On an otherwise unremarkable evening early in September 1965, when, for the fourteenth time, I was preparing lectures for the start of the fall term at Columbia University, the phone rang, and I heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice saying, “This is the White House.” I knew any number of historians for whom a call from the White House was routine. One of them, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., had shortly before been an assistant to President Kennedy, and at the moment another, Eric Goldman, turned up for work each morning at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as a member of the staff of President Lyndon B. Johnson. But such experiences had not been mine, and I was excited, and also a bit puzzled, until the woman added, “Stand by for Mr. Redmon.”

Unlike some of my friends in the profession, I did not walk familiarly through the corridors of power, but I had become accustomed to having in class any number of students who were destined for the public realm, or, like E. Hayes ReDmon, were already there. Among the students in my graduate courses at Columbia at about this point were Stephen J. Solarz, subsequently a congressman from New York and a high-ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Thomas Kean, who was to become the governor of New Jersey; and Aleksandr Yakovlev, who is today Mikhail Gorbachev’s right-hand man and said to be the second-most-powerful man in the Soviet Union.

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