A few weeks ago on Substack, Dr. Robert Reich posted a tale from his youth, titled “The sexual revolution and me: My introduction to political hypocrisy.”
His post shares about his time while he was a college student at Dartmouth College. In this tale, Reich admits having arranged having busses of young women brought to Dartmouth for weekend “parties.”
Or shall we call them sexual liaisons?
Reich tells the tale with such dripping nostalgia that one feels as if they are there: it’s the early 60s, and the campus was void of women, and it gets so cold “that one’s nostril hairs froze and broke off on the way to morning classes…Dartmouth in the early 1960s was a monastery … in Siberia.”
Imagery aside, Reich shares his misadventures as the newly elected Class President, a position his father surely was proud to see young Robert achieve, and “how proud it would make him that his runt of a son had been chosen to lead.”
And lead he did.
Well, not exactly.
In his tale, Reich shares that his leadership style actually included succumbing to the sexual proclivities of his all-male classmates: what they wanted — what they “demanded” from him was to “[i]nvite busloads of young women students to Dartmouth for the weekends.”
And he did.
Here is Reich’s detailing the arrival of the first busload of girls:
“To avoid having the young women snaked by upperclassmen, I allowed only freshmen through a makeshift fence surrounding the paved area where the buses unloaded them and had klieg lights directed at the bus doors from which the young women disembarked.” [emphasis added by me]
To be clear, Reich is the person who orchestrated this parade, this spectacle of lights, then suggests that it was he alone that worked to protect the young women. Unfortunately, the parade didn’t work out as Reich has planned:
“Unfortunately, this had the effect of forcing each young woman to make a rather theatrical entrance onto the campus from her bus — prompting my freshmen constituents to holler numbers from 1 to 10, reflecting their judgments about her looks. The spectacle made me cringe. It was worse for the young women. Many were humiliated. Some even refused to get off the bus. Several convinced the bus drivers to take them home.”
Ah, it made him cringe.
And so, through all his cringing, he permitted it to continue. I can really hear his cringing even now. He truly sounds like a man full of…well…cringe worthiness.
I’m so glad to see that after all this time, Reich is still focused on his own feelings first, and then may think about the affect on the women.
Many were humiliated.
You think?
And what happened to all those horny male students? Did they get their jollies off after your little Parade of Party Girls?
Actually, what happened to some of the students wasn’t so glamorous either.
“As class president, I was automatically a member of the student court, which heard complaints from the dean’s office about alleged violations of the handbook…I was responsible for asking what was known as the penetrating question. As the accused young man sat before us trying to explain how it came to be that the dorm janitor found him in bed with a young woman at 7 o’clock in the morning, it was my duty to ask, “Did you penetrate?”
If he answered in the affirmative, the student court was obliged to send him packing.”
Packing…as in…kicked out of college?
One might think that at this point, Reich might have recognized the harm he had caused to so many people.
No. No, he didn’t. Not then, and certainly not today.
Here’s what he wrote next.
“You see my dilemma. As class president, I was procuring hundreds of young women for my classmates, who had little else on their minds other than fornication. As a member of the student court with the job of asking the penetrating question, I was obliged to expel any young man honest enough to admit to it.”
Let me break that down for you.
You see my dilemma.
The problem that I see is that while Reich is attempting to lay bare his soul — to admit to some debaucherous actions of his past — he continues to focus even today primarily on how all of this impacted him.
I was procuring hundreds of young women.
Procuring women…for the intent of fornication? What shall we call this type of behavior?
PROSTITUION?
I was obliged to expel any young man honest enough.
To be clear, men who had fornicated with women Reich “procured” to Dartmouth and admitted to it were expelled, while Robert Reich, Dean of Student Fornication, was the one expelling them.
To sum, both the Dartmouth men and the busloads of women had their lives tossed about based on the university’s rules against student sexual activity, while the Dartmouth Class President — who made it all happen — cringed.
I must give Reich credit: he does attempt to take responsibility.
“I didn’t yet know the new depths of the hypocrisy I was plumbing.”
Hypocrisy? Plumbing?
Bob — you were a pimp running a sex ring for horny dudes while at college. Forget about your father being proud of you for being elected Class President: what did your Mom think about your exploitation of young women?
OK.
Ok, Ill get off my high horse. I’m sure Reich learned something after that first weekend.
“My dilemma came to a head, as it were, the following year. I had been reelected class president and by then had figured out how to lure even more young women to Hanover.”
OMFG!
Reich expands his tale of “glory” to share how the sex rules of Dartmouth had international power.
“A Dartmouth student had been caught in bed with a student from the woman’s college, but (and I emphasize “but”) the nefarious coupling had occurred during spring break, when both were vacationing in Mexico.
Did the College Handbook’s prohibition of fornication apply during spring break when neither perpetrator was on campus? I said no to both questions, but…the court voted to expel him. (A similar fate apparently befell his love interest.)
Giff was promptly drafted and sent to Vietnam.”
Clearly, Giff had sex with a woman outside of the college campus, but both he and the girl appear to have been expelled from their respective universities. Meanwhile, Bob the Pimp continued in his refusal to recognize the role he had played in any of it.
Until…
“[R]oughly 20 years later, my wife and I were sitting at the counter in Lou’s Restaurant on Main Street, and Giff walked in, now 20 years older.
And this next part is my favorite of the whole piece:
“The question of whether he had been killed in Vietnam must have been reverberating in the recesses of my guilty brain, because the moment I saw him, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that caused tears to well up.”
My guilty brain…caused tears to well up.
Hmm.
Dr. Reich, if you feel guilty it might just be because you are: you not only played a part, you were the key figure in all of this. The truth is Giff was expelled and could have been killed in Vietnam, and you found relief in seeing him alive.
But did you ever once give any thought to the bevy of beauties you brought to Dartmouth each weekend? Did you ever give even one thought for how many of their lives you may have ruined? How many of them might have been expelled by their schools? How many of them might have been black-balled by their sororities, or worse — their parents? How many of them might have ended up pregnant?
Damn Bob — you have actually written a piece here where you try to sound contrite but actually come away not expressing any remorse for anyone but yourself. The only one in this story that suffers is you!
Shame on you.
I’m not shaming you for your actions back then: no one can go back and change the mistakes they’ve made. And no, you didn’t even need to write this, so kudos to you for publishing something from the dark part of your life.
But damn, you have done a lousy job at acknowledging the harm you probably caused to so many others.
And that is what accountability is all about: accepting and acknowledging the harm your actions have caused others.
Reich ends his tale with the same lack of acknowledgement:
“Tears streaming down my face, I wanted to apologize. But I couldn’t find the words. There were none.”
I would expect it would have been quite difficult to apologize to Giff in person. But that was now many years ago, and even today, Reich can’t seem to bring himself to apologize properly. He is still stuck on “me.”
So, Dr. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, made mistakes in his youth that could have had tragic consequences on the lives of an untold number of other young men and women. And while he had no responsibility to share this sordid affair with his audience, he chose to do so — and for that, his fans admire him even more.
Except for me.
Because what I read in this piece was the story of a man refusing to acknowledge the deeper truth here: that his mistakes impacted the lives of people he never knew or even cared about. The men who may have been expelled. The women, who also may have been expelled, or impregnated — in the early 1960s, with all its societal ostracism.
Reading this piece, in the way it was written, reminded me more of Bill Clinton saying stupid shit like “it depends on what “is” is.” Or even worse, Donald “the rapist” Trump, a man found credibly liable for the rape of a woman who he mistook for his wife.
Robert Reich is no paragon of virtue, but many of us on the left have an enormous respect for the man who has spent his life — outside of his time setting up trysts at Dartmouth — educating the rest of us on economics, and truly on life.
So, why then does he fail so hopelessly when it is time to come clean? Nobody made him write this: he chose to share it, but then made a mockery of the whole accountability effort.
And to top it all off, his fans — those posting Comments on Substack — are giving him a pass. These are, by the way, many of the same people that would not want a pimp running girls in their own neighborhood but are OK with it at an Ivy League school.
We all have things in our past we would like to forget, or change, or remember differently. I don’t know any angels, and I surely have done much in my own past I don’t want to relive. But I’m also not writing about it here either, then distorting the story, shirking my part, or refusing to recognize the harm I caused with my actions. If you’re going to write about those things, you damned well better write about it honestly, focused not on yourself—as Reich has done—but with the skill of a surgeon, working to rip out the cancer you have protected for years. While no words can undo the harm, a full accounting of one’s actions might give the victims some peace, and just might restore a bit of one’s own integrity.
I felt obliged to leave a Comment on Reich’s post, sharing with him how I believed he had done an exceptionally poor job taking accountability for his actions while also failing to recognize the harm he had potentially caused others. I also replied to a few others who commented on my Comment. I cannot share that Comment with you because my original Comment, and the replies I made to others, have all been removed.
I was BANNED by Robert Reich.
So much for facing the truth Bob. They say the truth hurts, and you’re still running from it even today.
“The sexual revolution and me: My introduction to political hypocrisy.”
Well, at least he has the hypocrisy part down.
If you read his piece, and I encourage you to do so, be sure to leave a Comment. But be nice, or you’ll get BANNED like I did.
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