Many years ago when I was a young smart aleck (which probably has something to do with me being an old smart aleck), my dad and another alum father took a group of us to dinner after a hockey game in Boston. The other alum father was at the top of his profession... Harvard Law Review, senior partner at a Wall Street law firm, good buddy with the Supreme Court Chief Justice. He regaled us with his eminence and how his poker game at the national ABA meeting was the place to be. Then he turned to our affirmative action schoolmates, eg, Clarence Thomas and Ted Wells, who had just led a uprising at our college. "Why do they need help. My father worked his way up like everyone else and so did I. Why can't they?" The smart aleck at table piped up: "There weren't laws preventing your father from voting or learning to read." My father might have added that if the boys in the Fordham "mafia" hadn't of put Wagner in the Senate and Sylvester Ryan on the federal bench, the Wall Street law firm might never have gotten around to making the Irish kid a big shot. Instead, my father watched the fun in silence ... later he observed ... "If that guy's such a big shot, how come he split the dinner check with me."
Wells and Thomas were, in fact, very bright and would have done well anywhere. When they led their uprising, it wasn't a fair fight. The college wasn't entirely wrong in attempting to punish the protesters, but Wells painted the college into a corner so fast and so completely that the college surrendered ... unconditionally. I'd never play poker with Wells.
