And On Second Thought
I've been pondering the question put to me by a Harvard alum: If Larry Summers modeled himself after Bob Rubin at the Treasury department, who, if anyone, did he model himself after when he came to Harvard?
My initial answers were John Silber, former president of BU, and, um, Larry Summers at the Treasury Department.
But since then I've wondered if there isn't another figure who's a role model for Summers: Henry Kissinger....
Think about it. They're both celebrities of a sort, powerbrokers, pontificators, men who seem to revel in the power that accrues to them from their professional positions. They're both academics who've made it big in Washington. They both love to hobnob with the elite of media and politics—did anyone else notice that Larry Summers went to the White House Correspondents Dinner last weekend? (Why? There's nothing for Harvard in that.) And possibly they both think that the world of academia is too small for them...because they are figures of the world, period, and cannot be contained by Cambridge.
