It was the spring of 1970. We Fellows were beginning to feel the anxiety of hoping to finish our work; our stay in our New Eden seemed more precious than ever. Despite the press of work, we lingered over our lunches. We could always find a place to read and write, but how often might we talk things through with Jack Rawls and Dick Brandt, Jack Pole and Joe Barber? Though it had been a glorious year for us, it was a troubled year for the country. There were fires and riots in Watts and in the inner cities; there were student up-risings at Columbia and Berkeley…even at Stanford. Many of us had attended anti-war marches; some of us had written op-ed pieces about Cambodia.
It was, if I remember, late April or early May when I received an early morning phone call asking me to come up to the Center right away. A fire bomb had been set off in one of the studies. I rushed up the hill… to find that M.N. Srinivas’s study had been badly destroyed by fire. A life-time of sociological and anthropological research notes had been turned to unreadable ashes. As Jack Rawls came up the hill, he saw Srinivas standing near his study, dazed. Before going into at his own study — which was next door to Srinivas’s and which also appeared to have sustained some damage– Jack took Srinivas’ arm, and silently and gently took him for a long walk along the hills above the Center. It was only after they came back around noon, that Jack went into his own study to see how badly it had been damaged. The wall has been somewhat seared, but the manuscript of *A Theory of Justice* lay intact on his desk where he had left it the previous afternoon. He had spent the year revising the work for publication. There were no computers, no back-up disks: the copy on his desk was the only existing text of the work.
Of course we were all shaken, but Jack’s calm presence, his generous and instinctive sympathy, helped sustain us in the troubled days that followed. Some Fellows refused to continue to work in their studies until the Center provided massive security; other Fellows said they would not work in a place that had become a fortress. After a difficult investigation, it emerged that the attack was not personally directed to Srinivas, and that it was not even political. If I remember rightly, the investigation revealed that the fire was a random attack by an arsonist in the fire department.
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