When Lucia, daughter of James H. Rowe III '73, asked Dad what he did for a living, Rowe replied, "I'm a juggler."

Rowe's professional career--which has involved switching gears several times from Watergate investigator to Inaugural Ball chair to lawyer to NBC vice president to vice president for government, community and public affairs at Harvard--has indeed been a balancing act.

Yet, regardless of where the job offers took him, Rowe focused his professional life on a family passion: power play in Washington.

Colleagues, friends and family say Rowe's winning personality, his good judgment, his sense of humor (and what one friend calls his "decent" tennis game) have helped him jump from one prestigious job to another.

With a family rooted in the Beltway and experience in making friends and influencing people, Rowe has never had to stray far from his roots to be successful.

Son of the 1960s

Weaned on Washington wisdom, Rowe began to interact with top-level government officials early on and says he has "inhaled what was out there politically" since childhood.

His father, James H. Rowe Jr. '31 was a loyal New Dealer in the original Brain Trust during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt '04, a former Crimson president. In addition, Rowe's mother, Elizabeth, served as chair of the National Capital Planning Commission, leading the effort to preserve and protect the city she called "our national treasure."

When he wasn't listening to the Washington Senators (who he now admits was "the worst team in baseball") on his transistor radio or reading The Making of the President, young James III was spurning St. Albans high school's government club to listen to "the more interesting conversations going on at home."

Peter Fleming, a family friend who eventually hired Rowe to work in his New York law firm, recalls spending summers on Cape Cod with the Rowes.

"Jimmy was a '60s kid--a great kid--with hair down his back," Fleming says. "Then he cut his hair and went to Harvard--the typical good guy performance."

From College to University

Arriving at Pennypacker Hall in 1969, Rowe recalls an undergraduate atmosphere of activism, not academics.

In what was "not the most studious of times on campus," Rowe says Phillips Brooks House was often home for him, where he served as the service organization's vice president in 1972-73 after a stint as a volunteer at the John Marshall School.

Living first in a Leverett tower and then in a Lowell House suite, history concentrator Rowe graduated from Harvard cum laude in 1973 and soon after headed home to Washington.