October 08, 2004
Back in the Square
As I mentioned earlier in the week, my good friend and Dean's former campaign manager Joe Trippi invited Michael Silberman and I up to Harvard's Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Kennedy School of Government. Joe is a fellow there this fall (along with fellow Vermonter Jeff Amestoy and one of my journalism heroes Ben Bradlee), which is a program that brings in incredible people from government, politics, and media for a semester where they get to take classes at the University and be generally involved in return for teaching a weekly study group.
Trippi's is on campaigning in the 21st century, and he invited us to speak about what it was like being young campaign workers with major responsibilities, as well as to talk more broadly about the changing role of the internet in politics. Thus, until it can be proven otherwise, I became the first member of the Harvard Class of 2004 invited back to campus as a speaker.
The discussion was great fun and very interesting (to us, at least), and Michael has reported on the meat of the matter. The Official Joe Trippi at Harvard website has posted some photos of Michael and my talk there on Tuesday; alas, there's only one photo that looks decent.
It felt so wonderful to back in Cambridge and wandering around the Square. It was my first time there in four months—the longest period I've been away since graduating—and it's getting a little harder to go back. The stores are changing (the flagship Abercrombie & Fitch is now a Citizens Bank), and I know fewer and fewer people there. I didn't stop inside the Crimson because I doubted whether anyone I knew would be there.
(Harvard's changing in other ways too. News this week that "blogs," which didn't exist while I was there, are making a strong push on campus.)
All that said, though, I still feel very much at home among the old buildings, brick sidewalks, and human mess of the Square. I've actually had a lot of Harvard time recently, and it has made me quite nostalgic.
Being able to speak at the IOP this week was my second time in two weeks that I was reminded of the proud tradition in which I'm following as a Harvard alum. Last week, at the D.C. premiere of the movie "Going Upriver," about John Kerry's time in Vietnam, I ran into an elderly man wearing the club tie of the Harvard Crimson, black with thin red stripes. I went up to him and asked if he was a Crimed and introduced myself as executive editor of the 129th Guard. He said that he was Class of '45. We chatted a bit about Harvard and the Crimson during the war, but never covered who he was or what I was doing. We both wandered away as several other couples joined our table.
Well, after the movie, the same guy walked up on stage and sat down as part of the panel. Huh. As the moderator introduced him and summarized his resume, a little lightbulb went off in my head. Oh. That guy. You mean the Pulitzer Prize winning Time correspondent Stanley Karnow whose photo hangs in the front entry of the Crimson building in Cambridge as one of the paper's 17 recipients of journalism's highest honor. Yes, that guy. The Time reporter who covered Nixon's trip to China. He's the one wearing the Crimson tie.
Writing my final column last year for Harvard Magazine, I reminisced about how my experience there had impacted me, "It has had a profound impact shaping who I am, made me lifelong friends, and opened countless doors for me":
Perhaps most central to my well-developed fondness for Harvard Yard, though, is how—as someone who loves history and seeks it out wherever I go—Harvard's history has been indelibly pressed upon me over the last four years. From the towering Memorial Hall to the breathtaking wall of names inside Memorial Church, to the Revolutionary War barracks of Massachusetts Hall, one cannot escape the College without being keenly aware of the many Harvard lives that have walked along these cow paths before....
Someday, I definitely want to walk Cambridge's cow paths again.
For now, though, I'm becoming part of the process of choosing the next generation of Harvardians. On Wednesday night, I went to a training put on by the admissions office for new alumni interviewers. Sitting there, I was once again grateful for being lucky enough to attend one of the greatest centers of learning in the world's history.
At the session, after presentations by the local Harvard Club and the admissions office, we divided up into groups and were given real admissions cases to judge. In four out of the five groups, we were able to correctly guess the admissions office's decision (which said something to me about the ability to Harvard students to identify the traits of other Harvard students). At some point in the next couple of months, an impressionable young senior will sit down with me as an official representative of Harvard. We'll see how that goes...
