25 Years of Over-Achieving

The Harvard Alumni officer smiles contentedly. If only they were all like '54. Rich, successful and generous to their alma mater, they are ideal Harvard ambassadors, men the College would like to believe typical of its graduates.

Yet many arrived in September 1950 unsure whether they would spend four uninterrupted years in Cambridge. The United States had entered into the second war in these young men's lives. Naturally they were worried; older brothers had died in World War II. The headline in The Crimson's 1950 Registration Issue read "University Plans No Drastic Changes To Meet World Crisis; '54 Should Escape Draft Call." And they did. No one in the Class of '54 died on a Korean battlefield. In fact, George S. Abrams writes in the 25th Anniversary Report of his class, "The worst effect of the Korean War for most of '54 may have been the time wasted taking non-substantive military courses."

John Updike comments on the reputation of his class as the "silent generation": "We didn't question the in- tervention (in Korea). The idea that nations now and then fought was an unquestioned assumption. There was no doubt that America was the strongest and happiest nation in the world and opportunities were what we made them."

Sen. John C. Culver (D-Iowa) agrees: "For most of us there was not a lot of dissatisfaction. We saw only a few issues requiring reform."

But Ronald P. Kriss, a senior editor of Time magazine, says, "This quiet generation business is a canard--we were not as quiet as were sometimes made out to be, just more discreet about our likes and dislikes."

Daniel Steiner agrees with Kriss, saying, "There certainly was heavy outwardly-directed political activity, but inward-directed pressures to change the University were much less." Steiner should know--he has handled student protests at Harvard as general counsel to the University and chief aide to President Bok.

The Harvard of the mid-'50s certainly fostered feelings of security and self-satisfaction. Harvard hired maids to clean student rooms and make beds until 1953. Schoolwork sometimes interceded in the quest for a good time, but several class members allude to the easy availability of the "gentleman's C." The early '50s were the golden age of the college prank. For example, two Harvard band members were arrested in October 1953 for staging an impromptu 3 a.m. concert on Yale's Old Campus. The most elaborate stunt may have been The Crimson's theft of the Lampoon's symbol, its beloved Ibis, in April 1953. The Crimson then donated the statue to the Soviet embassy in New York as a gift from the students of America to those of the USSR. The treasurer of the Lampoon called on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy to investigate this trafficking with the enemy.

But this prank laughs off a more serious theme of the class's years here. McCarthy scared Harvard. Charging that the faculty was "pink-tinged," he created an atmosphere of mistrust and precipitated internal struggles at the University. David L. Shapiro, professor of Law, says, "The fact of McCarthyism was our significant external concern--the only time we felt acutely the presence of the outside world."

For the most part, Harvard, led by President Pusey, who succeeded James B. Conant in 1953, refused to yield to red-baiting. Yet news stories like this one in a late 1953 Crimson were common: "In a defiant reply to charges made last week by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, President Pusey yesterday declared Harvard is 'absolutely, unalterably and finally opposed to Communism,' and so far as he knows there are no communists on the Harvard faculty." Earlier, an accusation by a former Central Intelligence Agency agent forced John K. Fairbank '29, then professor of History and now Higginson Professor of History Emeritus, to issue a statement saying he had "never been a communist, nor a communist sympathizer." Denials like this were frequent, but more accusations poured out anyway.

Harvard countered the charges with cautious defiance, but some class members recall times when administrators forced students to consent to the Harvard line on McCarthyism. Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Calif.) remembers being "upset when the Harvard administration was very accommodating to him [McCarthy]." Beilenson and other members of the Committee on Academic Freedom, a part of the Student Council, passed a motion of censure against the administration. But after McGeorge Bundy, then dean of the Faculty, met with members of the committee, it withdrew the censure. The Council disbanded the Committee on Academic Freedom a few days later because of that administrative pressure, Beilenson says.

Interest in McCarthy climaxed in the spring of 1954 during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. Shapiro speaks for many classmates when he says, "I spent most of the spring of my senior year in front of a television." Christopher Lasch, a University of Rochester historian and author, adds that the only time he could remember so many people watching television was during the 1951 World Series. Updike says, "We were outraged and amused by this kind of buffoon. Nixon seemed that way too. From the safety of Harvard, it looked like an aberration in American politics--a subject in which we had little interest." McCarthy's threat to Harvard began to disappear as the Class of '54 was leaving. Concerns of the student body returned to subjects from which its collective attention had never strayed very far.

The football team, always under intense undergraduate scrutiny, improved steadily as '54 grew older. As freshmen, the team won only once, but with the arrival of the backfield of Dick Clasby and the senator from Iowa, the Crimson went six and two in their senior year. According to a Crimson editorial, the victory over Yale in The Game--the first Harvard win in the Yale Bowl since 1941--"cast a self-satisfied glow over the College."

Whether or not football induced the glow, the Class of '54 saw Harvard, then as now, as idyllic home. The distinguished lecturers and guests--Bertrand Russell, T.S. Eliot, Konrad Adenauer, Archibald MacLeish's audiences spilled out into the Yard--came and went.

Class members who live in the Cambridge area now say the University and the community were much more separate. "You could just look at some one from a distance of 50 yards and say town or gown, except in the Wursthaus, where they seemed to come together," Shapiro says. By the time of their graduation, the threat of fighting in a war had disappeared and they left from Cambridge confident that their past was merely a prologue of better times ahead.

In a class full of success stories, one stands out particularly but not surprisingly. Edward M. Kennedy left Harvard for good in 1956 and at the age of 30 in 1962, filled his brother John's seat in the Senate. He has remained there since. His classmates are acutely aware of his membership in their ranks. In their Class Report statements some urge him to bring even greater renown to the class, while other write things like "President Carter has been a disaster for this country and I don't think our classmate's performance would be much better."

Culver joins Kennedy in the Senate and Rep. David R. Bowen (D-Miss.) is in the Congress with Beilenson. Updike and Lasch (freshman year roommates) are successful authors. In the academic world, there is Steiner, and George D. Langdon Jr. '54, president of Colgate University, as well as 74 professors, including three at Harvard: Shapiro at the Law School, Walter J. Kaiser, professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Phillip A. Kuhn, professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

William O. Taylor is publisher of the Boston Globe, and Richard Eder is theater critic of The New York Times.

One of the four blacks in the class was Thomas B. Wilson Jr., a recording executive who founded Transition Records with colleagues from WHRB and went on to produce three Bob Dylan albums and discover several groups, including the Mothers of Invention. He died in Studio City, Calif., on September 6, 1978. Another black member of the class, Frederick L. Brown, is a judge on the Massachusetts Court of Appeals.

There are executives like the chairman of the executive committee of Alexander's department stores, the president of Exxon Venezuela, the chairman of the Merrill Lynch International Banking group, and even the general counsel to the United States Treasury. According to a recent survey which 687 members answered, there are 100 lawyers, almost all partners in firms; 92 doctors; 76 bankers or investors, and 14 writer or editors, with nine in the clergy and nine more unemployed or retired.

Of course, success has not followed every member of the class. One died in 1965 while fighting in South Vietnam. Another had a heart seizure in 1974 and went into a coma until mid-1976. When he awoke, his wife had divorced him, and his business had collapsed. A member of the DuPont family in the Class of '54 filed the largest personal bankruptcy claim in United States history in 1971 and is now in the joke-writing business.

Nevertheless, they come about as close as possible to collective fulfillment of the American dream. More than half report incomes exceeding $50,000 annually, 13.8 per cent earn more than $100,000. The class reflects current trends in upper middle class living. Jogging, tennis and squash are the favorite sports, but apparently they are not favored with quite enough dedication: 41 per cent said they were overweight by more than five pounds. The class clearly believes in hard work, with 57 per cent putting in more than 50 hours per week--nearly 40 per cent never wish to retire.

As reunion week approaches, Harvard officials are pleased to note that 95.5 per cent said they were glad they were alumni. The fundraising goal for the 25th reunion is $1.6 million, for which an average contribution of $2300 from every living alumnus is needed. Yale's class of 1954 currently holds the record for any single class at any college with $1,636,000 donated. (1636 is the year of Harvard's founding and some officials suggested that Yale might have fudged the total a little to gall its ancient rival.) The Harvard Class of '54 had more than $1.3 million in the till in May, and fund-raising officials are confident that both the goal and Yale's record are within reach.

More than half of the original members of the Class of '54 will stride into Cambridge this week. Too young to suffer during the Depression or World War II, in college during the Korean War, too old to be young in the sixties, yet not old enough to have children caught up in that decade, they have made much of their position in American chronology. They left Harvard 25 years ago, like many other classes, confident that the future offered nearly unlimited possibilities. For the Class of '54, the future kept that promise.Sen. JOSEPH R. McCARTHY