To the Editors:
Professor Sigmund Diamond’s account (NYR, April 28) of his relations with the Harvard administration in the spring of 1954 is seriously misleading. He quite erroneously asserts that his conversations with administrators were recorded, and he pays no attention to the crucial fact that the job at issue was administrative, not academic.
What actually happened is this. Sometime earlier in that year, at a time when none of those concerned had any knowledge of Mr. Diamond’s past as a Communist, Professor David Owen, the Chairman of the History Department, told me that the Department was not going to recommend him for an academic appointment. As often happens when a young scholar does not get an academic appointment, Mr. Diamond’s friends thought about other possibilities. There was a vacancy on the administrative side, and he seemed highly qualified to fill it. So I offered him appointment as Counsellor for Foreign Students and Dean of Special Studies. He accepted, and I recommended the appointment to the President and Fellows.
I must underline the difference, in the Harvard I knew, between an academic and an administrative appointment. An academic appointment carried all the immunities of academic freedom, and action on such an appointment was the shared responsibility of the faculty, the administrators, and the Governing Boards. Administrative appointments, on the other hand, were made by the Governing Boards on the recommendation of the President and other administrators. Such recommendations were made on the basis of one’s judgment that the individual recommended would be highly qualified to carry out specific administrative responsibilities. Sometimes, of course, individuals held dual appointments; a professor might serve also as a dean. In such a case, while the administration might decide for itself whether the person continued as a dean, it must respect the appointment as a professor. But an individual whose central appointment was administrative must be judged on administrative standards—was he or she the right person for the job from the standpoint of the effective conduct of the University’s business? The Governing Boards correctly insisted on a sharp distinction between one kind of appointment and the other.
Mr. Diamond’s was to be an administrative appointment. The relevant department was not interested in recommending him for an academic appointment. The distinction was fundamental to my handling of his case. It is true that like many young scholars turning for a time to administrative work, Mr. Diamond wanted to go on teaching, and the History Department was glad to have him do some tutoring. I initially thought he could have the title of Tutor, but I found that it no longer existed. But with or without that title, it was an administrative job he was offered and the administrative budget that would have paid his whole salary.
This was the situation on May 3, 1954, when I learned from a colleague that Mr. Diamond might have a past connection with the Communist Party. I no longer remember who told me that, nor whether that colleague told me how the matter had come to his attention.
I asked to see Mr. Diamond and learned from him essentially what he describes in his account—that he had been a Communist from about 1942 to 1950, why he joined and why he left the Party, and that since he knew of no illegal activity by anyone he had known in the Party he was inclined against “naming names” to the FBI, although willing to talk about himself. I reached a prompt decision that he should not be Counsellor for Foreign Students, and on two grounds. I thought it was a bad mistake for him not to have told me of his situation when I offered him the job. I also believed that the Harvard Corporation would not want an ex-Communist with these attitudes in any administrative job. Even in cases of academic appointments it had weighed similar behavior negatively in publicly explained decisions a year earlier (before either Mr. Pusey or I was in office).
I told Mr. Diamond of my decision and I wrote to the Corporation with-drawing my recommendation. The decision was based entirely on what Mr. Diamond told me and had failed to tell me earlier. In such cases no information was ever sought from or given to the FBI. I interviewed a number of such individuals in 1954 and 1955, and I never found one who did not seem to me to be doing his best to tell the truth about himself.
I believed that it would be wrong to have in an administrative job a man who had not thought it necessary to tell me he was an ex-Communist when I offered him an appointment which made that fact highly pertinent. In 1954 Harvard was indeed embattled with Senator McCarthy, and precisely because it was engaged in defending its academic freedoms it was under an obligation not to behave foolishly in its administrative appointments. The man in charge of advising foreign students necessarily worked on their behalf with agencies of government. A man in Mr. Diamond’s position would certainly have been an unlikely choice for such a job in 1954, and Mr. Diamond undoubtedly knew it. But he needed the job, and so he had not been able to bring himself to tell us of his predicament. The failure was understandable, but it was not one I could ignore.
I explained this position not only to Mr. Diamond but also to every professor who asked me about it at the time; I never heard one who disagreed. Nor did anyone, including Mr. Diamond, ever suggest at the time that the prospect of some tutorial work made the appointment in question anything but administrative. Such a suggestion would have been recognized as nonsensical.
Mr. Diamond is right when he says that his friends tried to find some other solution for him. While none was now ready to urge that he be recommended for any administrative appointment, there was discussion of the possibility of an academic appointment. I remember telling David Owen that I could not support such a proposal. I believed that this question had been decided on its merits earlier in the year, when the History Department did not include Mr. Diamond in its proposed appointments. He held its doctorate, and it knew him well. If it had not proposed him at the usual time, on what ground would it propose him now? It could not be argued that his academic claim was better in May than it had been earlier, and I was sure that this would be the view of the Governing Boards.
The choices Mr. Diamond faced that spring were obviously agonizing. If he had clearly made a mistake in not telling me a relevant fact, he was not so clearly wrong in his choice of candor about himself along with refusal to name other names to the FBI. That position was one that I not only respected but strongly defended in other cases; it was indeed the crucial issue in the crucial case, that of Professor Furry. I was one of those who had helped in persuading Professor Furry to move to that position from his earlier reliance on the Fifth Amendment; it was more dangerous from the standpoint of possible prosecution, but it was morally superior in every way.
So it was no pleasure to be placed where I had to tell Mr. Diamond that if he held to this position he could not have the administrative job of Counsellor for Foreign Students. I think I did tell him that if he changed his position I would try to persuade the Corporation to overlook his earlier failure to tell me of his problem, but I doubt if I pressed him hard to take this course. He faced a decision that honorable ex-Communists were deciding in different ways that spring, and it was much debated in Cambridge. Though I myself believed generally in full disclosure, there were people I respected on both sides of the issue.
The pressures on Mr. Diamond were cruel, and this is where I look for the cause of the most blatant error in his account. He must have come to his interviews with administrators in a state of great stress, and so indeed I remember it. Nothing else could account for his wholly erroneous recollection that Mr. Pusey and I recorded our conversations with him.
Neither Mr. Pusey nor I, either at Harvard or anywhere else, has ever recorded any conversation with anyone, either face-to-face or over the phone. (I suppose some may be surprised today that one could work for five years in the White House on this basis, but it is the simple fact.) It is totally unbelievable that either of us would have made a once-in-a-lifetime exception for Mr. Diamond.
What Mr. Diamond saw on the table behind my desk was what any other visitor saw, a dictating machine. That machine used green discs, but to dictate to them you had to speak directly into the microphone that was attached. If it had any other capability, I would be surprised. What I know is that I never used it for anything but dictation. What Mr. Diamond now remembers simply never happened, either in my office or in Mr. Pusey’s. I do not doubt his belief in his memory, but his memory is wholly wrong.
It is not easy to reconstruct these matters across twenty-three years. I have been helped in this case by the kindness of the present Harvard Administration, which gave me access to a long letter that I wrote at the time to Mr. Pusey, reporting my talk with Mr. Diamond and my resulting recommendation. I have relied on that letter in this account, and I have shown it to Mr. Diamond. Its last paragraph shows what I thought then and think now.
I wish I could recreate for you the impression made upon me by Mr. Diamond in our long interview. I find myself quite able to understand the pressures which led him in the first instance to join the Party. While it seems extraordinary that any man of sense should have stayed a member as long as he did, I believe the explanation of this is to be found in his statement, which I believe, that membership in the Party never dominated his life. I understand and approve the energy and zeal with which Mr. Diamond has tried in recent years to put his past behind him. I think it wholly plain that his record at Harvard is as good, taken by itself, as I have said it was in earlier recommendations to the Corporation. We then come to the question of his failure to let us know that he had a past in the Party at the time when we recommended him for administrative work. He made a serious error, and one which we cannot overlook, but I think it is also clear that pressures which worked upon him as he faced this decision were of a magnitude which not many of us have to face. He knew that what he did was not right, and the fact that he knew this was plain from his eagerness to respond to my first question at the beginning of our interview. But he knew also that this was the best and perhaps the only chance for him to make a record and even a career in our profession. Whatever may be the view of others, Mr. Diamond honestly believes, I think, that there is nothing shameful in his past. Mistakes, yes, but criminal error, no. In concealing his past membership from us, he made a wrong decision, and I think that our own necessary course is clear, but I cannot find much pleasure in the result.
