The American Spectator : Return From Sandpoint

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Return From Sandpoint

By Ben Stein on 7.12.10 @ 6:08AM

The death of Robert Butler, M.D., stirs memories.

Saturday -- July 10, 2010

Here I am back in L.A. I have been up in Sandpoint, Idaho, for about ten days with my beautiful wifey, and now we are back at home looking after our dogs and our lives generally.

With the exception of some noisy people renting the condo below us, we had a great time in Idaho, as always. We rode our boat out on the lake, rode our bikes around town, ate great salmon, and watched the ever changing sky. Really, I believe there is no view on earth better than the view out of our condo at The Seasons, probably the most wonderful resort condo community I have ever encountered.

I got quite a shock the day before we left when I saw in the NY Times that Robert N. Butler, M.D., had died at 83 of leukemia. Dr. Butler was a famous expert on aging and an advocate for the aged. And a kind-hearted fellow. But before he did all of that, he was my psychoanalyst. Real psychoanalysis. Four and five times a week on the couch. Thank you, federal employee health insurance. He had a lovely office adjacent to his home in Cleveland Park, a great home on a big triangular lot.

He was a fine shrink and a kind, loving man. He had a way of getting to the heart of things, sometimes quite sarcastically. I well recall one day after many days of my endless moaning about my mother, he sighed loudly and said, "Oh, a boy and his mother."

It was cutting, but it well summed up my greatly excessively close connection with my mother.

When I went back to Yale Law School, Dr. Butler offered me three excellent pieces of advice.

1. Make new friends.
2. Bind up your wounds.
3. Forget contempt.

All great words.

Of course, it might have included, "And stay the hell away from the Yale Health Service." It was going there that had laid me low in the first place. I went there to talk about my difficulty studying for Civil Procedure, taught by one of the meanest men I have ever met, J. William Moore, and a terrible, horribly incompetent teacher, too. The YHS, in their wisdom, prescribed Trilafon and Mellaril, two of the most dangerously powerful anti-psychotics on earth. It was like using an atom bomb for the fourth of July in a small town.

My reactions, ataxia, inability to read, extreme fatigue -- totally foreseeable -- put me utterly out of commission for weeks and led me to drop out of law school. In the end, that was a good thing, because when I went back, I wound up in the class of '70, a much better fit for me than the class of '69. The class of '69 was one of the last gasps of the Silent Generation. They were men, and a few women, who really wanted to be lawyers. My new class also had a few of them but it was largely hippies and radicals who wanted something else more like fun.

And, wow, did we have fun. It is just a guess, but I doubt if any law school class in any law school in history had more fun than the class of '69 at Yale Law School.

That was when we stopped getting kicked around by our teachers, got high a lot, demonstrated against anything we felt deserved our attention, and generally behaved like happy, very spoiled children. Years later, people at Yale referred to our time as "The Dark Ages" but they were wrong. They were the flaming bright glorious ages. The fun we had, playing bridge while stoned, mocking the teachers, watching great movies, observing Duncan Kennedy tie the teachers in knots. Fun, fun, fun.

I was a big student leader for telling a teacher to stop bullying us or I would take my clothes off in Anti-Trust and start reciting the names of the Vietnam War dead. The teacher was so angry he stomped out of class and became a spectacularly well-paid Wall Street lawyer.

I got cute little hippie girls following me around and started wearing pink tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottom trousers and sandals. I am telling you, it was happy days.

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About the Author

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American Spectator.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (8) | Leave a comment

Ned| 7.12.10 @ 7:05AM

Tom T. Hall sings the above quite well:

There wasn't anyone around cept this old man and me
The guy who ran the bar was watchin ironsides on tv
Uninvited, he sat down and opened up his mind
On old dogs and children and watermelon wine

Ever had a drink of watermelon wine? he asked
He told me all about it, though I didn't answer back
Aint but three things in this world that's worth a solitary dime,
But old dogs and children and watermelon wine.

He said, women think about they-selves, when menfolk aint around.
And friends are hard to find when they discover that you're down.
He said, I tried it all when I was young and in my natural prime;
Now it's old dogs and children and watermelon wine.

Old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes;
God bless little children while they're still too young to hate.
When he moved away I found my pen and copied down that line
Bout old dogs and children and watermelon wine.

As far as psychoanalysis goes, I like the new Geico insuarance commerical with R. Lee. Ermey as the Shrink.

Bill| 7.12.10 @ 9:16AM

"We had fun. They had balls."

To recycle an old phrase: There it is.

Quartermaster| 7.12.10 @ 7:34PM

Indeed, it is. At least Ben admits it. Too many of that generation are still proud of their cowardice.

RCV| 7.12.10 @ 11:34AM

Ben: Another wonderful read, for which I thank you!

Antoinette Aubert| 7.12.10 @ 9:42PM

You weren't trying to "stop the war" Mr. Stein. You were aiding and abetting the Vietcong in their aggression against the south. You were trying, and eventually succeeded, in keeping the United States from defending millions of people from communist aggressors. Those same aggressors won the war, killed hundreds of thousands and enslaved millions. Congratulations you must be so proud.

deadwood| 7.15.10 @ 8:50PM

Great stuff.
And we DID have fun (Paid for it though).

george kimball| 7.19.10 @ 4:37AM

Antoinette, I seriously doubt Mr. Stein or most of the antiwar crowd had any intention of aiding the North. Your description of a terrible outcome misses something crucial, which is that the offices running the war had lost credibility long before Tet showed them up. The credibility gap became a chasm, and rightly so.

Stateside, those in charge of the war had little understanding of the enemy and, crucially, feared to tell the truth about the infantry war to the tyrannical McNamara. The body-count lies passing for battlefield 'intelligence' from the military turned the Army into a necrotic conspiracy of misrepresentation - and which destroyed the moral standing of the command.

As an antiwar activist myself in my late teens, I had a very limited grasp of SE Asia geopolitics. Like most Americans I did not see a compelling reason to fight a colonial war in a very distant and alien place. The horrible truth is that virtually everything the government represented about the war was fabricated or falsified. Endless lies, misrepresentations and oppressive mendacity were used to deny the obvious: those running the war really didn't know what the hell was going on.

I am proud today that at 18 I had good enough judgment to grasp the core of the matter: if there was not credible information about the war, it was unprosecutable and unwinnable.

Blame for the outcome does not belong on the war's opponents - it is one of the few issues the American left ever managed to get right. The blame for the horrible rending of the domestic fabric and the outcome in Vietnam lies squarely with the lying federal government and the supporting pro-war cohort who refused to see the obvious, that nothing could be believed.

BUT - the subsequent rejection of Vietnam veterans by the left was and is one of the most disgraceful events of the ensuing decades. More Vietnam vets have committed suicide than were killed in combat.

Now are you the one that is proud?

Jim Packard| 8.3.10 @ 4:07PM

george kimball, regarding "Tet showed them up": Tet was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese army; it lost heavily everywhere it met American and South Vietnamese forces. Ho Chi Minh sacked the general who planned and executed the offensive. Walter Cronkite and other left-wing America-haters spun the facts to deceive the American people into thinking the Tet was a catastrophe for the US and thereby inculcate defeatism.