It's Truman, Say the Guesses, In Annual Degree Sweepstakes

This is Harry S. Truman's year in the honorary degree sweepstakes; no one can doubt it. Today, the tenth anniversary of the CRIMSON's first prediction that the former President would reap an LL.D. the annual guessing game about the most mystical of Commencement ceremonies once again begins.

You always have to guess; the canny Corporation which has the job of awarding the honoraries ("increasing the sum of human happiness," President Lowell called it, pithily) isn't telling, and even their wives and daughters don't know. But there are certainties: Truman; Adlai Stevenson, who for the first time in quite a while is not too controversial; Dean Rusk--or more likely Robert McNamara, who used to teach at the Business School.

The University now has so many friends in the government that it will probably have to pick them off according to seniority. Archibald Cox '34, Solicitor General, is therefore an excellent candidate; his boss, Robert F. Kennedy '48, and David E. Bell of the Budget Bureau are not. Still, one can't forget John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38, who both protested Harvard's giving too many degrees to Republicans, and who may both be ready for the honor themselves. Whizzer became Mr. Justice White too late.

Harvard likes educators, ripe or retiring, and will no doubt look to George Beadle of Chicago (a Nobel Prize winner and a reformer), Courtney A. Smith '38 of Swarthmore, T.C. Mendenhall (Smith), and the militant Millicent McIntosh (who recently left the Presidency of Barnard).

Looking inwards, it should seize upon Raphael Demos, retiring Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity; Erik H. Erikson, professor of Human Development; and Perry G. E. Miller, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature. All three have vastly increased Harvard's reputation, a service for which Harvard is ordinarily grateful.

Save Beadle himself, of all contenders for honors in the sciences Gerard Piel '37, publisher of Scientific American (and a member of the 25th Reunion Class) appears the strongest.

Theologians always tend to clothe themselves in honorary gowns, and since the great Swiss, Karl Barth, may still be in the country June 14, his name is a sound one. Rumor also spreads word of Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike. Among foreign diplomats Herve Alphand, Ambassador of France, seems a more than probable choice. Douglas MacArthur, unable to collect his degree on the last occasions of its awarding, will hopefully manage to come this year.

Sir Alec Guinness, of all people, will reach Cambridge at the proper moment, very possibly to hear his name read out in the Tercentenary Theatre. Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller '17 may be there too, the Frenchman to see his building, the Dymaxionist for his 45th Reunion. The composer Elliot Carter '30 ought to have a degree by now; so perhaps should Erich Leinsdorf, the BSO's new conductor.

It is also time for Robert Penn Warren, Sir Andrew Cohen of the British U.N. delegation, and Leon Kirchner of the Music Department. All the Massachusetts election candidates are too tricky: only Harry Truman is for sure.