Harvard presidents have not always been brilliant. Sometimes they haven’t even been smart. Early illustrious leaders included John Rogers, a quack who practiced medicine without training and preached without ordination. But lately, above average intelligence has been the benchmark, and most presidents have indeed been the “best” or the “brightest” in some sense of those words. James B. Conant ’14 was a top-notch chemist, Rudenstine a respected humanist. Summers follows in their path, boosting brilliance to prodigy.

It’s the classic case of nature versus nurture. Was Summers’ brilliance a product of his pedigree and inheritance or of his upbringing?

Summers was born in New Haven in 1954 to Robert and Anita Summers, and was the eldest of three sons. He was, in many ways, the typical 1960s kid growing up in the typical 1960s family. Friends and relatives describe little Summers as talkative, affable, and extremely bright—never the most popular, but always with friends, and as he matured, increasingly self-assured.

“I was a curious kid, not especially outgoing, I guess,” he says. Brother John explains: “He was always energetic, directed, and highly social. He didn’t really come into his own until he was in college, where he was around a lot of other very bright people.”

Larry (his mother insisted on Lawrence only when it came time for him to sign the dollar bill), Richard ’79, and the youngest, John, were still young when the family moved to Merion, an upper-middle class Philadelphia suburb.

As young kids the Summers boys occupied themselves in fairly typical fashion—friends say that young Larry was no Treasury Secretary (or president of Harvard, for that matter) in the making. Childhood games, as John sheepishly admits, consisted of “Balloon-Balloon,” a basketball tipoff-like war around the perimeter of the dining room, and “Carpet-Sweeper Derby,” a time-trial style race around the living room.