The Elephant In the Room?

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” declares Trinculo in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and that adage proved to be prescient as Lawrence H. Summers weathered the storm touched off by his January remarks on gender differences.

Amidst the ensuing uproar, many of Summers’ most vocal defenders—on and off campus—came from the right wing of the political spectrum. That marked a startling turnaround from a decade ago, when Summers, then a top official at the Clinton Treasury Department, was a favorite punching bag for conservative pundits.

But in the continuing evolution of Summers’ political persona, the University president has lost the support of many of his unlikely right-wing allies, who have expressed displeasure with his recent support for a $50 million package to bolster the status of women and minorities at Harvard.

The University president’s brief stint as an improbable conservative icon may be coming to a close.

WHIPPING POST TO POSTER BOY

As an economist, Summers has always been an unabashed free-marketer. But in the 1980s, he put forth proposals that placed him squarely on the left side of the political divide.

For instance, in 1985, he wrote in the New York Times that “the need for a tax increase has never been greater.” And during the 1988 presidential race, Summers served as a “kitchen cabinet” adviser to Michael S. Dukakis, the liberal Massachusetts governor. On behalf of the Dukakis campaign, Summers launched a series of scathing attacks on the first President Bush’s economic agenda, arguing that Democrats are “better for business.”

When Bill Clinton captured the White House four years later, Summers joined the administration as under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs. Never one to mince his words, Summers (in)famously accused Republicans who opposed the estate tax of “selfishness.” Reflecting on that remark, Summers says, “that was neither my first nor my last infelicitous statement.”

Summers quickly became a frequent whipping post for right-leaning writers like the Wall Street Journal’s Paul A. Gigot, who was perhaps Summers’ most caustic critic. While his columns mostly blasted Summers’ policy stances, Gigot also skewered Summers for his perceived arrogance. “Larry Summers is to modesty what Madonna is to chastity,” Gigot wrote in 1995.

That year, Summers served as Clinton’s point-man on a controversial effort to bail out the heavily indebted Mexican government. The Clinton administration bypassed the Republican-controlled Congress in the face of vehement GOP opposition to the bailout plan—a maneuver that didn’t endear Summers to Republicans on the Hill or their allies in the press corps.

Two years later, Gigot lambasted Summers for failing to anticipate the currency crisis that rocked East Asian economies. “Mr. Summers...helped to kill an all-Asia rescue that might have been an early firebreak,” Gigot wrote. “But this would have prevented Mr. Summers from playing the role of a modern ‘Gen. Douglas MacArthur’ in Asia...though this is unfair to MacArthur, who had a smaller ego.”

Asked by The Crimson last month about the origin of his vendetta against Summers, Gigot responded: “You’re making this seem like it’s personal, and it’s not...I think there’s probably thousands of people who would say that my descriptions are merely statements of fact.”

In the fall of 2001, when Gigot became chair of the Journal’s editorial page, he seemed to come around to join the Summers camp. Gigot’s change-of-tune foreshadowed a broader rapprochement between Summers and the right.

The pivotal moment came just over a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Summers, speaking at a Kennedy School of Government (KSG) awards ceremony for public service, criticized the event organizers’ failure to include members of the armed forces among the honorees.

“[I]t takes guts to get up in front of a crowd at the Kennedy School and tell them that ‘patriotism’ is a word ‘used too infrequently in communities such as this,’” the Journal opined.

Gigot’s editorial board acknowledged that this adulatory review of Summers’ speech might come as a surprise to some readers. “When Larry Summers turns to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, we suspect he doesn’t expect to find a whole lot of praise,” the paper wrote.

But Summers now says, “I’ve been doing things for the Republic long enough that little surprises me in the press.”

And by spring 2005, with pro-Summers voices such as Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse finding a home—and a platform—inside the Journal, applause for the University president had become par for the course on Gigot’s page.

“As a newspaper, we’re not in the business of holding grudges,” Gigot says.

A ‘CLOSET CONSERVATIVE’?

Back on campus, conservative-leaning faculty members viewed Summers’ 2001 appointment as University president with guarded optimism. “Almost anyone would have been better than [Summers’ predecessor Neil L.] Rudenstine,” says Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, the Kenan professor of government.

Another prominent conservative faculty member, Winthrop Professor of History Stephan A. Thernstrom, says he was “favorably surprised” by Summers’ early support for bringing the Reserve Officer Training Corps back to Harvard—three decades after the military program had been barred from campus during the Vietnam War.

But all the while, Summers remained a dyed-blue Democrat.

“I think I’ve had a fairly consistent perspective on things over the years,” Summers says. “I don’t think of myself as ideological.”

Federal Election Commission records indicate that since becoming Harvard’s president, Summers has made one political donation—$700 to a Democratic congressional candidate, Dan Wofford of Pennsylvania, who narrowly lost in a 2002 race.

Summers publicly advocates bread-and-butter liberal causes such as affirmative action and stem cell research. In March 2003, he co-authored a New York Times op-ed vociferously defending the University of Michigan’s use of racial preferences in its admissions process. And this year, he has emerged as a vehement critic of Bush administration prohibitions against scientific experimentation on human embryos.

“Larry Summers is not a closet conservative,” says University of California-Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong ’82, who served alongside Summers both on the Harvard faculty and at the Treasury Department.

FALLING OUT

In 2002, Jeff Jacoby, a conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, rallied to Summers’ defense during the University president’s spat with Cornel R. West ’74. (Summers had criticized West, then a star member of the school’s Afro-American studies team, for devoting too much time toward non-academic pursuits, including several prominent left-wing political causes.) And Jacoby commended the University president for his opposition to the Israel divestment movement, which Summers suggested was “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.”

But Jacoby now describes himself as “disillusioned” with Summers. “[I]t became apparent after a while that these were all one-shot deals, and that they were frequently followed by backtracking,” Jacoby writes in an e-mail.

In the wake of Summers’ controversial January remarks on women in science, conservative commentators rallied to Summers’ defense—with FoxNews host Bill O’Reilly (KSG Class of 1996) and bombastic radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, among others, weighing in on the University president’s behalf.

But after Summers disavowed his remarks and said he had “made a big mistake,” right-wingers’ ardor for the University president cooled.

“[H]e has become a serial apologizer and accomplished groveler,” lamented George F. Will, the Washington Post’s conservative columnist, in late January.

In recent weeks, the president’s $50 million initiative to bolster the status of women and minorities on campus has drawn further groans from the right side of the political spectrum.

“I was a little bit dismayed to see that President Summers is now buying back the good will of the Harvard faculty,” Gigot says.

“It could be said that his backtracking since the famous incident with the vomiting woman is a sign that his political liberalism is affecting his academic conservatism,” Mansfield says—in an apparent allusion to Nancy Hopkins, the MIT biologist who left Summers’ January speech because, she said, his comments left her physically ill. (Please see story, page 27.)

Nearly five months after his controversial remarks, Summers appears to have quelled the tempest that once swirled around Mass Hall.

But in doing so, he may be losing his unlikely coterie of conservative champions.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.