My father cried. His father had pushed public service and giving something back. Just as there was no doubt Paul Sarbanes would go to college, there was no doubt what he would do afterward. They were called idiotes, which was the precursor for our word idiot. That's how they regarded those people.
Friends describe Sarbanes as a natural leader.
At Oxford, he was captain of the basketball team, president of the American Association and secretary of the Junior Common Room at Balliol College, the British equivalent of the student government. There were no posters. Elections took place by a process of osmosis, a sensing of who would be good. A leader would never be promoting himself. That would have been infra dig, to use the Oxford word.