On a cold morning in Moscow, 38 years ago today, a mixture of snow and rain soaking the mourners, John Reed's coffin was laid to rest next to the Kremlin Wall--alongside those who had given their lives for the Bolshevik Revolution.

As a Red Guard band played the funeral dirge, a large Red banner was nailed upon the wall with the letters in gold, "The leaders die, but the cause lives on."

But these words would have had little meaning for John Reed. As poet, war correspondent, Communist, and Harvardman, John Reed saw life as one Big Game. You could lose the game, but it wasn't worth dying for. Life was too exciting.

Graduate of the Class of 1910, world famous by the age of 26, and dead at 32, Reed lived hard, and it was only when he was fatally stricken with typhus that he gave up fighting for the Bolsheviks as he had fought for Harvard, Pancho Villa, and the Socialists.

Reed was impetuous--a romantic who saw a beauty in fighting for something even if everyone else was against him. But at the same time, he craved popularity.

His friends had expected his impulsiveness to vanish, but he always cherished the memory of those moments, when, in front of the Harvard stands, Cheerleader Jack Reed could summon help to "dash old Eli's hopes."

"As song leader of the cheering section," Reed wrote at the age of 29, "I had the supreme blissful sensation of swaying 2000 voices in great crashing choruses during the big football games."

It was this spirit which impelled Reed, at the end of the Second Communist international in Moscow in August, 1920, to lift his team captain--in this case Lenin--on top of his shoulders.

With two friends, Paul Freeman and Owen Penney, Reed boosetd the Bolshevik leader up. Granville Hicks reported:

Before he knew what was happening, Lenin found himself high on Reed's and Freeman's shoulders, gazing down on a bewildered crowd. Ignorant of American customs, or perhaps disapproving, he protested, and, when protests did no good, kicked. They let him down, Reed, unabashed, joking at the bump on Penney's forehead.

When John Reed, son of an Oregon liberal, reached Cambridge in the fall of 1906, Charles W. Eliot was to serve only two more years as president of Harvard and would turn over to A. Lawrence Lowell a tradition of freedom and excellence that has characterized Harvard this whole century.

"Freedom is the condition necessary to the progress of society," Eliot told Reed's assembled class. "A striking phenomenon of our day is the distrust of freedom that is manifesting itself in all walks of life."

The class of 1910 produced a number of individuals whose use of this freedom was to develop into diverse, but highly articulated philosophies. In addition to Reed, there was Walter Lippman, T.S. Eliot, Heywood C. Broun, Alan Seeger, and Hamilton Fish, Jr.

Looking back on his college days, Reed wrote

There was talk of the world and daring thought and intellectual insurgency; heresy has always been a Harvard and New England tradition. Students themselves criticized the faculty for not educating them, attacked the sacred institution of intercollege athletics, sneered at undergradaute clubs so holy that no one dared mention their name.