I In Their Own Words
Don MacGillis (1964, CT) WHEN HE TOOK HIS FIRST TRIP TO WASHINGTON, D.C., in 1964 to
be recognized as one of the first Presidential Scholars, Don MacGillis was both flattered and dazzled. After a ceremony in the White House at which President Lyndon Johnson addressed all the scholars, MacGillis and his cohorts posed for a collective picture on the Capitol steps, and then returned to the White House lawn for a reception. “This was the first one,” he said, “and it was really a big deal. I remember seeing Leonard Bernstein and Herblock, the cartoonist for The Washington Post. I knew of him, and so I was delighted – there were all kinds of notables from different fields and endeavors.”
MacGillis had been a stellar student at William Hall High School in West Hartford, Conn., and had already been accepted to Yale University, but, he conceded, “I had only the dimmest idea what I was going to do with my life then. I may have been thinking about being in government before that, and the ceremonies made government look more approachable as a career, and certainly more attractive. But in the four years after that, things changed dramatically, in the perception of people in my generation, about Lyndon Johnson and government – most personally for me, because of the Vietnam War and the prospect of getting drafted, which did eventually happen.” After graduating from Yale, MacGillis, inspired by the work of war correspondents such as David Halberstam and Bernard Fall, joined the Hartford Courant as a reporter – a job he enjoyed for only a few months before being drafted into the Army. “So now the notion of working for the government,” he said, “was:Yeah, I was going to work for the government
98 50 YEARS OF U.S. PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLARS
In Pursuit of Excellence
– as an infantryman, and involuntarily. So any notion I had coming out of the Presidential Scholars Program about going into government and being part of this great endeavor had pretty much gone by the wayside in ’68, when the same Lyndon Johnson who sent me the Presidential Scholars notification sent me the draft notice that began with ‘Greetings.’” MacGillis served with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division in Aschaffenburg and Wuerzburg, Germany, first as a medic and then as a public affairs specialist. He established a division-wide program to improve relations between GIs and young Germans, most of whom were staunchly anti-war. After being discharged in 1970, he studied modern European history at the
University of Wuerzburg on the GI Bill, and then resumed his career in journalism. He spent more than two decades at The Berkshire Eagle, a daily newspaper in Pittsfield, Mass., where he was named executive editor in 1992. In 1995, MacGillis joined The Boston Globe as coordinator of “The People’s Voice,” a journalism project aimed at enhancing civic engagement in the 1996 New Hampshire presidential primary and the Massachusetts Senate race between John Kerry and William Weld. He joined the Globe’s editorial department in 2000, specializing in health, science, and the military; in 2007, he was named the paper’s assistant editorial page editor. He became the Globe’s national politics editor in 2011, and led the paper’s coverage of the 2012 presidential election before retiring later that year. MacGillis lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, Ingrid, whom he married in 1974. Their son, Alec, is a senior editor for The New Republic and lives in Baltimore; their daughter Lucy, an artist, lives in Fratta Todina, Italy. Today, he views the Presidential Scholars Program as an academic honor that has grown from unavoidably political roots – a view he once shared with Eric F. Goldman, the American historian who was, in 1964, a special advisor to Johnson. “He was the Johnson staffer who came up with the idea of [the Presidential Scholars], to put a greater emphasis on academics and intellectual pursuits,” said MacGillis. “I think it was a very good idea. He wrote about that in his book, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, and to write the book he got in touch with some of us Scholars in the original group. He asked me what I had thought about it. I told him I didn’t have strong feelings about it, but I saw it as something of a political maneuver – as Lyndon Johnson trying to achieve some of the cachet that Jack Kennedy and the White House had, to elevate the intellectual standing of the White House. I guess I saw it in somewhat political terms, but I didn’t begrudge President Johnson. I was so flattered to be down there and be part of what was really quite a big deal.”
PHOTOS COURTESY OF DON MACGILLIS
BY CRAIG COLLINS