Christopher has displayed another character trait, besides shyness, since an early age: charm. At the University of Redlands, which he attended on scholarship, he was a leading member of the debate team and was elected editor of the school paper as well as president of the sophomore class. Pierpoint's wife, his classmate and also member of the Redlands debating squad, recalls clearly, "'He had a quiet magnetism. He didn't have to go out looking for it; it just came looking for him" (Scheer, 1993, p. 22). Yet another factor came into play in Christopher's life and ended up shaping both his fate and his sociocultural vision. In the winter of 1937, still at the height of the Depression, his father, manager of one of the two small local banks, suffered, at 49, a massive stroke, which left his right side paralyzed. This, as his son explains 56 years later, "'was almost certainly occasioned by overwork from trying to keep his bank solvent'" (Scheer, 1993, p. 20). A very hard period in Christopher's life started when his father sold his house and moved with his family to Los Angeles hoping to recuperate. His mother Catherine was trying to support her invalid husband - who died four years later after several strokes - Warren and her younger child, Lois, out of a rented apartment in a bungalow complex in Hollywood, while the older children had to forgo college and get jobs. When Christopher became a student at Hollywood High, he had to work as a newspaper boy six hours in the afternoon. As former CBS correspondent and long-time friend Robert Pierpoint points out, "He felt discriminated against because he was poor, and to this day remembers those who discriminated against him. He wasn't a member of the Establishment in the high school. And to this day he feels a certain kinship to people who are treated as second-class citizens because of their poverty or their race'" (Scheer, 1993, p. 22). Yet, with time, the president has been spending more time on foreign i |
