Word: tolde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...phone, Caleb was polite but wary. I told him that I was writing about the dynamics of political ambition on campus, and about the arc of political ambition from freshman year to the final years of college. (I would also be interviewing the inevitable Harvard freshmen who publicized their presidential goals.) I said he was a well-known figure in campus politics and that I wanted to fly down to D.C. and profile him in-depth. He asked about the other people I would be interviewing. Finally, he agreed to the interview...
...asked him to clarify what he had said before. He told me that he wasn’t going to say that he was planning to reach a certain political office in a certain number of years. He said he had no definite plans for post graduation, and he thought it was stupid for college students to make grand predictions about their political futures. It made them look like tools, he said. He didn't want to come off as a tool...
That’s fine, I told him. You don't have to talk about the future. I'm interested in what happens here, at Harvard—in the dynamics of political ambition among the student body, and about the ways those ambitions are perceived...
...hung up the phone feeling better. I had given Caleb his chance, and we hadn't agreed to put any of the questions I cared about off-limits. When I told him he wouldn’t end up looking like a tool, I believed it. He seemed smart and grounded, not someone prone to making toolish pronouncements. I thought he would come out looking okay...
...until late that evening did I finally get to the point. That was when I told Caleb that I had heard his classmates refer to him as that guy who wants to be president. This would be a central moment of my article, so I watched his reaction carefully and took notes. After a few minutes, I backed away from the question and talked about other things...