The Beginning

Fineberg was in Wigglesworth F-11 when President John F. Kennedy '40 was shot.

He remembers it distinctly. He was sitting at his desk, listening to classical music on a large, red portable radio.

The music stopped. The cars passing by his window stopped. And Harvard stopped, paralyzed by the death of one of its own.

"Everyone took that personally," Fineberg says.

It was, he says, the defining moment of his first year at Harvard College--the year that marked the beginning of a long-lasting friendship between the young man and the institution that molded him.

A biology course under General Education, the Core's precursor, helped persuade Fineberg that he wanted to go to medical school. He became a psychology concentrator.

Harvey shared the three-bedroom suite in Wigglesworth F-11 with John A. Gresham '67 and Elliot B. Little '67. The three were very different, Gresham remembers.