Frank Fisher

Loosely mantled in a light top-coat, Frank Fisher was striding through Brattle Square with a Holy Bible under one arm and a steel saw under the other. Gesticulating with his ferocious tufted eyebrows if not with his burdened arms, Fisher was intoning in a cultivated midwestern drawl. "Don't characterize Frank Fisher as the director of the OGCP, Characterize him by what he had been, by the fact that he has left some place else." With that Fisher descended upon Sage's market and spun towards the back of the store where he found a fine red snapper at the fish counter.

Twenty minutes later Frank Fisher and the red snapper were in his kitchen. The fish was unwrapped and Fisher was exasperated. He had specifically directed the counterman not to cut off the red snapper's tail--only its head--but the fish was distinctly abbreviated at both ends.

Before Fisher cooked that red snapper or walked through Brattle Square that Friday afternoon he had been doing other things that characterize him better, if only because he left them. That morning he had been in Northrop Frye's course on the typology of the Bible--hence the Bible under his right arm--and the day before he had been at work on a wooden creation he calls a sculpture--hence the saw.

In the past 15 years, Fisher has left an established Chicago law firm after nine pleasurable years; two offices in the Agency for International Development after six challenging years; and the Department of Housing and Urban Development after three trying but successful years. He denies that he is either "mobile" or "insecure." "Adjustable," he concedes with a smile. Fisher does not appear to enjoy finding words or situations that might typify him, and it is only with a sanctimonious and mocking knitting-of-the-brows that he vows to attach himself ultimately to a rich Harvard graduate and retire to a gate keeper's cottage. Even such sarcastic complacency does not sit well with Fisher and after a brief pause his large right hand is combing the air vigorously and he is erasing the pretty image of the gate-keeper's cottage and the sedentary notion of retirement. Fisher is good at resisting such facile conclusions or categorizations. When he entered Harvard Law School in 1948, he directed the registrar not to inform him of his grades, so as to "demote their importance." He is so adept at demoting the importance of such figures that he does not know his height, cannot recall when he began growing his moustache, and has trouble remembering his birthday.

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Francis Dummer Fisher '47 was born in 1926 in a suburb of Chicago and grew up on a street that was named after the male side of his lineage. His grandfather, whom Fisher characterizes as a "prickly sort of character, a muckraker," made his name in the 1890s in Chicago by wrenching the foul control of the traction-barons, or street-car franchises, off City Hall. And because President William Howard Taft wanted a man who was as "pure as a hound's tooth," as Frank Fisher tells it, to head the Department of the Interior, he went to the provinces and summoned Walter L. Fisher. Walter T. Fisher '13 also made his name in Chicago, 30 years after his father as a lawyer whom his son says used his practice "as a base for a lot of public-spirited activity," working closely with the American Civil Liberties Union and Chicago labor unions.

Fisher's mother's side was also professional although not as formidable. Still, it produced Katharine Dummer, a woman who, Fisher claims fondly, would have been the vice president of a giant corporation if she had lived in an age that was more hospitable to women. As it was, she died of a protracted illness in 1962, and Fisher delayed his move to Washington by two years to see out the ordeal. Ironically, the only other female member of Fisher's immediate family, his older sister, is also afflicted with a mysterious and unnamed blood disease.

Fisher followed in the footsteps of the male members of his family when he came to Harvard College in 1943. His desultory interests were evident here, as he rambled in academic concentration from political theory in Government, to Economics, and finally to Cultural Anthropology, the precursor of Social Relations, where he studied under College luminary Clyde Kluckhohn.

It was in the Harvard Liberal Union and the international student movement that Fisher fostered what was to become an unwavering interest in politics, and in both organizations he "fought the world communists." Fisher imparts to these neophyte political struggles a certain nostalgic high drama, and one of his stories ends signally. "It was only in class the next day that California came in." That is the story about the 1948 Dewey-Truman election, when the Republican students banqueted in premature celebration at Memorial Hall, while the disconsolate Democratic students trudged to their rooms after a rainy day electioneering in South Boston.

Fisher says he learned the names of Harvard's private final clubs only upon his graduation, and that it is a sign of the political "bankruptcy" of the 1970s that some consider the clubs an issue. He is indignant at the level of political activity here. "Twenty students parade in front of our office to protest a recruiter from the Marines," he says then adds with his voice rising and squeaking. "That's political activism? There are real political issues in this world now, and American students aren't doing anything about them."

The liberal Fisher left off being a student in 1944 when he was drafted, and he says there was no question as to whether he would serve. He went to war, even if all that meant was scraping paint and filing charts as assistant to the navigator on a wooden Navy sub-chaser that chugged slowly across the Pacific and into Hawaii at the end of the war. He has served his country since, and more actively, as assistant general counsel to the Far East mission of AID and deputy director of AID's Colombian mission. In both areas, he channeled funds and manipulated economic policy. Once in Colombia, when the mission felt that the government was not making enough of a commitment with its own pesos to the progress of education in the country, it threatened to withdraw all U.S. assistance. The Colombian government shelled out in the end.

Fisher exudes a liberal magnanimity that seems to make such imperialistic endeavor palatable. He says that it is important that South American countries are "healthy" and democratic, and an inevitable aspect of this condition is capitalistic enterprise. He does not call this imperialism and cites such actions as the encouragement of Colombian beef production to the detriment of American cattle interests. Fisher justifies the American presence in an underdeveloped country: "You can say that we ought to leave the Colombian under the palm tree because he's happy there. But I don't think he's happy--he's missing things, and he knows it, and I think it's good to help him."

The gains that Frank Fisher thinks he helped to engineer for Colombia are not much greater than the marginal improvements he managed to effect in the percentage of sub-standard units of housing in Chicago when he directed the regional office of HUD in the midwest from 1967 to 1970. Fisher speaks of the end of racial injustice, the development of Colombia, and equality between rich and poor as social ideals that would melt his flinty eyes. "Learning to struggle for unobtainable things, without being cynical, that kind of frame of mind is associated with working in the public concern," he says. Fisher the civil servant is satisfied after work when he has "changed the chance of something getting done from a chance of .02346 to a chance of .02347."

Avowedly not a scholar, Fisher teaches a public policy course at the Kennedy School instructing tyros how to work their ways through a bureaucracy. It is part of Fisher's general attempt to bring more intelligent people into government. From his metaphor, which borrows extensively from bureaucratic argot, to his willingness to compromise on ideals, Fisher is somewhat anomalous in the academic community, but he is well respected. In a self-portrait published in the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report of the Class of 1947, Fisher compared his position in public service to that of the forsaken man in the sinking boat who pumps furiously despite obvious gains by the ocean. The academics, Fisher explains now, his voice assuming a mock gravity, "are studying the situation, doing a psychoanalysis of what a funny attitude this Fisher's got." By no means irreverent, Fisher concedes. "The more time the scholar takes, the better, the closer he will come to the truth. But for the operator, action deferred depreciates in value."

Fisher makes a hard sell for the "creative satisfying and important" nature of government service. "Most students think of the government as a pack of evil men in the control room with their hands on all the switches," is the way he begins his plea. Well, Fisher explains, when you finally make it into that room, there's nobody there, except a guy sitting in the corner smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine, or maybe a man in a green eye-shade at a desk, but neither of them knows anything anyway. The argument ends. "If you take risks, you can act in ways that will prove interesting, effective and will be seized upon and ratified by the powers on high."

Fisher's role at the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning is no abdication from weighty governmental issues, however, because more than simply supervising the attempted placement of students in jobs they want, Fisher is witnessing what he is convinced is a cultural adjustment of mammoth significance. With the burgeoning proportion of college graduates in the work force, and the presence in the culture of more and more institutions directed towards the educated, society experiences a "geometric jump" in its numbers of educated masses, he says. The growing pains are tough, Fisher concedes, because college graduates must learn not to regard their college experience as only a prelude to professional employment, but instead should adjust to lead lives uncheapened by work they consider--beneath them. A liberal education can be a significant personal experience, Fisher says, but it cannot promise to give students "earthy vocational skills." What is more important than reconciling the disappointed college-graduate job-seeker to employment below his station is the "question of how we can take advantage of this great ability to educate people, how we can recognize this as a symptom of success," Fisher says. "The forces we're talking about are much greater than the recession. They're secular."

As director of the OCS-OCL. Fisher makes $28,000 a year--$8000 less than his salary at the top of the civil service, and he does not have the notoriety he had, say, when he forced all-white Warren, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, to integrate its work force in 1969. Neither of those perquisites--money or notoriety--is as important to Fisher as the sense that he is dealing with big issues, and he is pleased with his work at 54 Dunster Street. "In general a job is pretty exciting if you can catch a couple of hours of grand policy every week," he says with no effort at a smile but with his right eyebrow darting halfway up his forehead.

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Frank Fisher has learned quite well how to live with himself. On this Sunday morning the oak logs that he cut from the forest on Blue Hill south of Boston are burning in the old Franklin fireplace on the first floor of his half-house on Farwell Place. Fisher says he emerged from "narrow scrapes" with marriage in his middle years, and is much more secure in his solitary situation today. "The conventional pressure to follow a particular family pattern was ever so much stronger 25 years ago," he says.

Fisher has accumulated a throng of "collateral interests" that he cultivates because he is a man who does not like to distinguish between his vocations and avocations. He has played the recorder since law school ("The problem of getting the next note was a pleasant occupational relief from the problem of studying law") and he is the only one of his father's children to have inherited the old man's fondness for bird-watching. Fisher also cooks, sketches, sails and plays chamber music.

Down the block from Fisher's house is an old brick apartment building that some developer has settled upon as a likely spot for condominium living. Workers are clearing out the interior and leaving a pile of rubble outside the building.

A tall and athletic-looking man with springy joints, Fisher is also a connoisseur of junk-heaps, and for the past few weeks has been salvaging wooden beams from his neighbor's yard. He is building a sculpture in his kitchen. He calls it "lobster pot" and it is destined for a spot in the OCS-OCL, library, Lobster Pot is a nexus of three pier-like beams jutting up from the floor and plastered with wooden slats that look like misbegotten orange crates. Lobster Pot is ugly, but Fisher's visitor doesn't know how to say so.

At first he suggests that Fisher's colleagues at OCS-OCL might not like the piece, but Fisher only replies that they will have to wait around for his next sculpture. It seems that Fisher has already begun planning his next, a snakish coincidence of twisted plastic pipes--again, salvaged--and that no arbitration by outside judgment will deter him. Still, the visitor is perplexed. "Aren't you a bit foolhardy?" he ventures.

And at that first genuine compliment. Fisher breaks into a genuine grin. "Why thank you," he says.

From his metaphor, which borrows extensively from bureaucratic argot, to his willingness to compromise on ideals, Fisher is somewhat anomalous in the academic community.