Harvard's Rolling Stone

From a third-floor office in Mass. Hall, a self-described “goof-off” in a brightly-colored tie keeps watch over how Harvard presents itself to the rest of the world.

His walls are decorated with a set of prints by Daumier—the 19th century French painter whose works advocated for the poor—and pictures of himself advising President Clinton and Sen. George McGovern.

His resume is a grab bag.

Alan J. Stone has worked on providing legal aid to poor people in rural Colorado and Worcester, Mass. He’s worked on hunger legislation with McGovern. He organized the Democrats in the Senate during Ronald Reagan’s first term. He also wrote speeches for Clinton.

He’s been all over the political map but since November, he’s worked in an office in Mass. Hall.

As one of Harvard’s five vice presidents, Stone is responsible for keeping up Harvard’s relationships with the press, for lobbying in Washington and for handling Harvard’s often-difficult relationships with Cambridge and Boston.

And University President Lawrence H. Summers bills Stone as one of his “most trusted advisors.”

Although his job may sound like anything but, he uses the word “fun” a good deal when he talks about his life, with a mischievous wiggle of the eyebrows. He’ll turn anything into a joke—his sense of humor knows no boundaries.

But his light-hearted nature can be deceptive.

A quintessential baby boomer, Stone has held a wide variety of jobs—but all along the way he’s been the behind-the-scenes man, the guy with the boss’s ear and also the man with a plan to help the people.

‘Kind of a Goof-Off’

A Chicago native, Stone was born in 1944 to Russian immigrant parents who ran the second-largest laundry in all of Chicago, he says with a certain pride.

As a child, he ran for president of his junior high school on a platform—though he doesn’t exactly remember what that platform was.

“I’m sure I was a reformist though,” he chuckles.

“Not a very serious student” in high school, he recalls that he “took the SATs and my advisors said, ‘Gee, why aren’t you a better student.’”

At Miami University in Ohio he joined his college’s chapter of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity—and, ever politically interested, he joined the interfraternity council.

“I was a frat guy and very social in the traditional sense,” he says.

But in his college years—1962 to 1966—a different world was emerging.

Stone recalls having been friends with a lot of the “new hippies” and going to one of the first meetings of the famously radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

At one point, he recalls, the meeting’s coordinator said, “I know there’s some people who aren’t ready for this and some people who are”—and Stone knew that he fell into the first category.

“You know, you have to evolve,” he says.

And though he was a political science major in college, Stone says he could never run for political office.

“You have to be driven to run for office and I’m kind of a goof-off,” he says. “Really, I became an issues guy. I wanted to be in the background.”

Stone went to George Washington Law School, and he got his first taste of what became a passion—working at the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), a group that organized welfare recipients.

Working under the close watch of George Wiley, the NWRO’s famous founder, for a summer Stone became a self-described “jack of all trades” as Wiley’s right-hand man, doing “pinch hitting, analysis, research.”

After graduating from law school in 1969, he joined VISTA—Volunteers in Service to America—which, like higher education, provided a way of avoiding the Vietnam draft.

“I got to feel I was serving my country, but not killing anybody,” he says.

Stone took a one-year position working as a lawyer in Worcester, which was racially polarized at the time—to an extent, he recalls, that “it was hard to function.”

After his year with VISTA, Stone took time off and wrote long pieces about health issues for the foundling publication the New Mexico Review.

In 1972 he won a fellowship to work for a short time as a lawyer in Montrose, Colo.

Back when Stone was a third-year law student, his mother had purchased a set of Daumier paintings, which she hoped would inspire her son with their depiction of barristers defending impoverished clients. He says he never found the right place for them.

In fact, the office in Montrose was the last law office he ever had.

In Colorado, Stone spent more time organizing the locals than providing actual legal services, setting out on projects such as fighting “to get the road paved in the Chicano part of town.”

The political science major was also came back to politics as a local operative. He organized, he says, “all the activists and the hippies and the Chicanos” behind George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, and wound up going to the Democratic National Convention in Miami as a delegate.

After his year-long sojourn in Colorado, Stone headed back home to Chicago and set up shop for McGovern’s presidential campaign in a storefront in the 43rd ward of Chicago, the ward where he was born.

But when Nixon “creamed” the McGovern campaign, Stone says he felt totally “burnt out.”

He took a vacation and then went to Washington.

Mr. Stone Goes To Washington

A CBS documentary from the early 1970s depicted hungry children in a school cafeteria watching other children eat lunch.

The kids had no money to pay for lunch, and the government had not yet created a plan to help pay for their meals.

The documentary created quite a buzz in Washington, and Sen. McGovern, chair of the Senate Nutrition Committee, set out to make school lunch something all children could count on.

At the time, Stone was working a construction job in Washington, D.C., when he ran into McGovern’s son-in-law, whom Stone had met working on the New Mexico Review.

The son-in-law said McGovern had a job opening on his committee. Stone said he’d be interested, and the senator interviewed him for the job.

“I was going on the basis of a recommendation,” McGovern recalls. “I was just impressed with his quickness of mind, his general intelligence, and on that basis we hired him.”

Stone wrote well and often solved problems with a “creative” tack, McGovern says.

Stone remembers his work in a characteristically more self-mocking way.

“Remember those awful lunches you got in school?” he says. “I wrote that legislation.”

McGovern also credits Stone with making sure that the legislation was actually set into place.

“If you don’t have somebody really pressing on a new program, it takes years for people to become aware of it,” McGovern says. “He was very good at outreach.”

And when the school-lunch legislation had been written, Stone advised a new focus for the committee. Up until then, the committee had focused on nutrition for the underprivileged. But Stone said they should look at the nutrition of average Americans.

They set out, McGovern says, “to find out what, if anything, was wrong with the typical American diet and we found plenty wrong with it.”

To the surprise of many, they found that the American diet contained “too much fat, sugar and salt and they released a report to that effect.

Stone had written most of the report, and McGovern says it dropped a “bombshell” at the time.

Despite his and McGovern’s work, the committee to which Stone had dedicated five years of his life—one a handful of times he spent more than a couple of years in one place—lost its funding.

Stone went on to work on international hunger legislation under the Carter administration, but then, he says, “Reagan’s guys came in and I lost my job.”

Now he returned to the Senate to work for minority leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.).

With relish, he recalls that his job was to find individual pieces within Reagan’s budget bills that would cast the administration in an unfavorable light. Stone was in charge of making sure those items were brought up for votes one-by-one instead of being buried in a vote on the larger bill.

Then he would publicize it—to, as he puts it, “show the world what Ronald Reagan was up to.”

Break from the Hill

Stone left his job with Byrd in 1983 to become the chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. The committee did not produce much in the way of concrete legislation, but Stone maintains it “influenced the discussion on a lot of important issues.”

But by now Alan Stone was growing tired of Washington.

In 1988, Stone put on his blue jeans and decided to take a break in Hollywood.

The break lasted three years.

He wrote a “really dopey” screenplay called “Surface Tension” about a love-torn, ambitious politician, which he says was “like the first thing that anyone writes.”

For the next three years, he wrote scripts for shows such as “Murphy Brown” and “Alf” and tried to sell them to the shows’ producers.

But like many of what the industry calls “spec scripts”—television screenplays that are submitted to studios and sometimes purchased but rarely aired—Stone’s never met the airwaves.

And the instability of life in Hollywood eventually bothered him.

“I was kind of losing interest at the end,” he says. “Not having health care and not knowing what my income would be in a few months was disheartening.”

When Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) invited Stone to join his presidential campaign in 1992, Stone joined on.

To this day, Stone loves talking about flying around in little airplanes and working events in tiny churches in the “retail politics” of the New Hampshire primary.

From Coast to Coast

After a string of unsuccessful primaries, Harkin dropped his bid for the Democratic nomination.

But the eventual winner of the nomination, Bill Clinton, took Stone on as a speechwriter in his campaign and then later in his White House.

But Stone—one of three writers who crafted Clinton’s first inaugural address—wasn’t satisfied with merely writing.

“I really wanted to be a policy person or a legislative person but they only knew me as a speechwriter,” he says.

But he didn’t want to leave the non-profit world. George Stephanopoulos guided Stone towards his alma mater, Columbia, where the university was looking for its first-ever vice president for public affairs.

At Columbia, Stone is widely credited with raising the university’s image and handling much of its federal lobbying, as well as some of its rocky dealings with Harlem.

His boss, Executive Vice President for Administration Emily Lloyd, personally took care of all community relations on building projects—typically the most contentious issues for a university’s external relations office.

Meanwhile, Stone streamlined the press office and managed day-to-day community relations.

Lloyd, who had been New York’s commissioner of sanitation before coming to Columbia, says she and Stone often joked about how much they underestimated the difficulty of university work.

“We both expected to come to a university and have it be perhaps sort of sleepy hollow,” Lloyd says, adding that they had “never worked harder.”

To his colleagues in the university’s administration, Stone seemed to be the one with students at heart. But, according to Lloyd, he dealt well with his fellow administrators and was a trusted advisor to President George Rupp.

“He was good at working with deans,” Lloyd says. “He and I were able to forge a really close working relationships.”

He left a good impression even on local activists, although Lloyd—not Stone—was the Columbia administrator with whom they dealt most often.

“My overall impression of him was as a decent human being,” says Barbara Hohol, who fought Columbia on its controversial plan to build a lab school for professors’ children. “My impression of him is if you ask him a question you’ll get three possible answers—one is yes, one is no, and one is ‘I can’t tell you that.’”

But last October, Stone was on his way again.

Harvard’s Own Stone

Stone’s farewell party at Columbia was attended by administrators and security guards—as well as much of the varsity basketball team, which Stone had cheered on during his time, and many children whom Stone had helped to look after on days when the university’s day care program was closed.

When he came to Harvard this fall, a party greeted him. Even city leaders were there to welcome the University’s new community relations leader.

Whatever his plans had been for community relations, his first few months at Harvard proved to be full of high-profile public relations fiascoes, from grade inflation to departures from the Afro-American studies department.

In this rocky year for Harvard in the media, it was Alan Stone who personally took the reporters’ calls.

But Stone says he realizes that “a huge challenge remains in Cambridge” to improve the fractious relationship between Harvard and the city. And one day he hopes to get back to providing for people—it’s what he’s always loved to do.

“I have a kind of bias, towards getting real resources to real people,” he says.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.