Not everyone at Harvard shared the aggressive sentiments of takeover organizers.

Whether because they found themselves too engrossed in their academic pursuits or because they fundamentally disagreed with the tactics of student organizers, some students simply missed out on the militancy of 1969.

One such person was James M. Fallows '70, president of The Harvard Crimson in 1969. He was charged with preserving the paper's objectivity under pressure from all sides.

In doing so, he faced an administration who found the paper's coverage too radical, and a staff filled with talented, opinionated and steadfastly liberal writers who thought the paper's position was not radical enough.

"In a way I was spared having to advocate anything particular because I was putting out a newspaper," Fallows said in a phone interview from Washington state, where he now works for Microsoft. "It wasn't my job to run protests but to cover what was going on."

But as he tried to maintain an objective position, Fallows formed an opinion about the proper way to pursue change at Harvard that fundamentally conflicted with the demonstrators' militant stance.

"The question was how you tried to get the point across, and I didn't think violence at the University was the appropriate way," Fallows says.

He characterized both the takeover and the University's response as misguided.

"The University Hall takeover was not totally unexpected," he says. "I don't know if tactically I would have predicted it a month before [it occurred], but generally things like this were going on."

One of the most vocal administrative opponents of both student activism and The Crimson was then-Harvard President Nathan Marsh Pusey'28.

Fallows said that while Pusey had good qualities, his conservative views were too far out of step with the political currents on campus.

"They couldn't have chosen a more symbolically inappropriate person for those times," Fallows says.

"There was a tragic historic accident for Harvard--Nathan Pusey had been a real political hero, but he was simply the wrong person for that job and for those times," Fallows says. "There is no doubt that Pusey's tremendous difficulty even understanding students' [views] made things all the more frayed."

Fallows says Pusey's "unbending rectitude" sent "the right symbolic message" 15 years earlier in the face of McCarthyist interrogation of universities.

"Fifteen years later, that same rigidity was the wrong political stance. He ended up making himself and the University symbols of something they had no business being symbols of--the U.S. policy in Vietnam," he says.