Richard Neustadt

When Ted Sorenson was staying in Leverett House last year, an undergraduate asked him what he considered the best way to prepare for a career in Washington. Should he major in government? Is there, in fact, a science of government that can be studied?

"No," Sorenson replied, "certainly not as they teach it now. I think law school will always be the accepted path-way, unless someone really changes the way government is taught."

A year later, Richard Neustadt has an order to come up with just such a change. As the first director of the Kennedy Library's Institute of Politics, his job is to create a program that "brings together the world of affairs and the world of ideas," as the order setting up the Library puts it.

That sounds innocent enough, but the order's vague verbiage has already set off a battle between rival schools of textual interpretation. "Keep the Institute away from Harvard," one party begs. "There is already enough academic comment on policy--let this be a place where real politicians can come to talk over their problems and get people excited about them."

There are, however, obvious problems in trying to bring active politicians to Cambridge, and obvious objections to limiting the Institute to a center for defeated or decrepit legislators. So another school argues for a basically academic approach to political problems, centered around the already existing facilities and Faculty of Harvard and Boston's other colleges. This side was pleased by the decision to make the Institute a part of the Graduate School of Public Administration.

Between the two parties, Richard Neustadt sits like a chief justice, and he seems well suited to the role. He chain smokes cigarettes or a belching pipe, and his words come out like an oracle's from behind a maze of smoke. But the oracle is indecisive at the moment. "You understand, I don't commit myself to anything for more than five minutes," he explains. "We're still gathering ideas."

Neustadt will have to bring together the purely political and the purely academic approaches to the Institute, and he is certain of how he will begin. "You have to build from the academic side out," he said last week. "I'm not against un-academic work, you understand. But if we don't persuade the scholars in the Boston area to create an academic core, we won't have a sufficiently solid base in this community.

On top of the scholars, Neustadt hopes to pour a stream of Fellows and visiting residents. He feels that the Institute ought to have some resident "junior fellows"--young men from journalism or from private life, not career government servants. Then there should be young men who have worked in politics and are likely to embark on elective careers--"the Bill Moyerses who don't happen to be counsel to the President," as Neustadt put it.

He turned to the difficulties of bringing active politicians to the Institute. It would be good to have visitors in residence "for their own and for the community's sake." Yale's Chubb Fellowship program, which brings politicians to New Haven for a week, might be one model. Then an older man putting together his memoirs might be brought to Cambridge "to get a Bundy-Stimpson volume by finding a Bundy to go with a Stimpson." Neustadt feels this could be done "twice a generation."

His voice--slow, carefully articulate in the manner of a lecturer--slowed even further as he shifted from the Institute's personnel to its subject matter. "The idea is to get academics to study governing. You have some things to offer them in an Institute like this--access, for instance. One of the reasons academic political science doesn't often charge into problems of actual operations and policy is that the executive departments have slid out of sight in the last 20 years. You'd have to pry some doors open, but if you did, you could get an infinite amount of stuff.

"Take a guy like Larry O'Brien. He's been in the middle of a quiet revolution in congressional relations. Given the information he has, you could produce something genuinely valuable."

Neustadt knows the workings of colleges and of politics from firsthand. His Columbia courses were among the most popular in the college; he also has a reputation as an outgoing, friendly teacher who enjoys inviting undergraduates to his house for dinner and talk. His only book, Presidential Power, established his scholarly reputation firmly. James Reston called it "the nearest thing we have in contemporary America to Machiavelli's The Prince," and John Kennedy is supposed to have been influenced by it. In Washington he helped organize the White House staff for John Kennedy and served as a Presidential adviser.

For the remainder of this term he will retain three homes, commuting between Harvard, Columbia, and Washington. In Cambridge he will work full-time on the Institute for a year; he does not plan to teach until the spring of 1966, when he will offer "200-level" course on the Presidency.

By then, he will have had to blend the two plans for the Institute. And no one will be able to tell. Richard Neustadt that politics and academics do not mix.