On the Town With Kahn

E. J. KAHN has better reasons to be sick of Cambridge than most people around here, but he also has the same problem many of us face-of not being able to break away. After one year of residence and a year of writing. Kahn finished his Harvard book. It Can't Happen Here, only days before the police bust last April. Naturally he had to do an oppressive amount of rewriting, if only to preserve his own emotional well-being.

But some people, including Kahn, never learn. Kahn is now doing a piece for the New Yorker on David Durk, the New York cop recruiting at all the Big Name colleges. Last week, Kahn found himself lured back to Harvard once again to cover Durk in the Leverett House JCR.

Fascinated by police myself, I made a point of hearing Durk speak. Although I had noticed Kahn's photo on the back cover of his book, now called Harvard: Through Change and Through Storm, which I was reading at the time, I had no idea that E. J. Kahn was the man who sat down next to me and initially introduced himself as "a reporter," But when Durk came over to us and chatted just before he began his recruiting pitch, my suspicions arose that "the reporter" was not just any reporter. Kahn finally revealed his identity to me and started telling me about his story on Durk for the New Yorker. The following day we had a longer conversation.

Kahn came to Harvard in 1933 and entered the CRIMSON's spring competition during his freshman year. He dropped out of the comp to write for a rival daily, the Harvard Journal, which lasted 13 weeks. Among the Journal's founders were Joe Thorndike, now managing editor of Life, and former Dean of the College John Munro, who got so involved with the paper, according to Kahn, that he never passed his courses that spring and failed to graduate Harvard.

CRIMSON editors, traditionally vindictive, forbade Kahn or anyone else who had written for the Journal to have any association with the CRIMSON, Kahn, who had been editor of his high school paper at Horace Mann, had to sit out the next three years isolated from the daily journalism scene. (People say that history repeats itself and perhaps those on the wrong side of the journalistic fence right now should look back 35 years and sneak a gaze into their own futures.)

Kahn's history with the CRIMSON seems closely connected to the coverage he gave it in his book: he portrayed the CRIMSON as a paper filled with biased reporters wholly sympathetic with SDS. Kahn said that last spring the CRIMSON played up the radicals' stories too much and that he found the editorials particularly objectionalble. "I thought the CRIMSON that year was pretty rough on the University, but all in all I rather like the CRIMSON."

In APRIL of his senior year, Kahn got his first piece published in the New Yorker and during Easter vacation, the New Yorker let him report on a trial basis. They hired him and he has been a regular staff correspondent ever since. During World War H, Kahn was in the Army for four and a half years. He did about 50 pieces for the New Yorker in a series called "The Army Life," and, for his last two Army years, did public relations work in which he experienced "the difficulty of wearing two hats."

Kahn told me, "My generation is getting more radicalized in its attitude towards the Army. I was a great Army booster and friendly to the Army for years, but I don't have the same confidence for the military that I used to have. This comes largely as a result of the Vietnam War and Korean War," ROTC, Kahn said, makes for "more heterogeneous Army officers" but he has mixed feelings on whether it should stay at Harvard. He suggested a central non-campus place where students from Boston area colleges could fulfill ROTC requirements. "If you're going to have a civilian Army, it's a good idea to have civilian officers."

Kahn explained that he had had little to do with Harvard since his graduation until his 25th reunion where he "had a marvelous time and met a lot of classmates [he] had never known before." Since then, Kahn has added two more sons to Harvard, one who just graduated and another who is a junior. He is also a recently-elected representative of the Associated Harvard Alumni, which he feels, after attending two meetings, is "supposed to study what role alumni can or should play in Harvard's continuing existence."

I asked Kahn to assess the current political situation at Harvard in light of the various sets of disciplinary decisions this fall. Kahn said, "I thought it was very restrained. I think that's probably a good thing. I don't like people beating up other people. But I think it's good the Administration has come so far from tossing people out firmly. I don't like seeing people kicked out unless they are kicked out for acts of violence deemed criminal felonies." He said he would not define the verbal taunting of Dean May at the third University Hall takeover last semester as an act of criminal violence.

Kahn said he considers obscenities "a new language, not to be interpreted literally all the time. It's a kind of daring, kind of fashionable. It has a cathartic effect." He spoke about the issue of letting four-letter words appear in print: "The New Yorker -we've held the line." Kahn said the only time he used an obscenity was to describe the Widener posts which Yalies painted "FUCK HARVARD." "I was trying to lapse into contemporary rhetoric, too," he admitted, but plans not to use any obscenities in his future writings.

At the end of the month, Kahn is traveling to Asia for six or seven weeks to cover Expo '70. His itinerary will also include Taiwan, Hong Kong, Cambodia, and Thailand. Even though Kahn has made many trips to Asia and has written a book on Micronesia, he still has never been to Vietnam. "I hope to get in there for a day or two to satisfy my curiosity as to what Saigon looks like."

Kahn summed up the life of a Harvard student as "an existence I can only regard as amiable." But asked to predict the political future of the University, Kahn only said. "I make no more predictions, having been so gloriously wrong once."