Hey Powerhouse.
Making Their Argument: A Weekend with the Harvard Policy Debate TeamIn 1962, Harvard debate coach Dallas Perkins’ father clowned the entire state of Texas. At the time, the state was swept up in a minor temperance movement that gave towns the power to set their own alcohol laws. Dallas’ family lived on a cluster of farms outside the bone-dry quarters of Abilene in northern Texas, part of Interstate 20’s Bible belt. In a fit of entrepreneurial brilliance, Dallas’ dad filed a motion to incorporate his farmland into a legally recognized municipality. The town of Impact, Texas, population Perkins family and about 30 neighbors and friends, was born. Not long after they tallied the results of a farcical, smug-faced vote on whether to keep up prohibition or “go wet,” Impact was on the map. The Perkins family found themselves at the helm of three multi-million dollar liquor superstores, soon serving every thirsty Texan tomcat within a hundred-mile radius. The Perkins and their associates had gotten rich off the small print, establishing the most successful watering hole north of Dinosaur Valley.
Forty years later, Dallas is running his own gang of outlaws, using the tricks his father taught him to hustle Harvard’s rival debaters straight under the rug. Having learned from the best, it’s no surprise that he’s considered by many to be the greatest debate coach in the country. Under his watch, the Harvard team has climbed to the very top of the supremely weird world of competitive policy debate. I spent a weekend with the team back in February, flying to my hometown of Chicago to follow them around at the last regular tournament of the season.
Before I actually saw it, I associated debate with briefcases and ties. I expected official procedure, strict rules and a swarm of snobby political buffs pretending to be lawyers. I also came expecting drugs. Mountains of coke, primarily—so much of the stuff that you could run a slalom. The Crimson actually footed the bill for my trip under the condition that I find some. These debater kids talk inhumanly fast, I was told, and the only way they can stay focused is by doing lines and taking meth. Unfortunately, my expectations did not pan out. But despite the absence of cocaine, I found a universe unlike any I’d ever seen before—a community where every college freshman in sight could speak at an incredible 600 words per minute, weaving the subtle ins and outs of theorists like Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Levinas into complex arguments about nuclear proliferation and toxic emissions. I found a world where college students, paired off into two-person teams, woke up at six every morning, frantically collected evidence for their arguments, and then ran four debates a day before hitting the bar for drinks with their judges.
Hosting the showdown was Northwestern University, where Harvard would be competing against 80 other colleges from across the country in the high octane three-day meltdown known as the annual Owen L. Coon Memorial Debate Tournament.
The topic for the year—and this weekend—was energy policy, and the stakes were enormous. Harvard’s top team, Elliot S. Tarloff ’05 and Michael K. Klinger ’05-’06, would be battling not only for a top spot at the Owen Coon but also for the prestigious Copeland Trophy, an award given out at the end of every season to the team with the best record and the most style. The Copeland is the holy grail of every debate season. Northwestern won it in 2003.
Now, they were up once again, with one more win than Tarloff and Klinger. But because of a traditional debate taboo against competing on your home turf, Northwestern did not register at the Owen Coon, leaving Tarloff and Klinger one last shot at the big prize before Tarloff graduates.
“The word on the street, and I’m not saying this is my prediction, is that Klinger and Tarloff are more popular and that we, Harvard, are more popular than Northwestern,” Dallas told me before the tournament. “They’ve won a lot, more than any other debate team in the nation. People would like to see somebody else win [the Copeland]. A lot of people are wishing us good luck.”
There was more riding on this competition than usual, in other words, but Klinger and Tarloff, collectively known as “KT” when they’re debating, handled the pressure with a cool confidence.
Klinger, the shifty-eyed, quick-thinking co-captain of the team, is known only by his last name to both his friends and his enemies. The general consensus on him, according to his teammates, Dallas, and pretty much everybody else I talked to, is that he’s a lazy bastard who could become one of the best debaters to ever play the game if he’d just put forth a little more effort. Klinger, 21, has one more year left on the Harvard team because he was kicked out of school after his freshman year for ditching too many Expos classes.
He’s still number one with a bullet though, and his partner Tarloff, a fresh dresser and an unlikely womanizer on the side, is just as good. Together, they’re basically unstoppable, and in the grand tradition of debate, they’re both most likely destined for positions of great power. People say that the debate community breeds more politicians and public policy makers than any other college activity—student government included. Top debaters are frequently scouted and recruited into high state positions, and several recent alums currently serve in the Department of Homeland Security and the C.I.A. Sure, a lot of debaters start their careers coaching and judging college debate, but more often than not, it’s just a temporary measure before law school or government.
According to Daniel E. Luxemburg ’07, a blockmate of mine who also happens to be the Harvard team’s most promising rising star, the race for the Copeland has only been as close as it is this season once in the last 20 years.
The Owen Coon was the last tournament of the year that would be considered in the deliberations—set to take place several weeks later among a group of national debate committee higher-ups—and if Klinger and Tarloff didn’t win, they would have no chance.
DAY ZERO: “MODERNITY IS THE HOLOCAUST"
I flew in to the city separately from the rest of the team, taking a two-hour train out from O’Hare Airport to Evanston, where the rest of them had already arrived and packed into their seventh floor suite in the luxurious Hotel Orrington.
When I got there, I found a storm of debaters teeming by the door with piles of luggage and plastic tubs full of files (tubs packed with a semester’s worth of research are a debate mainstay). A lot of them looked up at me as I walked in, probably wondering what team I was on and why I was carrying a big camera around my neck. I stood in the elevator with a frail looking bald man, and when he asked me who I was with, I said Playboy.
Upstairs, I found Luxemburg and his debate partner, Christine A. Malumphy ’05, the team co-captain, preparing their arguments for the next day with a skinny, fresh-faced guy with a hammer and sickle tattoo named Nate Gorelick. Gorelick is an assistant coach—a 24-year old NYU grad who runs an after school debate outreach program for inner-city kids in New York. He reminded me of the Wolf from Pulp Fiction, lying there on his king size bed and calmly barking instructions at Luxemburg and Christine.
“We’re gonna throw a pie at octos,” Nate says to Christine from his bed, in the characteristically foreign language that only other debaters can understand. “Because if there’s anything I learned during my entire undergraduate career, it’s that modernity is bad. Modernity is the Holocaust.”
The Harvard team employs a total of five assistant coaches: Nate and four others, who work mostly with Klinger and Tarloff, developing technique and logic and helping them gather the enormous amounts of evidence they need to be adequately prepared for a round. Dallas and second head coach Sherry Hall employ them for about $15,000 a year each. Some of the assistants work with the team year-round, while others, like Nate, only come down for tournaments. They’re all in their mid-twenties, they’re all friends, and they all remember each other from their days on the college circuit.
Klinger, Tarloff, and the pair’s four coaches were staying elsewhere on the seventh floor, all of them working and reading and discussing the next day’s strategies. The other four kids, freshmen Eli O. Anders ’08 and Alex N. Harris ’08, and sophomores Maya E. Frommer ’07 and Nikhil D. Mirchandani ’07, were staying in the next room over, and although they debated just as much as KT and Luxemburg-Malumphy, I didn’t get to see much of them at all. Their golden age, anyway, won’t arrive until next season at the earliest.
When we left the hotel for dinner around six in the evening, Dallas was waiting at the front door with a furious expression on his face. He grabbed Luxemburg by the shoulders as soon as he saw him and screamed in his face for being late. “We need to have a serious conversation,” he said. “You are always being late for everything. Do me a favor, out of respect, and be on time for something at this one tournament.”
It was the first time I’d ever seen him in person, and he was terrifying. Enormous, wild-eyed, and grizzly, he spoke with a predictably thick Texas accent. As he seared his gaze onto a very scared Luxemburg, I imagined Dallas coaching our embattled university president, which he did for four years as a law student when Summers was debating for MIT. Dallas told me that Summers’ biggest strength was his ability to listen for his opponents to say the wrong thing and “exploit it to win.”
That Friday evening, pairings for the next day’s match-ups were posted and every member of the Harvard team retreated into their rooms to plan their strategies. I didn’t feel right bothering Klinger and Tarloff in their room yet, but according to the schedule, Saturday would not be presenting them with any real challenges. There were only a few teams that could beat them, all told, and the chances of being matched against them in the first round were small. Preparation was still required, however, so the gang set diligently to work.
There was a lot to do. Between the eight of them, the debate team was traveling with just under 20 plastic tubs full of research they had done over the course of the season. Since tournaments only happen once every few weeks, that research is really the heart of the debate lifestyle, and it’s no exaggeration to say that debaters do more of it than any other student in college. In the weeks before a competition, for example, one member of the Harvard team is responsible for combing Lexis-Nexis for every article published in the United States that mentions President Bush or Congress. Because of a relatively new emphasis on philosophically framed arguments, debaters have to know Marx, Weber, Kant, and Plato inside and out as well as the specific dates, aims, and authors of every relevant piece of legislation floated in the Senate.
In other words, debaters are smarter than just about anyone else their age, and they know more than you about everything.
DAY ONE: “DEATH DRIVES A CHEROKEE.”
On Saturday morning I followed Luxemburg and Christine to their first round—a gimme, more or less, against a minor team from Florida.
Clumsily carrying bagels and fresh-squeezed orange juice, we entered the Orrington’s Mulford conference room, where a fat kid in a vertical striped shirt had set his things down on one of the tables. Neither Christine nor Luxemburg, both of them intensely focused and predictably nervous, made eye contact with him as they set up their base at the table across from him.
Meanwhile, I went out looking for action in the halls of the Orrington. I quickly found it by the window, where a rosy girl from the Florida team was sitting on her knees and practicing her argument out loud. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone speak “debate-style,” and the sheer speed and incomprehensibility of her machine-like chatter was mind-blowing. I could make out a word here and there, but to follow her sentences—let alone the progression of her argument—was positively impossible. She sounded like an auctioneer, shrieking violently every 15 seconds like a drowning victim to catch her breath. People walked past her, but no one seemed to take note of her disturbing behavior except me. Apparently, this was completely normal.
“You do it fast, so you don’t pass out,” she told me when she was done practicing. “The idea is that if you talk fast, you can say more arguments.”
Debaters are trained in this fast talk from a young age. Luxemburg said that one of the most gruesome parts of training, which usually occurs at high school debate camps over the summer, is an exercise in which one must lodge a pencil under his tongue and attempt to enunciate as clearly as possible using only his lips. It builds speed, Luxemburg said, and it trains you not to move your mouth too much.
Watching the Florida round, I finally got a sense of how a debate actually works. At the start of the ordeal, each team is allowed an opening argument (either an “affirmative” or a “negative,” depending on what you’re assigned in the draw) and then a chance to question the other team in an informal, three-minute cross examination. These are the most fun, the part of the show where rock stars like Klinger get a chance to flex their argumentative muscles and tear apart their opponents. Following the first set of back and forths, each team is granted a rebuttal speech and a final closing argument. Energy policy has been the topic all season, but since every debate team takes a unique approach to the question, no two rounds are ever the same.
From where I sat, the Florida debate sounded more or less like a normal conversation played in fast forward. The fat kid didn’t look Luxemburg in the face as he asked him questions during the cross examinations, and Lux snapped back with frustrated, condescending answers. They interrupted each other constantly. The rosy Florida girl, for her part, vibrated in her chair as she spoke, hiccupping loudly to draw breath and peppering her speech with periodic exclamations of “oh gosh.” Luxemburg, meanwhile, calmly walked around the room as the girl screeched and hyperventilated, pulling pieces of evidence from his accordion file and handing them to Christine to read during her rebuttal.For a time, it looked like Lux might not come to the Owen Coon at all. Earlier this year, he announced to the team that he was quitting. His ideas about debate, he felt, had strayed out of line from everybody else’s. Luxemburg wanted to be more experimental—to use the work of fiction writers like Borges and Kafka as evidence and to incorporate film and media studies into his arguments. Within a week, Dallas and the team had talked him out of quitting by agreeing to let him pursue these experimental techniques.
Today, Lux is one of the best sophomores on the entire debate circuit. His decision to pursue unconventional modes of argumentation—he uses everything from SUV commercials to poetry—has had him winning rounds and speaker awards at almost every competition he’s been to this year.
Deathridge, the Northwestern coach known ominously as “the Duck,” says that Luxemburg is the only debater who can make that kind of thing work, adding that he’s “hands down” the best public speaker he’s ever seen. And the Duck is a seasoned soldier on this circuit. He’s been coaching debate for 20 years, and his team has consistently been at the top of the ranks—primarily because of his impeccably keen eye for talent. Though he failed to recruit Lux two years ago, he did win superstar M. Tristan Morales, Klinger and Tarloff’s big rival and an equally legendary figure on the circuit.
During the Florida debate, Lux played a series of SUV commercials on his laptop, commenting on the cultural implications of each and explaining just how hypocritical the “rugged lifestyle” of the SUV driver really is in the context of Heideggerian conceptions of morality.
“It’s hard not to notice,” he says about a Jeep ad featuring the grim reaper, “that Death is driving a Cherokee.”
The round took a total of 90 minutes, and Florida was soundly defeated. The Luxemburg-Malumphy team went on to post a 4-0 record for the day.
During the morning’s second round, I had planned to watch KT for the first time, but when I got to the room, all I found were two young kids sitting in the back typing on laptops. One of them had braces, and the other was dressed in a blue tracksuit. They told me they were high school students from Minnesota. They had driven down to Chicago with their debate coach to watch Klinger and Tarloff—to pick up a few pointers from the masters before KT broke up on account of Tarloff’s graduation.
The three of us sat in the room for about half an hour before someone came in and informed us that the other side had forfeited.
I left the young fans and went looking for their idols, who I quickly found on the balcony killing time with the coaches and talking about high school basketball. I joined them for lunch, where I was told I could finally meet Northwestern’s infamous Tristan, another star so big that high school debaters know his name.
Dallas, earlier that day, had told me that if you went around and asked 50 people in the Orrington if they liked Tristan Morales, 48 of them would say they “couldn’t stand the fuck.”
“I like him okay personally,” Dallas said, “but he’s arrogant, he’s elitist, he’s smarter than you are, and he knows it. And you know he knows it and he doesn’t try to hide the fact that he knows it, and it pisses you off.”
Tarloff, meanwhile, seems extremely well-liked. Ever the ladies’ man, Tarloff wore a white dress shirt and a tie all weekend—a relic of class among a sea of sweatshirts and blue jeans. Someone from another team told me he does it to intimidate, but the truth is, Tarloff was friendlier, sunnier, and more approachable than anyone else I met all weekend.
I saw Tristan for the first time at the Olive Mountain, a Middle Eastern shwarma place the Duck had commissioned to feed everybody in the tournament. He looked like a regular jock, with a silver stud in his ear and a baseball cap on his head. He seemed to avoid looking anyone in the eye, preferring instead to stare far off over their shoulder as he spoke.
That said, he seemed to get along great with KT; the mutual air of respect between the three of them was reminiscent of Olympic athletics. The Copeland remained on everyone’s mind, however, and although relations were friendly, the air was inherently thick with a passive, distant tension.
After lunch, we walked back to the hotel with Tristan and parted ways, and I followed Tarloff and Klinger to their next stop: a round against an experimental team of Dadaists from Regis College in Colorado.
At 2:30, half an hour after the debate was supposed to start, the Regis team strolled in carrying just one accordion file. They were packing light, compared to KT’s six full tubs—an indication, Tarloff said, that they weren’t going to pull anything but their usual, self-contained Dada attack.
One side effect of the rise of critical theory in policy debate has been so-called “concept” teams, like this one from Regis. These teams attack the fundamentals of language, argumentation, and sometimes, the debate activity itself, often ignoring the assigned subject altogether. Klinger and Tarloff prefer to stick to matters of policy, so they started off against the Dadaists by keeping the subject strictly energy. Regis would be using a “kritik,” as Tarloff explained to me, a method which originated in the early ’90s when critical theory first entered the realm of policy debate. Instead of just using facts and statistics, kids started invoking philosophical arguments to attack their opponents’ positions, and today, you usually can’t get through a single round without hearing Foucault’s name at least once. Despite the fact that Tarloff and Klinger prefer to stick to straight policy, they can wipe their opponents with critical theory if the situation calls for it.
Klinger had the first speech. When he began, he transformed immediately, speaking faster than anyone I had ever heard in my life. The sound was dizzying, and yet the words were somehow completely clear. His breathing was metered, restrained, and regular—nothing like the nightmarish babble that came out of the Florida girl’s mouth earlier that morning. Tarloff, sitting quietly at his partner’s side, looked over at me with a proud smile.
Later, Tarloff explained to me that clarity was what separated a good debater from a bad one. Anyone can speak fast, he said, but to be understood is the most important thing.
Meanwhile, one of the Regis guys, dressed in baggy jeans, a backwards hat, and an Adidas sweater, was meticulously tearing up a sheet of paper into little bits and gluing it into his notebook. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but Tarloff had mentioned that they might do something along those lines to prove “the meaninglessness of syntax.”
As I suspected, the Regis guys spoke slowly—which is to say, like normal people. Strangely, I held a little bit of contempt for them at this point, having grown used to the breakneck speed of the other debaters. In their speeches, the Dadaists referenced Russian writers like Pelevin, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsin, using their works as an excuse to self-righteously make fun of debate.
“Disorder creates a mode of escape that unravels itself and liberates us instead of making us into fossils,” one of the Dadaists said, looking around the room dramatically. “It is a book of white noise that erases itself.”
When it came time for Tarloff to speak, he rolled up his sleeves, sniffed, and asked the room if everybody was ready. A few people in the audience laughed, and he energetically kicked into a brilliant speech that lasted about eight minutes.
“Debate does not destroy human experience,” he concluded. “Debate is a human experience.”
KT won, and they had no trouble with the next team either. Undefeated, they headed to dinner.
At midnight, Luxemburg and I decided to go to bed, and as we rode up the elevator, he tried to communicate to me just how untouchable Klinger and Tarloff really are in the context of debate history. Most of the people trying to get assistant coaching positions at Harvard, he said, are doing so because they want the opportunity to coach them. If Klinger did as much work as Tarloff, Lux told me, the two of them could be legendary—paradigmatic, in fact, for what a great debate team should be.
DAY TWO: “YOU SHOULD ASK THE LITTLE YELLOW BEAR.”
Sunday was mostly uneventful, with KT losing a round and bringing their two-day record to 7-1.
Luxemburg and Christine went down twice, putting their total record at 6-2. Even so, both teams would qualify for the top 16 elimination round with no problems.
Before that could happen, though, in their last debate of the day, Christine and Lux found themselves in a messy swamp of a situation involving an uppity, difficult team from Weber State. Also something of a “concept” team, Weber argued that because all language is meaningless, a debate about emissions and pollution was completely irrelevant.
In one of their rebuttals, the Weber team uttered a string of gibberish containing key words from various tracts of critical theory as well as references to Jacques Lacan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fight Club, and M*A*S*H. Christine, already in a bad mood on account of the day’s losses, thought they were making fun of her, and interpreted the speech as a personal affront.
“I have a question,” she said before launching into her response. “What did we do to deserve that?”
Having delivered a convincing counterargument, Christine sat down, and what ensued was the weirdest cross examination I witnessed all weekend.
“What is psychoanalysis?” the Weber girl asked.
“I don’t know,” an infuriated Christine answered. “What are you?”
“Um,” the girl stammered.
At first I thought Christine was throwing the round, but it quickly became clear that she was in fact turning their “language is meaningless” argument against them, showing the judge just how ridiculous such an approach is in the context of a policy debate round.
“I said what I said,” Christine continued, responding to a question about Luxemburg’s use of culture theorist Slavoj Zizek. “You should ask Winnie the Pooh. You should ask the little yellow bear.”
“Okay, cool,” the girl said, getting used to the treatment now, choosing awkwardly to ignore it, and sitting down.
The round was over, and the judge began thinking over his verdict. Christine began nervously knitting a scarf that she had been working on intermittently all weekend, while the judge considered his decision.
“Gotta admit I’m not in a very good place right now,” he finally said, sitting down at his desk. “Most of the argumentation in this debate was in most places quite good. But the tone didn’t put me in a very good place.”
“Sorry about that,” Christine said sheepishly.
The judge paused briefly, looked around the room, and reluctantly announced that he was voting in favor of Harvard.
That evening, at the dinner banquet, Klinger got the tournament award for best overall speaker, and Tarloff trailed nearby in third place. The award didn’t impact anything at all—it didn’t extend past the tournament and it was unlikely to affect the Copeland odds. Still, it was nice to have. Luxemburg, who had been complaining all weekend about how poorly he’d been performing, did not place in the top 20, and Christine, who had been getting speaker awards on a regular basis all year, also missed the mark.
The Duck gave a brief address as the debaters ate, and the night dwindled before too long as everyone was exhausted and somewhat nervous about the upcoming elimination rounds. Bedtime came early, and the next morning at seven, as soon as the first round brackets were posted, the pressure clicked on and the real games began.
DAY THREE: “IF YOU WANT US TO PROVE IT TO YOU, WE CAN GO WAY FASTER.”
Luxemburg and Gorelick were out of the room by the time I woke up in the morning, so I took the opportunity to pack my bags for my 6 p.m. flight back to Boston. Regardless of whether Klinger and Tarloff made it through the day, I was going to miss the championship, which wouldn’t begin until 10 p.m. at the earliest. Realizing my coverage of this dramatic tournament was going to be inevitably cut short, I grudgingly found a match-up sheet in the hotel lobby and went to KT’s first round.
There was a serious audience at this one, with six debaters sitting around the room typing furiously on their laptops, most of them inputting all the arguments flying back and forth into Excel spreadsheets for future reference and self-instruction. Today’s rounds would be presided over by three judges each, a special measure intended to equalize any potential biases during the high-stakes elimination rounds.
Klinger and Tarloff won the round swiftly, garnering a unanimous vote from the panel of judges—one of whom lovingly berated the losing team in his post-round comments. “You’ve got to slow down and tell me what the fuck your argument is!” he shouted. “I don’t know what the fuck you said!”
Christine and Luxemburg, meanwhile, were busy losing to a team from Kentucky they had no business losing to. Christine closed her eyes as the head judge announced a 2-1 ruling in favor of their opponents. As soon as the round was over, she and Lux went straight back to the tapas bar with Dallas’s credit card and started drinking.
KT was set to go against Long Beach in the first round, which meant I’d finally get to see the famous hip hop team debate. I went out to the ninth floor balcony to have a cup of coffee and eat a quick breakfast.
Serendipitously, the Long Beach rappers were there, talking nervously to a short-haired Southern woman I assumed was their coach. The bigger one, Walid Kandeel, wore a crooked black L.A. baseball cap and a pair of Air Jordans. The other was a white guy with an unfortunate beard who initially refused to give me his “colonial name” but later grudgingly identified himself as David Peterson, DP for short. The coach had huddled them together in a triangle, and when I walked a little closer, I realized that she was giving them a dramatic pep talk.
“Today is a battle,” she said. “Everyone will be battling today. Everyone will be out for themselves today.” She patted them on the shoulders and they went in. At 2 p.m., Long Beach hit the play button on their stereo, and the round began.
“Now I see the American dream wasn’t meant for me,” Kandeel rapped over his beat. “It never gave me nothing but slavery.” DP stayed seated, awkwardly bobbing his head and mouthing the words.
“You talk about apocalypse,” Kandeel said during the cross examination. “A climate apocalypse that’s going to take place in the future. But our argument is that this shit is happening now. It’s happening in my community where I live.”
“But our argument’s about global warming,” Klinger answered in a deadpan, “which is a unique scientific process where CO2 particulates heat up the atmosphere. That destroys bio-diversity and kills human beings. So obviously that’s not going on in your home town, right?”
Kandeel and DP then attacked KT for speaking too fast and making debate inaccessible to students from the inner city who couldn’t afford expensive debate camps or home computers in high school. KT speaks a specific language, they said, that is useless because normal people can’t understand it.
“What’d you mean by a specific language?” Klinger asked. “Do you mean English? Because you guys both spoke in English too.”
“It has to do with the speed, the jargon—”
“You went pretty went fast too, man,” Klinger interrupted. “Probably easily as fast as I was going for most of mine.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, well, where’s the bright line? How many words per minute does it take before it’s no longer an effective social process?”
“I think the breathing, the gasping...” Kandeel’s partner said, trailing off somewhat.
“I’m an asthmatic,” Klinger said sarcastically. “That’s seriously your standard?”
“When you speak normally, you don’t double clutch in your breathing,” Kandeel answered calmly, ignoring the laughter.
To the audience’s delight, Klinger insisted that he had been trying to slow down the whole time.
“If you want us to prove it to you, we can go way faster,” he said as the entire audience continued laughing.
At the end of the cross examination, almost the entire room—spectators, judges, and debaters alike—went outside to smoke before the last two speeches. Even though Kandeel and DP had basically labeled KT a couple of racists during their rebuttals, the four of them chatted like old friends and at the end of the break even made a date to meet up at the bar later in the evening.
KT once again won 3-0, and at this point, I sadly gathered my things and went to the airport. Quarterfinals was a tough round against Dartmouth, I hear, but they pulled in a 3-0 just the same. In the semis, they avenged Christine and Luxemburg’s loss against Kentucky, “a crafty young little team,” in the words of Dallas, that had had a miraculously successful day.
When they decisively beat Berkeley for the championship at one in the morning, the 40 people watching in the stands cheered and clapped. Many of them knew Klinger and Tarloff were now in the running for the Copeland.
THE AFTERMATH
Unbeknownst to most people in the Harvard community, Klinger and Tarloff came home the next day as heroes, anxious about the Copeland—whose results have still not been released—and ready to start practicing for the final competition of the year, to be held over spring break in Washington, D.C. The Owen Coon, all in all, was quite a tournament, as Dallas gleefully told me over the phone a week later. He had trained some damn good outlaws.
I wish I could be one of them. They know more about what goes on in the world than any other kids their age, and to see the scraggly, the nerdy, and the stoned transform into rapid-fire fact-spitting machines is inspirational. But it’s more than just a competition about knowledge—it’s a contest of style, reputation, and wit. So far it’s spawned a special on College Sports TV, an extensive ethnography entitled Gifted Tongues, and according to the rumor mill, Spellbound director Jeffrey Blitz is planning to film a documentary about it.
The activity breeds weirdness and brilliance, and personally I hate my high school for never offering it. I could have been something, basically, and now we’re all at a disadvantage because we’ll never catch up.
As I write this, the Harvard team is busy administering the high school tournament, earning their budget and breaking their backs trying to make sure the kids get home alive. You can see the little ones rushing around Harvard Yard in suits, carrying trophies and wearing stupid ties, most of them unaware of just how much weirder everything is going to get when they make the jump to the college circuit. Waiting for the quad shuttle one evening, I stopped a group of them and asked if they’d heard of Klinger and Tarloff.
“Sure, man,” one of them said with a smirk. “They just won at Northwestern. I actually saw Klinger walking around earlier today. It was cool.”
The others passively confirmed the admiration and they were on their way. I thought about warning them, I really did—telling them about how complicated things would get, how busy their heads would become. Fact is, though, with kids like this, it would probably only encourage them. After all, they could become the next KT, and failing that, they could at least get some cushy government jobs.
—Alyssa N. Wolff contributed to the reporting of this story.
Covering Summers: How Larry Got His ReputationFifteen MinutesWhen he first got the job, Lawrence H. Summers thought this whole Harvard president thing would be a breeze. After all, it couldn’t be any tougher than what he’d already been through in Washington.
He’d worked there for almost a decade, first as chief economist at the World Bank and eventually as Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. In that time, Summers had earned a reputation as a politically careless upstart who frequently overstepped his bounds and landed on a lot of toes in the process. His untucked shirts and mismatched socks cast him as something of a Washington outlaw who wasn’t afraid to question his superiors or stir up a little controversy.
Early in his political career, Summers had been hailed as a proud wunderkind with admirable ambition. But it wasn’t long before proud seemed more like pompous, and ambition more like arrogance.
The press quickly caught on, and after the New York Times and the Boston Globe published a handful of definitive profiles on Summers, his image as an ambitious “enfant terrible” was cemented.
The political heat was getting to be a lot to handle, and Harvard would be a breath of fresh air. In Washington, Summers told Allan Murray, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, that half the people who knew his name were waiting for him to fail at all times. Summers was looking forward to working in a place where everyone would be cheering for his success.
Within a year of his arrival at Harvard, however, Summers found himself in the midst of a public relations crisis, facing criticism from all sides for his loose tongue, his rough treatment of various professors, and above all, his extremely charged feud with African American Studies star Cornel R. West ’74. Factions of the faculty were in an uproar, and in reporting the unrest, the national press painted Summers as a man who simply never learned his lesson.
It was a turn of events Summers could not have foreseen at his installation in 2001. Indeed, he thought he was coming to Harvard freshly reformed. His five years at the Treasury were like a term at reform school for Summers, where Robert E. Rubin ’60, his predecessor at the helm of the department, trained him in the art of diplomacy. Rubin, known among reporters as an impeccably polished leader, taught Summers how to watch his mouth, treat people with sensitivity, and approach potential controversy with caution. Never again would Summers allow himself to be caught with his name next to anything like the “infamous World Bank memo,” a leaked internal document about the dumping of toxic waste that made him an army of enemies back in 1991.
Summers knew he had to make some changes before taking on a high-profile cabinet level position, and Rubin’s treatment worked wonders. According to journalists who covered him at the time, Summers underwent a dramatic transformation, coating his famously bold personality with a keen sense of tact and thoughtfulness. Murray calls Summers the most political Treasury secretary ever, pointing out that he is the only man to hold the job in recent memory who did not make any major public blunders.
Today, as he faces another public relations crisis, media reports seem to be linking the new Summers to the old one, forging a narrative that deceptively skips over the vast improvements he made to his character at the Treasury. His public image as an insensitive and socially inept bully seems only to have worsened. Over the course of the recent fiasco, he has been described as “sexist,” “abrasive,” and “brutal” on the establishment broadsheets, and the independent blogosphere has been even less forgiving.
Never mind the “Bob Rubin Finishing School,” as his transformation at the Treasury was known among reporters at the time. Summers had come up in the political world as abrasive, and if you read the headlines, he hasn’t changed a bit.
TOUGH PRESS FOR A BRILLIANT MIND In the summer of 1993, the young Larry Summers faced an enviable choice: resign from his professorship at Harvard so he could hold on to his top position at the World Bank, or return to the University from his leave of absence and get to work revolutionizing the field of economics.
The limited yet consistently fawning media attention he had received so far had characterized him as a rising star—a genius who would be wildly successful no matter which path he chose.
These days, Summers is seldom mentioned in the press without some reference to the numerous public scandals that have forced his foot into his mouth since those early days in Washington. Over the course of the last six weeks, as public outrage over Summers’ remarks suggesting differences of “intrinsic ability” between men and women continued to snowball, the media has not given Summers a single day off. Most of the nation’s major news dailies have published editorials on the “women in science” scandal, and the new book Harvard Rules, a self-proclaimed exposé of Summers, can be seen prominently displayed on the shelves of the Coop and Harvard Bookstore. At last week’s faculty meeting, reporters and cameramen from many major news organizations—from the Associated Press to NBC—descended upon Lowell Lecture Hall to get a piece of the supposed revolt taking place inside. The Boston Globe, meanwhile, has been running several articles a week on the topic; since breaking the story back in late January, Globe reporter Marcella Bombardieri seems to have interviewed every member of the faculty.
With media outlets as disparate as the Christian Science Monitor and Slate covering the story, Larry Summers’ reputation in the public eye as an insensitive, blundering loudmouth may now be cemented beyond repair.
It is a reputation that Summers has been struggling to overcome since before he took over the Harvard presidency. A 1999 story in the Times reported him pleading with a journalist that “he would like to be described in the newspapers as anything except the ‘the brilliant but acerbic Larry Summers.’”
A survey of the most recent Summers stories listed on Google News reveals a remarkable consistency in the way the president has been characterized by journalists and commentators. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, referred to him as “abrasive” in the opening line of their Feb. 26 report, while the Weekly Standard compared him to Archie Bunker in a write-up about student protestors at Harvard. The Boston Globe has made several references to Summers’ “confrontational” nature over the course of their recent coverage, and the Washington Post, in their Jan. 19th report, mentioned his “reputation for blunt, sometimes brutal comments” in the first paragraph. Meanwhile, when the official transcript of Summers’ lecture was released late last month, The Crimson was one of the only publications to explicitly point out that he had never actually uttered the infamous phrase about “innate differences.”
The Salt Lake Desert News ran a Times feed last month under the headline “Disliked Harvard President Promises to Be Nice.”
The reputation seems to be a universal one—and although Summers’ faux pas and public relations debacles at Harvard can account for most of it, his name has been inextricably linked to controversy since the early nineties.
MAKING THE MYTH Back in 1988, the Wall Street Journal was calling Summers “one of the brightest and most versatile economic thinkers in academia,” while a flatteringly extensive 1991 profile in the New York Times called him “the rare economist who is equally at home in the ivory tower of pure theory and the down-and-dirty world of policy.”
“Instead of turning a single subject on its head, Mr. Summers has cut a swath through half-a-dozen disciplines with clever, mostly contrarian contributions,” the Times reported, unwittingly diagnosing Summers with a condition that would eventually lead to his biggest mistakes as a public figure.
At the time of that first Wall Street Journal story, Summers was dipping his toes into politics for the very first time—quietly stepping into the public eye as an economics advisor to the Michael S. Dukakis presidential campaign.
Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush, of course, but in 1991, Summers nevertheless decided to turn his back on academia and take a job in Washington as chief economist of the World Bank. “Brilliant” and “phenomenal,” the papers called him, and under such generous spotlights, Summers began to develop into a compelling public figure.
The following year, however, he suffered a major blow at the hands of the Economist, which published the now-infamous internal memo from his desk at the World Bank.
It was February 1992, and the rest of the media quickly picked up the story. A firestorm of criticism ensued, and with that, the tone for the next 15 years of Summers coverage was established.
“Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, sent a memorandum to some colleagues on December 12th,” the short, straightforward write-up said. “The Economist has a copy. Some of the memo has caused a fuss within the Bank.”
In the copy provided to the magazine, Summers started the note by asking his staff, “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?”
“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that,” the note continued, adding that “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted” and that “their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”
While the Economist called the memo’s language “crass,” they extended an appeal for balance at the end of their article, asking readers to “look at it another way: Mr. Summers is asking questions that the World Bank would rather ignore—and, on the economics, his points are hard to answer.”
Despite the magazine’s advocacy, the day after the piece ran, the Financial Times announced that Summers had “found himself embroiled in controversy after the leaking of an internal memorandum.” Indeed, the weeks following the Economist leak made Summers the target of a barrage of shock and fury from environmentalist groups and policy makers. Brazilian officials filed a protest with the World Bank, while Greenpeace took the honor of being the first group ever to call for Summers’ resignation. The Boston Globe dubbed him the “enfant terrible of global liberalism,” and as criticism continued to escalate, the rest of the national media dived eagerly for the story.
Summers apologized, telling his critics that the memo was supposed to be a “sardonic counterpoint, an effort to sharpen the analysis” and that he had not been advancing a serious policy option. The week after the story broke, the Economist came to Summers’ defense, editorializing in eerily familiar terms that if Summers “was merely trying to provoke debate,” “it is to be hoped that he succeeds—and that the Bank does not, instead, go silent on the subject.”
The “infamous memo” was not forgotten, however. According to a January 1993 article in the Economist, Vice President Al Gore ’69’s decision to veto Summers’ bid to chair the Council of Economic Advisers under the Clinton Administration was a direct result of the memo—and the Journal’s Alan Murray, who has since become an assistant managing editor at the paper, says that most of Summers’ image problems can be traced back to that one incident.
“Anyone who talks to him knows that he’s very sharp and analytical and clever and pointed,” Murray says. “But I think it was really the memo that was the cause of his reputation as being prone to make gaffes.”
Even more instrumental in shaping his image, it seems, were the widespread, often starry-eyed reports of the blunt approach he took in dealing with colleagues and underlings when he wanted to get something done.
In 1992, the Financial Times described a meeting of the American Economics Association in New Orleans, during which “Mr. Summers made little effort to hide his feelings” and “listened in exasperation” to views he found preposterous.
A few months later, while in the Ukraine to consult with government leaders about the country’s economy, the same paper reported that Summers had “found fault with almost every aspect of the government’s reform plan,” telling officials there that what was “going on in Ukraine… can not be called reform.”
These same qualities, while lauded in Washington for their effectiveness, would prove irreconcilable with the working environment he’d later find at Harvard. Moreover, as Summers learned under Rubin, they wouldn’t even cut it at the Treasury.
SUMMERS GETS A TUNE-UP In 1993, Summers was named undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs—a consolation prize, as Murray puts it, for losing out on the chairman post on the Council of Economic Advisors—where he worked under Rubin, a Washington veteran who had hired Summers as an economic adviser to Goldman Sachs many years earlier.
“I think for most of us who covered him, there was a sense that when he moved to the Treasury with Bob Rubin, that he learned enormous amounts,” Murray recalls. “I think it’s kind of mystifying to those of us who watched him mature in Washington that he hadn’t just become acceptable, but really good.”
But as Summers worked on smoothing his rough edges, the press stayed on his case—paying him a reluctant respect while insistently dwelling on his propensity towards blunt and unforgiving behavior.
In 1995, Summers found himself up for a promotion, as the Clinton administration was pushing Congress to confirm him as deputy secretary—the most powerful position in the Treasury below Rubin’s. Owen Ullman, a reporter with BusinessWeek Magazine, wrote a story about the obstacles facing the nomination entitled “Larry Summers: From Prodigy to Punching Bag.”
Today, Ullman admits that he might have overdone it with the characterizations.
“I guess I used the words ‘brilliant’ and ‘abrasive’ a lot,” he says. “Maybe I overused that. I think it became a cliché, as it was such an easy way to capture him. Everyone would agree that he’s certainly a brilliant mind, and abrasive was shorthand for perhaps not always being sensitive to others’ feelings. I think it was a reputation that continued when he was at the Treasury because he would be outspoken in dealing with reporters and wasn’t afraid of tackling difficult subjects.”
In an effort to scale Summers back, Rubin often ribbed him in front of reporters.
“One time there were a bunch of us in the Treasury conference room waiting for Summers to come brief us,” says David Wessel, a Journal reporter who took up Summers coverage after Murray was promoted. “Rubin walked in and he sat down and was sort of chatting with us the way he did often. Summers came to the door, and Rubin stood up very swiftly and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Treasury Undersecretary of the United States.’ Larry blushed, and Rubin said, “Larry thinks we should do this more on merit and less on title.’”
Rubin’s joke took a stab at Summers’ overactive sense of pride, in other words, making fun of his tendency to assert intellectual dominance over his superiors.
Letting a little air out of Larry’s ego in front of the press, Wessel says, was one of the weapons that Rubin used to “prod Larry into being wiser about how he treated people in public.”
The treatment worked wonders, according to both Wessel and Murray, and in his whole career at the Treasury, Summers made only one serious public relations mistake, in a meeting during his tenure as deputy secretary about repealing the estate tax. The GOP had been trying to push the measure through Congress, and Summers told a group of reporters over lunch that there was no case for it “other than selfishness.”
The comment angered high-ranking Republicans in Washington, and coverage spread like wildfire as soon as the Associated Press first reported it.
“It was a laugh line—it was very funny,” says Times reporter David E. Sanger ’82, who was present at the lunch and is also a Crimson editor. “People laughed, and it was only when it appeared the next day that it sent the Republicans off the deep end. In the context…it was just Larry being Larry.”
Wessel says Summers was very upset about the amount of “play” the story got in the national press.
“After the story started moving on the wires, he instantly tried to get us all not to write it and he was forced to apologize,” he says. “We all found ourselves in situations where Larry said things that made good quotes that you knew he would later regret.”
A NEW MAN
According to Wessel, such things never happened after 1999, when Summers was chosen to succeed Rubin as Treasury Secretary—the most powerful, high-profile position the economist had ever taken on.
The world financial markets hinge so dramatically on the Treasury Secretary’s words that extreme caution is necessary whenever the public or the press is within earshot, according to Murray. One wrong word could send the dollar into a tailspin or destroy a foreign economy. Paul O’Neill, for example, Summers’ successor at the Treasury, single-handedly caused the collapse of the Brazilian real when he said the country needed to guarantee that aid money “doesn’t just go out of the country to Swiss bank accounts.”
“If you don’t watch where you step, you’re immediately punished for it,” Murray says.
But Summers sailed through his years as Treasury secretary, retaining his bold hand while avoiding any major conflicts with foreign leaders or domestic policy makers. According to Wessel, the most impressive thing about Summers at the Treasury was “how hard he worked at courting the press and trying to undo this image of being Washington’s smartest klutz.”
Despite his efforts, the press did not draw much attention to Summers’ transformation—because, after all, the absence of scandal is hardly news worth reporting. But even when journalists did acknowledge his changing persona, they invariably coupled it with a reminder of his traditionally abrasive tendencies.
An article in Time Magazine about his ascent to the top of the Treasury reported that Summers, who had “made great strides in improving his people skills, has a reputation for brilliance, if not tact.” The story then quoted a famous column by Wall Street Journal commentator Paul Gigot, in which he wrote that “Larry Summers is to humility what Madonna is to chastity.”
To combat the precedent, Wessel says Summers even started writing thank-you notes at the Treasury, praising staff for doing a good job and complimenting reporters for publishing fair, if not always favorable, stories.
“He was aware of his tendencies to slight people, and he was trying really hard to compensate for them,” Wessel says.
The diplomatic ability Summers had cultivated in his time at the Treasury, Murray says, makes his record at Harvard all the more mystifying.
A COLD RECEPTION
Despite his optimistic predictions, any initial sense of welcome Summers might have encountered at Harvard was quickly complicated by the Cornel West imbroglio, which began within four months of Summers’ installation as president. The incident cast doubt on assurances from Rubin, who as a member of the Harvard Corporation had vouched that Summers had gotten over his bad habits during the presidential search process.
The national media first broke the West story in late December 2001, reporting that Summers had insulted the African American Studies professor during a private meeting in Summers’ office.
The Globe reported that Summers had reprimanded West for releasing a rap album, skipping too many lectures, and failing to produce serious scholarly work during his time at Harvard. His efforts, Summers was reported as saying, should be realigned towards more academic pursuits.
The conversation set off a media frenzy not unlike the current one, and Summers stuck to a familiar script—first declaring the whole thing a misunderstanding, then apologizing for unintentionally hurting any feelings, and finally taking institutional measures to rectify the problems some saw as the heart of the conflict. He met with West, and according to an extensive write-up in the Washington Post, the two of them “actually bonded” for a brief period over their cancer survival stories (Summers had survived Hodgkin’s Disease, while West had battled prostate cancer).
The Post article, a 3,000 word in-depth account of the scandal from West’s point of view, was published in the newspaper’s Style section in August 2002, and although it did acknowledge Summers’ attempts at reconciliation, it also aligned him with the legions of conservatives who spoke out on his behalf—a trend that has continued with the most recent scandal. The article blamed Summers for opening the door to those who “question the intellectual competence of African American scholars” and recounted the outcry from right-wing columnists like John Derbyshire from the National Review, who called African American studies a “pseudo-discipline invented by guilty white liberals as a way of keeping black intellectuals out of trouble.”
Despite several promising negotiations and a healthy dialogue between Summers and Department of African and African American Studies Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr., West ended up leaving for Princeton with famed philosopher K. Anthony Appiah joining him not long after.
By the end of the saga, the embattled University President was stuck with the criticism of having torn apart Harvard’s ascendant African American Studies department.
Around the same time, a public disagreement with faculty members over the foundation of a new Latino Studies center arose, and the Globe reported an incident in which Summers called a question asked by a law professor “stupid” during a lecture.
Each of these caused minor eruptions in the press, receiving varying degrees of national attention, but taken together and slotted as supporting acts for the Cornel West dispute, they formed a familiar image of Summers—one he had hoped would fade in light of his efforts at self-improvement at the Treasury.
Still, despite his attempts to apologize and sort out the conflicts, the positive reputation he tried to establish in Washington was quickly gutted and his “bull in a china-shop” image—an epithet first uttered by West on a radio talk show—was firmly established.
When reporters started interviewing members of the faculty after the West story surfaced, however, professors eagerly volunteered stories about Summers’ authoritarian leadership style and disrespectful demeanor.
Reports of such behavior, journalists say, might not have made it to the water cooler in the capital, let alone the front page. Indeed, Summers routinely scolded his colleagues while at the Treasury, but the absence of a volatile audience analogous to the Harvard faculty made it less likely that the press would take notice.
“Washington is a plate full of highly intelligent, artless, tactless, and harsh people,” says James S. Traub ’76, who wrote a 2003 cover story on Summers for the New York Times Magazine. “It is true that even there, diplomatic skills get you to the top. But it’s also a world of people who are really abrasive.”
Murray says “the other obvious difference between Larry Summers at Washington and Larry Summers at Harvard was that in Washington he was on the left side of the spectrum, and at Harvard he’s considered to be on the far right.”
The new environment simply called for greater caution and more attention to political correctness, and the diplomacy he learned from Rubin, while effective at the Treasury, was still insufficient for Harvard.
And so it made perfect sense that Summers’ “gaffes” at the University were widely reported in the media. The press, in its attempt at objectivity, avoided passing judgment on the impropriety of his remarks and instead deferred that duty to the Harvard faculty—a famously liberal group whose outrage made the stories as big as they were.
When conservatives came to his defense, furthermore, as they did en masse after this year’s scandal about women in science broke, Summers inadvertently became an unlikely darling of the right.
CEMENTING THE IMAGE
Summers’ seemingly authoritarian style and supposed “closet conservatism” only added another unfavorable layer to his public personality. Although most of the damage that his reputation suffered in the public eye can be attributed to individual anecdotes rather than actual trends, reporters says Summers’ true character was essentially revealed in these incidents.
“Anecdotes are a powerful thing,” Traub explains. “They’re a lot more powerful than statistics are. There have been so many interactions, but the ones that become public, those are few. In talking to people at Harvard, it’s not hard to find someone who’s had a personal experience with Larry that they found bruising. So it’s not these exceptional moments where he decides to get on the soapbox or something. His whole intellectual method, which to him is simply designed to drive towards an ever more rigorous truth, strikes other people as being designed to undermine their credibility.”
Traub’s article in the Times Magazine, which was accompanied by a memorable close-up cover photograph of Summers, carefully addressed the president’s reputation, qualifying the weight of the anecdotal evidence behind it while confirming rumors of his overbearing managerial style through extensive faculty interviews.
The piece served as a restrained counterbalance to the Cornel West story in the Post, which was published exactly one year earlier. Traub cast Summers as a focused, if not slightly overzealous leader who had been explicitly hired by Harvard’s Corporation for his willingness to offend if necessary and his ability to impose the firm hand of governance that his predecessor Neil L. Rudenstine had reportedly been incapable of.
“It is a kind of given of the study of Larry…that he left a trail of bodies behind him at Treasury—and yet I failed to discover that trail of bodies,” Traub says. “There were lots of references to bruised feelings, but nothing of the order of magnitude of what’s happened at Harvard.”
While Summers is ultimately responsible for his actions, the hot-button incidents that have made headlines throughout his career have conveniently played right into the powerful, evolving myth of his disagreeable personality, according to Traub. The fact that he improved his behavior at the Treasury, in other words, went largely unnoticed because the incidents at Harvard so perfectly fit the reputation he had established earlier in the 1990s.
“What happens is that a public person takes on a certain shape in the public’s mind and everything he does subsequently is judged according to that shape,” Traub says, invoking the examples of former U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, who was notorious for his clumsiness, and President George W. Bush, who is regularly lambasted for making up words and misspeaking.
“Larry is someone who very easily took on this shape—this abrasive ‘bull in a china shop’ thing—so every new anecdote was pressed into that form. But I don’t think you can blame that on the media. Larry gave himself that shape,” Traub says. “He handed the media a self-parodied version of himself and they all too happily adopted it.”
ANOTHER ROUND OF MATURATION?
“I think as president you always have to be conscious of your role as president and that your words will never be heard in a way that is entirely separated from your role as president,” Summers told the Crimson last week. “I certainly do intend to continue to engage in intellectual discussion, but I’ve certainly learned some important lessons from this experience about choice of words, choice of subjects, the posing of hypotheses, and other things.”
A front page profile story published in the Times last week seems to confirm that Summers plans to once again reevaluate his habits and the way he conducts himself in public. Patrick Healy, who previously wrote about Summers for the Globe in the late 1990s, and Sara Rimer, an education reporter who has been covering the current saga for the Times, were given an interview with the University President in his office on Feb. 18th, where he discussed what it was like to hold his job over the course of the previous month.
“I’m learning from all of this, and thinking about all of it, and I suspect I’ll be a better president for all these discussions,” he told the Times.
According to the article, “Rubin did not return phone messages seeking comment, but friends of Dr. Summers say the two men have been in regular contact.”
But perhaps Rubin’s influence has not taken Summers far enough. Indeed, if last month’s uproar is to suggest anything about the legacy of his days at the Treasury, it’s that Washington-trained diplomacy just won’t cut it for the world of liberal academia—an institution whose structure differs fundamentally from that of government.
As long as Summers continues to offend the sensibilities of his faculty, his remarks—private and public—will continue to make national headlines and drive his reputation even further into the ground.
The veteran reporters who covered Summers in his early days would probably be sad to see the bluntness go. Almost every journalist contacted for this story warmly recalled the honesty and well-intentioned carelessness they were treated to whenever they interviewed him as a government official.
“He would think out loud a lot more than people in the Bush administration do,” says Sanger. “I found it very refreshing. You get used to his style, which isn’t always mild. But I would always prefer a forceful advocacy of a view as long as it was backed up by facts than the approach that you hear a lot in Washington today.”
If Summers does adjust his ways in wake of the recent crisis, precedent seems to suggest that the media may not take very much notice. After all, as dramatic as his development was said to be at the Treasury, his reputation was thrown right back to the days of the World Bank memo as soon as he made his first missteps at Harvard.
That said, it would certainly be an oversimplification to suggest that the media has grossly misconstrued Summers in its recent round of coverage. Even his most loyal journalist supporters, like BusinessWeek’s Owen Ullman, say his public persona does reflect key facets of his true personality. “He is as he’s being portrayed,” Ullman says. “I think we sometimes portray other public figures as being dumber than they really are, or smarter, or more conniving, or more brilliant. But I think in this case, from what I’ve read, I find myself saying, ‘Gee, that’s the Larry I know.”
