Jeffrey R. Toobin

As an undergraduate reporter, Jeffrey R. Toobin ’82 rode in a limousine with writer Tom Wolfe and cursed with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. But what he remembers most is the water. Lots of water.

Three feet of it, flooding Harvard Yard in the course of an evening. Maintenance crews chasing summer students, hoping they wouldn’t get electrocuted.

“It was a freak thing,” former Crimson President William E. McKibben ’82 says of the midsummer flood. A pipe had burst, and by the morning the water was gone.

Toobin—the New Yorker writer and CNN legal analyst—covers deeper waters today, but they were ones he never intended to swim.

GENETIC DESTINY