Review: Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (Henry Holt, 2004, 592 pp.)
There is a tendency—particularly in older corners of the left and newer corners of the right—to divide American history into two periods: the modern era, and the era in which America was ruled by WASPs. The implication is, depending on your political preferences, either that things have gotten much worse or much better since the upheaval of the 1960s and ‘70s unyoked America from the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant class.
This historiography is, unsurprisingly, over-simplified.1 It is correct to say that white, English-descended, mainline Protestants were dominant throughout much of the 19th century. But the specific group to which the term “WASP” usually refers—north-easterners, especially from New England, descended from Mayflower arrivals, educated at “St. Grottlesex” and then the “ancient eight”—exercised only sectional influence prior to the Civil War, in conflict as they were with the southern elite.2 Even after that war destroyed the southern aristocracy, presidents were drawn more often from the midwest, prompting the classic line “some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are from Ohio.”
The period of WASP dominance, rather, is that book-ended by the presidencies of Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, from the Progressive era to the end of the Great Society. One might distinguish this period (to over-rely on presidencies) by education. Of the presidents between Lincoln and Teddy, only one earned a degree from a prestigious northeastern university (Hayes, an LLB from Harvard).3 Then comes Roosevelt (Harvard/Columbia), Taft (Yale), Wilson (Princeton, of which he was later president), Coolidge (Amherst), FDR (Harvard/Columbia), and Kennedy (Harvard). Many of these men, moreover, were formed in the rarefied air of the New England prep schools before their matriculation. The pattern is not uniform, but the basic trend is apparent.4
Education is an important measure of WASP dominance partially because of the centrality of certain educational institutions to WASP culture, but also because one such institution is at the core of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment. The book serves in part as a biography of Kingman Brewster, scion of the WASP aristocracy and 17th president of Yale. But it is also about Brewster’s eponymous circle of fellow WASPs: New York City mayor John Lindsay, Ford Foundation president and policy advisor McGeorge Bundy, statesmen Elliot Richardson and Cy Vance, and the revolutionary Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore. Collectively, these men were the masters of America’s institutions throughout the tumultuous 1960s.
As presented by Kabaservice, the book is a brief for the tradition of Liberal Republicanism and “guardianship” for which these men stood. This generation of WASPs, in this view, exemplified an ideal of American statesmanship, and in so doing navigated the tempest of ‘60s social upheaval—as typified, in the book’s climax, by the way in which Brewster prevented Yale’s infamous May Day protest from turning violent. As Kabservice writes, “the liberal establishment is gone and will not return ... without overlooking the failures of Brewster and his circle, however, it is possible to have a clear-eyed appreciation of their successes and their service. A new generation of leaders may someday measure itself against their example.”
It is possible to read The Guardians in this vein. But it is possible, also, to understand it as an explanation of the way in which the “liberal establishment”—the WASP ruling class—ushered in not only its own demise, but the total transformation of the institutions the guarding of which it took as its charge.
First and foremost, The Guardians is about Kingman Brewster, a WASP’s WASP. He was an eleventh generation descendant of William Brewster, “the spiritual head of the Mayflower and chief religious prefect of the Plymouth colony.” He attended the Belmont Hill school in the suburbs of Cambridge, then went on to Yale—where he edited the Daily News and refused a Skull and Bones tap—followed by military service and then a law degree at Harvard.
Brewster’s formation emphasized the virtues of debate and discourse. As much was true in his mother’s parlor, where her friends discussed the issues of the day; on the Belmont Hill debate team (where he befriended McGeorge Bundy); on the Yale Daily News; or at Harvard, where Brewster was indoctrinated in the then-regnant “process school” of legal philosophy, which emphasized “arriving at decisions through clearly delineated procedures, based on objective principles.” Brewster also evinced an unusual interest in social action: at Yale, he was a student leader of the then-respectable “America First” movement, which opposed U.S. involvement in the war. (He withdrew his support after Pearl Harbor, when the movement took its more questionable turn.) By the time he ascended to Yale’s presidency in 1963, these experiences had crystalized into a belief in social reform through careful and considered process—of moderate means to progressive ends.
In this, Brewster closely resembled the other men who make up The Guardians’ supporting cast. Men like Lindsay, Bundy, and Richardson were part of the now basically extinct tendency called liberal (sometimes “Rockefeller”) Republicanism.5 Between the end of World War II and Reagan’s election, these northeastern Republicans routinely clashed with the GOP’s ever-growing conservative wing (“Rockefeller” refers to Nelson Rockefeller, who represented the liberal wing of the party in the 1964 primary against Barry Goldwater). They opposed the party’s rightward turn, believing that the GOP was the party of moderation and cautious progress. By the end of the 20th century, they were mostly Democrats.
Before that change, though, the Guardians led the nation’s institutions through the 1960s. Bundy, Vance, and Richardson were the counsel behind three presidents’ involvement in the Vietnam war, while the draft weighed heavily on Brewster’s mind. When the “long, hot summer” of rioting broke out in 1967, then-mayor Lindsay walked the streets of New York to keep the peace. Moore, the episcopal Bishop, felt it was his duty (and good for his career) to become a hard-charging advocate for social change.
Their commitment to moderated progress often put the WASP leaders in an uncomfortable relationship with the more radical elements that drove the protests of the latter half of the ‘60s. Brewster was forced to more or less constantly manage William Sloane Coffin, Yale’s crusading chaplain who helped students burn their draft cards and who once enraged alumni by telling a civil disobedience conference, “while no one has the right to break the law, every man upon occasion has the duty to do so.” Lindsay, funded by Bundy at the Ford Foundation, oversaw an experiment in “community control” of New York’s schools, which resulted in a stand-off between black parents and Jewish teachers that temporarily shut down education a million students. Paul Moore, then the bishop of Washington, D.C., let his church play venue to a speech by black radical H. Rap Brown, who used the pulpit to declare, “violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.”
Brewster also oversaw important changes at Yale. Early in his tenure, he installed R. Inslee “Inky” Clark as dean of admissions. Clark transformed the way in which Yale admitted students, switching from a heavy emphasis on prep schools and legacy status to a preference for test scores and meritocracy. This had the effect of eroding Yale’s traditional WASP base, replacing them with a growing black, Jewish, and midwestern population.6 Then in 1968, after several years of dancing around a merger with Vassar, Brewster became the first president under whom women were admitted to Yale College.
Brewster, too, had a complicated relationship with the radicals who sometimes colonized his campus. Protest came to Yale in the Spring of 1965, when students objected to the denial of tenure to a popular philosophy profess, Richard J. Bernstein. Over the next five years, Yalies would organize actions against setting up skylights on the Cross-Campus green, briefly take over a freshman dorm over the firing of a black dining hall staffer, and make myriad protests against the war in Vietnam, often with the encouragement of Coffin. These acts routinely outraged alumni, who saw them as somewhere between juvenile insolence and hardcore radicalism. But Brewster defended their behavior on procedural grounds, arguing that academic freedom and institutional neutrality were paramount.
This commitment was most tested in May of 1970. The prior year, several members of the local chapter of the Black Panther Party had identified 19-year-old Panther Alex Rackley as a potential police informant. On this belief, they tortured him for several days before executing him in a bog. The murders resulted in the trial of nine Panthers, including national Chairman Bobby Seale, who had been in New Haven to give a speech hours prior to Rackley’s murder, and whom one other Panther alleged had given the order to kill him.
The trial of the Panthers became the cause celebre of the then-powerful American left, and Yale became their target. Public plans were laid for a mass protest and occupation of Yale on behalf of the Panthers on May Day, 1970. Such a protest promised to turn messy. That year already, a “Maoist faction of the SDS” had occupied a central administrative building at Harvard and gotten into a fight with the police; at Cornell, black students “occupied the student center; their action turned into an armed occupation when they brought in rifles.” Both incidents ended with the resignation of Harvard and Cornell’s respective presidents.
What happened next at Yale was shocking to contemporaries, but unsurprising to modern ears. At the April 23rd faculty meeting, Brewster orchestrated an agreement whereby the expectation that students go to class would be suspended (as opposed to the demand from members of the black faculty that all classes be suspended per se). And in a public statement so infamous it would be quoted in his obituary, Brewster announced that “in spite of my insistence on the limits of my official capacity … I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”
In the following week, “somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand demonstrated came to New Haven, fewer than anticipated. Yale housed and fed them, and student volunteers served as marshals, medics, and even day-care attendants.” Through Brewster’s careful machinations, the weekend was transformed from an expected riot into a non-violent affair (assuming, that is, one discounts the victimless bombing of Ingalls rink).
The Guardians, for its part, depicts this resolution to the expected crisis as a triumph of moderation. In fact, it is the signal triumph, typifying the prudence of the Brewster/WASP tradition. While there were errors in it—Vietnam chief among them—the implication that the way in which the liberal Republicans dealt with the protesters and the radicals is the more sensible, sane approach. Over and over throughout the sections of The Guardians on the student protest movement, the book contends that the anti-Vietnam movement, at least at Yale, is run largely by “moderate” students, and that Brewster’s alignment with it, like his sympathy for the Panthers’ procedural rights, is based on basically sound, centrist principles. The same is true, by implication, of the flirtations with radicalism by men like Bundy, Moore, and Lindsay, who were fundamentally applying their WASP gradualism in an attempt to tame the excesses of progress without snuffing it out together.
There are two problems with this view. The first is that by offering support—and often explicit approval—to students and radicals, Brewster et al. were not providing a moderating influence. Rather, they were spending down the liberal establishment’s authority by aligning it with some of the most hated people in American society.
Vietnam is the obvious example: by early 1968, Americans were more likely than not to call entrance into Vietnam “a mistake.” But opposition to the war was routinely dwarfed by opposition to anti-war protesters. In 1969, three quarters of Americans told CBS they opposed public protest against the war. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting at Kent State, a majority of Americans said the students were to blame for the four deaths, not the national guard. A popular chant in Kent, Ohio went “the score is four/and next time more.” Richard Nixon—the WASP establishment’s greatest enemy—ran for reelection in part on opposition to leftist radicalism, a message that won him 49 states and the greatest popular vote share ever won by a Republican.
This leads us to the second problem, which is that while they were nominally in favor of moderation, the WASPs often found themselves unable to say no to the radicals with whom they made common cause. Over and over again they allowed themselves to be relegated to junior partner status, while at the same time offering support to people who wanted to go much farther than they did. This support had material consequences: Bundy (as Ford Foundation president) and Lindsay (as New York Mayor) and Richardson (as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare) funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to radical activist groups, all without ultimately making a dent in their radicalism. Yes, May Day was non-violent. But Brewster opened the gates of Yale to radicalism, gave it food and shelter, and above all the approval of the dean of the liberal establishment. And once it was in, it never really left.
After all, the Yale of today—the college campus of today—resembles far more the bacchanal of May Day Yale than the patrician Yale of Brewster’s youth. Protest is almost a ritual behavior, given absurd deference even when it rises to the level of absurdity. The moderation that Brewster and his fellow WASPs counseled is often regarded—like them—as relics of history, standing in the way of progress.
One can’t read The Guardians without concluding that our campuses have become this way in part because of the support for such behavior lent by men like Brewster. The establishment’s inability to challenge such radicalism on substantive grounds—and their commitment to including radicals on procedural grounds—left them without an immune response capable of identifying values fundamentally hostile to their own. They should have been able to see in the far left what they often saw in the far-right: people who were opposed to the important values they protected, even if those values implied nominal inclusion. Instead, today’s campus left feels none of the commitment to academic freedom and institutional neutrality that, sixty years ago, were the principles that Brewster used to give them a platform.
One of the ironies of this about-face is that it is now campus conservatives, such as they are, that are the most vocal proponents of academic freedom. At Yale, this takes the form of an independent institute named for Bill Buckley, which trumpets its dedication “to promoting intellectual diversity and free speech.” Connecting that sentiment to Buckley is particularly funny, given his entrance on to the national scene. In the Summer of 1951, just having graduated and barely 25, Buckley published God and Man at Yale, his polemic against dear old alma mater. In particular, Buckley charged that socialism, atheism, and Soviet sympathy had infiltrated Yale’s curriculum—all under the guise of “academic freedom.” To Buckley, commitments to “institutional neutrality” and “free expression” were pretextual—a moderate, facially value-neutral way for the left to obtain purchase on what was then a highly conservative campus.
Buckley makes only a few appearances in The Guardians. He is something of a boogeyman for the WASPs, a pretender—in manner and politics—to their position, with no real understanding of WASP virtues. Buckley’s run for a seat on Yale’s governing board in 1968 ends in a 2-to-1 defeat to Guardian Cy Vance, a seemingly final proof that he will never truly be part of the aristocracy.
God and Man, too, was not well-received by the WASPs, who felt that it represented an outsider—a Catholic, for heaven’s sake!—challenging a sacred institution. McGeorge Bundy, in a rebuttal in The Atlantic, labeled the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author and the writer of its introduction,” and called Buckley “a twisted and ignorant young man.” Obviously, Buckley did not understand how things were done, how WASP values would protect Yale against the creeping radicalism he alleged.
The point here is not to make a judgement about whether the radicals were right (I tend to think mostly but not entirely no) or whether academic freedom is, in principle, good (I tend to think mostly yes). Rather, it is to argue that a descriptive level, Bundy was wrong, and Buckley was right. The WASPs were stewards of a particular social order, a component of which was—they believed—a commitment to civil discourse and open debate. And yet when they opened that discourse to radicals who did not share that commitment, it was to their loss, and the radicals’ gain.
Were he alive today, what would Kingman Brewster think of a Yale that is from time to time taken over by tent encampments and mass protests? Of a Yale where communists get tenure and teach unmolested? Of a Yale where “free speech” is regarded with suspicion, at best? Perhaps he would be alarmed. But perhaps he would cheer it, as the culmination of the social transformation he inaugurated.
Perhaps you do too. Or perhaps you think—as the WASPs did—that the ends are just but the means unseemly. If anything, the lesson of the Guardians is that that philosophy was unsuccessful in deradicalizing the radical. Academic freedom is an important, and noble goal—if, that is, it is professed by people who truly believe it. But Bill Buckley was right: in Kingman Brewster’s moment, it was a pretext, one done away with as soon as it was no longer useful.
I will admit that I used to unthinkingly buy it, until my wife pointed out to me that it was silly.
Notably, nine of the 15 presidents before Lincoln were born in the south, including 7 from Virginia alone; just two were from Massachusetts, and they were father and son.)
One could arguably also include Garfield’s BA from Williams.
There are of course exceptions. Harding, the last Ohioan to be president, went to Ohio Central. Hoover, the first Californian, went to Stanford. Eisenhower was a graduate of the U.S. Military academy, while Johnson went to Southwest Texas State Teachers College. Truman never held a college degree.
The closest one might get to this tradition today are recent and current GOP governors of New England—Charlie Baker, Phil Scott, Chris Sununu, Kelly Ayotte—as well as senators like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
Clark, notably, would go on to head the Horace Mann school—one of New York City’s top prep schools—between 1970 and 1991. In that position, reporting and litigation after his death revealed, Clark protected (and possibly participated in) a ring of child predators who abused dozens of children throughout a period of decades.