The former president of Boston University has died at age 86.

I will leave the discussion of Silber’s record at BU to others better qualified than I. But I do have one story to tell about Silber that may lend some insight into the man.

In 1990, I interviewed Silber at his office at BU for an article on his gubernatorial campaign against Bill Weld. It was impossible when talking to Silber not to be struck by the sheer adversarial nature of the man; he wanted to pick a fight with you whether there was reason to or not. (He reminded me of former New York Yankees manager Billy Martin in this way.)

Silber was born with a birth defect—a right arm that ended at about the elbow in a very sharp, hard point of bone and skin. He told me that, when he was a child, he used to be taunted by bullies because of his arm, and he would fight back by hitting them with the pointed bone of his stump.

I couldn’t help but stare at his arm then and later because Silber had his jacket off, and he had tailored the right sleeve of his shirt so that it ended in a cuff, like a pants cuff, just above the stump—as if to say, not only will I not be ashamed of this deformity, I will flaunt it; I will dare you to look at it, and dare you not to look at it.

And throughout our conversation, when he wanted to make a point emphatically, which was often, he would pound the stump on the wooden table in front of him, like a chicken flapping a wing or a judge pounding his gavel.

For someone unused to the sight (and sound) of bone hitting wood, it was unnerving—something Silber clearly knew, and didn’t hesitate to use to his advantage, even when the situation wasn’t anything close to hostile.

But I just kept thinking of young John Silber, fighting the bullies with that stump, and then wielding it in a different (but no less effective) way later in life, and though I thought that there was something very sad about that, there was also something bitter and unhealthy in it. He would have been a terrible governor.