Harvard Hates LeBoutillier

IT'S FUNNY thing about Harvard. Just when you think you finally understand how much the Harvard image is exploited in American mythology, the sheer power of the myth reveals itself in yet another way. Just when you think you've finally seen it all--The Paper Chase as a T.V. show--John LeBoutillier '76 turns up in news magazines and signing books at the Coop (even if it was only a couple of copies).

If this book had any other title--say, The Personal Views of a 23-Year-Old Student, or John LeBoutillier's America, or even the subtitle: The Odyssey of a Born-Again American--a private printing might have run off 20 copies: 10 for the author's parents and 10 for aunts and uncles in Orange County, California, or some other reactionary region. As it is, the book is prominently displayed in reputable bookstores and reviewed in reputable publications. That means others--including other reviewers--are forced to take account of drivel they could otherwise throw in the circular file with the rest of the crank mail.

If LeBoutillier has to write about Harvard as a liberal/radical enclave, he could at least do it with virulence (a la Joe McCarthy's speech about "the Kremlin on the Charles") or with wit and style (a la William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale). Instead, he loads us down with sixth-grade platitudes and an embarassing series of distortions.

The beauty of LeBoutillier's writing and the logic of his argument about Harvard's radical bent can be summed up in one passage. John is graduating from Harvard.

As my turn came, I was escorted by two Ph.D's up to the platform. I climbed the steps. The diploma was handed to me. I was thinking of my family and how proud I knew they were. And I was so proud of them for all they had done to achieve this. Then, instead of congratulating me, Dr. [Warren E.] Wacker simply said, "Now John, if you'd only move a few steps to your left." It took me more than a moment to realize he was not talking about my physical position on the platform.

LeBoutillier's Harvard is a frightful place, inhabited by the likes of--God forbid--Charles Warren Professor of History Frank Freidel, that "liberal" who dared to interject a personal opinion about welfare into a lecture on FDR. The author is outraged. He is also surrounded. His sophomore history tutor, he says, is a Marxist. The tutor is quoted as uttering such realistic phrases as: "Jesus, how heavy, how heavy, how incredibly relevant and heavy," and, better tailored to LeBoutillier's needs: "America the Beautiful my ass. It should be America the home of fascism."

Like all of LeBoutillier's radicals, the tutor is a hypocrite: he wears Bass Weejuns and has a rich wife. Martin Peretz, now editor of the New Republic, is cast in much the same light--as a rabid McGovern supporter who also happens to be wealthy. "I had to laugh out loud at the irony of the situation," the author writes. In truth, of course, Peretz never supported McGovern, but that is almost beside the point. The Dick and Jane analysis would be pathetic by any standard.

LeBoutillier, it seems, is a rather sheltered sort. "In a physical sense, the 'Square' appears normal." he writes. "However, under no circumstances can the term 'normal' be applied to Harvard Square." It's all part of the same phenomenon. Gays make him "shiver." Hare Krishna are hypocrites.

The situation is not much better on campus. He somehow remembers a pusher going door to door in Kirkland House selling heroin--curious, in retrospect, considering you can't even bum a cigarette in Kirkland House nowadays. During punching season, he is shocked by a conversation with Porcellian Club members, who tell him he must learn to party if he joins. He declines. He bemoans the decadence symbolized by Linda Lovelace's 1974 visit to Harvard.

But after about 50 pages, LeBoutillier forgets about Harvard, and the book's title--a misnomer to start with--drops from sight. What we get instead, is John LeBoutillier's philosophy on government, as derived from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Harvard history courses at their most simplistic level, and his senior thesis--which had something to do with the origins of the Republican Party.

LeBoutillier is disillusioned. As an undergraduate, he had offered his help to a former POW running for the Senate against George McGovern in South Dakota. The college kid raises $250,000 for the ex-POW and all of a sudden LeBoutillier is a hot prospect for both the Ford and Reagan fund-raising teams--or so he says. But he finds the Republican Party has "lost its soul." What the party and the country needs, he believes, is another Homestead Act--to return Americans to the land and their families; to recapture the spirit of 1862 without having to give 162 acres to each person.

For all his right-wing rhetoric, the proposals contained in the author's "New Homestead" border on the pinko. He believes in Metropolitan government, re-investment in the inner city, and health care for all who can't afford it (although not paid for by the government--figure that out).

LeBoutillier dislikes Harvard enough to write a book about it but not enough to leave. He returns to the Business School, where he identifies greed and a "Big Business Mentality." That even makes some sense, until he tries to connect it to the "Liberal Mind" he knew as an undergraduate.

None of this would be so painful if it was rip-off plain and simple. The rip-off, however, is a righteous one. Harvard may in fact hate America but it hates this guy a lot more.