After college, Alter found himself at “loose-ends.” In his senior year he had moved off campus with his roommates and had thrown himself into a thesis on the changing nature of American policy during the Vietnam War.

A history concentrator, Alter calls writing the thesis “one of my best experiences at college.”

David Kaiser ’69, who advised Alter’s thesis, remembers Alter the college senior as “quite low-key, mid-western, with a great political background having grown up in a very political atmosphere.”

“He used to always tell this story about how his mother went to the democratic convention when he was just three years old,” Kaiser said.

Kaiser also recalls Alter’s thesis as outstanding and remembers that it received two summa readings.

“He probably worked harder on his thesis than anything else,” adds Kaiser, who wrote a book on the same subject about four years ago. “In part it was an oral history, with interviews, but it also had a good theoretical argument.”

University President Lawrence H. Summers remembers talking with Alter about his thesis as a graduate student in Lowell House, where Alter lived as an undergraduate.

“I’ve known Alter for a long time, and we talked on and off when I was in Washington,” Summers remembers, “but I was first bowled over by him when he was writing his undergraduate thesis on Vietnam...a lot of people write theses about Vietnam, but most people who are college seniors don’t have the sophistication to interview the best and the brightest politcal figures like MacNamara and 290 other people. That just left me enormously impressed.”

Over the years, Summers says that Alter “has given [him] advice about Harvard and questions relating to education.” He adds that he has spoken with Alter at length about “ways that Harvard can make in a difference in terms of education.”

Summers says he regards Alter and Whitaker as “extraordinarily successful,” and he calls Alter “one of the three or four most talented journalists of this generation” because of “his thoughtful approach.”

“He is a powerful journalist because he’s willing to step back from the news," Summers says.

Alter also remembers courses with now-retired history pundits Adams University Professor Bernard Bailyn and David Donald. He also remembers a course at the Kennedy School with the Charles Warren Professor of History Ernest May and Richard Neustadt called “The Uses of History,” which he says has “proven very helpful to me for my column, since one of the things I like to do is provide history as context for current affairs.”

“I have had a life-long interest in history, and that is one of the things that I bring to the table,” says Alter, who often draws on analogies to Vietnam for his political coverage.

But after college, Alter had less conviction about life-long interests. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life at all,” he says. Whitaker was going to graduate school at Oxford and working at the London bureau of Newsweek.

“I decided to travel around Europe and backpack around, and then I stayed with Mark in a house he was housesitting in London,” Alter remembers, “And I visited Joe who was on his way back from the Middle East and at [the London School of Economics], also working for Newsweek.”