Free A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth by Louis Auchincloss

roommate, Bill Bundy. He and his younger brother, McGeorge, would later become world famous as security advisers to presidents Kennedy and Johnson and ardent supporters of the Vietnam War. In fact, they earned from David Halberstam the ironical title of "the best and the brightest," despite the fact it was they who helped plunge us into disaster.
    Well, returning from the Groton library where I had spent a Saturday afternoon
not
attending a football game with a visiting team, which we had lost, I found Bill actually in tears over the defeat. Foolishly I mocked him, and he was so angry that he arranged to have a new roommate. We made it up later, but it was not the best way for me to make friends.
    Although McGeorge was in a lower form, he was the younger brother who became the better friend of mine. Both brothers shared an intense feeling about internecine sport, and I have sometimes wondered if the spirit of "Groton must not lose" did not play a role in their reluctance to face defeat in an unwinnable and unnecessary war.

    Mac, as president of the dramatic society, chose for his annual play Shakespeare's
Henry V,
of which he seemed entirely to accept the conventional interpretation that it is a hymn to patriotic and military glory.
    But this was only so far as the king is depicted in his heroic speeches. The faculty coach, Malcolm Strachan, who believed that Shakespeare was seeking secretly to convey his own pacifist credo in the lines of the clowns, persuaded Mac that it would make a more interesting production to portray both interpretations. At any rate, what stood out was Mac's splendid acting as Henry V glorifying a totally aggressive war. I cannot help but note that it is recorded that, in difficult moments of the Vietnamese conflict, Mac recited some of the speeches he remembered from
Henry V
to LBJ.
    ***
    When I was president of the dramatics club, the year before Mac, I should have had the lead in the play chosen, Moliere's
The Would-be Gentleman.
Yet my cousin Gordon Auchincloss—last seen in non-theatrical circumstances—was considered better for the part. This was disappointing, and I had to content myself with the secondary role of Dorante, but much worse was to follow. In my principal scene with the elegant marquise Doriméne, I clumsily sat on the edge of a curtain dropping to the stage. So tight did I pull it that the audience feared it would come down, and so missed all the words.

9. Religion
    I CANNOT RECALL that religion played any important role in my life until I went to Groton School at the age of twelve. The Auchinclosses, being of Scottish origin, were naturally Presbyterians, and in my grandfather Auchincloss's generation very strict and sober ones.
    My grandmother Auchincloss, of English descent, born a Russell of New York and Newport, belonged to the more fashionable Episcopal church, but as a dutiful spouse, she accompanied her husband on Sundays to his Presbyterian temple. Unlike him, as it happened, she was very devout, though it did the poor lady little good at the end when she died in an agony created by the fear of hell's fire. Her ending confirmed my father in his lifelong antipathy to religion.
    "I never knew ease of conscience and independence of mind," he told me once, "until I wrapped up religion once and for all and threw it in the East River."
    Yet a more moral and honorable man never drew breath. He taught me that there was no necessary connection between Christian faith and Christian conduct.
    ***
    As children we often accompanied Mother to church on Sunday while Father played golf. She was interested in religion, but as a part of philosophy in which she was widely read; it never seemed to answer an emotional need in her. For her offspring the celebration of religion was pretty well confined to the sentimentality of the Christmas story. My older brother, whom I much admired, made no secret of his firm atheism, and when I asked him if he didn't even believe in an afterlife,