But despite the vastness of his domain, Bok strives scrupulously to separate out his private and public lives.

"No, I'm sorry, absolutely not," Bok answers, when asked whether or not it would be possible to interview his children. "I don't think that it's fair to get them involved in all this business. Can you imagine if everyone started calling?"

Dr. David Nathan, Bok's tennis partner and neighbor, explains: "When he's on the tennis court, he's on the tennis court. I don't know anything about Harvard University."

"This man is intensely private, and he keeps his professional life and his personal life completely separate," says Nathan, a professor at Harvard Medical School. "I see a lot of Derek, but I see him only as a tennis player and a neighbor."

And Bok says he cherishes his private moments, especially those with his family, wife Sissela and three children Hillary, Victoria, and Thomas. He frequently states his inability to spend more time with his family is one of the great regrets that the office of the presidency brings.

"But when those afternoons do come, I like to take a long walk in the country with my wife, or see my children," Bok says. "We have an enormously important family life. I have tried to stay away from corporate boards because my children were growing up."

It is, indeed, an irritating challenge to provoke Bok to reveal something else about himself. He seems genuinely entertained when a reporter attempts to poke about and explore his personal life, to see what makes Bok tick. The president is fully aware that the interviewer isn't going to get anywhere.

"Oh, I don't mean to be difficult," he says after the same question had been worded three ways without an adequate response. "But that's much too simplistic a question. People are much more complex than that. I just don't see an 'I-owe-it-all-to-my-mother' type answer to that one."

* * *

Bok's quiet demeanor certainly does not match his extraodinarily rapid and successful rise from scion of a rich Philadelphia family to president of Harvard, in 1971, at the young age of 40. Bok is the son of preeminent liberal Pennsylvania jurist, now an associate justice of the state supreme court, and the grandson of Edward W. Bok, the first editor of Ladies Home Journal.

Tall, good-looking, and athletic, Bok made good on the family roots right off the bat as an undergraduate at Stanford, earning plaudit as a veritable Big Man on Campus, a reputation he carried with him to Harvard Law School.

Law School classmate, John Kaplan, now visiting the Law School from Stanford, says that Bok "was considered the handsomest guy in the class, the best athlete, probably the richest, and he was among the smartest in the class. God, you could genuinely hate someone for all that, but you just couldn't hate Derek."

"What kept me from hating him?" Kaplan asks. "I could have you know. But what impressed me most about him, though, was that he was the most giving, and the most decent person that I had ever come into contact with. His integrity and fairness just made it impossible to dislike him."

After an initial uncertainty about his career plans--and a sojourn in Paris as in Fullbright scholar--Bok decided on a career in teaching, and embarked on scholarship in labor law, an endeavor that was sidetracked temporarily in 1968 when he was named Law School Dean. That administrative digression was virtually made permanent two-and-a-half years later, when, after more than a six-month search, the governing Corporation tapped the 40-year-old Bok as Harvard's 25th president.

From the beginning of the search, Bok was regarded by many as the clear-cut first choice. In what is known by long-time administrators as "the time of troubles," Bok had proven himself as an adept conciliator, no small accomplishment compared to the man he replaced, Nathan M. Pusey '28, who had summoned the police to evict the demonstrators who had taken over University Hall. One of Bok's most celebrated moments was when, as dean, he showed up to confront student occupants of Langdell Hall armed only with coffee and doughnuts.