THERE WAS, AT ONE TIME, a different and even grander vision for the tract now occupied by the Kennedy School, JFK Park, and the Charles Hotel. In 1966, Harvard and the Kennedy Library Corporation agreed on the “Big Plan,” with I. M. Pei as architect. The Big Plan called for a complex including the John F. Kennedy library, museum, presidential archives, and School of Government, plus the Institute of Politics (IOP), all on the “car barn” site of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). But Harvard’s fundraising bogged down, the MBTA took years to relocate, and well-heeled Cambridge neighbors, including some Harvard faculty, objected that the tourist attraction would cause unbearable congestion in Harvard Square. In 1975, the Big Plan unraveled and eventually the Kennedy Library rose at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Richard Neustadt, who died last October at his English country home in the village of Furneux Pelham, Hertfordshire, at age 84, was among those who created the Big Plan, and its demise saddened him. Instead of viewing the tourists as a nuisance, Neustadt considered the influx of thousands of ordinary American citizens as a valuable resource that would preserve the Kennedy School from insularity. “You would have had real live tourists streaming past the windows of the institute and school all the time,” he said last year, somewhat wistfully. “Those were voters, and the students had to notice. But the voters were moved away in order not to bother the professors. Right? So it’s symptomatic of a lot of things.”

Such musings epitomize Neustadt, an academic who embraced the polity with open arms and felt at home in the untidy world of politics and governance. And Neustadt was in on the “ground floor” of the Kennedy School before there even was a ground floor. In 1964, he and Don Price urged Robert Kennedy to accept Harvard’s offer to be the institutional home of the Institute of Politics and to rename the Graduate School of Public Administration, of which Price was dean, in John F. Kennedy’s honor. Robert Kennedy acquiesced, and a year later Neustadt left Columbia University to come to Harvard as Littauer Professor of Public Administration and associate dean of the Kennedy School. In 1966, he launched the Institute of Politics as its founding director.

In that role, Neustadt brought live political animals — “hazardous-duty people,” he called them — to Cambridge. He settled the institute in a wooden-clapboard building at 78 Mt. Auburn Street, familiarly known as the “Little Yellow House,” a move he later called “the best strategic decision I ever made.” It was near Harvard’s residential houses and very convenient to collegiate foot traffic. “Students loved the Little Yellow House,” Neustadt said. “It gave the IOP a lot of vitality.” Yet, as he also remembered, many professors viewed it as “a distant innovation, somewhat distasteful in a university setting, but not troublesome, and probably ‘the price you have to pay for the assassination of a president,’ as one member of the faculty said to me.”

With a handful of other senior faculty, Neustadt was one of the Kennedy School’s “founding fathers. ” His centrality was such that his onetime student, former Kennedy School Dean Graham Allison, said that “Without Dick Neustadt, the Kennedy School simply would not exist.” Along with Price, dean from 1958 to 1977, and Allison, dean from 1977 to 1989, Neustadt defined the school’s mission, hired its first faculty, and built the new campus. “Think of them as a triumvirate,” says Kennedy School Professor Richard Zeckhauser. “Neustadt was the jockey, Graham [Allison] was the thoroughbred, and Don Price, the gentle trainer. It was a very good situation.”

By 1968, the IOP was thriving, but the Kennedy Schoolwas
a graduate school in name only. “You’ve got a big tail [the IOP] here, but you haven’t got a dog to attach it to,” declared Katherine Graham, Washington Post publisher and a member of the Institute of Politics’s Senior Advisory Committee. “Yet the president’s name was on the school,” said Neustadt. “It had to be a proper memorial. Price and I convinced ourselves that we had to create a dog worthy of the tail.” Neustadt worked tirelessly on canine construction, and put his money where his mouth was, pledging 20 percent of the IOP’s annual income for five years to help create the MPP Program. Last year, with one of his characteristic deep laughs, Neustadt reflected that, “In retrospect, I think I might have been smart to go the other way, and attach the IOP to arts and sciences, rather than let it live alongside the Kennedy School. It certainly would have been a lot easier for the director!” Indeed it would have been, but in that case the Kennedy School might never have come to be.

BORN IN PHILADELPHIA on June 26, 1919, Neustadt attended the University of California at Berkeley and served in the Navy. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1951. As a young man he had a formative experience working in the Bureau of the Budget under President Harry Truman. Years later, colleagues like Theodore Sorenson liked to joke about Neustadt’s readiness to tell a Truman story at the slightest provocation.

In his most significant scholarly work, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership, first published in 1960, and reissued in later editions, Neustadt described and analyzed the powers of the presidency. For Allison, Neustadt “towered above all other 20th century students of the American presidency.” Neustadt also taught a course on “The American Presidency” at the Kennedy School until 1987. “As he repeatedly said, the great power of the president is the power to persuade,” says Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “He kept quoting Truman’s comment on Eisenhower: ‘As a general he is used to giving orders. But as president he gives orders and nothing ever happens.’ [Neustadt’s] ideal president was FDR, who was a master of the techniques of presidential power. President Kennedy admired Presidential Power and was himself an ideal president in that tradition.”

President Kennedy also asked Neustadt to prepare a top-secret report on the Skybolt affair, a diplomatic rift between the United States and England, centering on a troubled missile program. Neustadt delivered his report to the president on November 15, 1963. President Kennedy read the document and gave it to Jacqueline Kennedy, saying, “If you want to know what my life is like, read this.” She was carrying it on their fateful trip to Texas. “He was going to see me after he came back from Thanksgiving,” Neustadt recalled. “I’ll never get over not having had that meeting.”

Writing about the presidency interested Neustadt more than taking White House jobs, but he did consult with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and Clinton. He believed in organizing the White House to match the interests and skills of the president. For example, while Eisenhower, trained in military administration, liked hierarchical organization charts with boxes, JFK had little use for such systems and, taking his cue from Neustadt, dismantled the elaborate structure that “Ike” had put in place. Neustadt’s book Preparing to be President collects memos he wrote for Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton for their transitions into the Oval Office.

Neustadt became an emeritus professor in 1989, but remained active in Kennedy School affairs and continued to write books and advise officials. His first wife, Bert, died after a long illness in 1984; Neustadt later married Shirley Williams, professor of electoral politics emeritus, a member of the House of Lords, and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in England. In recent years they divided their time between England and the coastal town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod.

“He was ironic and optimistic,” says Schlesinger. “He viewed the presidency as comedy — he was gently amused by it. Not that Dick didn’t respect the office as an instrument of life and death. But he regarded administrative history and analysis as a comedy, with tragic consequences.”

A memorial service for Richard Neustadt will be held on April 15, 2004, at 5 p.m. at Memorial Church, Harvard University. Following the service, a brief reception will be held in the Kennedy School’s Forum.

Craig Lambert is deputy editor of Harvard Magazine.