He loved this place. He thought it was a very uniquely important luxury, a luxury, a blessing. You didn’t deserve Williams. It was a gift. You didn’t deserve it. You didn’t earn it. It was much too luxurious for that. He was a bit almost puritanical. Whoever went should be grateful, notwithstanding the cost of […]

Bob Gaudino was never fully revealed.

There were those who accused him of having disciples, not students, and what if he teaches the young bad things? There is a grave danger to us all when the charismatic teacher leads the young flock astray. He was quite conscious of that and talked about it. He knew that his life, his convictions, afforded […]

I was there at a wonderful time at Williams. There were some wonderful giants: Bill Gates in the Econ Department, Binks Little in the Religion Department, Frank Oakley in the History Department. These were powerful intellects and wonderful teachers. And as our friendship grew each semester, he would ask me to bring in the syllabi […]

We began during the course of that semester to watch tapes of the actual Watergate hearings. That was part of the class. It was never explicit that you had to be there but you showed up because there was lots of talking to do. We had to talk about Mr. Dean [the White House counsel]. […]

All of authority was up for grabs, every piece of it. The authority of the church, the authority of a rabbi, the authority of the institution like Williams, Cornell, Columbia, you name it. All of that was up for grabs — the notion of police power, the notion of government, the notion of whether or […]

The first day of class we met in the basement of Greylock Dining Hall. There were 14 of us, I believe. He reached into his briefcase on the first day of the course and he put this grotesque Halloween mask on his face. Everybody was embarrassed to silence, what to make of this. This wasn’t […]

I was married. We lived in Mrs. Carter’s stucco home literally right across from the freshman gate. And I was on the third floor in the back so I could overlook Bob’s house. The proximity was part of the reason why I was helpful. I wasn’t the only one but I began to run errands, […]

He described that he had conceived of the compensation scheme as by the hour. After several weeks he also told me there was a lesson to be had here in political economy–he was not convinced that the house would ever get done. If it didn’t get done quickly, in all of his illness he was […]

He had a little motorized go-cart that he would get around the house in and near the end was crashing through all these walls and we used to make jokes about him being a bad race car driver. This was a little automated electrical cart. Another source of humor. Humor lost on his freshmen. But […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note