Bradley - Time present, time past: a memoir

Reveals a restless intellect with a rare sense of history.

Baltimore Sun

Powerful and poignant. It will become a rare classic in American letters.

Cornel West

An extraordinarily reflective book that manages to provide uncommon insights into politics, celebrity and diversity.

Toronto Globe & Mail

Bradleys book will be recognized for what it isthe most significant political memoir of our time a rare and challenging book: epic in scope, brilliant in insight, and sublimely literary in writing style and construction. [A] Whitman-esque journey to the very heart of their national conundrum.

Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)

A journal filled with real human characters and their struggles. [Bradleys] memoir is deserving of a place among the book shelves of Americans, no matter what their political persuasion.

Charleston S.C. Post and Courier

A memorable contribution to the literature of politics. Remarkable not only for its candor and objectivity, but for its penetrating insight.

Robert A. Caro

One of the most decent, thoughtful, inspiring books by a public figure I have ever read.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Anyone who loves this country should take a look at it through Bill Bradleys eyes.

Jack Kemp

Senator Bill Bradley is a like a drink of ice cold lemonade at a fourth of July picnic. I hope Time Present, Time Past will not be his last book because this man from Missouri has a candor and an objectivity too long absent from American politics.

Tulsa World

[A] blend of scholarly smarts and Beltway brawn he tackles tough issues without a flinch. Bradley in print is like Bradley on the hardwood: no finger rolls or reverse stuffs, just solid jumpers from the key.

People

Unusually self-searching provides further insights into the personality and likely future of this intensely self-demanding man.

Washington Times

Bradleys grace is to portray his uncommon achievements as a common American experience.

Los Angeles Times

Humility and self-awareness bleed out of every chapter of this interesting and forthcoming memoir.

Newsday

In this beautifully realized memoir we read the whole manone of the most principled and compassionate public servants of our age, and one of the most interesting.

E. L. Doctorow

Intriguing a serious and valuable book from a fascinating public figure.

Christian Science Monitor

A skillful literary balancing act. The voice is authentic, the questions absorbing.

Chicago Tribune

Bill Bradley has been a three-time basketball All-American at Princeton, an Olympic gold medalist, a Rhodes scholar, and a professional player for ten years with the New York Knicks. Elected to the Senate from New Jersey in 1978, 1984, and 1990, he has authored extensive legislation, including the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Bradley has written two previous books, Life on the Run and The Fair Tax. He is married and has one daughter.

Time Present, Time Past

Life on the Run

The Fair Tax

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 1997

Copyright 1996, 1997 by Bill Bradley
Maps copyright 1996 by Paul J. Pugliese

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Michael Lewis: Excerpt from Where He Is; Senator Bill Bradleys Speech at the Democratic Convention by Michael Lewis (The New Republic, August 3, 1992). Reprinted by permission of Michael Lewis. Patricia Nelson Limerick: Excerpts from The Legacy of Conquest by Patricia Nelson Limerick. Reprinted by permission of Patricia Nelson Limerick. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.: Excerpt from The Dance, words and music by Tony Arata, copyright 1989 by Morganactive Songs, Inc./Pookie Bear Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U. S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in -Publication Data
Bradley, Bill. 1943
Time present, time past: a memoir / Bill Bradley. 1st Vintage
Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: A.A. Knopf, 1996.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49194-7
1. Bradley, Bill, 1943 . 2. LegislatorsUnited StatesBiography. 3. United States. Congress. SenateBiography. 4. United StatesPolitics and government1989 . 5. United StatesPolitics and government19451989. I. Title.

[E840.8.B67A3 1997]
328.73092dc21 96-48105

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

v3.1

For
Ernestine and Theresa Anne, and
for Mom and Dad, too

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

Burnt Norton
T. S. E LIOT

I HAVE always preferred moving to sitting still. For ten years after finishing college, I made my living by running around in short pants in drafty arenas across America, as a professional basketball player. The rhythm of the roada drive, a flight, a performance, a hotel, a sleep, and a drive, a flight, a returnprovided a frame through which I saw America and myself. The perspective had its limitations, but it ordered my movements. In 1976, I published Life on the Run, a book about my decade as a player on the road.

For the past seventeen years, I have crisscrossed America as a politician, a United States senator from New Jersey, following the familiar rhythma drive, a flight, a performance, a hotel, a sleep, and a drive, a flight, a return. I have spoken in convention centers, union halls, churches, hotel ballrooms, college campuses, and the living rooms of wealthy contributors. I have autographed T-shirts and auctioned basketballs. I have shaken hands at factory gates, commuter stops, farm picnics, and state fairs. I have dedicated new buildings and eaten endless varieties of ethnic food, including white-bread sandwiches with the crust cut off. I have spit out ten-second TV interviews and taken part in two-hour panel discussions. I have appeared in support of senators, governors, congresspeople, and mayors. By 1994, I had campaigned in forty-six states.

I threw myself into these political trips around America. Give me eight hours in a hotel room for sleep, phone calls, and reading, and I could stay on the road for weeks at a time. I enjoyed listening to the people I met. They told me their stories, got me to laugh, made me wince, angered me. These encounters were the meat and potatoes of my travelsand the spice. As I moved from place to place, I inevitably brushed up against historythe story of what had happened to people living in that part of America. Slowly, as the number of places I visited increased, I saw past events not only in their particularity but also in their sweep. The expansion of the United States westward became more than the founding of St. Louis, or Custers last stand, or wagon ruts in the Wyoming rock beds of the Oregon Trail. The ruins of dwellings at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico triggered my imagination about the Anasazis, who lived there long before the first European arrived in America. An exhibit in western North Carolina on the Scotch-Irish immigration confronted me with my own roots and spurred me to look into the lives of my ancestors. Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg and Antietam conjured up images of Americans fighting each other in defense of liberty as each side defined it. The tensions and contrasts in America between freedom and order, the individual and the community, material well-being and spiritual transcendence, a common culture and ethnic diversity, pop out at anyone who travels with open eyes and a curious mind.