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  Once more unto the breach, dear friends . . .

  There were also visits to New York theaters under Dad’s tutelage—when we were at an age to appreciate the works. In those days—the 1940s and ’50s—you could buy a good seat in a Broadway theater for $3.75 or $4.50. At least two or three times during our vacations, starting when we were no more than eight and ten, Dad would find the money and the time to take us to performances. These were sometimes musicals (I enjoyed watching Finian’s Rainbow from a front-row seat), but often dramas of significant weight (Hamlet, The Winslow Boy, and others of the time). Tony and I thrilled to these experiences, and my brother would hoard Playbills in the bookcase that Missy allotted to each of us.

  At Putney, we both served on stage crew; we acted in a variety of plays. Tony played Hotspur in Henry IV.

  Together, Tony and I crammed as many performances as we could into our short vacations, discussing the assets and debits of each one, keeping the experience locked tight in our memories. We went to the Fourth Street Theater to see almost the entire oeuvre of Chekhov, played by some of the old master actors of classical theater in New York.

  For these hours, we set aside sibling rivalry, the arguments, petty jealousies, angry wrestling, and fistfights. We doused our anxieties, adolescent doubts, anger, and pain in the art and craft of theater. Through theater, we were bound by an aesthetic that was built into us—by genetics, by education, by emotion. We were no longer on divergent tracks that characterized every other sphere of our lives, but focused on one agreed passion, compounded by our need for applause, our love of words, and our common blood.

  Theater was also a way for both of us to use emotions that we could not—or preferred not to—express in other ways. Such feelings as anger, sorrow, and revenge could serve us well in roles that Shakespeare wrote. In real life, their expression was dangerous.

  One example: In my first year at Putney, Tony and I fought, both verbally and physically, often bitterly, violently. I remember a slug match that had us rolling around the floor. Though Tony was at least ten pounds heavier than I, there was something of the desperate scrapper about me. I could hang on with my nails or teeth or legs while being pummeled. I could take the pain of punches in the hope of turning the tables on Tony. On this particular occasion, I recall being on top of him, pounding his chest, and screaming, “I’ll gouge your eyes out!” It sounds almost Victorian, but those are the actual words I used.

  From Putney, Tony went to Harvard. That institution was the perfect place for him. Within a few days of arriving, he had settled into Harvard Yard, where thousands of students before him, from the seventeenth century onward, had lived and eaten. He was a Lowell House resident, an intellectual in the company of like-minded individuals. He signed up for courses in religion, history, and political science. And, shortly, he set his sights on the daily university newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, whose membership claimed the best and the brightest, generation after generation. He hoped—no, he was certain—that the Crimson would be a stepping-stone to the New York Times.

  Tony learned about the Times (and journalism in general) from a genial man named Richard Strouse, whom he encountered in the mid-1940s at Christmas parties given by friends of Dad’s in Mamaroneck, the ones we attended because we didn’t really think of ourselves as Jewish.

  It was here that Tony, only about fourteen, once expressed to our hosts his desire to be a newspaper reporter. Dad’s friend suggested he talk with Strouse, who was then at the Times. The older man was delighted to sound Tony out about his ideas for a future, and they struck up a once-a-year friendship in which Dick gave Tony hints about preparing for such a career. If Tony had not seen the Times as his primary place of employment before this point, there is no doubt that he did so after several years with Strouse at the Mamaroneck house.

  Early on, Dad and I began to receive clippings from the Crimson in the few letters Tony sent that first year: interviews with Adlai Stevenson for his first run at the presidency and with McGeorge Bundy, then dean of the college (later architect, with John F. Kennedy, of the beginnings of the Vietnam debacle). Tony had found his calling. If he hadn’t been such a good student—so adept at reading and retaining huge amounts of material—I doubt that he could have carried both his academic load and the demands of the Crimson. He was prodigious in his duties at the paper. He spent every evening there, and much of each afternoon. He became assistant managing editor; he wrote stories that made the front page time and again; he learned the techniques that would put him in good stead later: how to interview, how to ask questions, how to sniff out the story.

  Tony was convinced that the Crimson would offer him the kind of training and experience necessary for an entry into the “real” world of newspaper publishing, but it always seemed to me that the Crimson—a daily of considerable heft—already was real-world publishing. At Harvard, Tony was a bylined reporter for a respected paper, one that broke stories to be picked up by other local Boston papers, one that stepped on toes that needed to be stepped on. He seemed well beyond basic training when he graduated.

  No better statement of how Tony operated at Harvard could be found than in the words of another Crimsonite, David Halberstam:

  It was the fall of 1951 and we were freshman candidates for the Crimson. He walked into that newsroom different from the rest of us, already fully formed intellectually: he was passionately serious, yet surprisingly gentle for someone so fiercely ambitious, and finally, he was also darkly brooding . . .

  In the 1950s, in the world of the Crimson, boys taught boys. Tony was my first great mentor. He helped teach me that journalism was not just the collection of bylines, but that it had to be about something larger . . .

  I still take pride from the fact that the first issue our board put out in February 1954 contained a long, detailed magazine piece by Tony about the life of Wendell Furry, an associate professor of physics at Harvard and an early Communist Party member then very much under attack from McCarthy. The piece detailed why Furry had joined the party and what party meetings had been like. It was an astonishing piece of reporting. He was all of 20 at the time. The Associated Press moved the entire piece on its wire. The next day the managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called to offer him a job. “Would it be all right if I just came for the summer instead?” he said. Why just the summer? asked the editor, slightly annoyed. “Well, I still have a year of college left,” he answered.

  In their junior year, Halberstam was elected managing editor of the paper. Tony never got that appointment, not even as a senior.

  THE YEAR AFTER Tony entered Harvard, I got into Swarthmore. Tony had told me there was no point in my even applying there because I wouldn’t get in. And if I did, I wouldn’t be up to the intellectual standards.

  When I look back these many years, from Tony’s point of view—from what he’d seen of my academic achievements so far—he was right. I didn’t have the intellectual chops to make it. But Swarthmore deans thought otherwise. They looked at my SATs and at my nonacademic work (flute, chorus, theater) and decided they could take a chance on me.

  Gradually, I found subjects in which I could both operate and write. I discovered how our professors wanted us to think about the world—broadly, deeply, with skepticism, but not cynicism. At the end of my sophomore year, I had decided on psychology as a major.

  I was in the Honors Program. Seminars were small—six to eight students at most—and we were all expected to contribute both verbally and on paper. It was grueling, full of stress, but it also gave me a rigorous start to life in the real world, where independence of thought was required for the professions I eventually entered. I learned how to communicate on paper as well as with the spoken word. I came to think better of myself, academically. And, because the community was a small one (only nine hundred students), other teachers and other students knew of my work and my accomplishments. God knows how I would have fared at a large university like Harvard! I didn’t give it a thought.


  If I did better and better academically, my social life (a euphemism for sex and love) was dismal.

  That I could not find even a temporary mate was unpleasant at the least, and often caused me abject self-doubts.

  More than doubts, there was emotional and physical pain: psychosomatic stomach cramps. In my senior year, this symptom showed up whenever I had even a casual relationship with a woman. By the winter of that year, I would often have to dash to a nearby bathroom, leaving my date sitting in her seat at the movie theater or at dinner or on the front porch of the main building, alone and disgruntled. Even before this embarrassing and uncomfortable disorder sprang up, I was baffled that I couldn’t find anyone whom I could love, or who would love me.

  Despite my disasters when it came to romance, I was able to claim a little piece of glory at Swarthmore. Graduating with high honors and selected for Phi Beta Kappa by the faculty, I could also look back on successes in dramatic productions, a series of musical endeavors that brought me some note, and a bunch of good friends who might think me a little strange but who honored strangeness as a badge of character.

  And I could look back on one of the few times I got an encomium from Tony. I had finished my junior year in the Honors Program with high grades, and Tony wrote me a letter that started off, “I’m very proud of you.” This was trebly sweet. Tony had often criticized me for rushing through papers and other school exercises, for not “thinking through” knotty problems, and for being a politically naive lightweight. Few words of praise had come my way from him.

  This letter, with its opening line, moved and rewarded me deeply.

  At Harvard, Tony had concentrated on studying history and political science and on honing his command of the English language. His two role models were A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker and H. L. Mencken, who had been a star reporter and editor in Baltimore. Both men were renowned for their acerbic writing and their gourmand tastes. Mencken made outsize attacks on the establishment, while Liebling wrote exquisitely about the seamier sides of life, both here and abroad. It’s hard to know which of these qualities Tony most admired. Perhaps it was Liebling’s attachment to good eating and Mencken’s years in Baltimore; perhaps it was their willingness to take on sacred cows.

  One summer Tony worked for a Long Island newspaper, writing obituaries. I remember discussing with him the fact that the paper didn’t allow anyone to use the word “cancer” as a cause of death.

  It soon became clear to the family that Tony’s goal was to be not simply a reporter on the Times but a crack foreign correspondent. He had read the work of the best of the travel jockeys who reported from distant lands. He had read James “Scotty” Reston and A. M. Rosenthal’s reportage in the Times. He wanted to be like them. Dad scoffed at his dream, suggesting that “wishing won’t make it so” and telling him not to be a creator of impossible fantasies. I don’t know if Dad was egging him on or had a sincere doubt that anyone in our family could ever become that competent, that well-known.

  If it was the latter, he was sadly mistaken about Tony, underestimating both the dreamer and his competence.

  AFTER GRADUATION, Tony went to the Free University of Berlin to study political science. It was there that he wrote the first of a collection of about forty-five letters to me. They are remarkable for their length—he made up in pages for the months and months between epistles—and for their lack of detail about the places he was visiting. Most of the time they told about his feelings: his loneliness, anger, jealousy. Occasionally he spoke of advancement or lack of advancement. Every now and then, something of his actual life in the foreign clime came out.

  The Crimson had trained him well. He edited his typewritten letters as if they were to be published, with carets used to insert careful changes. His handwriting was a little adolescent, but easy to read; even now, I can see it in my mind’s eye, thick blue ink scrolling the letters. In some way, even though I, too, typed all my letters, it was the inked-in words that seemed the most personal to me: here is the real me, they seemed to say, beneath the smart words and the research and analysis. Here is the real Tony Lukas.

  I looked forward to all his letters. I was profoundly grateful that he chose to share his experiences and his inner thoughts with me. Dad complained that he never heard from Tony, but I accepted his sporadic writing habits as part of who he was. If I didn’t hear from him for months, I did not interpret this as a signal of something gone wrong, or as a sign that Tony had stopped loving me. In this regard, I let Tony be Tony.

  Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the long hiatuses, spelling out—as they did—his emotional lows.

  In 1950 Dad had quit the Society and became chief legal counsel to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), where he would serve a variety of constituencies, including African-Americans during the upcoming civil rights revolution. Tony and I were startled to hear that Dad was joining a “Jewish organization” because of his strong antipathy to religion. But when he pointed out that the AJC’s primary role was human rights and civil liberties, we could see that the job fit Dad’s experience and persona.

  The main exchange of letters between Tony and myself began in October 1956. Tony had come back from Germany and was preparing to go into the army. After his deferment year, the draft had caught up with him.

  I was destined for the University of California at Berkeley, where my Swarthmore mentor thought I belonged. It was the seat of some of the best research work in the country. I had also applied to Boston University’s school of theater. My heart yearned in that direction. Dad, as one might expect, was all for the Ph.D. program and against the idea of his son becoming a theater director. At the time this puzzled me. It was he who had introduced us to the world of theater, he who had married an actress, he whose dramatic flair showed itself in the courtroom. What could he possibly have against theater?

  In retrospect, however, the choice made eminent sense—for him. He had been disappointed by the theater: in his view, it had been at least partly responsible for stealing his wife from him. And he already thought I was too dramatic in my everyday behavior for my own good.

  Of course, there was that other thing: like many a parent who had come through America’s Depression, he wanted to make sure I had something “to fall back on.”

  Sensible, perhaps. It didn’t work out the way either of us expected it to.

  One letter I received in Berkeley spelled out that Tony was suffering both from a cold and from the fact that the next day he would have to appear at the army for his physical. He was not upbeat about his next two years, but he did say that he would be more sanguine if he could get into the psychological warfare division of the army or perhaps work on Stars and Stripes, the famous army newspaper.

  By mid-November, he was at Fort Benning in basic training. He moans about having to get up for KP duty at three-thirty in the morning and explains how he and two law school grads found that by standing in the middle of formation, they didn’t get lopped off for kitchen duty: peeling spuds. The close-order drills, the early formations, the strict adherence to schedule, and the fear of being sent into combat in the Korean War provided him with plenty of worries and complaints.

  He talks about my “condition,” his coy word for my intestinal problems. They had continued unabated after college, and endless tests proved they were clearly not physiological in origin. I had begun psychotherapy to try to get to the bottom of them, but this proved more difficult than anyone had supposed. I still had to decide where I was going and with whom based solely on the nearby availability of a bathroom.

  If it hadn’t been for the miracle of paregoric (an opium derivative prescribed by my doctor) and the companionship of good male friends who understood my dilemma, I might have become more agoraphobic than I did. As it was, I was afraid to venture too far outside the dorm and, for a while, seldom dated.

  I don’t think Tony ever really bought into the concept that a psychological problem could turn into a physical one. Psychology was not
among the courses he took at Harvard, and he was ignorant of Freudian concepts. Though the idea of psychosomatic ailments had been around for decades, he knew little or nothing about them. In this letter, he suggested I not be “too clinical ” about my problem. “I try to take these things in stride,” he said.

  I don’t know what he meant by “these things,” but his lack of understanding at that time was very upsetting. I felt crippled by both the physical and the psychological characteristics of my intestinal disorder—for that is precisely what it was—and his statement made me angry. How could he know what I was going through if he’d never had a problem like this? Why did people think it was just an upset stomach when I had done all the medical tests and knew that I had something that Maalox and Pepto-Bismol weren’t going to cure? Something alien and disconcerting and frightening had happened to me, and Tony’s lack of understanding disturbed me deeply.

  I didn’t hear from him again until March 1957. He was finishing up his basic training at Fort Benning and studying how to write propaganda to be beamed into Korea. He sent mock army forms that “excused” him for forgetting my birthday.

  The same week, in my apartment in Berkeley, I received a telegram from Dad saying that he and Betty Field had been married. Betty had some reputation as an actress: her role in the film Of Mice and Men, as well as numerous Broadway plays, confirms her talent. The fact that her name was Elizabeth, and that she was an actress, speaks volumes to me about Dad’s inability to let go of Mother.

  Tony had attended the wedding, and I was upset. No one had alerted me, or given me the chance to say I wanted to be there. I had met Betty a number of times but had no feeling one way or the other about her. By this time, another mother was not something I sought. Betty had three teenage children from a previous marriage. Given the difficulty Dad had with raising us, Tony and I wondered how he would deal with them.