Harvard's link to Washington

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By Carrie Sheffield

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. | President Obama has plucked at least a dozen professors from Harvard University for his administration, tapping a resource on which presidents with wide-ranging ideologies have relied heavily for nearly a century.

Mr. Obama's picks make up a veritable brain trust, with experiences ranging from overseeing military planning during the 1994 North Korean nuclear weapons crisis to representing a secretary of state before the Supreme Court to accepting a Nobel Peace Prize for limiting global arms after the Cold War.

"This is the largest number of Harvard professors going into government that I can remember in a long time," says David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an adviser to former Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

"Harvard in the '60s, and today, remains the leading research university in the world. It has a very large faculty of political scientists, historians, economists and others. Presidents like to have people around them who understand the world."

Richard Norton Smith, a presidential historian and author of "The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation," says former President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, was the first president to bring together a gathering of the most capable minds to hash out public policy solutions.

The "brain trust" idea got further attention from Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University; gathered more traction under Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and reached its zenith under John F. Kennedy.

"That was a radical idea, that a university had an obligation to be part of its time and not just a cloistered area to study the past," says Mr. Smith, a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University. "During the Kennedy years, Washington was known as 'Harvard on the Potomac.'"

Mr. Smith says Mr. Nixon repeatedly denounced the Ivy League for what he saw as elitism, yet he had a number of Harvard faculty and alumni in his administration, including Henry Kissigner. Mr. Smith also says Lyndon B. Johnson would rail against "the Harvards," who would write what Mr. Johnson thought were unfair history books.

However, Mr. Smith says, despite the stereotype of Harvard as a bastion of progressive thought, presidential poaching from the institution has been a bipartisan affair.