Summers’ appointment as Harvard’s president “worried some of those who knew [him]. The economist had earned a reputation as a bull in a china shop, rudely dismissive of the opinions of others, astoundingly arrogant even by Washington standards.”
Some gems in this Politico piece.
It’s not just that Summers continued a friendship with a man who clearly had a pathological sexual interest in girls and had gone to jail for his sexual proclivities. It is also hard to imagine how Summers could have been so stupid as not to expect that emails with a convicted felon might one day go public.
As for the content of the emails… much of it is, in a word, gross. Certainly, we all write emails that, deprived of context, could embarrass us if they went public. But Summers’ emails went to a deeper, darker place; there is no context that absolves them.
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In July 2011, the former Harvard president was interviewed at the Aspen Institute by its head, author Walter Isaacson, in front of an admiring group. A friendly Isaacson asked about the veracity of a scene in the movie The Social Network in which Summers agrees to meet with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two Harvard undergraduates who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them. The “Winklevi,” as Summers referred to them, came from Greenwich, Conn., rowed crew, were tall, handsome and old school — they wore coats and ties to meet the Harvard president. Summers disliked them instinctively, and the film portrays him treating them with humiliating condescension. Was it true? Isaacson wanted to know.
“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities,” Summers answered. “One is that they are looking for a job and have an interview. The other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”
The remark — a former president of Harvard describing two of its students as assholes — prompted near-unanimous laughter from the audience, titillated by this trash-talking rule-breaker. Summers wore the chuffed look of a man who rarely tells a successful joke but is pleased to have done so now. The funny thing is that Summers was wrong on both counts: Zuckerberg wound up paying a $65 million settlement to the Winklevoss twins, and Larry Summers turned out to be the asshole.