Treasury Secretary Had Meteoric Ascent

When Lawrence H. Summers wakes up on Saturday, he'll be out of a job, his eight years on the Clinton Administration's payroll over. But now the outgoing treasury secretary may now have a shot at another prestigious position: the presidency of Harvard.

As late as four weeks ago, says a Clinton administration colleague, Summers claimed he had no interest in the Harvard presidency. But Summers remains one of the leading contenders on a short list of 30 to 40 candidates winnowed from the overall field of 400 nominees--and those under consideration routinely deny their interest.

Though he has spent the last eight years as a public servant and policymaker, Summers is a highly regarded academic and has the all-important Harvard connection--a prior affiliation with the University that makes him more appealing as a candidate and gives him backers on the inside. And with his extensive experience on the national stage, colleagues think Summers might be the man with the vision to use Harvard's bully pulpit to its full advantage.

Now his future depends on another kind of fickle presidential politics:

the Harvard-style politics that will determine whether he will be offered the university's top post.

The Economist

Summers, who is married with three children, is the son of two economists and the nephew of two more. He was born Nov. 30, 1954 in New Haven.

He attended MIT, where he too studied economics. After graduating, he moved up the river to become a graduate student in economics at Harvard. In 1982, he completed his doctorate. Only one year later, at 28, he became the youngest tenured professor in Harvard history.

Over the next decade, Summers taught undergraduate economics classes, advised dissertation students and conducted research in areas involving both applied and theoretical economics. During that time, students and colleagues say, Summers left his mark on the careers of scores of young economists.

"There are almost no distinguished applied economists between the ages of 33 and 43 who didn't have Larry Summers as a mentor in some way," says Professor of Economics Lawrence F. Katz, who did graduate studies under Summers.

Students who impressed Summers as undergraduates became his dissertation advisees, and many followed him to Washington.

Bradford J. Delong '82, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, met Summers when a fellow economics student introduced him.

Delong was Summers' first dissertation student and became a close friend. When Summers went to the capital, Delong says, "I went along as a spear carrier."

Summers' chief of staff, Sheryl K. Sandberg '91, also met her future boss at Harvard: she wrote her thesis under his supervision.

One of Sandberg's predecessors at Treasury, Sylvia M. Mathews '87, says mentoring is one of Summers' greatest strengths, a valuable asset for a presidential contender, especially at the College--an area of particular concern for the search committee.

But Summers' former students remember their relationships with Summers at Harvard for more than the influence he had on their careers. It was at Harvard that many colleagues got their first sense of the breadth of Summers' intellectual pursuits.

"He was incredibly energetic. You'd run into him in a hallway, and he would talk and talk," Katz says.

Summers' interests extended well beyond economics.

"Larry gets incredibly enthusiastic about an idea," Delong says. "It's not just economics--the meat and fish of what he does--he can be interested in any idea. He has a tremendous omnivorousness for ideas."

The Administration Insider

Summers' interest in the broader aspects of intellectual discourse continued at the World Bank, where he became a vice president and chief economist in 1991, and then at the Treasury Department.

"I worked very closely with Summers, not only because of his central role in the administration, but because he was the most driving intellectual force in the Clinton administration," says Michael Waldman, a chief Clinton speechwriter.

Summers quickly became an administration insider, the only Cabinet secretary invited to the senior staff meetings every morning.

"He was someone who was a real source of ideas and perspectives far beyond the narrowness of his field," Waldman says. "We [at the speechwriting office] wrote two months worth of speeches off of my notes from one meeting with Larry."

Sandberg says that Summers "was very influential in decisions involving other causes he was interested in."

Mathews, now the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, says one example is Summers' work with the Global AIDS Vaccine Initiative--an issue that falls more in the realm of science than Treasury.

Mathews served as chief of staff at the Treasury Department while Summers was deputy secretary. Summers steadily rose up from the posts of deputy and under secretary until he was handpicked by outgoing Secretary Robert Rubin to be his successor in the spring of 1999.

The Cabinet-level post of treasury secretary sits at the top of a 140,000 person-strong bureaucracy, which includes the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the Secret Service, as well as 40 percent of federal law enforcement.

It was in his role as secretary, colleagues say, that Summers gained the managerial skills they felt would serve him well as Harvard's president.

Summers was able to motivate his deputies in an atmosphere which often made it difficult to get things done.

"I think the Treasury Department is like a university in that it is not a place where you bark out orders and expect bureaucrats to fulfill your whim," Waldman says.

Summers succeeded despite this challenge, Delong says.

"He was extremely good at making people who work for him feel valued," Delong says. "He could get the most out of them."

But Summers was also good at making it look like he was disappointed.

"Often people had done their best, but he assumed that they could have been doing better," Delong says.

The Candidate

Summers' stint away from academics, colleagues with Harvard connections say, is what makes him a good candidate for the Harvard presidency.

They see him as a candidate who combines the intellectual credentials of his career as an economist--he was the first in his profession to win the National Science Foundation's top prize for scientific achievement--with the managerial aptitude he gained in the administration.

Elaine C. Kamarck, senior policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore '69 and a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says that in some ways the structure of the Harvard administration resembles the structure of the Treasury Department.

"Like the Treasury Department, Harvard is composed of its own little empires," she says, adding that the business school, the law school and the medical school would be analogous to the IRS, ATF and the U.S. Mint.

When one branch of that structure wasn't working as it should have been, Summers acted aggressively to fix it.

Summers played a decisive role, Sandberg says, in initiating IRS reform.

"Larry was the first person to really recognize the problem," she says. "He said it was a time for a change, and saw the change through."

Summers also led the department's search to bring in a new head of the IRS.

He was most effective in making these kinds of personnel decisions, Waldman says.

"Larry was excellent at reaching into the younger ranks, the younger civil servants, to find minds," Waldman says.

University President Neil L. Rudenstine is known for spending long hours on meticulous searches. Delong also says that Summers' ability to pick good people is one of his greatest strengths.

"For the part of the job that is spent in ad hoc committees making personnel decisions, he's the best you can possibly get--probably one of the best in the world," Delong says.

Equally strong, says Delong, would be his ability to plan for the University's future. Summers, he says, is a central thinker about the emerging New Economy and is deeply interested in the ramifications it will have for the world.

"In planning for the future of the University, Larry would be again among the best of the world. He's someone who can move resources into promising new areas, as opposed to merely following behind," Delong says.

Waldman remembers Summers' enthusiasm as they worked late one night on a speech Clinton was to give at a conference in Geneva two days later. A line in the speech mentioned how the global economy should lift people up.

"He had a passion for making this vision a reality," Waldman says.

Liabilities

Summers' post as a Cabinet secretary has provided him with valuable managerial and policy experience--but in the world of academia, political affiliations are sometimes a liability.

He is the only big-name Washington insider still known to be on the search committee's list--Clinton and Gore failed to make the first cuts--and his time in Washington was not without controversy.

The Asian financial crisis and the Mexican bailout were both high-stakes political controversies that played out during Summers' time as a top policymaker.

But Kamarck says none of these controversies hurt him personally.

"He took a lot of grief, but no personal hits," she says. "When someone can come through something like the Mexican bailout without permanent scars, it's testament to their ability."

Kamarck agreed that the University president should not be an overly political figure, but pointed out that of the cabinet secretaries, the secretary of the treasury is one of the least partisan positions anyway.

Mathews says that knowing how to play politics could be an advantage in a university environment of diverse individuals.

"He has been in places where you need to make those kinds of judgements," she says.

--Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.