"They were being manipulated by a little group of extremists who mistakenly thought that the world was coming to an end and there was going to be a revolution and they were going to lead it," he says. "You could almost say these people were crazy."

The University Hall takeover, Pusey maintains, was orchestrated by "not more than five or six people who had adopted this Marxist-Leninist business."

"These were not innocent little kids," he says. "These kids were rough. Not the majority of Harvard students--I'm talking about the radical bunch of leaders. When the cops came [into University Hall], they all got out, and let the other people get arrested. They were just evil people. And don't think young people can't be evil. They can be as evil as any adult. There was a little bunch of those people who were simply wicked."

"The strangest thing from my point of view is the way that this feeling about the United States being a rotten country was that the people responsible for that were universities," Pusey adds. "This I find absolutely shocking, that anyone could have been at Harvard and come to an idea like that. I thought it would have to be a damn fool."

But Pusey's greatest frustration came from faculty members who were reluctant to discipline student activists or denounce their beliefs.

"I thought they were old enough to know better, but a lot of them believed the kind of ballyhoo that the students were shouting, or at least felt sympathetic that young people should be permitted to make their errors," he says. "That was what was really hard to cope with, almost impossible to cope with."

The months following the takeover, in which students and faculty denounced the police intervention and called for the president's resignation, were a psychologically difficult time for many administrators. Pusey, who also drew heavy criticism in the late 1950s for his statements that Harvard was a "Christian" community, never understood why many had come to see him as a reactionary.

The former president says it "makes him sick" that the student activists' versions of the events of 1969 often portray him as a villain. "But it doesn't make any difference, because someday, the historians will straighten all this out," he adds.

Pusey remembers 1969-70 as an academic year nearly as troubled as the previous one.

"The worst thing there, of course, was the time when the gang came up from Boston and smashed all the windows of all the stores in Harvard Square," he says. "It was the most horrible thing you can imagine--glass, destruction all over, and why anybody in their right mind would do that--I mean, I thought people had gone crazy."

"I didn't have any personal life apart from Harvard," Pusey says. "Harvard was my life. And I was saddened and hurt by the kind of behavior that was going on there at that time."

It was in the spring of 1970 that Pusey announced his early retirement, a move he says was not prompted by student unrest, but rather by the impending departure of several members of the Harvard Corporation. He left hoping that the University's troubles were nearing an end, that soon "there was going to be some sanity."

"I thought by 1970-71, my final year, that everything was quiet, and it was over, and Harvard could get back to business," Pusey says. "That was a utopian thought, because feelings were so strong that they were not going to return to normal in a hurry. The faculties were divided, with real personal animosities built up."

"Real dislikes, almost hates, were built up within the faculty between the people supporting what I call the University position and the people supporting the radical position," he adds. "People who were mad at me for having called in the police, and people who thought that I did the right thing. And that wasn't going to disappear quickly. It may not even have disappeared to this day."

Pusey and his wife now live in a modestly furnished apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he has been involved in the work of several charitable causes. Throughout his first years in New York, he says, he was often stopped on the street by Harvard alumni wanting to console him for what they saw as the disaster that had befallen his presidency. Once again, Pusey felt misunderstood.