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Kurt Tauber

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I knew him from Jan. 1 or Jan. 4, 1960 as a colleague. My special field was political theory and comparative politics. Of course, Fred Schuman was there teaching international relations and as you well know he was known as “Red Fred,” then there was a “Green Fred,” [Fred Greene] and much to Green Fred’s […]
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Shortly after I came in the students invited Bill Buckley, who had written “God and Man at Yale,” had just become editor of the National Review, was one of the brightest conservative voices around. And so Buckley came and everybody, the students who knew nothing about classical conservative theory, thought this was going to be […]
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By the way he lived with Fred Schuman. Fred Schuman rented him an apartment downstairs. Schuman owned the house, he and Libby owned the house. It’s on Main Street, a small brick house, a nice brick house, which now has an insurance company. And it’s surrounded by steep slopes. The house has only one floor […]
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You know, to see him he would’ve been a fabulous family man, but it never was to be. I don’t know whether he had any women friends or not.
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He got involved with the Peace Corps, which was organized after the Kennedy period. Do you remember [President] Kennedy’s brother-in-law? Sergeant Shriver became the head of that and then [Harris] Wolford took over, and he was a classmate of Bob Gaudino’s and Bob Gaudino got himself involved in the Peace Corps, and in the course […]
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I began looking over his shoulder, rather than looking at what Fred Greene is doing or Fred Schuman is doing or even Jim Burns. You know, every new person wants to have some kind of guidelines. What does a syllabus look like around here? How many pages do you assign to your students? How often […]
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I mean there are apocryphal stories of course, you know, because everybody invents his own. But he might be sitting at the football game and admire a particular formation, a particular play which had just been pulled off by the Williams team, and he would turn to the student next to him and say, “Mr. […]
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Gaudino, and later on, I myself, demanded a very close reading of the text. So in order to maintain that rigor in class he also maintained a kind of formality that I’m sure everybody has mentioned. And those were people who later on, after Bob had gotten sick and towards the end of his life, […]
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Had he been a showman and had this discipleship, this charisma, affected a huge number of people, there would have been [envy]. But as a matter of fact, his charisma, his seriousness impacted only, by its nature, a very relatively few students. You know, a Williams student comes to get himself a degree, and yes, […]
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Well, he was subversive in the sense–and maybe I’m buying into his rhetoric– in the same way Socrates was subversive. Socrates was put to death because of subversiveness and accepted his death because he knew he was subversive. How can a man who pursues truth be anything but subversive in a lying society? So at […]
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CHAPTERS

Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note
credits