'And Don't Think Young People Can't Be Evil'

From the moment 400 state police charged in to University Hall on the night of April 9, 1969 to end a takeover by several hundred angry students, the question was asked: why did he do it? That question comes up again and again, even today.

Why did Nathan Marsh Pusey '28, president of Harvard since 1953, opponent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and something of a hero among liberals in the early part of his career, call in police clad in riot gear to break up the takeover?

Pusey is not troubled by such questions.

The son of Iowa Episcopalians, Pusey, now 82, says he always guided his actions with the same clear principles. He had written his Harvard thesis on the laws of ancient Athenian democracy, and believed deeply that "force or violence" should not be tolerated.

"When I was against McCarthy and I was out in Wisconsin fighting against his election, and when I was calling in the police at Harvard, I was fighting for the same principles," he says.

So, on the night of the takeover, as Pusey conferred with deans about what to do, the decision was "a very simple one." In the years since, he has seen no reason to change his mind.

"I said, and the deans all said, 'What's going to happen? We've been waiting now for four years, hoping that some sanity was coming back, and instead of getting better, it gets worse. When they take over, this is the real test of strength. If they do this, and hold that building, and throw out all the people who belong there, and this goes on and on, and Harvard Yard just becomes an endless battleground for the rest of the year, that's the end of the academic year--that's the end of everything. So the only way to cope with the situation is to take the building back right now. Quick. And then take the trouble, whatever blame they want to throw--we'll do that, but let's get that done.'"

"We had all the state police lined up, ready to do that, so I said, 'Send them in.' They did. And they cleared it right out. That was the end of that."

"What we were trying to say is that in a university community we're not using guns, we're not using knives, we're not going to push people around or anything else," he says. "You have to sit down and discuss and reason with them. That was the only issue."

But what about the photographs of blood on the pavement outside University Hall, and the newspaper reports of police clubbing both demonstrators and members of the national press?

"I would put no trust in anything The Crimson said at that time. They were involved in this thing with these radicals."

"Of course, lots of these people wanted to get hurt," Pusey says. "They were trying to act like they were being brutalized, but Dean Ebert [of the Medical School] was there, and he could tell you there was no brutality of any kind. I think there was one girl that jumped out the window and may have broken an arm or something like that, but I don't think anybody else ever went to the infirmary. The reports of violence were just not true. There was no violence at all. The police just pushed you, they just trucked them right down the stairs and out...It was done very quickly, and we were all sitting watching it from my house, from the window."

"Our idea was to get it done without anybody being hurt," Pusey says. "And that was why [the police] sent in these specially trained people, because they were aware that our concern was that people should not be hurt. Get them out of there, but don't hurt them. And that was done, despite the things that were said. They did a good job. I was proud of the way they got them out. They were not hurting anybody. And they did it so darn quickly, too."

To Pusey, the protesters' specific demands had little relevance; it was "scholarship and reason" themselves that were at stake, as he would later write. Through most of his presidency, Pusey had proudly watched as Harvard helped guide post-war America into a "golden age." But in recent years, many at Harvard had harshly attacked Pusey's most cherished goals and accomplishments. Some had even called for revolution.

Although he says he never lost his love for the Harvard community, Pusey had grown increasingly disturbed by what he saw as the gullibility of leftist students and faculty.

"They were being manipulated by a little group of extremists who mistakenly thought that the world was coming to an end and there was going to be a revolution and they were going to lead it," he says. "You could almost say these people were crazy."

The University Hall takeover, Pusey maintains, was orchestrated by "not more than five or six people who had adopted this Marxist-Leninist business."

"These were not innocent little kids," he says. "These kids were rough. Not the majority of Harvard students--I'm talking about the radical bunch of leaders. When the cops came [into University Hall], they all got out, and let the other people get arrested. They were just evil people. And don't think young people can't be evil. They can be as evil as any adult. There was a little bunch of those people who were simply wicked."

"The strangest thing from my point of view is the way that this feeling about the United States being a rotten country was that the people responsible for that were universities," Pusey adds. "This I find absolutely shocking, that anyone could have been at Harvard and come to an idea like that. I thought it would have to be a damn fool."

But Pusey's greatest frustration came from faculty members who were reluctant to discipline student activists or denounce their beliefs.

"I thought they were old enough to know better, but a lot of them believed the kind of ballyhoo that the students were shouting, or at least felt sympathetic that young people should be permitted to make their errors," he says. "That was what was really hard to cope with, almost impossible to cope with."

The months following the takeover, in which students and faculty denounced the police intervention and called for the president's resignation, were a psychologically difficult time for many administrators. Pusey, who also drew heavy criticism in the late 1950s for his statements that Harvard was a "Christian" community, never understood why many had come to see him as a reactionary.

The former president says it "makes him sick" that the student activists' versions of the events of 1969 often portray him as a villain. "But it doesn't make any difference, because someday, the historians will straighten all this out," he adds.

Pusey remembers 1969-70 as an academic year nearly as troubled as the previous one.

"The worst thing there, of course, was the time when the gang came up from Boston and smashed all the windows of all the stores in Harvard Square," he says. "It was the most horrible thing you can imagine--glass, destruction all over, and why anybody in their right mind would do that--I mean, I thought people had gone crazy."

"I didn't have any personal life apart from Harvard," Pusey says. "Harvard was my life. And I was saddened and hurt by the kind of behavior that was going on there at that time."

It was in the spring of 1970 that Pusey announced his early retirement, a move he says was not prompted by student unrest, but rather by the impending departure of several members of the Harvard Corporation. He left hoping that the University's troubles were nearing an end, that soon "there was going to be some sanity."

"I thought by 1970-71, my final year, that everything was quiet, and it was over, and Harvard could get back to business," Pusey says. "That was a utopian thought, because feelings were so strong that they were not going to return to normal in a hurry. The faculties were divided, with real personal animosities built up."

"Real dislikes, almost hates, were built up within the faculty between the people supporting what I call the University position and the people supporting the radical position," he adds. "People who were mad at me for having called in the police, and people who thought that I did the right thing. And that wasn't going to disappear quickly. It may not even have disappeared to this day."

Pusey and his wife now live in a modestly furnished apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he has been involved in the work of several charitable causes. Throughout his first years in New York, he says, he was often stopped on the street by Harvard alumni wanting to console him for what they saw as the disaster that had befallen his presidency. Once again, Pusey felt misunderstood.

"Here were all these right-wing people adopting me, which made me even more unhappy, because I'm not a right-winger," he says. "I was the University president for 18 years. All but two of those years were just pure joy and happiness. I think I was the luckiest man that ever lived. I had a wonderful situation, friendly and supportive people--why should I feel sorry? But here were these people all feeling sorry for me."

But if Pusey does not feel sorry for himself, he feels sorry for the way the world has changed in the years following the tumult of 1969--a year which marks in his memory the point when the nation and the University he loved succumbed to the pressures of a harsher, more violent age.

"One of the things that I'm saddest about is that up until that time, we didn't have all the doors locked, and all the chains on things you see now at Harvard," Pusey says. "It just makes me sick to see what Harvard has been like since 1969, and what it was like before. It was an open place."

"Since '69, if you're in New York City, everything has to be locked up...I was held up by a Black yesterday."

"All of this comes since '69," Pusey says, convinced that he was there when the tides changed. "Since you were born, really--you never knew what a pleasant world it was before then. After [World War II], and before all this trouble came, was the period when all of the forces were creative, and helping higher education. That's when the American universities, about 20 of them, became the great institutions in the world. It was a real joy to have been identified with."

"It all kind of went out when the Kennedy boys got shot, and Martin Luther King was shot, and when that Vietnamese war dragged on and on, and everything got worse and worse," Pusey says. "Now we've had these eight years of Reagan, and this tremendous debt and so forth, and whether or not this thing's going to get straightened out in another 10 years I don't know."

Still, Pusey says he has not lost his faith in the University he has loved since he arrived in the Yard in the fall of 1924.

"Harvard is just great," he says. "It righted itself; it just went through a troubled sea, with a lot of people in the ship that were making it go this way and that way. And that was just something that had to be lived through. We have lived through it, and it's gone. And I think sanity has come back."