‘Smith,’ I thought, ‘They’re doing it alphabetically,’ and I didn’t think there was anybody after ‘Smith’ but me. That turned out to be the case. 

JBG: Wow. That is amazing. So, both you and Ralph Smith from Alabama went on to be selected.  

MW: Ralph Smith and I went at the same time. We were roommates on the SS France going across the Atlantic. We went by ship then. And Smitty, Ralph Smith and I, he’s actually counsel in our law firm. His office is two doors down from me right now, although he’s in Oxford right now for three weeks. And Smitty and I have been close friends ever since, and two other real good friends of mine, Phil Jackson – he was from Oklahoma. That was his first name called in that region, Jackson – and Mark Williams (Kansas & New College 1973) from Kansas, from another region, those two and I were very good friends, and unfortunately, they both have passed, and we’ve lost several people, you know, in our class. But, yes, Ralph and I have been very close now for 50 years. 

JBG: Wow. And you mentioned being roommates with Ralph on the SS France, and I was wondering if you would mind sharing about that experience, about sailing over with your class. 

MW: Yes. Sailing over was extraordinary. One, I had never been on a ship, and so, sailing on a big ship, going across the Atlantic, was exciting. And I really liked it because the Scholars got to know each other. I mean, of the 32 Americans and, I think, seven Canadians, there were at least two or three of the Canadians and probably, out of the 32 Americans, 25 or 28. There were a few that went separately. Most of us were all on the ship, and we got to be very good friends. I got to be good friends on the ship, you know, with Phil Jackson and Mark Williams, Ray Burse (Kentucky & St John’s 1973), and Fred Manget (Georgia & Oriel 1973). Got to know everybody, you know. By the time we got to England, I’d already made good friends with several. We had a great time on the ship. Typically, when the dinner was over, we’d go to the lounge and have a beer. I was 23. The others were 22. So, we were perfectly legal.  

The most interesting thing that happened on the ship was the last night. We were arriving in England the next day, and we were in the cocktail-, in the lounge, after dinner, and we were seated at different tables, because there were about 30 of us. We couldn’t all sit at one table. And at the table I was sitting were, Mark Williams, Phil Jackson and, I think, Ray Burse. I think Smitty – Ralph Smith – was at another table. And we were having a beer and talking, and we looked up, and across the room, there were three couples walking in, dressed formally, the men in tuxedos, the women in gowns, and we had not seen them before. And they looked to be in their 30s, ten years older or so than we were. And we thought, ‘Well, they must be in First Class and they’re coming down to the lower level to see how the Second Class people operate.’ That’s what we thought, and that is, sort of, what they were doing.  

As they looked around and they walked over – there were three or four tables with our Rhodes Scholar group – and they split up, and one of the women came to our table and said, ‘Are you Rhodes Scholars?’ and we said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Well, we have heard, up in First Class, that there was a Rhodes Scholar group in the tourist section. Tonight is our last night. We want to come down and visit with you and learn about the Rhodes Scholarship.’ And we said, ‘Okay, sure, sit down.’ So, they had clearly spread out, you know, and the woman, she appeared to be ten years older than me, 32, 33, something like that, and she was asking us questions and we were, you know, visiting. We hadn’t really introduced ourselves yet but she was asking us about the Scholarship and what we would study, and then she said, ‘Well, what are your names, and where are you from?’ And so, we went around the table and we told her our names and where we were from and where we went to college, and finally, one of us said to her, ‘What is your name?’ And she, kind of, backed up, and seemed to hesitate, and she said, ‘Er, Sydney, er, Rockefeller. My husband, David, is standing over there,’ David Rockefeller, I guess, Jr. And we said, ‘Oh, interesting, okay.’ I mean, we were trying to act calm. So, she continued to ask us questions, and she said, ‘How much does the Scholarship pay you?’ So, we told her, you know, what we had heard and what we expected, and she said, ‘Well, that’s all you get paid? How can you go skiing in Switzerland on that?’ And we said, ‘Well, probably, we won’t go skiing in Switzerland,’ although we did do a good bit of travelling in the vacation periods we had. But she sat with us, that whole group sat with us, for probably 45 minutes, and then they finally got up and left and went back up to First Class. That was the interesting event about the trip over on the SS France. [40:00] 

JBG: Wonderful. That is amazing. 

MW: Yes. 

JBG: So, you arrive in England. Were you brought by bus to Oxford? 

MW: Yes. Sir Edgar Williams, the Warden, met us. Of course, he had a bus driver. But we went to Southampton, deboarded at Southampton and were on the bus headed to Oxford. On the bus, of course, all of us had gotten to know each other and knew a good bit about each other, and we were laughing and talking and joking and having a good time. But as we got close to Oxford, we could see some of the spires and steeples in the distance, and the closer we got, the quieter we got. Our conversations started to slow down, until we were coming over the bridge by Magdalen, and then we were totally silent. It was, like, ‘Oh, gosh, what do we do now?’ And the bus was stopping at each college and the Warden, Sir Edgar, was just simply saying, ‘Your main cases, trunks and all, will be already delivered to your college’ – because another truck had taken our baggage – when he stopped. Fortunately, there were, I think, five of us at Merton that year. He said, ‘Merton: you walk down that pathway, you’ll see Merton.’ I mean, you know, he just, sort of, said, ‘Look there, look there, look there.’ So, we walked into Merton College, to the entranceway, and told them, and some of the guys, Phil Jackson and John Ettinger (New York & Merton 1973) were actually in the college itself. Three of us were in the annexe on Holywell Street, and we walked over to Holywell Street to see where our room was, and we, sort of, got just settled in. 

JBG: And I know you mentioned changing your intended course of study on your Rhodes application to indicate PPE. Did you go on to read PPE in Oxford? 

MW: I did, yes. I went on to do PPE, and my focus was on the politics, even though I had all the basic-, two economics courses, two philosophy courses, two politics courses the first year. And then, the second year, I was able to focus on the politics. I’m very glad I did that, one because a lot of the politics at Oxford is really more like history, and I was history major, and so it fit in with what I was used to and what I liked. The other thing, though,was that Merton had said up front, ‘We have economics teachers and philosophy teachers, but we do not have politics teachers at Merton.’ The story was, when PPE came into Oxford in the 1920s, Merton thought that was too modern, and they were going to stick with the historic-type cases. I’m not sure now if Merton has politics tutors, but when I was there, Merton did not have politics tutors. So, the advantage, and I’m really, really happy it happened: I went to other colleges for politics.  

So, I was a Merton student, but I had the advantage of having the experience of three different colleges where I went to politics tutors: Christ Church, a old and huge college; Pembroke; and then All Souls, which was really the tutors’ and professors’ college with no resident students. They had students to come in. So, I had courses at Christ Church, Pembroke and All Souls, and that was, sort of, an opening experience for me. The real, sort of, advantage was, at two of the colleges, Pembroke and All Souls, I had politics tutorials with two extraordinary tutors with amazing backgrounds. At Pembroke, my first year, I had a politics tutorial with Zbigniew Pełczyński, who had been a refugee from Poland. In 1944, he actually fought for Poland in the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis and was taken prisoner by the Germans and was in prison camp for a while when the war was over. But he eventually got out. Poland was communist then, taken over by the Soviets, and he came, and he ended up being in academia in England and then, eventually, was tutor in politics at Pembroke. And I had him for, I think, two tutorials, and it was interesting: he was extremely good, and I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was reading a book about Bill Clinton (Arkansas & University 1968), when Clinton was at Oxford in his first year on the Rhodes Scholarship, he was at Pembroke, and his very first tutorial was with Zbigniew Pełczyński, which was interesting. Now, Pełczyński was an extremely respected tutor and he lived a long, long life. He died just a few years ago, in his mid-90s.  

The other professor I had was my second year, my last year, at All Souls, and it had been recommended to me. It was the only course I had where it was not a one-on-one tutor and student. It was a seminar of 12 students at All Souls, and it was a seminar about foreign policy, basically, and it was taught by Michael Howard. Michael Howard – and he later became Sir Michael Howard – was an extraordinary tutor, very famous. His focus was on the history of war and approaching how you study the development of wars and how you conduct war a bit different than what the standard view was, and many days, during the seminar that I had, he would have to leave early to go to London to have a conference with the foreign minister in London. I wrote a very long paper, with another course, on President Kennedy and his détente with the Soviet Union. While I was at Oxford, I expanded it, and I did more research. It was a 12-page paper in my tutorial and I expanded it to maybe an 80- or 90-page paper. And by the time I had Michael Howard in the seminar, I told him what I had done, and I said, ‘Would you mind reading it?’ and he said, ‘Sure, I’ll read it.’ And he read it and gave me comments, and he was complimentary on it. I thought, well, that was neat. I mean, he didn’t have to do it, it wasn’t for his class, he didn’t really know me except in class, but he was very, very acceptable. And he lived a long life. He only died a few years ago as well, just like Professor Pełczyński.  

The thing I did not know about Michael Howard until a couple of years ago-, I was reading a fairly recent biography of Winston Churchill written by Andrew Roberts, published in 2018, and I was reading along, and Churchill had just been selected prime minister of Great Britain. He’d only been the prime minister, I think, a few months. And I was reading how Churchill liked to be at Chequers, the home where he frequently would go to, to do work, and paint, and relax, and it said he had a military assistant and, basically, a guard to help protect him, and help him with things, and it was a Lieutenant Michael Howard in the British Army, who went on to be a prominent tutor at Oxford, and I thought, ‘My goodness.’ 

JBG: Wow. 

MW: Michael Howard knew Churchill personally. He never mentioned that, and I never knew it until I read the biography. But again, of course, you can run into people like that in the US and in Harvard, and so forth, in schools, but for someone my age and with my interest in history, to have that experience at Oxford was remarkable, and to be around people like that – Pełczyński, who had [50:00] been in a Nazi concentration camp for a while and escaped the Soviets in Poland, and Michael Howard, who was leaving class to go to London to advise the foreign minister and actually had been on Winston Churchill’s staff briefly – was just extraordinary. 

JBG: Wow. That is incredible. Thinking about your leisure time when you were in Oxford, I know you mentioned doing quite a bit of travelling, so, I would love to know about that and any other ways that you might have filled that additional time in Oxford.  

MW: Sure. Yes, I did a good bit of travelling. The first break we had, the first year, I went back to Münster, Germany and visited the German family that I had lived with the summer before my senior year at Duke. In the spring, Chris Hendrickson (Washington & Balliol 1973) and Eugene Dionne (Massachusetts & Balliol 1973) and I took a trip, basically to central Europe. We took a train. I think the train went to Vienna. We went into Austria and toured around. We then went to Yugoslavia. We went to Hungary – Budapest – and then ended up back in Vienna. So, we did, sort of, a circle in central Europe there. A great trip. My second year, I went to Spain and rented a car in Madrid and drove south to the coast, around Gibraltar and along the coast there, then took a ferry over to Morocco and went to Rabat and Casablanca and Fez, which is a smaller town inland in Morocco.  

JBG: Wow.  

MW: And it was fascinating to be in the Islamic country. You could see-, I mean, driving down the highway, there would be people on camels, you know, going places. But people were very friendly there. It was a fascinating. A couple of other things that we did for fun: the Americans liked to get together on Saturdays or Sundays and play touch football. Mark Williams and Ray Burse had played college football at small colleges, and so, we would get together and play touch football. One Sunday, I think it was our second year, someone came up with the idea, ‘Let’s have something called “The Rhodes Bowl,” and let’s get as many Rhodes Scholars to participate, and let’s see if Sir Edgar, the Warden, will come watch us.’ And he did. 

JBG: Wow. 

MW: We were playing on a nearby rugby field, it was chilly, and we had a whole bunch of guys playing touch football, and here comes Sir Edgar Williams in his coat and tie and overcoat, and he stood and watched us play football. A remarkable, you know, thing to do by the Warden, and it was lots of fun. Another thing that we did that was very interesting, and it was fun, but it was also, actually, related to, sort of, the academic side: Fred Manget, who was a good friend of mine – and actually, we went to see Fred about nine months ago. Fred had his career in the CIA – Fred came up to me one day and said, ‘Look, Elliot Richardson-,’ who had been in the Nixon and Ford administrations, had been, I think, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliot Richardson was now the American ambassador to Great Britain, and Fred said, to me, ‘You worked for Senator John Sparkman in his campaign. Do you know Senator Sparkman?’ And I said, ‘Well, yes, I know him. I mean, I know him, he knows who I am.’ And at that point Senator Sparkman was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, in the Senate. ‘Do you think we could get Elliot Richardson to come speak to us?’ And I said, ‘I’ll write Senator Sparkman and ask him.’ Back then, of course, you had no cell phones and no internet, and I didn’t know how to do a long-distance phone call. I guess the Warden would have let me, but-, so, I wrote a letter to Senator Sparkman and asked him if he would mind contacting Elliot Richardson to see if he would come talk to our Rhodes Scholar group, not just our class, but the class ahead of us. So, that may have been our first year. And I got a letter back from Sparkman, and then a letter from Elliot Richardson saying, ‘Yes, and I’ll be glad to be there on such-and-such a date.’  

JBG: Wow. 

MW: So, Elliot Richardson came in to Rhodes House and spent about an hour with us, talking about foreign policy and answering questions, and that was fun to do, and it was more or less related, I guess, to the fact that I’d worked for Senator Sparkman and at least knew him reasonably, and the fact that Sparkman, then was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  

The other thing that we did, for fun: there were seven of us, the very first term we were there. It was me, Ralph Smith, Mark Williams, Phil Jackson, John Tillman (Oregon & Queen’s 1973), Fred Manget and Chris Hendrickson, those seven, and we all were friends, and we said, ‘Once every term, let’s dress up and try to go to a nice restaurant.’ You know, we were trying to act economically-, but we said, ‘Once a term, let’s get together and go to some fancy restaurant,’ and we said, ‘Okay.’ So, the first time we did it was in the fall, in Michaelmas, and we were dressed up, either in tuxedos or dark suits with a black tie, looking like tuxedos, and we would generally go to someone’s college to have a beer or so first and then go to the restaurant and we’d go to somebody’s college and have sherry after dinner. And Phil Jackson-, we were always joking with Phil, because Phil was losing his hair. His hairline was strictly receding. And the first night, we were walking along, and I guess we’d had dinner and we may have even had a couple of sherries, and we were laughing and talking, and someone said – I don’t remember who said it – ‘Let’s do this every term,’ and we said, ‘Yes, we’ll do it every term,’ all seven of us. And someone said, ‘What are we going to call ourselves?’ and someone said, ‘Let’s call ourselves “The Magnificent Seven”.’ That was after a movie. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie. 

JBG: I haven’t.  

MW: But ‘We’ll call ourselves “The Magnificent Seven”,’ and I said ‘Yes, and Phil Jackson will be Yul Brynner.’ Yul Brynner was in the movie and he was totally bald, and everybody was joking with Phil about losing his hair, and Phil took it well. So, you know, we made very good friends when we were over there. 

JBG: That’s really, really lovely. You mentioned, Mike, before that you had been in your first year of law school when you applied for the Rhodes: and was that at Duke? 

MW: That was in Alabama.  

JBG: Alabama. Okay. Okay. So, you knew during your time in Oxford that you would be heading back to finish your law studies afterwards? 

MW: That’s correct. 

JBG: Okay. So, did you return to the University of Alabama right after Oxford? 

MW: I went right back to the University of Alabama and went back to law school. 

JBG: Okay. And what was your experience in law school like? And you mentioned your experience in the Key Club and the encouragement, I think the words you used were, ‘To become a lawyer and to do something useful,’ and I’m curious about how you might have been thinking about that in law school.  

MW: Yes. Yes, in law school, when I started my first year, I had just finished up working in the Sparkman campaign. But in law school, I was active in a number of things. I was editor of one of the journals in the law school. We had a law review, and what’s called The Journal of the Legal Profession, and that’s what I was the editor of. I was active in some other things, made some good grades, made the highest grade in a couple of courses, which was, you know, good to do and fun to do. But I had been contacted by the largest law firm in Alabama – still, probably, the largest. A very highly regarded firm – to law clerk with them during the summer, after my second year, which I did, and then they offered me a job. So, I took it, and I went to work at Bradley Arant Rose & White in Birmingham, the largest firm in the state, and I really enjoyed it. I thoroughly enjoyed the work. I was doing a little bit of everything.  

But in law school, in college, I had always thought about [1:00:00] not just being a lawyer, but being involved in some sort of projects, some sort of policy. I was not sure I would run for anything, but at least being involved in public policy in some way. So, I had only been practising law for a year and a half and this friend of mine, who encouraged me to go to Duke, who was in law school when I was a freshman at the University of Alabama undergraduate, and he got me set up with Duke contacts, he had started his own law firm in Mobile, and he was an extraordinary guy, extremely intelligent and a superb political organiser. And there was a gentleman, in 1978 – I graduated from law school in June of 1977 – running for governor, named Fob James. Fob was a nickname: his name was Forrest James. Nobody knew him in Alabama, except he had been an All-American football player in the 1950s at Auburn. He had never been in politics. He had started a company, Diversified Products, that ultimately-, what people know about now, but back then, it was a new item: he built barbells for weightlifting, but instead of building the weights that are steel, he built them with plastic covering. Nowadays, if you go work out at a gym, you’ll pick up plastic-covered barbells and light weights. That’s what he put together, and he had manufacturing plants in Opelika, Alabama, where he lived, and Toronto and, I think, in California. It made him independently wealthy, and he was bought out by a huge company. Then he decided he wanted to run for governor, but he was unknown, and he was running against what was called ‘The three Bs’: Albert Brewer, who had been the former governor of Alabama; Bill Baxley, who was the current attorney general of Alabama; and Jere Beasley, who was the current lieutenant governor of Alabama.