Well, I took an elementary political science course with Gaudino my freshman year. I was not then a very serious student and the results in that course showed it. My father had come east to go to Harvard Law School and was a lawyer who died suddenly in the middle of my junior year in high school. I had a younger brother in the house [in Brooklyn] so when I went for Williams I think it was attended by a fair amount of ambivalence and guilt. When I came to Williams I had a hard time focusing. It wouldn’t surprise me if I got a C. But beginning my sophomore year things began to sort out. Then my junior year I took his seminar which I believe was two semesters on political theory and culminated in a reading of Plato’s Republic. I think it was no more than a dozen [students]. Ara Asadourian was in that seminar, Steve Lewis, Les Thurow was in that seminar. We met in the old house that I think became for a time the admissions house. He used to call it his Nocturnal Council. Not “his,” we were a Nocturnal Council. And I was reflecting on that the other day a) Why did we meet at night? I don’t know the answer. B) Why did he take pleasure in referring to it in that way?

Richard Herzog,
’60