The Deane Of Image and Reality

The morning of April 10, 1969, when administrators ordered police to arrest the hundreds of protesters occupying University Hall, most of the world saw only one image--the blood of angry young people spilled near the statue of John Harvard. Deane Lord saw that sight, but she saw another too--the men who ran Harvard grieving as they looked on. "There were grown men with tears streaming down their faces watching the police go in," Lord says. And so she didn't grow as bitter with Harvard as many; she recognized the bad things, but she recognized the good as well, and kept on loving the University. Which, considering her job, is fortunate.

As director of the University's public relations office, Lord is responsible for creating a positive image of Harvard: wise, but not overbearing; worldly, but not mercenary. Often her job is simple; 40 to 50 reporters call her each week, eager to quote a Harvard expert on the nature of some truth or another. But every so often someone asks about 1969, or about racism, or about investments in South Africa. "Expectations of Harvard's infallibility are just like Gatsby's problem," says Lord, recalling the F. Scott Fitzgerald lecture she used when she taught Expos here. "When Gatsby finally came face to face with Daisy, he was somewhat disappointed, and I see the same thing."

An occasional disillusioned reporter is not the only problem that Lord confronts in her spacious headquarters atop Holyoke Center. With her assistants, she must produce a weekly newspaper (the Gazette) and coordinate media coverage of events occurring throughout the University. In the morning she might be scrambling to get headlines for a professor proud of some scientific advancement, and in the afternoon be running interference for a scholar who claims his studies cannot be interrupted by chattering journalists. And then Lord might discover that it's Thursday, and her weekly column for the Boston Herald American is due. "I'm just a flack," the lady may say, but it isn't so.

Even when Lord is completely immersed in painting a positive portrait of Harvard for the world, she says, she never plays the huckster. "People believe perceptions, not always the facts," she explains, and perceptions of the school, she insists, are not always fair. Her public relations team is there not only "to express the administration's viewpoint, as they want it expressed" but also "to provide all of the facts...Harvard is not a monolith, so I'm trying to convey what the work or the action is and let the public's response take care of itself."

When Sports Illustrated led the charge in poking fun at the College several years ago for allowing a seminar on the football team's "multiflex" offense Lord was faced with the typical challenge of "closing the gap between perception and reality." It was no easy task convincing people that the multiflex, which happens to be a very esoteric game plan, was, nonetheless, not a major field of concentration for Harvard students. "The whole situation became symbolic of the decline in American liberal education," she says with a smile.

The Vietnam protests and the student strikes presented more serious questions about Harvard's image. Formally employed at the time as a Radcliffe PR person. Lord participated in an urgent drive to present Harvard's case to alumni and the media. The Gazette. Harvard's official weekly, was founded amid the tumult as an alternative to the student press, which was seen as radical. Today, 11 years after she assumed the helm of the main news office. Lord still sympathizes with those young people who lashed out at authority while Washington pursued the most unpopular war in the nation's history: "The universities were viewed as a place where students' voices would be heard, and certainly they were right."

But her professional instincts, as well as her dedication to an employer of 23 years, draw her back toward an explanation that exonerates Harvard. "My observation was that the anger was so high that the students were acting just to express their total frustration with the war in Vietnam," she says. And she defends the stunned administrators, who viewed aggressive student activism as "an assault on deeply held values," saying, "the academic community is ill-equipped to deal with irrational anger and violence. We live on discussion, consultation, and reason."

Sticky political issues collide with the pristine Harvard image set forth in news office pamphlets and fund-raising speeches even in periods of relative calm. "Things have been plain dull recently." Lord says, but her office has had to work hard on the continuing sagas of town-and-gown relations, and racial tensions on campus, as well as the occasional shenanigans of the school's professors. This spring, for instance, Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor Emeritus, put himself in the middle of an international war of words when he announced that nuclear-armed American ships have docked in Japan since the time he was ambassador to that country. "We really had to do some moving on that one," says Lord, shaking her head.

By and large, though, the Faculty give Lord's office an added touch of prestige. "My brothers and sisters in other press offices have to go out and beat the drums," she says. "Here, people come to us." Lord has, over the years, nurtured many relationships with professors here, and her colleagues elsewhere in the Ivy League speak admiringly of her ability to provide a spokesman for any subject and to make even the most ornery of ornithologists chirp willingly for the press. "She stands apart in her mastery of her resources," Fred Kneubel, director of public relations at Columbia University, says. "It seems she's almost one of them, the way they respect her."

Indeed, though, she is known for occasional fits of moodiness. Lord commands the respect and affection of many of Harvard's finest minds. "To the people who work for her and with her, her vitality, generosity, and warmth in this cool culture are all the more welcome." David Riesman '31, Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus, says. Relaxing in the Faculty Club dining room, she must interrupt herself regularly to greet friends, and one scholar unabashedly gives her a big hug and kiss. "She knows the place, gets around a lot, and reports the news very straight every time." President Bok says.

The object of all this academic affection ran her own class a few years back. Lord decided to teach Expos because she was distressed over the College's inability to train undergraduates in basic prose. She remembers that her most successful sessions included lectures from professional writers who shared their experiences with her neophyte authors. Gloria Emerson, who wrote moving accounts of the Vietnam war, brought many students to tears, Lord remembers, by describing the utter tragedy of her subject. "You have to figure out some way to move the kids," Lord says.

As a teacher herself, Lord feels qualified to classify Harvard professors as "a mixed bunch, not all wonderful." But she says she sometimes has to remind her Gazette co-workers to set aside personal opinions and emphasize their role as public relations staffers. "A big problem is containing some of the people who are really journalists," she says. "They want to hear the whine of the old bullets and have the freedom to whack it out with the city editor and expose things, but we are not out to expose corruption in the administration."

Felicity Beringer, now a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post, was one aspiring journalist who could not be broken to the PR regime, says Lord. Beringer "would go up to the fundraisers, and they would call me, and say, 'Deane, who is your newest employee? She makes us feel as if we are hiding something.'" Beringer agrees that she sometimes resented her role as a writer on a leash, pointing out that everything written for the Gazette must be cleared with University sources for publication.

As a result of its limitations, the Gazette can get tedious, and Lord is the first to admit it. She still giggles over a Lampoon parody of her paper: "page after page, a boring list of names--'The Gazette Announces...'it was excellent." Yet she expresses a good deal of pride in the publication as well: "We view ourselves as a very proper, mellifluous Bostonian: sensationalism is not our thing." The perfect University PR people are "writers who love Harvard, who love the written word, and love to do features," she says. Under Lord's direction, the Gazette has spruced up its appearance in recent years and now includes well-received photo features on the school and Cambridge, as well as pieces on interesting behind-the-scenes developments in the academic community.

Lord does far more than merely supervise in-house news releases. Before coming to Harvard in 1953 to write fund-raising copy, she worked for Time, Life, and Madamoiselle. She "still keeps her hand in it" every now and then with a free-lance piece, and then there's her column in the Herald American. Every week, Lord and her daughter, Mary, comment on a current issue, emphasizing the perspectives of different generations and the relationship between mother and daughter. "It's always loads of fun because we both love to write," the elder Lord says.

The page-three feature, which appears every Friday, began with a tragedy. While working in Washington after graduating from Radcliffe, Mary Lord was attacked and subsequently hospitalized. Deane took time off to be with her daughter, and while on a therapeutic trip to the Bahamas, they began talking in earnest about their different views of the world. They wrote down some of their thoughts and forgot about the whole business. A year later, though, Deane's friend, New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin suggested the Lord duo try to market the results of their tete a tetes. Today, the column is syndicated, even appearing in a Japanese daily.

Lord and her daughter frequently address the plight of women in America, and discuss the changing nature of American society. Deane usually takes a more reserved stance, defending the hard-working wife-mother and encouraging readers to respect women, regardless of their career achievements. She relies on a folksy style and low-key sense of humor to convey her theme. In a recent discussion prompted by the air traffic controllers' strike, she concluded:

When asked what would happen if all mothers went out on strike, a young father replied. "Why, what a crazy idea."

When pressed, the best he could come up with was. "Gosh, I guess maybe dads would have to scramble more eggs."

Another Humpty-Dumptyism, and we know what happened to Humpty Dumpty.

Women are routinely portrayed as rulers in the realm of "the unironed shirts, the dirty floors, and the unwashed dishes," but they are not to be scoffed at.

And this outlook, not surprisingly, surfaces in Lord's assessment of her own career. She frequently refers to her attempts at juggling marriage, children, and a career. In a piece on Sandra Day O'Connor, President Reagan's choice for the first female Supreme Court Justice, Lord commiserated with the jurist, writing. "I can guess at the hard choices that Judge O'Connor must have made to succeed."

Lord says there are topics--namely gun control and abortion--that she doesn't address. "I'd be willing, but I'm not sure the paper would welcome my views," she says. In a similar fashion, she often finds herself hoping that exciting media events will fall into her lap when Harvard administrators would just as soon see the Yard free of television cameras and sound crews. Last spring, when rumors "were hot and heavy" that Reagan might turn up to give a Commencement speech, Lord appeared on Channel 5 to comment on negotiations between Massachusetts Hall and the White House and she was clearly rooting for the big event to come off. "As usual, I would have loved all the press," she says, adding with a wink, "but I don't think my views were widely shared. Oh well."CrimsonNevin I. ShalitDEANE LORD