The First Word on Lawrence Summers

For the year and a half Summers served as secretary—from July 1999 until the end of the administration—Summers proved that he had learned much from his mentor. He managed the bureaucracy well, remaining a close adviser to the president and maintaining the political capital the Treasury had built up during the Rubin years. He kept relations with the other branches of the government civil and productive. He demonstrated his skills as a people picker, finding a wealth of talent to fill openings beneath him and coordinating the restructuring of the IRS that culminated with the search to pick a new director. And probably not entirely unrelated to Harvard’s interests, he oversaw the last year and a half of the longest economic expansion in American history, during which Harvard’s endowment swelled to an unprecedented $19 billion.

“You are not going to get a sleepy, white-haired old man who says forgettable things” in Summers, Neff says. For all of Summers’ civilizing at Rubin’s elbows, he hasn’t completely left behind his former self. “New Larry”—the managerial, governmental, political Summers—has its merits, but the search committee made its decision with full knowledge that many of the aspects that characterized “Old Larry” are still kicking around.

In some cases these “Old Larry” qualities were desirable. Summers was and still is brilliant. In other cases it was neutral—like the disorganized lab partner that Neff remembers from high school, the Summers of today requires a rule that says you are “never to give Larry the only version of anything” lest it “disappear into the pile.”

And, as even admirers admit, there are still aspects of “Old Larry” that will require further adjustment.

Summers has a reputation for arrogance that has persisted despite efforts to assume Rubin’s humility. The perception, his defenders explain, comes from his penetrating and incisive intellect. He can see to the core of an issue so accurately and quickly that those who don’t know him sometimes see ego instead of efficiency. That said, Summers has at times brought the criticism on himself—one colleague remembers him holding up a briefing book and asking the room if there was anything in it he didn’t already know.

Flashes of the “Old Summers” would appear when Summers held meetings, and in 10 minutes discuss and dissect memos that underlings had spent six months constructing. “If you wasted one moment, he’d cut you off,” a friend says. The quality of his analysis was always impeccable, but his style ruffled feathers.

“In government, people are more willing to sacrifice egos to do something right from the efficiency standpoint,” one friend says. In the world of academic administration, where egos play a greater role, Summers will have to watch himself. “Someone will give a longwinded response, he’ll cut them off. That will hurt him.”

And though friends practically say they will take a bullet for Summers, they say he’s not always the most relaxing person to talk to—his mind always active, his debater’s instincts always there. “When you’re in a conversation, this could get very exhausting and sometimes frustrating,” another friend says.

The comparison with Rubin is revealing: “Rubin was just a mellow guy, you’d feel relaxed talking to him. Very few people truly felt relaxed talking with Larry.”

Rubin argues that these perceptions are flawed and that neither impatience nor arrogance are likely to pose a problem. “He’s very good at sitting down and discussing the ins and outs of an issue for hours when the issue warrants long discussion,” Rubin says. Equally importantly, Rubin says, “He got to be able to sit there—sometimes on Capitol Hill—even when the merits [of the discussion] would not warrant prolonged engagement. He was very diplomatic.”

And on the flip side, some think that a leader needs to be impatient to be effective.

“I have a reputation for being brash, but you do want someone who is impatient,” Dukakis says. “Keynes said that in the long term everybody will be dead—you don’t want to sit around and do nothing.”

Doing things—conventional wisdom would suggest that this is what a university president is hired to do. In a quickly changing world, you want a leader who acts, a leader who changes too.

Lawrence H. Summers steps off the plane. Welcome to the beginning of doing something.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.