How Larry Got His Rep

When 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.”

—Nina M. Catalano, Michelle Cerulli, Elizabeth M. Doherty, and Aria S.K. Laskin contributed to the reporting of this story.