Summers’ presence on the magazine cover raised some eyebrows at the White House, where not everyone thought a deputy cabinet secretary deserved equal billing with Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan. In the Washington pecking order, deputies were supposed to be anonymous. But the photo did reflect how influential Summers had become and the closeness of his relationships with the other two men. Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers dined together weekly, and their disagreements were as collegial as they were rare.
Summers’ presence on the cover of Time was also a sign that Bob Rubin was grooming his successor. Though Rubin would not talk about it until seven years later, in 1996 he and Summers had cut a deal. Summers agreed to turn down other job offers and stay at Treasury after Bill Clinton’s reelection. In return, Rubin would ask the president to agree to nominate Summers to replace Rubin when he stepped down, which he expected to do in 1998. Clinton agreed to go along with the plan.
As it turned out, Rubin stayed until mid-1999, not wanting to look like he was abandoning the president during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But the secret arrangement stayed in effect for two and a half years, unknown to anyone except the three men and a handful of their closest staff members. Just as he would five years later with the Harvard Corporation, Rubin had secretly helped Larry Summers acquire a powerful position. When Summers and Rubin dealt with foreign governments, they pushed for transparency. But when it came to their own fortunes, different standards applied.
And Rubin didn’t just promote Summers internally; he worked to polish Summers’ public image. Both men agreed to cooperate with the New Yorker and Time in part to promote the perception that Summers was the inevitable heir apparent. So, whereas Rubin used to affectionately tease Summers in public, he now began to refer to his deputy as “Dr. Summers,” and conspicuously deferred to Summers at public events. And even before he’d announced his resignation, he suggested to the New Yorker that Summers “would make a very good Treasury secretary.” The pre-emptive strategy was calculated to defuse resistance to Summers’ ascension.
Rubin announced his resignation on May 12, and the Dow Jones instantly dropped 213 points. President Clinton promptly nominated Summers to take Rubin’s place, and by the end of the day the market regained all but twenty-five of those points. To the financial community in New York, Summers’ appointment meant continuity, competence, and a reliably pro-business treasury secretary. The Street probably wouldn’t have felt comfortable with the Larry Summers who had advised Mike Dukakis on industrial policy, but it had no problem with the Larry Summers whom Bob Rubin had groomed.
The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on Summers’ nomination on June 22, and Summers showed how much he’d learned about politics during his years in the nation’s capital. He brought Vicki and their three children, twin girls named Ruth and Pamela and a younger son, Harry. “Is it not encouraging that Larry can have such beautiful children?” committee chairman William Roth said from behind his microphone. “Some apples fall far from trees,” Summers demurred. When Florida Republican Connie Mack asked Summers if he still felt that “efforts to cut the estate tax are selfish,” Summers ate the requisite crow: “No, I do not, Senator Mack,” he confessed. “What I said was wrong.” Concluded Iowa senator Charles Grassley, “You seem more relaxed now than when I first got acquainted with you, and you smile occasionally.” All the smiling, whether it was in a Senate office building or on the cover of Time, paid off. The full Senate approved Summers’ nomination by a vote of 97–2.
On July 2, President Clinton swore in Summers as treasury secretary at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. “I felt ready,” Summers said. Nonetheless, it was an emotional moment. As he thanked his parents, his family, and Robert Rubin, Summers was on the verge of tears. “I can’t begin to describe how much I have learned from Bob Rubin,” he said.
Seventeen months later, the United States Supreme Court would rule on the matter of George W. Bush v. Albert Gore, Jr. The decision was heartbreaking for Gore, of course, but it also had a negative impact on Summers. The vice-president, who had once blocked Summers from a White House post, had come to appreciate Summers and was prepared to reappoint him. But now Summers’ tenure as treasury secretary would always have the anti-climactic quality of stewardship. There was only so much you could do in the last year and a half of a lame duck administration.
When the Republicans moved in, Larry Summers retreated to a sinecure at Washington’s Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank. But his heart wasn’t in it; Brookings, a rather dreary building of long, uneventful corridors, is full of public policy wonks grinding away behind closed doors. Worse still, Summers’ marriage was falling apart, a victim, some said, of his hectic schedule and obsession with work.
“There are trade-offs in life,” Summers said some years later. “You can’t be negotiating through the night to prevent Mexico from going bankrupt and tucking your kids into bed that night. And you can’t get in a position to do that without having worked many long nights at the office…. Have I gotten that balance right at every point in mylife? There are choices that if I had to do again, I would do differently.”
By all accounts the divorce, which wouldn’t be finalized until 2003, was deeply painful for both husband and wife. Victoria Summers received the house in Bethesda, custody of the children, and some $8,000 a month in child support. She also took back her maiden name, becoming Vicki Perry again.
Summers had a hard time talking about the divorce. According to several sources familiar with the Harvard presidential search process, Summers did not tell the Corporation of his divorce while it was considering him. An oft-repeated story has that Harvard did not actually learn of the divorce until it received a phone call from Victoria Perry, who pointed out that it had not been necessary to send her an invitation to her ex-husband’s inauguration.
At the end of the Clinton administration, Summers could easily have hopped the Delta shuttle to Manhattan and made millions. That’s what Bob Rubin had done, becoming chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup and pulling down a reported $25 million a year. But getting rich wasn’t what drove Summers. He was a young man, just forty-six in 2001. His energy was remarkable, his drive undiminished. He missed the immediacy, the prestige, the urgency of Treasury—the knowledge that he, Lawrence Henry Summers, was helping to shape the world of the twenty-first century. He missed the limos and the private jets and the one-on-one meetings with foreign leaders. He missed having a rapt audience for every public utterance he made, the heady realization that with one slip of the tongue, he could move markets, make tens of millions of dollars of wealth vanish just like that. He would never do it, of course, but just the knowledge that he could…He missed that adrenaline-boosting sense of being important. Being powerful. Being alive.
But what could he do? He couldn’t return to economics, not after a decade away from his chosen field. Even if he could catch up with all the work he’d missed, how could he go back to writing theoretical, abstract papers about economic issues and crises when he’d just spent a decade living through and shaping the real thing? He’d become one of the people those papers were written about. He was the most successful academic to go into politics since Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Henry Kissinger—and if you considered that a lot of people regarded Kissinger as a war criminal, maybe Summers was the most successful since Woodrow Wilson.
So Summers weighed his next move, and he waited. And then Neil Rudenstine resigned, and Harvard came calling, and Summers realized that he didn’t have to work in Washington to change the world.
2
Neil Rudenstine’s Long Decade
On May 22, 2000, Harvard’s twenty-sixth president, Neil Rudenstine, announced his retirement. He was tired. A young-looking fifty-six years old when he took the job a decade before, Rudenstine now looked like a man slipping into old age. His dark hair had become heavily streaked with gray, and his face had fallen around the edges, as though life had given it a gentle downward tug. “This
has been a good run, and it’s time for someone else,” he said. Few at Harvard would have disagreed, at least with the second part of that statement.
Neil Rudenstine became president of Harvard in the fall of 1991, succeeding the popular Derek Bok, the wealthy, patrician scholar of labor law who’d been at Harvard’s helm for the preceding two decades. Early in his presidency, some saw the handsome Bok as too polished, too Californian. Before law school at Harvard, Bok had gone to college at Stanford, and there was something about him that always made one think he was just about to hit the tennis courts. He was tall, with thick, wavy gray hair and a craggy face that would have worked as well in Hollywood as at Harvard. He had a beautiful Swedish wife, Sissela Bok, an academic in her own right, and three attractive children. Derek Bok made everything look easy.
But Bok’s good looks and good fortune belied a canniness about university politics, and over time he showed that his smoothness masked both diplomacy and depth. Perhaps only a man so secure in his own identity could have guided the university from the political and social turbulence of the 1960s into a period of healing, stability, and, ultimately, growth. “Derek took a university stuck for the same reasons America was stuck, and managed the aftermath,” said one Harvard professor. “He reminded Harvard of its mission: to train the leaders of a great nation that would navigate the shaping of the world.” Derek Bok, said Peter Gomes, the chaplain of Harvard’s Memorial Church, “began his presidency like Cary Grant and ended up like Abe Lincoln.”
Neil Rudenstine at least looked a little like Abraham Lincoln. He was a slender man with an angular, sensitive face that could appear either thoughtful or anxious but that rarely suggested certitude. He had a floppy handshake and a reedy, singsong voice, and when he spoke he tended to stare at the ground. His body language radiated pliability rather than strength. “Neil Rudenstine looked delicate, like an orchid,” said one colleague who knew him well.
He was a surprising choice for president. Asked for their advice, Harvard alumni had suggested 763 candidates for the job, and it was never clear that Rudenstine was one of them. He was not a well-known figure. Unlike Bok, who’d come from an extremely wealthy and socially prominent Philadelphia family, Neil Rudenstine was the product of humble and diverse origins. His father was a Jewish prison guard, his mother a Catholic waitress. The first member of his family to graduate high school, Rudenstine went to Princeton and flourished there, falling in love with its intimate, communal atmosphere. In Princeton’s peaceful, village-like world of dining clubs and libraries, Rudenstine found a calling. When he finished, he spent two years in England on a Rhodes Scholarship, then returned to the United States and enrolled in graduate school at Harvard to study poetry. Completing his degree in 1964, he taught in Harvard’s English department for two years, then returned to Princeton, where he received tenure. His life was an American dream come true.
Neil Rudenstine was reputed to be an excellent teacher, passionate about his material and skilled at conveying its intricacies to his students. But no one would ever have called him a major scholar; other than his dissertation, Rudenstine never published a work of scholarship. So, like many professors who realize that they are unlikely to revolutionize their field and grow weary of the scholar’s solitary life, Rudenstine moved into administration. He became the dean of students at Princeton, then was promoted to a bigger job, dean of the college, and then, in 1977, became Princeton’s provost, a sort of right-hand man to the university president. He held that job for eleven years, and by all accounts excelled at it.
Princeton is a small university. It has an undergraduate college and a graduate school for aspiring Ph.D.s, but it does not have the power-house professional schools that Harvard does—no law, medicine, or business schools, for example. Located in the affluent, leafy suburb of Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton feels like a school where, if it isn’t possible to know everyone else, it may be possible at least to recognize them. Rudenstine liked that. The lover of poetry saw in Princeton an oasis where a scholar’s values—tolerance, tranquility, reason—could be cherished and nurtured like a hothouse flower.
After more than a decade on the job, Rudenstine left Princeton in 1988 and became an executive vice-president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York City, where his job was to judge the appeals of the money-seeking. He was comfortable in that environment, too. For a man who had grown up poor, and a humanist who studied poetry, Rudenstine was strangely at ease among multimillionaires. “Derek Bok was always very uncomfortable around the very rich, whereas Neil loved it, just loved it,” said one member of the Harvard faculty. The very rich, in turn, charmed by Rudenstine’s courteous, deferential manner and appreciative of his literary bent, delighted in his company.
In the hunt for a new Harvard president, Rudenstine was an intriguing dark horse; he had sufficient academic credentials and what appeared to be more than adequate administrative experience. The only problem was a rumor that he had once turned down the presidency of Princeton. Would he even be interested in the Harvard job? An offer couldn’t be made if it might be rejected; word could get out, and that would be humiliating to Harvard. So an emissary from the Harvard Corporation sat down with Rudenstine and asked. And simple as that, Rudenstine said yes. He would certainly be interested.
Things fell into place quickly. Rudenstine was announced as the new president in March 1991. His installation occurred that October. The mood on campus was upbeat. A weekend celebration devoted to “Values of Education” featured educational symposia, lectures, concerts, and arts performances. Students spelled out “We Love Rudy” in pizza boxes in the Yard—which was a little odd, not just because no one called Neil Rudenstine “Rudy,” but also because few at Harvard really even knew Rudenstine, much less loved him.
From an outsider’s perspective, Neil Rudenstine probably seemed an odd choice to run Harvard. He was a little-known academic with no national reputation, and he hadn’t worked at Harvard in twenty-five years. But in less obvious ways, Rudenstine must have seemed like a promising choice for an immensely difficult job—a job that had changed over the past decades just as Harvard itself had changed.
At the beginning of World War II, Harvard was still what might be called a pre-modern university. All of its students were men. The vast majority of them, about 97 percent, were white, and most of them were Christian. The number of Jews was still small, between 10 and 20 percent—small at least compared with the number of Jews qualified to attend. Slowly, Harvard was opening its door to deserving candidates from both public and private schools, as well as from different regions of the country, but it was a tentative process. Most Harvard students still hailed from New England, largely from the elite private boarding schools of that region.
The wave of social change effected by World War II changed all that. In the war’s aftermath, the federal GI Bill helped young men from all over the United States come to Cambridge—the sons of farmers from Kansas, ranchers from Texas, and fishermen from Washington. As the fullness of Hitler’s atrocities sunk into the national consciousness, Jewish faculty and students suddenly found Harvard more welcoming also. Though it would never vanish completely, the influence of Andover, St. Paul’s, Exeter, and the like began to wane. Harvard, for centuries a bastion of social privilege, was becoming more of a meritocracy—more, theoretically, like the country it predated.
And it wasn’t just new blood that poured in, it was money. The postwar years witnessed the growth of the great American foundations—philanthropic, research-minded groups with names like Ford, Carnegie, and, yes, Mellon. Those foundations became an enormous source of revenue for American universities. The federal government would play an even more important role. The government had formed close relationships with university scientists during World War II, enlisting their help with everything from code-breaking to the design of nuclear weapons. Throughout the Cold War, that partnership would continue, as Washington funded hundreds of millions of dollars in scientific and medical rese
arch, and the universities built up their labs, departments, and scientific facilities. Both sides benefited. The government employed the nation’s finest minds without having to underwrite the entire infrastructure in which they worked. And the universities grew bigger, stronger, and richer, attracting researchers who might otherwise have chosen the private sector and students excited to work with the big names in their field.
But the money did not help only the direct recipients of its grants. At Harvard, the university initiated a tithe on every grant its professors received, ostensibly to pay for overhead. But the tithe was the same regardless of whether you were a biophysicist who needed a multimillion-dollar lab or an English professor writing about John Donne—a little tax that disappeared into the university’s gradually swelling coffers.
By the 1960s, in terms of the breadth and caliber of the research they produced, American universities were without question the world’s finest, one of the great success stories of twentieth-century America. But that evolution had its downside. To manage such rapid growth, universities began to enlarge their administrations, hiring lawyers and accountants, personnel managers and health care administrators, retirement benefits experts and real estate managers, and public relations gurus and fundraisers galore. They tended to come from corporations and consulting firms, and their style of doing things reflected a corporate culture rather than an academic one. Before Vietnam, and even more so before World War II, Harvard’s strongest constituency had been its faculty. But the growth of a central administration shifted power to the office of the president and the anonymous bureaucrats who answered to him. At Harvard, power began to flow away from the people who supposedly represented the purpose of the institution, toward the people who knew how to make it work—and, above all, to the people who controlled its money.
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