Professor Ernest May: A Personal Reflection

Professor Ernest R. May, former dean of Harvard College and a longtime member of the Belfer Center board of directors, passed away earlier this year. Harvard will hold a memorial service for him on Sept. 23 at 3 pm in Memorial Church. One of Prof. May's former students, Vivek Viswanathan, wrote this piece in memory of his passing.

"An experience, especially in youth, is quickly overlaid by others, and is not at the moment fully comprehended," John Buchan wrote in the preface to Pilgrim's Way. "But it is overlaid, not lost. Time hurries it from us, but also keeps it in store, and it can later be recaptured and amplified by memory, so that at leisure we can interpret its meaning and enjoy its savor." I graduated from college just last month, and my ability to recapture the experience, to make sense of the fragments, will come only with time. Even in old age, I can imagine the difficulty of identifying, in Buchan's phrase, the "effect upon one mind of the mutations of life." But if I do make such an effort some day and think back to my education, rifling through memories of papers and problem sets, seminar discussions and spirited dining hall conversation, I am sure that my thoughts will settle on Professor Ernest R. May, who passed away just before commencement last month. His influence on me was incalculable; I cannot imagine Harvard without him.

"He has a sphinx-like quality to him," my first-year adviser told me before I met Professor May for the first time in September of 2005. Hoping to enroll in the freshman seminar that he offered on the 9/11 Commission, I was unsure of what to expect of my interview with Professor May. While I had arrived at school ten days beforehand and had not yet finished unpacking my belongings, he had taught at Harvard for fifty-one years, having joined the faculty two years after Harry Truman had left the White House. Before coming to Harvard, he advised the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Arthur Radford, as Radford decided whether to advocate for intervention on behalf of the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. In the years since, he had written award-winning books on the history of American diplomacy, developed pioneering approaches to the study of international relations, served as Dean of Harvard College at the height of the student antiwar movement, directed the Institute of Politics, transcribed and edited the recordings that John F. Kennedy had made in secret during the Cuban Missile Crisis, consulted with the Defense Department and the CIA, and drafted much of the 9/11 Commission Report, a government-sponsored publication that also happened to be a final-round contender for the National Book Award. The policymakers who had over the years sought his counsel ranged from Averell Harriman to John McCloy, Brent Scowcroft to Robert Gates.

I did not know any of this when I went for my interview, a lack of awareness that seemed not to concern Professor May in the slightest. The interview, located in his office in a hidden nook on the third floor of the Harvard Kennedy School, consisted of just two questions. And when, at the end of the interview, I asked a question of my own, I was met with what I later discovered to be his signature pause, as he rocked back in his chair, tilted his head to the side, and looked up at the ceiling until, eight or ten or twenty seconds later, he had composed a response that was to his satisfaction. I had little inkling back then of the time that I would spend in that office, sitting in the old wooden chair. Yet in that brief encounter, I glimpsed the qualities that marked Professor May: his fascination with historical puzzles; his soft-spoken reserve, even shyness; and his abiding humility, his willingness to learn from undergraduates even as we felt that we had little to teach him. And there was the sense of humor. His deep and distinctive laugh would accompany his anecdotes, and often the corners of his mouth would turn upward and he would begin to chuckle even before he had finished the story.

This light touch, combined with his sense of purpose in addressing the most intractable problems in public policy, piqued my interest. He seemed to embody, in his work and habits, the words of Archie Epps, the former Harvard administrator who had hoped for us to develop through our education a "philosophy of life that brings dignity and honor to human affairs." His scholarly reputation certainly drew students to his courses. He was, Philip Zelikow noted, the "most important scholar of American foreign relations to emerge during the second half of the twentieth century." Just a few weeks into my first semester, I remember attending a talk at the Harvard Book Store by Sean Wilentz, the prominent Princeton historian. After Wilentz finished, I stood in line to have my book signed. As he wrote his name, I told him that I had just started at Harvard and was in a course with Professor May, and had he heard of him? "Heard of him?" Wilentz replied, incredulous. "You realize that you are talking about the most distinguished American historian there is!" Several years later, when I had written Lawrence Summers soon after the 2008 presidential election with regard to the possibility of working in Washington, D.C. after graduation, listing some of my coursework and activities and offering to provide more information, the only item that he asked for in reply was a letter of reference from Professor May. In addition to his scholarly regard, Professor May possessed an intrigue about him that attracted students. There was a sense among all of us, even those who knew him well, that there was a part of his life that we could only guess at, consisting of classified intelligence matters and state secrets. His natural reticence only enhanced the allure of mystery that followed him.

But more than his renown as a historian or his intimate knowledge of national security policy, I was fascinated by the quality of his mind: the precision of his words, the pointed nature of the questions that he posed, and the bracing clarity of his thought. He offered the nuanced perspective of an academic, once recalling, with more than a trace of amusement, an observation from his daughter that he seemed to respond to every question with the same answer: "It's complicated." Much of his historical work addressed his belief that decision makers tend to simplify what should not be simplified. Yet even as he reveled in complexity, he was not hemmed in by it. In his own writing and in his discussions with students, he would move crisply to the essence of an issue. He often suggested that, in our search for suitable topics for our seminar papers, we seek out "puzzles." Why did this or that happen? If this or that factor had changed, would the outcome have changed? In pressing the key question, he would be gentle but persistent. After a student had responded, he would invariably pause, look up, nod his head up and down as the response cycled through his mind, and then turn his gaze back to the student and ask: "Why?" I once asked him about a much-publicized New York Times Magazine essay that had called for a revival of Cold War liberalism in the post-9/11 era. "I quite enjoyed it," he told me, "but then I realized at the end that, try as I might, I wasn't sure what the author was trying to say." His courses, with their analytical rigor, sharpened the mind; each time I exited his lecture or seminar, I had the feeling of having that much more insight into the operation of my mental machinery.

In addition to the clarity of his thought and the lucidity of his prose, I learned from the remarkable manner in which he approached his work. His love of history, its puzzles and personalities and ceaseless irony, was palpable. Surely he drew satisfaction from the influence of his work on senior policymakers and fellow scholars, as well as the esteem in which they held him. Yet he seemed as inner-directed as a person could be. The years of painstaking research and writing had not seemed to wear on him, and in fact at the time of his passing he had been at work on two books. "He is really quite ageless," a former student and since-retired colleague of his, Akira Iriye, told the Harvard Crimson five years ago. I once struck up the nerve to ask Professor May why, at age eighty, he had not retired. He smiled and, bowing to his tendency to discuss himself as little as possible, referred me to an obscure amendment that Congress had made to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1986 that had subsequently lapsed in 1994. As I pondered his non-answer later that afternoon, I recognized that the question itself had been somewhat doltish. Like many others at Harvard, I have found that my hope to spend my life doing excellent, substantive, meaningful work is in uneasy coexistence with a longing for the approval of others. "The desire for greatness, to be recognized for your achievements, is an insatiable worm that gnaws at your consciousness, invades your dreams," wrote Jerome Groopman in The Measure of Our Days. "Who doesn't suffer its effects? Driven to do more, make more, rise higher." Often only on the cusp of death do we recognize that this is a "fruitless climb," Groopman wrote, "because there is no real summit." It was a truth that Professor May appeared to grasp intuitively.

Curiosity, rather than the accolades that flowed effortlessly in his direction, motivated his research, and for a scholar who had pursued his craft for fifty years, he retained a striking independence of mind. He delighted in his interactions with undergraduates, and listened attentively to them, not only because he enjoyed teaching but because he believed that careful listening would enable him to reexamine his own beliefs. He once reflected at the end of a seminar, as we looked on, mystified, that our discussion of the concept of globalization had led him to revise his view of its value to historians. When I went to work as his research assistant, he would explain his view of whatever subject he wanted me to research, for example, instances in the last half-century in which Congress has curtailed the commander-in-chief power of the president, and then tell me, "I want you to make sure I'm right." His most skilled research assistants, he noted, were those students who, upon receiving his instructions, would tell him, "I don't think you asked me the right question." In one of his published essays, he affirmed the value that he placed on feedback: After acknowledging two of his colleagues who had provided comments on drafts and issuing the standard disclaimer that they were "not responsible for anything [the author] says," he added, in an epigrammatic footnote: "They are responsible for some things he does not say." His habit of disciplining his mind, of pursuing excellence in his work for its own sake, was fixed in his constitution, and it influenced me from the start. "Get to know one professor really well," we were told upon arrival at Harvard, and I decided that I wanted very much to be like Professor May.

I followed him around the university for the better part of the next four years, enrolling in the freshman seminar, a survey course in the history of American foreign relations, a lecture course on the Vietnam War, a reading seminar in international history, a research seminar on Cold War crises, and a graduate seminar in diplomatic history. It never was repetitive, and I discovered why in the spring of my first year, when Professor May addressed an issue central to his discipline: Why study history? The study of history is argument without end, he noted, as well as a source of wonderful stories. But he went further. "History matters," he told us, "because history influences the way we think." He reminded us of how Franklin Roosevelt, reaching for a framework to replace the hapless League of Nations, labored under the gaze of Woodrow Wilson; how Harry Truman looked to Korea in 1950 and remembered the appeasement at Munich; and how George H. W. Bush, debating whether to continue to Baghdad in 1991, recalled the prolonged wars in Korea and Vietnam. Only by reconstructing key judgments "within the little worlds in which they are made," he explained, "can we truly understand and evaluate that extraordinary human faculty we label ‘judgment.' And only by doing that, can we learn to do better." But learning to do better was no simple task. Policymakers, he said, tend to know too little history and, worse, misuse the history that they do know. He encouraged us to be different, to become more sensitive to the possibility of change. Quieting my instinct to extract lessons from the past, I learned to inspect the evolution of an issue, probe presumptions, and place individuals and organizations. Such study, Professor May wrote, may develop the rare practice of "thinking in time-streams...imagining the future as it may be when it becomes the past-with some intelligible continuity but richly complex and able to surprise." He appreciated the difficulty of developing the capacity to think in such a manner. The presidency, he wrote with Philip Zelikow in their study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, requires "very high intelligence and cool judgment."

While his scholarship centered on policymakers who fell short of that standard, he went out of his way to demonstrate his respect for them. It was a view that he shared with his longtime colleague, Richard Neustadt. "American bureaucrats, like the American professional middle class in general, have long felt themselves superior to politicians," Neustadt once noted, adding that he wished for an "inoculation against sneering" among the Kennedy School faculty. Former senator Bob Dole recalled his own method for responding to smugness among members of his staff. "If you're so smart," an exasperated Dole would say, "then how come I'm the senator?" Professor May sympathized with the predicament in which policymakers on the cusp of a decision often find themselves, even as he pointed out the ways in which they could have done better. "Recognize that when a decision-maker makes a decision, it is under conditions of great uncertainty," he once told us. "The range of options is far more limited than it seems in retrospect." He cited, as an example, an observation that Madeleine Albright made in response to a question from the 9/11 Commission on why she did not dedicate more of her time to counterterrorism. Had she done so, the former secretary of state responded, she might very well be fielding questions from a different commission on why she had not done enough to avert war between India and Pakistan. In Professor May's course on the Vietnam War, I witnessed a powerful illustration of his appreciation for the constraints under which policymakers must act. We were assigned a case study on the options available to Lyndon Johnson in April of 1965 as he weighed whether to Americanize the war effort. After reading the case study, we were to simulate the deliberations in our course sections. "When I taught this case at the Kennedy School, I used to play Johnson in the simulations," Professor May told us. "But every time I did, my stomach would get tied up in knots," he said, recounting his struggle to choose among the options available, none of them good. "I don't play anymore." Choices, he understood, were seldom clear in an imperfect world.

His understanding of human frailty enlivened his teaching and writing, and to this Professor May added his sense of humility. I once asked him how the classic text on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Graham Allison's Essence of Decision, came to be written, and he responded by mentioning a faculty study group at Harvard's Institute of Politics with which he was involved. Only later did I discover that he had in fact chaired the study group and that the study group was known as the May Group. When I started research for an end-of-term essay on Nixon's move into Cambodia in May of 1970, he suggested several general sources. Only later, while searching through the Washington Post archive, did I discover that he had authored an op-ed with Thomas Schelling that sharply criticized the move into Cambodia and that he had, with a select group of Harvard professors, flown to Washington, D.C. to confront Henry Kissinger over the decision. ("You're tearing the country apart," Professor May told Kissinger in an emotional meeting which, Kissinger later said, "completed my transition from the academic world.") If Professor May identified more with one political party than another, he never told us. When I asked him if he had any advice on how to choose among the various candidates running for president, thirty seconds passed as he considered the question, his hands clasped in front of him, his eyes staring off into the distance as he rocked back and forth in his chair. Then he looked back at me, smiled, and deadpanned: "No." After our laughter subsided, he returned to the subject, suggesting that we focus less on policy pronouncements and debates and more on such subtle factors as how the candidates interacted with their staffs. If I asked him his view on some potent political issue, such as the wisdom of the NSA wiretapping scheme or the success of Bill Clinton's presidency, he would answer with characteristic insight. But that was his answer, he seemed to be saying. "History changes," he often told us, "and its reference points are uncertain." He pushed us to develop the independence of mind to arrive at judgments of our own.  

With time, we learned more about Professor May. His favorite books included The Education of Henry Adams and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt; he read four newspapers every day, though one of these, the Boston Globe, he read mainly for the sports page; of all of the Wise Men who set the course for America in the Cold War, he believed that Robert Lovett was the wisest. And we learned of his humor, his love of laughter, his penchant for storytelling. He once detoured for ten minutes during a lecture on the origins of the Cold War to explain how John McCloy had defeated Don Budge in a game of tennis. He would tell of how, in the late 1950s, he had invited a former State Department official to speak in his class. The speaker criticized then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, which led a student to ask who the speaker thought could do better than Dulles. "Anyone!" the speaker responded. "You, for example!" His keen sense of irony exhibited itself when I asked him once how lawyers differed from historians. He began by explaining that lawyers start with their conclusion already settled and attempt to fit the facts of the argument to support the pre-drawn conclusion. Then he paused. "Historians sometimes do that too," he said with a smile, his eyes sparkling.

In the last lecture of his survey course in American foreign relations, Professor May closed by reciting "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold," W. B. Yeats wrote in the most famous passage of the poem. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." But Professor May did not stop his recitation there. Instead, he continued to Yeats' meditations on an unknowable future. "What rough beast," Yeats asks, "its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" We are, Professor May emphasized, at a fraught moment in our public life. "We no longer have a shared sense of what matters most" in our approach to the world, he said in January, "and what therefore should shape our responses." Yet he believed fully in our ability to think creatively and devise new approaches, even if we are puzzled by what form the rough beast will take. As an earlier generation successfully framed the Cold War challenge, he suggested, so we could do the same. I will always treasure the opportunity to have learned from him, to have attended his lectures and sat in his office and read his books. And I will always miss his brilliance and gentleness, humility and humor, and his capacity to see around corners and show the way.