Sutton recalls spotting Kennedy, replete with black suit and tophat, surveying the Yard "as if he owned it." At the time Sutton took economics with John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus, and history with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. '38. "It was fun to see professors and people I worked with going into the administration."
"Kennedy harnessed the brain trust," says Ryden. Speculation about who would be the next pick for the Kennedy cabinet ravaged the Yard and nearly all such speculations turned out right.
The Kennedy-Nixon race started the class thinking about real problems, says Bloom. "Up to that point we didn't talk of world issues. "We were placid and dormant," Bloom says. Kennedy changed that.
In 1961 Kennedy established the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), programs which "captured a notion of idealism," says says Daniel J. Givelber '61, now the dean ofNortheastern Law School. At the same time thesegroups provided "a constructive way" to deal withworld problems, says Bloom, who worked in Africafor 20 years for USAID and now heads itsAfrican-Asian division.
The combination of ideals and structured meansfor action sparked many members of the class tocarry the nation's torch of public service."Kennedy probably influenced me to go toWashington to work for the next 20 years," saysMichael Abbell '61, an international criminallawyer who spent most of his career in the JusticeDepartment.
When Givelber, who did not get involved inpolitical issues until he graduated, hit theworking world, he joined the civil rights crusadewith a month-long legal stint in Mississippi. "Ihad an idea I ought to devote some time to publicservice and civil rights was the time to do it,"he says. "It was clear that this was likely thegreat moral struggle of my life."
Like their professors who had been snatched wayin 1961 to bolster the Kennedy Administration,some members of the class who headed to Washingtonwere give direct responsibility for pioneering newfrontiers. College years spent on the footballfield and in the library, far away from any civilrights activism, were the end of "Eisenhower-eraapathy" for men like Terry F. Lenzner '61. Hisfirst job out of law school, with the JusticeDepartment, led him to Mississippi to investigatethe murders of three civil rights activists, whichhelped galvanize a growing national indignationabout abuses of Black civil rights. Lenzner wenton to head the national legal service program forthe poor, worked on the special Senate committeeinvestigating Watergate, and drafted the subpoenademanding the Watergate tapes from PresidentRichard M. Nixon in 1974.
Lenzner says his career proved to him theefficacy of working within the system to effectchange. Although half of the president's cabinetat one point said that programs they headed hadbeen sued by Lenzner's legal aid service on behalfof poor clients, the service was made independentand continues today. "I retain a strong confidencein the system," says Lenzner. But attendingcollege in a period of pro-administrationquiescence "might not have been helpful" for hiscareer, he adds.
"The civil rights problem was alien to me,"Lenzner says. "If I had been exposed to theproblem and had more time to think about how toresolve it, I might have been more effective thanI was."
Other classmates who started out working withinthe system realized that a better society wouldnot come about in the traditional way. "We thoughtthat if you voted for the right people and if theychose the right advisors then society would changefor the better," Ryden says. "Instead, societytaught us that if you wanted change in America,then you had to work from the outside."
Donald F. Herr '61, who drafts NATO policy forthe Defense Department these days, had similarmisgivings. The magna cum laude graduate says hewas in Cambridge when Fidel Castro received ahero's welcome on campus in 1959, adding that"Castro did not seem quite the ogre that thegovernment made him out to be" at that time.
When Kennedy bolstered the nation's involvementin Latin American affairs, Herr decided to involvehimself in the inner workings of policy. "I hopedI could make some difference if I got ingovernment and changed policy by working aroundthe edges."
As a foreign service officer, Herr wrote areport questioning U.S. policies in Cuba, in hopesthat "somewhere up the line things would berethought." Instead when "nothing did change,"Herr left the State Department in 1972. He laterreturned as a policy advisor for NATO.
Jonathan Z. Larsen '61, who is now a freelancewriter, says he approached the New Frontier withrenewed patriotism. "When Kennedy sounded thebugle, I was more than ready to follow." But theturmoil of the late '60s taught Larsen, who coveredthe tumultous 1968 Democratic convention inChicago for Time magazine, that the solution forchange "was to openly challenge the system." Asbureau chief for Time magazine in Saigon in theearly 1970s, Larsen grew disillusioned with "theanarchy" he saw in almost half of the AmericanGI's on drugs. "Kennedy would have beenpessimistic himself."
Some members of the class say that underlyingtheir lack of activism against the system was adissent, voiced in more subtle ways. In late nightbull sessions in cafes along Mt. Auburn Streetthey articulated their dissatisfaction with theirparents' value systems and found a spokesman inthe music of Bob Dylan, says Larsen.
"We were cynical among ourselves. We reactedagainst the Norman Rockwell self-satisfied visionof America," says Larsen. "We thought there had tobe more to life than that.