In an Uncertain World by Robert Rubin, Jacob Weisberg Page B

readmit me the following year.
    So I went to see the psychiatrist. He told me that when he had been about to begin medical school, he had taken a year off instead and traveled abroad. He said that I was fine—but that perhaps the dean ought to come see him if he found what I wanted to do so troubling.
    A few days before law school started, I had run into some college classmates who were on their way to England for a year. One was going to study at Oxford, which sounded appealing. I was too late to apply to Oxford or Cambridge, but I discovered that I might still get into the London School of Economics for that year. I applied by cable, emphasizing my Harvard credentials. The LSE cabled back, accepting me. Then I called my parents and said I had a surprise for them. I was dropping out of law school and going to London.
    The only impediment to my immediate departure was that I had to go home to Miami first to meet with a representative of my draft board. Graduate study provided a military service deferral, but the school had to be recognized. My interviewer at the draft board was a southern businessman of an earlier era.
    â€œWell, I don’t know anything about the London School of Economics,” he said. “The trouble with boys of your race is they don’t want to go to war.”
    â€œI have no objection to war,” I told him obsequiously. “I just want to study at the London School of Economics.”
    â€œHow do I know this is a respectable institution?” he said.
    I offered to get him a letter. So the chairman of the Harvard Economics Department, Arthur Smithies, had to write a letter stating that the London School of Economics was a recognized academic institution.
    Before arriving in England, I had never been abroad, unless you count one family trip to Mexico and an elementary school excursion to Cuba. My year in Europe was enormously enlarging—and I’d recommend a postcollege year abroad to anyone who has the opportunity. Just before I left, I had a conversation with a worldy woman in Miami who was a friend of my parents. She told me that I should just open my pores and absorb everything I could. And that, in some reasonable measure, was my approach.
    Harvard was an American culture, albeit a cosmopolitan one with quite a few foreign students, especially in the graduate schools. The LSE, on the other hand, was a truly international culture, with students from all over, especially from Commonwealth, former Commonwealth, and soon-to-be former Commonwealth countries. I met Indians, Africans, Australians, and West Indians. The political spectrum these students represented was much wider than what I’d encountered previously. Many described themselves as socialists, reflecting the broad-based support socialism had in both the developed and developing worlds at that time. I thought then, as I do now, that the concept of state direction of economic activity and state ownership of economic resources was likely to be highly inefficient. But debates around those issues also helped form my own interest in the problems of poverty and income distribution.
    Meeting people with experiences and opinions so different from what I’d been exposed to was mind-opening. Issues that people at Harvard took to be about standards of living and economics, my Third World friends took to be about dignity and respect as well. For instance, people from the developing world wanted their own steel mills and airlines in order to show that they were just as good as the English and Americans, despite arguments that this was an economically inefficient allocation of resources for low-wage countries. Such arguments were a lesson in how fundamentally different an issue can appear from different perspectives. But the more important lesson, which would strengthen for me as time went on, was the overwhelming importance of recognizing and respecting the dignity of the individual. That respect is a fundamental