“He came from Iowa and had confidence in his midwestern idea of America. He couldn’t believe we could be involved in an unjust war,” Bethell says. “Pusey got locked into defending the war, even as the Faculty and his deans around him opposed it.”

On the flip side, students couldn’t understand Pusey’s position. And his characteristic strong will didn’t help things—“when he said no, he meant no. He was perhaps too inflexible,” Bethel says.

The result was the fiery conclusion of the 1969 sit-in in which the police evicted SDS occupiers. Even more vicious was the backlash—deans were critical and students said their president had lost all connection to their concerns.

Pusey had once attended a plethora of Harvard sporting events, and had stayed on generally good terms with students as late as the mid-1960s, Bethell says. Three years later students were spitting in his face.

In the 30 years between his departure and his death yesterday, Pusey remained unapologetic. “The students just talked about the brutality of that thing,” Pusey told The Crimson last year. “But the cops were well behaved for the most part. Students jumped out of the windows. That wasn’t the cops’ fault.”

Pusey said he forgave the student occupiers, but still spoke critically of the faculty members who supported them.

Rosovsky says that he felt like Pusey opened up late in his life, and probably thought better of his actions in later years, even if he refused to admit it. “I’m sure that if he had had the experience, known what he knew later, he would have acted differently,” Rosovsky said.

—Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff Writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.