IV

Living in a House dramatically changed the quality of life for me. Before my senior year, other than the historians I have mentioned, I had met no faculty members in the social sciences. Crane Brinton, the historian (later to write The Anatomy of Revolution, a book I admired), and Seymour Harris, the economist (with whom I was later to work, along with McGeorge Bundy, on a plan for a national self-liquidating student loan bank), were tutors in the House, as was Carl Joachim Friedrich of the Government Department. (I met Pitirim Sorokin only once, when I invited him to address a House colloquium; I still recall his opening comment that he was educating his son to shoot straight even before he taught him to think straight!) Entertained by tutors, Langmuir and I would in turn give tea parties for them, for fellow students, and for young women from Boston and occasionally Radcliffe.

What was truly decisive for me was meeting Friedrich, a nonresident tutor who had come to Harvard as part of a small group of German exchange students in the mid-1920s; he had not intended to stay, but at some point Professor Arthur Holcombe invited him into the Department of Government as an instructor. Friedrich was primarily responsible for my becoming an academic man. He had taken his doctorate at Heidelberg with Alfred Weber. At Dunster House he quickly had around him a circle of some of the most intelligent students. He was energetic and ambitious, of sanguine disposition, though capable of anger and contempt; he was a vigorous cello player. He was at home in French as well as

general European art history (he later published The Age of the Baroque ). He went on to a distinguished career in scholarship and public affairs in the United States and in post–World War II Germany. In due course I became one of his closest disciples. When I had become a student at Harvard Law School, we bought a rundown farm together near Brattleboro, Vermont. He introduced me to the European social sciences and to some American writers such as Thorstein Veblen. What was decisive for me, as I realize in retrospect, was that Friedrich was a magnetic and cultivated person, who not only was fond of me but also respected me as a potential intellectual colleague.

Had I lived in the Yard with most of my class, I would not have had this opportunity for easy intellectual commerce with faculty members and would have been less likely to encounter James Agee, then a junior, a haunted and engaging person, who was also in Dunster House. My interest in the Houses provided a few opportunities for conversation with President Lowell. (I quixotically sought to interest him in having Walter Gropius design one or another of the new Houses.) I was startled and found it clarifying to have Lowell dismiss my admiration for Henry Adams by saying that he was a whiner, full of self-pity. Lowell wanted Harvard, and particularly its law school, to turn out tough-minded leaders, potential statesmen, and also leaders of the bar—not aesthetes.