WANG DAN IS FORTY-FIVE

WANG DAN 
王丹 
b. February 26, 1969 

AT A 2004 FORUM ON 

TIANANMEN +15 

Harvard University 

Cambridge, Massachusetts 

Looking back fifteen years afterwards at the events of the spring of 1989 which culminated in the crackdown known as "六四" (Liu-Si, June 4) in Chinese and as "Tiananmen" to the outside world. 

Wang Dan was a student leader in 1989; imprisoned afterwards; eventually a Harvard Ph.D. 

In a little more than three months, the quarter century anniversary will be upon us. 

LARRY SUMMERS GIVES UP ON THE FED

LAWRENCE SUMMERS 

DECLINES -- 

BEFORE HE IS 

NOMINATED 

LARRY SUMMERS 
SENDS A LETTER TO 
PRESIDENT OBAMA ... 

... declining to be nominated to chair the Federal Reserve Board. 

President Obama accepted. 

Will the President now nominate "Mr. Yellen" (as he called Janet Yellen, the vice-chair of the Fed, in a news conference)? 

More Summers here and here  

NOW THAT COLLEGE IS BACK IN SESSION AGAIN ... A LOOK BACK TO WHEN CO-ED LIVING WAS NEW

"THE NEW CAMPUS REBELS: 

WOMEN" 

SHARING A BATHROOM AT HARVARD 
Nearly Forty Years Ago 

Published in the December 10, 1973, 
issue of NEWSWEEK (p. 120) 

To be continued 

MATINA HORNER IS SEVENTY-FOUR

MATINA SOURETIS HORNER  

b. July 28, 1939 

MATINA & JOSEPH HORNER 

AT HOME 

with children and dog, 1972 

when Matina Horner's selection as 

President of Radcliffe College was announced 

Two summings-up after a decade and more of Horner's presidency (she served until 1989), here and here.  Some information on her post-Radcliffe life is here and here and here. 

Dr. Joseph Horner's obituary ("inventor indulged love of chamber music") can be found here. 

KARL DEUTSCH BORN A CENTURY AND A YEAR AGO

KARL W. DEUTSCH 

July 21, 1912-November 1, 1992 

PROF. KARL DEUTSCH 

TEACHING AT HARVARD 

For more information on this renowned scholar and 

teacher of political science, please see here; also here. 

EZRA VOGEL HAS A BIRTHDAY

EZRA F. VOGEL 

b. July 11 

Author of the biography of 
DENG XIAOPING 
and other seminal works 
on China and Japan 

More on Ezra Vogel here and here; 
on Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, here and here; 
on China, here; 
on Japan, here 

NO SECOND ACTS? GAIL PARKER, TOM PARKER, AND THAT "BENNINGTON AFFAIR"

A LOOK BACK AT 

BENNINGTON COLLEGE'S 

FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT -- 

AND HER VICE-PRESIDENT 

THOMAS D. PARKER 

GAIL THAIN PARKER 

and their daughter 

JULIA THAIN PARKER 

Published in Women's Wear Daily  

July 27, 1972, p. 24 

To quote from Lee Wohlfert's opening paragraph:  "You could almost hear the outrage in college faculty rooms across the country when Bennington College broke the news.  Come September, its new president would be Gail Parker, a 29-year-of slip of a girl who's currently an assistant professor of American history and literature at Harvard.  To top it off, they named her 30-year-old husband, Tom, now a senior tutor at Harvard, Bennington vice-president." 

The Parker presidency-vice presidency did not last the typical four-year undergraduate term, and ended with a bang, not a whimper, taking the Parker marriage with it. 

But separately Gail and Tom Parker went on to other careers.  Both remarried.  President Parker, as Gail T. P. Wickes, has a short biography here.  Vice-president Parker, Thomas D. Parker, has his here.  Julia Thain Parker made the news on a happy occasion, here.      

WINSOME, WITH BONNET

STATUE ALIVE 

ADOLPHUS BUSCH HALL 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

RODERICK MACFARQUHAR HAS A BIRTHDAY ... AND A CONFERENCE

RODERICK MacFARQUHAR 

Birthday December 2 

CELEBRATION-cum-CONFERENCE 

November 30-December 1, 2012 

"Chinese Politics Past and Present: The 18th Party Congress" 

KARK W. DEUTSCH BORN ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY

KARL WOLFGANG DEUTSCH

July 21, 1912-November 1, 1992

KARL DEUTSCH & STUDENTS

AT HARVARD

For more information on this renowned scholar

and teacher of political science, please see here.

NOW, THE SON: BO GUAGUA IS WHISKED AWAY

THE KENNEDY SCHOOL

&

THE STUDENT PRINCE(LING)

THE TAUBMAN BUILDING

KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Bo Guagua, the son and only child of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, was to be finishing up his second and final year studying for a Master's in Public Administration at the Kennedy School in May -- next month. His father, Bo Xilai, already had been very high in "public administration" in the the People's Republic of China (here). With his parents now suddenly in disgrace, his father dismissed from his posts, and his mother, at least, facing a murder charge, what future for the son, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts? "Now he is an orphan," was the message from "a source close to Bo's family."

Late last night, it is reported, Bo Guagua was picked up at his apartment near Harvard by unspecified "law-enforcement officers," and it was speculated that he might have been seeking protection from "American authorities." For "Throughout the day a group of Chinese men" had been "parked conspicuously in front of a fire hydrant outside" his apartment building.

DEREK BOK, PRESIDENT OF HARVARD THE FIRST TIME AT FORTY-ONE, IS NOW EIGHTY-TWO

DEREK CURTIS BOK

b. March 22, 1930

DEREK BOK

Dean, Harvard Law School, 1968-1971

President of Harvard University,

1971-1991 & 2006-2007

More details here; Derek Bok now;

a group photograph with his predecessors

James B. Conant and Nathan Pusey, here;

a photograph of Sisela Bok, Grace Conant, and Anne Pusey here

EZRA VOGEL DISCUSSES "DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA"

EZRA VOGEL

ON HIS MASTER WORK

ON DENG XIAOPING

EZRA F. VOGEL

Author

DENG XIAOPING AND

THE TRANSFORMATION

OF CHINA

Prof. Vogel spoke this evening at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he taught at Harvard for many years (a notice of the event is here). A good source of background information on Vogel's work on the book can be found here, and a number of reviews, here.

More Vogel here; more Deng here.

Tomorrow: the next president of China is due in Washington, D.C.; see here.

TAIWAN HOLDS AN ELECTION; WANG DAN IS IN THE NEWS

MA YING-JEOU

RE-ELECTED

PRESIDENT OF TAIWAN

WANG DAN AT HARVARD

A.M., 2001, Ph.D, 2008

STUDENT LEADER IN BEIJING IN 1989

("TIANANMEN," "JUNE 4")

SEVEN YEARS IN CHINESE JAILS

NOW TEACHING AT

NATIONAL TSING HUA UNIVERSITY

HSINCHU, TAIWAN

As a sidebar on the Taiwan elections held today, the Washington Post ran a piece by Andrew Higgins featuring a lecture by Wang Dan on "why China, too, needs elections." What made this deemed newsworthy was apparently the presence in the audience of students from the mainland, some of whom "rushed to pose for a souvenir photograph with the man reviled by Beijing as a 'counter-revolutionary' agitator."

In the end, Beijing's preferred candidate in the Taiwanese presidential race, the incumbent Ma Ying-jeou, won handily enough, though with a smaller margin than last time. The details and some of the context can be found here.

The L.A. Times article quotes a People's Daily editorial which says, seemingly without any sense of irony, "Ma Ying-jeou's victory was the choice made by Taiwan's people."

HARVARD FOUNDED 375 YEARS AGO

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

FOUNDED

October 28, 1636

PRESIDENTS BOK, CONANT, PUSEY (L-R)

TOGETHER, THESE THREE HARVARD PRESIDENTS

REPRESENT ALMOST SIX DECADES

OF HARVARD'S 375 YEARS

JAMES BRYANT CONANT, 23rd President, 1933-1953

NATHAN MARSH PUSEY, 24th President, 1953-1971

DEREK CURTIS BOK, 25th President, 1971-1991 &

Interim President, 2006-2007

CASPAR WEINBERGER b. August 18, 1917

CASPAR WEINBERGER 

August 18, 1917-March 28, 2006 

"CAP" WEINBERGER 

as Ronald Reagan's 

Secretary of Defense 

Published in BUSINESS WEEK 

September 28, 1981 (p. 73) 

A product of San Francisco on the one coast and Harvard College and Harvard Law School on the other, with a stint in the Pacific Theater in World War II, Caspar Weinberger fairly quickly entered Republican politics in California.  In time he went to work for Governor Ronald Reagan in Sacramento and then for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in Washington.  He came to head the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); Office of Management and Budget (OMB); and Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). 

But Weinberger's career peaked when Reagan named him Secretary of Defense right at the outset of his presidency, and he stayed for almost seven years; only Robert McNamara before him and Donald Rumsfeld before and after him lasted longer in the office. 

As Nixon's OMB director Weinberger gained a reputation as "Cap the Knife."  As Reagan's head of the Pentagon he was anything but.  It turns out what he was interested in cutting was not budgets generally but social programs in particular. 

My direct impression of Weinberger at the time was that he was much more Cap in the Candy Store than Cap the Knife -- or that he was an enabler for Pentagon procurement sometimes run amuck. 

It is quite interesting reading now how a range of observers seem to agree with this assessment.  One of the most interesting comes from the Pentagon itself, and can be found here. 

There are many other notable points in this long career.   Besides his role the defense buildup in general (and what it did to the budget), Weinberger was influential in the Reagan administration on the Soviet Union, the missile build-up, and SDI ("Star Wars") and the many crises of the day, and nearly undone by the Iran-Contra scandal (saved by a pardon by President George Bush).  Some informative sources besides the DOD one cited above can be found here and here and here. 

(A side note:  As the Pentagon biography talks about Richard Perle's work with Weinberger, you may want to have a look here.) 

KARL DEUTSCH b. July 21, 1912

KARL W. DEUTSCH 

July 21, 1912-November 1, 1992 

PROF. KARL DEUTSCH 

at the podium 

teaching Gov. 20 

at Harvard 

Nicholas Kristof, when he was writing for the Harvard Crimson and not yet the New York Times, headlined Karl Deutsch as "The Best Political Scientist in the World."  The New York Times obituary (not written by Kristof) called him "An Innovator in Political Science." 

Colleagues at Harvard and in the political science field more broadly wrote long appreciative pieces on Deutsch, which can be read here and here (the latter includes an extensive bibliography). 

I had the pleasure of working with Karl Deutsch as a Teaching Fellow in Government 20, Introduction to Comparative Politics. 

 

ELLIOT RICHARDSON b. July 20, 1920

ELLIOT LEE RICHARDSON

July 20, 1920-December 31, 1999

ELLIOT RICHARDSON AT WORK

For a time in the seventies, Elliot Richardson was the Republican presidents' go-to-guy. Eventually, under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, he held four Cabinet posts: Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare; Secretary of Defense; Attorney General; and Secretary of Commerce.

This is still, apparently, an all-time record.

Richardson had won two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star in World War II; was graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School; clerked for both Judge Learned Hand and Justice Felix Frankfurter; served as U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts and Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts; then began his service in Washington as Under Secretary of State, the number two, before being appointed to the four Cabinet posts named above. (Details in the New York Times obituary, here.)

As the Pentagon's own official summing up of its eleventh Secretary of Defense put it, "When President Nixon selected Richardson as secretary of defense, the press described him as an excellent manager and administrator, perhaps the best in the cabinet."

But with a tenure of less than four months as SecDef, Richardson did not have much chance to prove his mettle there.

President Nixon moved him to Attorney General, to "handle" Watergate.

And so it happened that, as Richardson himself said, he became known for what he did not do: "I’m the only American I know of who is principally remembered for what he didn’t do—I didn’t fire Archibald Cox" -- as Nixon had ordered him to, when Cox tried to take his investigation of Watergate farther than Nixon wanted.

Thus, the Saturday Night Massacre of October 20, 1973: Richardson resigned; his deputy William Ruckelshaus also resigned rather than fire Cox; Robert Bork did the deed. (Yes, the one who was later "Borked.")

Interesting details of Richardson's memories of the event are to be found here, including the arguments Nixon tried to use to keep him from resigning.

Richardson became known as a "moral arbiter," and did go on to do more good deeds. He did not get elected to the Senate when he tried to in 1984.

He did win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American civilian honor, in 1998.

A note about the photograph: According to the Times, Richardson "once told friends that he spent his years at Harvard College mostly drawing cartoons for the Lampoon, the comedy magazine" (which did not stop him from graduating near the top of his class). Here he is, decades later, doodling while being interviewed: