Word: said
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That’s fine, I said. You don’t have to talk about your future plans...
...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...
...hung up the phone and turned to my editor. He nodded. Fair enough, he said. I was good...
That should have been enough—I had the interview—but Caleb had said one thing, something about the future, that I hadn't understood. I could have let it go, but it was clear just from Caleb’s attitude that he wouldn’t have agreed to an interview about presidential ambitions. If I was going to be sneaky, I should at least give him a chance to push back—to ask a question I couldn’t talk around...
...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...