Politics Overtake Career Plans

Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County

Trying to move on from the political tumult of the 1960’s, I finally got serious about college and restarted my studies at LA City College. I shifted from my interest in political activism to requirements for pre-med. Chemistry and biology were courses in my second and final year.

But politics intervened. On May 4, 1970, national demonstrations against the latest expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and the National Guard shooting and killing of student protesters at Kent State shut down LA City College and hundreds of colleges around the country. I had lost interest in biology and was back talking about the war. We were given our grades up to that point and told to start summer vacation early. On a road trip to upstate New York for resort work, we listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Four Dead in Ohio” as it played endlessly on the AM radio. It was one of the fastest released and distributed songs in history and reminded us how powerful the war’s effect was on our Baby Boomer generation.

When I returned to LA for a fall quarter at Cal State, I switched to a political science degree. A friend suggested I transfer to UCLA and I started there the winter quarter. It was a rainy 1971 winter. My first day of foreign policy class, Professor Simon Serfaty lectured in an intimidating giant hall. At the end, he suggested we all see a screening of Dr. Strangelove on campus that evening. I knew I had found a home in this fun, wildly stimulating environment.

The war was mostly fading into the background but campus Democrats were organizing, and in March of 1972 I attended a rare campus anti-war protest. There, Bill Walton, already a star of UCLA’s champion team and later to become a Hall of Fame basketball player, was loaded on a bus under arrest. Coach Wooden bailed him out quickly. McGovern was going to lose massively. (I went to the Democratic Convention in Miami – another story) and Watergate was just becoming a news story.

Graduating in 1973 cum laude and being chosen by Chancellor Young to lead the social science class at graduation, I decided to get serious about some kind of career in politics. Graduate political science departments were crowded so I took the LSAT, did well and settled to go where law and politics blended – Georgetown. I was sad leaving friends. LA had been my home since 1965 and I doubted that whatever was next would be as idyllic. Nevertheless, I was headed east to begin a new, lifelong political adventure that started at Georgetown University Law Center then shifted to Denver.

Politics and lots of serendipity drove my life.

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