Gigot’s editorial board acknowledged that this adulatory review of Summers’ speech might come as a surprise to some readers. “When Larry Summers turns to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, we suspect he doesn’t expect to find a whole lot of praise,” the paper wrote.

But Summers now says, “I’ve been doing things for the Republic long enough that little surprises me in the press.”

And by spring 2005, with pro-Summers voices such as Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse finding a home—and a platform—inside the Journal, applause for the University president had become par for the course on Gigot’s page.

“As a newspaper, we’re not in the business of holding grudges,” Gigot says.

A ‘CLOSET CONSERVATIVE’?

Back on campus, conservative-leaning faculty members viewed Summers’ 2001 appointment as University president with guarded optimism. “Almost anyone would have been better than [Summers’ predecessor Neil L.] Rudenstine,” says Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, the Kenan professor of government.

Another prominent conservative faculty member, Winthrop Professor of History Stephan A. Thernstrom, says he was “favorably surprised” by Summers’ early support for bringing the Reserve Officer Training Corps back to Harvard—three decades after the military program had been barred from campus during the Vietnam War.

But all the while, Summers remained a dyed-blue Democrat.

“I think I’ve had a fairly consistent perspective on things over the years,” Summers says. “I don’t think of myself as ideological.”

Federal Election Commission records indicate that since becoming Harvard’s president, Summers has made one political donation—$700 to a Democratic congressional candidate, Dan Wofford of Pennsylvania, who narrowly lost in a 2002 race.

Summers publicly advocates bread-and-butter liberal causes such as affirmative action and stem cell research. In March 2003, he co-authored a New York Times op-ed vociferously defending the University of Michigan’s use of racial preferences in its admissions process. And this year, he has emerged as a vehement critic of Bush administration prohibitions against scientific experimentation on human embryos.

“Larry Summers is not a closet conservative,” says University of California-Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong ’82, who served alongside Summers both on the Harvard faculty and at the Treasury Department.

FALLING OUT

In 2002, Jeff Jacoby, a conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, rallied to Summers’ defense during the University president’s spat with Cornel R. West ’74. (Summers had criticized West, then a star member of the school’s Afro-American studies team, for devoting too much time toward non-academic pursuits, including several prominent left-wing political causes.) And Jacoby commended the University president for his opposition to the Israel divestment movement, which Summers suggested was “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.”

But Jacoby now describes himself as “disillusioned” with Summers. “[I]t became apparent after a while that these were all one-shot deals, and that they were frequently followed by backtracking,” Jacoby writes in an e-mail.