Still Himself

While age has certainly not left Pusey behind--he digresses a little more in conversation than he would have 10 years ago--he still remains coherent and thoughtful in his comments.

In many of the most vital ways, Pusey is still his same old self: The old classicist still peppers his speech with analogies from antiquity--calling the Harvard Corporation the equivalent of the Roman Senate, and the Overseers a modern day "Tribune of Plebes."

And he is as frank--some might say a bit too frank--as ever. He admits that he has always looked down on people in professional schools and says he had it on good authority in 1953 that the candidates competing against him for Harvard's presidency were "undeserving and incompetent."

But more than half a century after he left his native Iowa, Pusey's speech is still folksy. Joe McCarthy was "a damn foolish" fellow who turned many a "name into mud." But Pusey is a city cat too. As he talks about the places where he has worked over the years, he instinctively provides their street address and cross streets, as a New Yorker would.

Although he can walk on his own for short distances, Pusey moves around his apartment with a walker, and around town on a motorized cart. He is clearly quite fond of the latter, offering more than once to get in it and pose for pictures, which his wife rejects as unnecessary.

These days, however, Pusey rarely leaves his fifth floor flat in a postwar building on East 66th St.

The apartment is small--living room, dining room and den are a single medium sized room--and decorated in a 1970s modern style. The coffee tables are glass and most of the art is Asian. Aside from a photograph of Pusey with John F. Kennedy '40 with some Neo-Georgian buildings in the background, there is not a hint of the old Harvard look that once characterized his home in the Yard.