From the moment 400 state police charged in to University Hall on the night of April 9, 1969 to end a takeover by several hundred angry students, the question was asked: why did he do it? That question comes up again and again, even today.

Why did Nathan Marsh Pusey '28, president of Harvard since 1953, opponent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and something of a hero among liberals in the early part of his career, call in police clad in riot gear to break up the takeover?

Pusey is not troubled by such questions.

The son of Iowa Episcopalians, Pusey, now 82, says he always guided his actions with the same clear principles. He had written his Harvard thesis on the laws of ancient Athenian democracy, and believed deeply that "force or violence" should not be tolerated.

"When I was against McCarthy and I was out in Wisconsin fighting against his election, and when I was calling in the police at Harvard, I was fighting for the same principles," he says.

So, on the night of the takeover, as Pusey conferred with deans about what to do, the decision was "a very simple one." In the years since, he has seen no reason to change his mind.

"I said, and the deans all said, 'What's going to happen? We've been waiting now for four years, hoping that some sanity was coming back, and instead of getting better, it gets worse. When they take over, this is the real test of strength. If they do this, and hold that building, and throw out all the people who belong there, and this goes on and on, and Harvard Yard just becomes an endless battleground for the rest of the year, that's the end of the academic year--that's the end of everything. So the only way to cope with the situation is to take the building back right now. Quick. And then take the trouble, whatever blame they want to throw--we'll do that, but let's get that done.'"

"We had all the state police lined up, ready to do that, so I said, 'Send them in.' They did. And they cleared it right out. That was the end of that."

"What we were trying to say is that in a university community we're not using guns, we're not using knives, we're not going to push people around or anything else," he says. "You have to sit down and discuss and reason with them. That was the only issue."

But what about the photographs of blood on the pavement outside University Hall, and the newspaper reports of police clubbing both demonstrators and members of the national press?

"I would put no trust in anything The Crimson said at that time. They were involved in this thing with these radicals."

"Of course, lots of these people wanted to get hurt," Pusey says. "They were trying to act like they were being brutalized, but Dean Ebert [of the Medical School] was there, and he could tell you there was no brutality of any kind. I think there was one girl that jumped out the window and may have broken an arm or something like that, but I don't think anybody else ever went to the infirmary. The reports of violence were just not true. There was no violence at all. The police just pushed you, they just trucked them right down the stairs and out...It was done very quickly, and we were all sitting watching it from my house, from the window."

"Our idea was to get it done without anybody being hurt," Pusey says. "And that was why [the police] sent in these specially trained people, because they were aware that our concern was that people should not be hurt. Get them out of there, but don't hurt them. And that was done, despite the things that were said. They did a good job. I was proud of the way they got them out. They were not hurting anybody. And they did it so darn quickly, too."

To Pusey, the protesters' specific demands had little relevance; it was "scholarship and reason" themselves that were at stake, as he would later write. Through most of his presidency, Pusey had proudly watched as Harvard helped guide post-war America into a "golden age." But in recent years, many at Harvard had harshly attacked Pusey's most cherished goals and accomplishments. Some had even called for revolution.

Although he says he never lost his love for the Harvard community, Pusey had grown increasingly disturbed by what he saw as the gullibility of leftist students and faculty.