The Confession by James E. McGreevey

curriculum stressed the Great Books, but encouraged us to try and rip away at them. It was tough going. For a professor like Richard Brilliant, who taught art history, it wasn’t enough that your essays shed new light on, say, the great artistic rivalry between Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini; they also had to be lyrically composed. He rejected paper after paper of mine, marking them up as if he were a professor of English composition. I was running at such a deficit that it seemed I might not pass. Finally I made a deal with him. If he would give me the chance, I would rewrite every paper he had given a failing mark until he was satisfied with it. He agreed. And I passed that class with an A—though the poor man sometimes had to read through eight or nine drafts.
    Richard Pious’s course on the American presidency was dazzling. I got to hear Warner Schilling, one of the world’s great experts on military policy, lecture on World War II and the cold war; and Andrew Nathan, author of major works on Chinese political history, on the Cultural Revolution. General Telford Taylor, the key U.S. prosecutor at the NurembergTrials, gave evening lectures on the principles and primacy of human rights, a field he is credited with pioneering. I worked so hard to keep up that I often developed splitting headaches.
    The city campus also introduced me to a new kind of diversity. For the first time in my life, I was studying side by side with Jewish and Protestant students—and, more startling to me, with agnostics and atheists. Still, I drew great strength from my faith. By request I bunked at Ford Hall, a Catholic Campus Ministries house named for the priest who brought Catholicism to Thomas Merton, a Columbia alumnus and one of my great spiritual heroes.
    The liberalism of academia, and the challenges of my professors and fellow students—as well as life in the teeming Big Apple—had an unexpected tug on my political leanings. I began reading Merton and Karl Marx. I devoured Kant, Burke, Nietzsche, and Freud, inhaled Weber, Mill, and Locke. With the cold war still in high gear, I read Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, weighing their flawed but interesting ideas. I came to understand that liberal societies were arguably better equipped to manage dynamic change, respond more acutely to market shifts, and cope with culturally diverse populations, than the totalitarian models those men espoused.
    Within Catholicism, I also became aware of exciting social justice movements. Dorothy Day, the reformer who’d founded the Catholic Worker house just downtown, was one inspiration; I used to ride the subway down to help the center distribute food and clothing to the poor. The energy and passion of the Liberation Theologists especially drew me in, inspired as they were by the terrible dictatorial crimes in Latin America. Week after week, I snapped up the newest copy of National Catholic Reporter for the intoxicating words of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, where three thousand people were being killed every week by forces attached to the military ruler. The other Salvadoran religious leaders remained silent while Romero railed against the killings and the system that produced such suffering.
    Watching Carter navigate these shoals impressed me. While Carter’s Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, was busy painting Central America as Communism’s beachhead in the hemisphere, Carter and his team felt there was something else at play there, something fundamentally human—a struggle for freedom, a chance to separate right from wrong. He pulled theplug on aid to Nicaragua and its strongman leader, Anastasio Somoza, after members of his National Guard assassinated an ABC newsman, Bill Stewart, on live television after making him lie facedown in the middle of a road. Republicans in Congress took out a full-page ad in the New York Times warning of another Cuba, and Carter did try to mitigate the leftward