Still, Alter and Whitaker both have fond memories of The Crimson, the place which helped launch them into journalism.

Alter’s early stints with tabloid journalism helped propel him into the highest echelons of political journalism—covering the president and his sex scandals.

“During the Clinton impeachment process, I was back to sex and the media,” he quips. “I wrote an enormous number of articles about how far is too far for the media to go in reporting this kind of thing, so I guess some of that began at Harvard.”

Whitaker, who covered a number of different beats, from faculty council to the admissions office, remembers the newsroom as a “very egalitarian place.”

“You would show up, do the work, drink some Crimson Kool-aid, and they would accept you,” he says.

Growing up in an academic environment, Whitaker never thought he would choose journalism for a career.

“I thought I had to work on my academics,” he says, “that seemed like the real world to me.”

But one day he got a call from a graduate student named Chris Foreman who had seen Whitaker’s pieces in The Crimson and told him the he had “a good shot” at landing an internship at Newsweek.

Whitaker applied, got the job and flew off to San Fransisco for the summer, where he covered everything from bogus cancer cures to the shooting of the San Francisco mayor.

Alter also remembers The Crimson fondly, filled with budding media stars. In the late seventies, Steve Ballmer ’77, Nicholas B. Lemann ’76, Francis J. Connolly ’79 and Alix M. Freedman ’78 were all working in The Crimson’s newsroom.

“I think we learned as much from our friends as our teachers,” Alter says. “Many people were just developing their talent back then, and it’s important to remember that not everybody is developing at the same pace. There are going to be people who really surprise you with what they do with their lives...and then there are people who seem like they have the whole world at their fingertips and then don’t do as much with it.”

But Alter’s confidence about his life-long friend never waned. “I always knew that Mark would be successful at whatever he did because he combined such a powerful intellect with discipline and motivation and determination.”

The summer after their junior years, Alter and Whitaker lived together with other Crimson editors—Susan D. Chira ’80 and Robert E. Grady ’79—in a house in Washington D.C., described by Christopher Buckley in Esquire as the “Washington bureau of The Harvard Crimson.”

Chira was working as an intern on Capitol Hill, Grady as a speechwriter, Whitaker as a reporter for Newsweek, and Alter as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter.

“Mark lived in the basement,” Alter recalls, “which was full of books. I remember having the distinct impression at the end of the summer that he had read every book in the place.”