A big step, those who know him closely say, came when he began to work for Harvard economist Feldstein the summer after his sophomore year—the beginning of a partnership that would bring Summers to Harvard, and eventually give him his first brief taste of policymaking.

Feldstein remembers Summers’ father, with whom he had worked, saying that he had a bright son he thought needed exposure to research. “I decided I’d take a chance,” Feldstein says. “It worked out.”

Summers worked with Feldstein throughout college, and then moved down Mass. Ave to attend Harvard graduate school. Focusing on public finance, and issues like tax policy, social security and health care, Summers worked closely with Feldstein. It was then that Summers and Feldstein published the earliest of the several papers they wrote together. When Summers finished his thesis, he returned to MIT to teach as a junior professor. After briefly thinking about accepting tenure in California, he was lured back to Harvard to become the University’s youngest tenured professor at that point. “He was writing quite a good deal at that time,” Feldstein says. “We were quite eager to get him back.”

At the same time as Summers was, under Feldstein’s tutelage, rapidly climbing the ranks of academia, he was assimilating Feldstein’s more conservative economic philosophy, Summers observers say. During college, graduate school, and as a young professor, “Summers shifted toward the right,” Neff said. “He was probably furthest to the right during the early eighties, when he was working closest with Marty.”

When Feldstein became head of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, Summers went with him, staying for a year. Friends say Summers’ main motivation was the desire to discuss pertinent policy issues on another level. This move, though, Richard says, associated Summers with some of the Reagan administrations’ more conservative fiscal policies, and advocacy of supply-side economics.

By 1988, the pendulum seemed to have swung back the other way. Paradoxically, Summers’ time in the administration pushed Summers’ politics against it. “I think he was horrified by some of the supply-side economics of the Reagan administration,” Neff said. “It was like looking into the abyss—and he pulled back.”

As a symbol of this shift, when Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis was looking for an economic adviser for his ultimately unsuccessful presidential bid, Summers was fair game. “Fortunately, he and Feldstein had parted company philosophically,” Dukakis says of Summers. “He was making a strong, reasoned argument for something other than what we were getting—the stupidity of supply-side economics....Prior associations are less important than getting someone who is making sense.”