Marc L. Goodheart '81 doesn't want you to know who he is.

The door to his second floor Mass. Hall office is unlabeled. He doesn't return reporters' phone calls. The most popular word his colleagues use to describe him is "discreet."

As President Neil L. Rudenstine's Staff Director Jackie O'Neill jokes, Goodheart's lips are sealed from having personally licked the 200,000 envelopes that the presidential search committee sent to the Harvard community early this year.

As Secretary to the ultra-secretive Harvard Corporation, Goodheart is the administrative mastermind behind the search. He's a key aide and confidante to the members of the presidential search committee, planning its meetings and serving as a conduit between Rudenstine, the Corporation, the Board of Overseers and the deans.

His Harvard colleagues describe Goodheart as a brilliant lawyer with a sharp wit and an even sharper pen, who feels that his job requires him not to talk to the press--even though he was once a journalist himself.

But although Goodheart is reticent, his friends reveal that the mysterious man with the shock of gray-speckled hair has a past and a personal life: a spectacular academic career led to a clerkship with a future Supreme Court Justice and, brought him to the halls of power at Harvard at age 32.

Momma's Boy

The key to a man is his mother.

Goodheart mother, Hope Goodheart, laughs when told her son is "cooperating with us through the news office."

"That's my son," she says. "That's my son."

Marc Goodheart was the first in his family to go to Harvard--a place his mother says he always dreamed of attending and never wanted to leave.

"I never thought when I sent him off that he'd never come home!" she says now. "I'm thrilled that he's there. He's as happy as a clam."

He may be happy, but he's certainly quiet about it. His Mass. Hall office is tucked inconspicuously in the back of the second floor. And from all outward appearance, the office--like the man--is anonymous.

"He's very reserved," his mother says.

But not too reserved to call his mother during a break in a high-powered meeting Sunday.

Indy Man

Goodheart came to Harvard from New Rochelle, New York, a posh New York City suburb near the Long Island Sound where he lived within less than a mile of three country clubs.