Word: neustadter
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Ansara then produced a concrete proposal: would McNamara be willing to debate an anti-war spokesman at Harvard? If he would, then a demonstration might be unnecessary. Gordon doubted that the idea would be acceptable, but said he would check out the proposal with the Institute's directors, Richard Neustadt and Frank. The answer was, as expected, a firm...
...names, including those of some 50 Faculty members and more than 90 teaching fellows. This put some punch behind the proposal, and it also probably began the gradual alienation of SDS and the Institute. For, by going to the community, SDS had informed the Institute -- that is, Frank and Neustadt -- that it intended to pressure them into either accepting a proposal which had already been rejected or suffering unspecified consequences. Both Frank and Neustadt, who consider themselves to be fair but hard-nosed individuals, were antagonized by this approach...
...Wednesday before McNamara was due to arrive in Cambridge, the Institute and SDS made what was to be the last serious attempt to resolve their differences. The petitions asking for a debate had already been collected, and the challenge to the Secretary of Defense was formal. Richard Neustadt called two leaders of SDS (Ansara and Eric Lessinger '68) into his office, and with Frank sought to convince them that there were good reasons for not permitting a debate. Until this time, Neustadt had remained relatively aloof from the public conflict. He had been preoccupied with a series of important lectures...
...never really wanted to negotiate," Neustadt said the evening after the McNamara confrontation. In fact, neither side ever strayed far from its basic position: the Institute was willing to guarantee a peaceful demonstration so long as McNamara was insulated from it (something SDS could have on its own any time); SDS insisted on McNamara in the flesh -- either standing before a public podium or stranded in the street. "All SDS wanted," Neustadt said, "was to embarrass the Secretary of Defense...
...reasons that Neustadt turned down a debate have been repeated endlessly, but they can bear one more review. His program for the "honorary associates" had been founded on the premise that everything these men said would be off-the-record. The Institute's undergraduate activities were aimed at bringing students into closer contact with politics; the rationale behind the associates program was that Harvard had enough public speeches by enough important people, and that real understanding could be better served by small, informal meetings. Neustadt felt it only fair that if men of public stature were to give...