Jefferson County’s most famous native son was back in the news recently, in the most unexpected way.
Bill Bradley, the illustrious member of the Crystal City High School Class of 1961, is now 78 years old. For all of his world-stage accomplishments as an All-American basketball star at Princeton, as a Rhodes Scholar, as an Olympic gold medal winner, as an NBA Hall of Famer and as a three-term U.S. senator, author and presidential candidate, Bradley has been an extremely private person.
I worked in the newspaper business in Jefferson County for more than 40 years, starting midway through Bradley’s NBA career. In all those decades, I interviewed him twice, though he came home semi-regularly when his parents, Warren and Susie Bradley, were still living here. As much as he didn’t like the spotlight in Washington, D.C. or New York, where he played with the Knicks, he absolutely shunned it when he returned to Missouri.
Even to those who covered him regularly as a senator from New Jersey, Bradley would have been a good candidate to be named Least Likely to Ever Perform a One-Man Show About My Life.
And yet…
Washington Post columnist Matt Bai, who covered that 2000 Democratic presidential race (Bradley eventually dropped out and then-Vice President Al Gore won the nomination) recently covered a preview of Bill Bradley’s one-man show in New York. It was surprising enough that he would do the show, given his reputation as an egghead, long on ideas and smarts but short on charisma. But the bigger shock was the stream of personal, private anecdotes that he related about his life and career.
This guarded, accomplished man apparently decided to let his hair down while he still had some.
Bradley has written six books. The earliest did contain a little personal information, and even sentimental descriptions of Crystal City, the town “tucked between two limestone bluffs along the banks of the Mississippi.”
But nowhere in those tomes did he get into intimate issues such as one Bai reported – that Bradley had impregnated a woman in the 1960s and that she’d had an abortion that was botched.
That anecdote – and its timing – will raise even more eyebrows as the U.S. Supreme Court considers the future of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973.
Bai noted that he was a young reporter when assigned to the Bradley presidential campaign. The veteran scribes were covering Gore, who was assumed to be the nominee, which turned out to be the correct presumption.
Bai described the second-team press corps assigned to Bradley as a hard-partying “Boys on the Bus” sort of group. They wanted to know Bradley’s background, his thoughts on religion and personal details they thought might shed light on who he was.
The candidate dodged and weaved like he used to do going down the lane for a layup. He wanted to talk about policy and the mundane – no, boring! – wonky details of government.
“He found us, I think it’s fair to say, fundamentally unserious,” Bai wrote.
In turn, the reporters – and as it turned out, America – found Bradley too cerebral and nerdy to be a 21st century candidate for president. Al Gore was not exactly a lampshade-on-the-head kind of guy, either, so for Bradley to be deemed the more unexciting candidate of the two was a new frontier in the realm of dull.
Personally, it would be thrilling to be able to vote for dull and super-smart, as opposed to shallow, sound bite-driven, focus group-selected candidates. We all should feel better as citizens if we think the president is smarter than we are.
Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be the approach these days.
But back to Bradley.
When he decided to run for president in 2000, he chose the front steps of Crystal City High School on a Wednesday in September 1999 to make the announcement. With a weekly Tuesday deadline, it was the only time in the Leader’s 27-year history that we held the paper to cover a Wednesday event.
Many of you will remember it, a glorious early fall day with bunting and “Bradley for President” signs and buttons everywhere. Far fewer can recall his hardwood glory days for the Hornets, which ended more than 60 years ago.
A lot of the old-timers, many of them now gone, were there in 1999. I interviewed one who knew him as a boy and asked the man about Bradley’s politics, which were unapologetically liberal. Jefferson County was still voting Democratic two decades ago, but they were conservative Democrats.
“Well,” the old-timer began, “I disagree with Bill on this and I disagree with him on that, and probably most things.
“But I’m for Bill.”
Who said the man had no charisma?
