Early Life
Smith was born on May 12, 1914 in Ferriday in Concordia Parish in eastern Louisiana near Natchez, Mississippi, to Howard K. Smith, a nightwatchman descended from a poor but "gentleman-farming" family in Lettsworth in Pointe Coupee Parish north of Baton Rouge, and the former Minnie Gates, the daughter of a Cajun riverboat pilot.
Smith worked his way through Tulane University in New Orleans, having studied German and journalism. After his graduation in 1936, with both bachelor of arts degree, he signed on as a deckhand with a ship bound for Germany, where he briefly studied at Heidelberg University. In 1936, he spent a year as a reporter in New Orleans before securing a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University's Merton College, from which he graduated in 1939. Smith became active in student politics, mostly protesting Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's seemingly soft attitude toward Nazism. While at Oxford, he was the first American ever to chair the university Labour Club.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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