In the first two summers of the Eisenhower administration (1953 and 1954), when I was 12 and 13 years old, I worked as a Senate pageboy. As I sat on the steps of the Senate chamber’s rostrum during long, somnolent hours of debate or roll calls or mere parliamentary idleness, I studied the senators. They were, to me, a dramatic, semi-mythological breed, famous and powerful and vivid men. (The Senate’s lone woman member was Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.) That they went about their business in the flesh, so close to me—that they now and then scratched themselves and yawned or snapped their fingers to summon me to run to the cloakroom and fetch them a chilled bottle of White Rock seltzer water—made them still more exotic: the Senate was an intimate, historic spectacle. I was a lucky boy.