To begin, I think it’s important to understand what it was that structured my life and drove me to try to excel in many different undertakings. As I’ll talk more about later, when my father died, I had just turned 19 years old, dropped out of college, enlisted in the Air Force, just finished Basic Training, and was sent to Biloxi, Mississippi, to start Tech School. After endless hours of thinking about how I would turn my life around and build direction and structure in my life, I decided that I needed to become a “Renaissance Man.” I had read much about that concept earlier, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that would be the correct path for the rest of my life. Simplistically, a Renaissance man could be described as one who works diligently to excel at everything he undertakes. He excels intellectually and athletically, as a warrior, in commerce, as a leader, and as a true gentleman. That’s a pretty big order for a young man of 19 but I decided that if I were going to build a roadmap for the rest of my life, I would set the highest goals. I knew that I may not always achieve them, but I felt that it would always be better to fall just short of the highest goal than to set a lower goal and accept mediocrity. As you read through this, you will see this theme continually repeat. Many of my old friends told me that I am very different than others. This may help explain my marching to a different drummer, if that's true.
I believed that I was one of the good guys, and I felt very strongly that I was both privileged and very lucky to be placed in a position where I could serve my country. I could do what I could to preserve our society and, more importantly, make the world a little bit better place for me having been in it. I guess I was, in the true sense of the word, a Kennedy liberal. My idea of going through life was to get up every morning and try to save the world. To go around trying to help less fortunate people, to make their lives a little bit better. I'd like to think I did. I wasn't always successful, but I certainly tried.
