A Date With Debate

The Harvard Policy Debate Team, originally called the Harvard Debate Council, was founded in 1892. This was the year the Johnson County War erupted between small farmers and large ranchers in Wyoming, and the year Homer Plessy sat in the wrong seat on a train and prompted a landmark Supreme Court case. These are things that debaters might know because they can never tell when their opponents will bring up the way mass media affected rebellions in the West, or why the Supreme Court isn’t a reliable source for expanding nuclear disarmament.

Dallas G. Perkins Jr., who coaches the policy debate team, told me that the debate council was founded in 1891, but he prefaced the statement with “I am told,” as in, his sources might be unreliable. Perkins has seen a lot of unreliable sources in his life, and he knows enough not to trust what he hears.

If you asked Dallas Perkins—whom I referred to in correspondence as Mr. Perkins, because he is an intimidating man and he signs his e-mails “DP”, which doesn’t really give someone a hint one way or another whether they’re allowed to use the first name—why the policy debate team is interesting, I think he would just ignore you. He would lift his straw hat from the table, place it on top of his head, say, “Have a good day,” and leave. He has better things to do.

The reason he needn’t answer is because it’s not a far leap to say that the team is a perfectly good paradigm for the continuation of an institution, the values of research, and talking really fast, the way people feel about things they did when they were younger, long careers, nuclear disarmament, the British government’s abuse of the Irish people, train rides, plane flights, offices in Quincy that lack windows, pancake houses in the Midwest, three-day tournaments in which people forget about things like breakfast, undying loyalty, national titles, never-ending glory. Dallas Perkins wouldn’t say these things because to him and others, they are obvious.

MAKING THE CASE

You see, I can’t decide whether to call him Dallas, or Perkins, or Mr. Perkins. It probably has to do with the circumstances under which I met him. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a round straw hat that looked out of place in Au Bon Pain (or in Cambridge, for that matter). He said things that reminded me how little the policy debate team cared about publicity and how they occupied an entirely different sphere than other student organizations.

I didn’t know much about debate until about a month ago. This probably explains why I asked debaters silly questions that they all answered very patiently. Questions like, How do you guys prepare for a debate? How do the freshmen look this year? Who are your biggest rivals? What first sparked your interest in debate?

When I talked to the captain of the team, senior Geoff A. Smith ’10, he wore a green and white polo and talked with his hands. He seemed to be consciously slowing down his speech patterns so that I could perfectly understand him. He told me that this year, the team would be debating the following issue, as determined by the Cross Examination Debate Association, at all of its tournaments (he recited it from memory and I had to replay it three times on my recorder just to get it right): “The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce the size of its nuclear weapons arsenal and/or substantially reduce or restrict the role and/or mission of its nuclear weapons arsenal.” I asked him, jokingly, if he could tell me some of the arguments that he uses (or would that compromise his position?).

He looked at me, serious and wide-eyed, paused, said, “I can probably tell you what we used at Georgia State last weekend.”

Policy debate is structured around two-person teams. One person does mostly affirmative, one mostly negative. Everybody debates on the same issue all year, so eventually the arguments are tailored to fit a certain team’s style. Tournaments are long and intense. The first round is on Saturday at 8 a.m. or 8:30. One round of debate can take around 2.5 hours with four debates a day. This happens for two days, while you compile a record and, at some point, break for lunch. The third day is elimination rounds, where the top 32 teams compete in a tournament-style bracket. Good teams will be debating until late Monday, when a champion is crowned. Younger teams book flights home early.

Some teams are so sure of their inferiority that they count on leaving early—potential Cinderellas filling out brackets weighted against them. It’s the hierarchy that debate creates, a world where the best pairs in the country are known by the combined initials of their last names. I began hearing the letters “PJ” uttered reverently for the first time. PJ said such and such, PJ were invited to a special tournament, PJ almost won.

An exemplary argument for the affirmative: “The US should increase the rate at which it dismantles nukes. At the moment, when we sign a treaty to dismantle, we basically just sign papers and put them (the nukes, not the papers) in a warehouse waiting to be dismantled, which could take now until 2040, because obviously it takes a while to take them apart, without blowing yourself up. Our argument is that it’s better for security not to have a large number of nukes around that we can’t protect.”

For the negative: “It’s an argument about deterrence. We need certain weapons and postures for deterrence. If you cut these weapons you cut our deterrence capability, which leads other countries to reassess their calculations, try to reach nuclear parity with the US.”

“That’s one of the arguments deployed,” he concludes. I can’t tell whether he’s using the word ironically.

But in this world, arguments are as dangerous as radiation and as swift as ballistic missiles, as are the curt phrases that punctuate them. Later, I will hear the story of the 1984 Northwestern Tournament from the man who won it, Jonathan B. Wiener ’84. The other team spoke at length about Cuban refugees intercepted by US patrol boats. Wiener and his partner parried with their own counter-plan, but its significance eluded their opponents. “I guess you missed the boat,” the Harvard team quipped. The audience collapsed in hysterics. It ruined the other team.

Such long-range attacks don’t materialize out of spontaneous witticism. Geoff described the summer of background reading, learning everything there is to know about the nuclear issue, and then as school got closer, beginning to zero in on specific arguments, searching for large quotes from obscure magazines, piecing the quotes together to make the case, then organizing them in files and sharing them among the team.

“You make sure your argument can take care of all different other arguments. You cobble your file together when you see what applies,” he said. “We’re going paperless now, but we used to carry four 14-gallon tubs to tournaments.” The tubs were filled with evidence, each sheet of paper called a card.

This brings me to something important. It was very clear from the beginning that these tournaments were essential to the debaters, the lifeblood of the activity. How could I write an article about the debate team without seeing the debaters in action? To use a line from sports writer Heywood Hale Broun, not only would I be veterinarian to the Light Brigade, but I’d be home tending the rabbits while the company was out in the field.

This was going to be an issue. Long articles need color. Color is easy to find at large events, easy to pick out in snatches of conversation (did you hear that PJ won again?), to distill from the clothes that people wear (did you see their matching shirts?). So I wrote some e-mails, plied some contacts and started imagining a plane ride to Kentucky, paid for by The Crimson. I’d sit behind the captain and coach, nestled among the younger team members, jotting down exceptionally good quotes, helping to carry the evidence tubs when we departed. At the debates I’d sit in a corner, watch PJ dazzle the audience and their opponents.

Then I got an e-mail from a sophomore on the team who said, you’d better talk to Dallas.

MEETING THE MASTERMIND

So I sent the man an e-mail (Hi Mr. Perkins, My name is etc.), and the coach answered quickly and directly: “Sure. Do you want to talk on the phone or in person?” I told him I’d meet him in front of ABP the next morning, and I’d have on a gray Mets cap.

The next morning I ran out the door fumbling with my tape recorder, forgetting to put on my gray cap. I arrived in front of ABP turning in circles, looking for someone who might look like a debate coach. But it was Perkins who found me. Apparently my hair looked like it fit with an Italian name.

In ABP we sat down across from each other at a plastic table. This was my first interview with a debate person, before Geoff and his patient helpfulness, so I asked informational questions, and then just some silly ones.

For example: “My roommate, he’s on mock trial and did debate in high school. He told me, very cryptically, [short laugh] to ask you about something called the Emory Switch and if Harvard uses any special tactics.”

Perkins: [Pauses. Looks at me. It really wasn’t a good question and he and I both know it.] The Emory Switch was something that was invented before you and your roommate were born. It refers to the fact that...Apparently, way back when, debaters from Emory used to switch the order of their speeches and bash their opponents first. It did, however, get Perkins talking about how the Harvard team isn’t really characterized by any single approach to argument. This is in contrast to teams like the inner city Baltimore college that talks about race, or Cal State Fullerton, which focus on “radical stuff, very lefty,” or Oklahoma, where debaters bring up Heidegger and Nietzsche.

This was the part where my voice recorder ran out of battery, and it was also near the end of my questions. So I started to wrap it up and closed my notebook.

He looked at me and said, “That’s it?”

I was startled, and started babbling something about this just being a first interview and I was trying to learn something about the team and—

“Well you haven’t learned anything,” he interrupted. “You don’t know the size of the team. You have one name (he had given me Geoff’s e-mail address). What do you know?”

Beyond the philosophical implications of his question I had to admit that he was right. I think this was where I threw in my request to go to a tournament so I could see the debate team up close, maybe get to know something. It seemed to be a logical rejoinder.

This was the part where he told me, all in the calmest and most collected voice, that the team had had a Crimson reporter who’d come to a tournament before. He embarrassed the team and they had to spend the next month explaining to other teams how they were not assholes, it was just the reporter who was an asshole. Perkins asked me what my agenda was, and at some point I asked what he was insinuating. When he left, he lifted his straw hat off the table, put it on his head, and said simply, “Have a good day.”

SEARCHING FOR THE HEAVY HITTERS

I hadn’t had any idea that The Crimson had run a story on the Policy Debate Team before, much less a controversial one. Finding the article was easy. The first paragraph is entirely devoted to Dallas Perkins and the slightly illegal dealings of his father who had “clowned” Texas. The need for that opening could be found in the first line of the second paragraph, which proclaimed that today, Perkins “is running his own gang of outlaws.” (This earlier writer had no qualms concerning what to call the coach, dropping the confident “Perkins” after the first paragraph and proceeding to rely on the familiar “Dallas”).

I thought this was what Perkins had taken issue with, or maybe the tongue-in-cheek references to drugs. Instead, the coach told me, the problem was the caricatures of the other teams, who were made to look foolish compared to the Harvard debaters.

Looking back over the article, I guess he was probably right. But for me the article was interesting because it underscored the dramatic rise of that year’s top pair, KT (last names Klinger and Tarloff), for whom the horizon was rapidly expanding, with the national championships imminent, and great things about to come.

Though the piece was written in 2005, it shone a new light on the current policy team, bringing PJ into focus. These were the two who had been last standing at Georgia State the weekend before. These were the two whom all the excitement was about. The best Harvard has seen in years. And there was no way I was going to get to see them perform, not after the fiasco of the last reporter to cling along for a tournament.

I went to the archives and found names of old debaters. I sent out some e-mails. The archives have a folder for nearly everything, including Policy Debate. There were fliers from the ’50s advertising debates on nuclear weapons (again!), Richard Nixon as president, the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the treatment of the Irish by the British government. There were fraying newspapers mentioning old national champions. There was even a form sent by the secretary of the Debate Council, in 1947, to other universities for the purpose of organizing the next year’s debates. The cutoff slip at the bottom, to be sent back quickly to Wigglesworth G-32, had a space to write in the name of the person who was answering the letter. It had the word “Mr.” followed by a blank line.

But none of this could help me visualize PJ. I decided to cold e-mail them, without going through the captain or coach first. Geoff had told me their civilian names: Alex A. Parkinson ’11 and Eli J. Jacobs ’11. They e-mailed back quickly, but they were too busy to meet with me (schoolwork and prepping for tournaments). I could imagine them sitting at vast, thickly papered desks, sifting through files, and passing folders back and forth.

When I interviewed Cata Santos ’12, Geoff Smith’s debate partner, I tried to put PJ out of my head. Cata said things like, “You can think of debate as a game. Sometimes you have to play affirmative, sometimes you have to play negative. That’s just life.” When she says “topicality” she traces a “T” with her fingers, and when she reaches a driving point in her argument she pinches the tops of her fingers together. To explain why she loves debate, and what her favorite moments are, she says, “Okay. PJ is debating in octofinals, they’re the only Harvard debaters left in the tournament. Octofinals was at something like 7 a.m. on Monday morning, so you’ve been getting five hours of sleep for three days. Coaches stay up almost all night doing work for us. So at that point most debaters are just exhausted. If they’re not debating they’re asleep. But for me, the best moment is when, despite all that, everyone is up at 7 a.m. and the whole team is there for two people, getting them food, highlighting, making sure they have water, everything they need. So when the whole team is cooperating . . . it really feels like a team. Even not being Alex or Eli it’s great, everyone loves that.”

At the end Cata showed me the results from the last tournament and there they were, Harvard PJ, to be facing Emory IW in the seventh round. I pointed and Cata nodded and said, “PJ, isn’t that a great name? Alex and Eli, you should see them together. They’re so good.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, they’re tall and slender, and . . .” Cata trails off. Earlier she had tried to describe what made them so good and found it hard to put a finger on.

FINDING THE HALL-OF-FAMERS

One night I got an e-mail back from Michael B. King ’79, one of the alumni I had asked to talk about the team. He wrote, “Sure! My schedule is a bit choppy this week (I am traveling to Philly tomorrow evening), but we should be able to make something work.” Soon I get another e-mail from someone I had not contacted, John M. Bredehoft ’80, who had been debate partners with Mike when they were back in college. Because the e-mails are all in a chain I can see the correspondence between the two: King wrote to his friend, “Did you get one of these? If not, mind if I send him your way? Good lord, this would be like somebody on the Crimson staff of 1979 getting in touch with a Harvard debater from . . . Truman’s day!”

Bredehoft responded, “This is wonderful! Send him along!"

They were debate partners at Harvard when King was a senior and Bredehoft was a junior, and that year, in 1979, they won the National Debate Tournament. King was writing to me as he was traveling to Philadelphia, and he took a break during the flight. When he got back to the computer he said, “I see that in the interim John has responded, and I will resist reading.” At times, in the middle of their narratives, they would ask questions of each other, checking that their facts were accurate.

King came from a long line of debaters, documented back to his grandfather who won a two volume history of the French Revolution for winning the LaHaye Seminary’s debating prize in April of 1899. Bredehoft debated successfully for Spellman High School in the Bronx, where Justice Sotomayor went, although they didn’t overlap.

Upon winning nationals, they earned an article in the Lexington Herald, which reported that “the debaters rattled off their points faster than an auctioneer at a tobacco warehouse.”

By all accounts these men were among the best. Looking back at my notes from the archives, I realized that their names popped up everywhere—in snippets of articles, in alumni newsletters. They were PJ, 30 years ago.

They had remained close over the years. They were meeting up in Virginia within the month. For a decade they have collaborated on an “alternate history” project (e.g. if Hitler had declared peace with America). They sent me over 7,000 words, and I can’t begin to pick what to include: the fact that they argued way back then that global warming was a real phenomenon? That they and their fellow debaters go to each other’s weddings and anniversaries? Or: van rides back to Cambridge over Thanksgiving singing Christmas carols; eating pancakes at an off-the-road-diner in Western Pennsylvania; “working all-nighters in the concrete block debate office of that era, windowless, in the basement of Quincy House”; “emerging for breakfast at dawn to continue a discussion on the First Amendment implications of noise regulation, or exhausted but exalting over having discovered a data error in the latest unpublished study on the effects of unemployment on stress-related illness”; or “just standing in front of the mimeograph machine and chatting about life in general for hours on end.” “Do you know what a mimeograph machine is?” Bredehoft asked in parentheses. If I could not see PJ this was the next best thing: letters from these reincarnations from the past.

“ANOTHER THING ALTOGETHER”

There will always be pairs of top debaters, but over the past 30 years the one constant has been Dallas. In searching for a good anecdote about her coach, Cata kept harping on his old straw hat. When I said he was an intimidating man, Geoff agreed and said he’d felt the same way at first. Both of them stressed the fact that he was direct and honest and really cared. Cata said that every once in a while he wears pink or green suits, artifacts from the 70’s. Bredehoft puts it best: “Dallas was another thing altogether—Dallas is Dallas, and there is no way around it.” He continues: “He was the first coach of Harvard Debate for many years not to have been a Harvard debater (he went to Georgetown, then Harvard Law). When I first met him in the mid-1970s, he was partial to wearing one-piece pastel jumpsuits and had light orange hair down to his knees. Incongruously, when he spoke it was in one of the most pronounced West Texas drawls ever heard (he comes from Impact, Texas, outside Abilene). I remember someone making a cheesy movie about debate—“Talk to Me”?—called Dallas to see what the Harvard debate coach sounded like. Needless to say, the drawl and hair did not make it to the screen. Appearances notwithstanding, his mind was and is razor-sharp; his instinct about argument unerring, and his dedication to debate boundless.”

Our last interaction was over e-mail. He asked if we had arranged sufficient interviews. I asked him how many people were on the team. I also wanted to know if I could look at the team’s own archives, somewhere in one of the river houses’ subterranean depths, and he said, “I don’t know if there’s anything to ‘check out.’ Who told you there was stuff in the Adams basement? I have no knowledge/memory of that.” He signed it “dp.”

As I write this he’s at a tournament. It’s twenty to two, so he and the other debaters have probably grabbed a quick lunch and are going on the fuel of coffee and donuts from the early morning. Dallas is probably listening carefully to arguments, watching one of his teams of two, PJ or SS or one of the others. Maybe one of them is at a podium, and the other is sifting through files, searching for the right evidence.