His son inherited his pulpit and his pen, leaving a vivid account of America’s first days as a republic.
The moment the city was liberated, he hurried to a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers to move that General George Washington be given an honorary doctorate. My namesake, Reverend Andrew Eliot, ’37, while bravely tending his parishioners, kept a daily record-still extant-describing what the Revolutionary War was like during the siege of Boston in 1776. Yet I do have one tenuous connection with my noble forebears. I don’t even hold a candle to Jared Eliot (Class of 1703), the man who introduced rhubarb to America. But the brilliance of the family tradition has grown dim with me. As recently as 1948, my cousin Tom received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In war, in peace, in church, in science, and in education. I am the last Eliot of a great line to enter Harvard. And I return, resplendent in my disappointment. The bravest of them all laid down his life for something he believed in.
Another, whom we barely noticed, has become the musical sensation of our age. The future President of Harvard is a guy I used to lend my clothes to.
The roommate I once thought of as a fruitcake is the candidate likeliest to be our next Secretary of State. Who knows which of them will end up on a podium in Stockholm? Or the White House lawn? And what’s amazing is that some are still married to their first wives.Ī few of the most glittering successes were close friends of mine. I stayed up half the night just staring at the faces of the guys who once were undergraduates with me, and now are senators and governors, world-famous scientists and pioneering doctors. It really brought home my own sense of failure. Today a heavy, red-bound book arrived that chronicles all the achievements of The Class of ’58. Scared to face all my successful classmates, walking back on paths of glory, while I have nothing to show for my life except a few gray hairs. May 112, 1983 My Harvard Twenty-fifth Reunion is next month and I am scared to death.
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