As a Harvard graduate, who studied there when Henry Kissinger, one of the university’s professors, was actively helping the country’s president wage war in southeast Asia as national security adviser and later, after I graduated and moved to Sweden, as secretary of state, it is heartening to see Harvard in the forefront of the struggle against the current president’s efforts to wage war on his own country. In these tragic times, it seems appropriate to remember and sing along to the words of another Harvard graduate, the inimitable Tom Lehrer, in offering our support to the fight. This was one of the first songs he wrote, when he was still a college student in the 1940s, a “genteel” fight song, as he called it, before he wrote the politically satirical songs that were so popular in the 1960s and which we often play at the shop. He gave up song-writing in the 1970s, saying that he couldn’t write political satire after Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize. But his songs, and for that matter, he himself live on. Fight fiercely, Harvard!
AndrewJamison 