The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment

From Publishers Weekly
As president of Yale in the 1960s, Kingman Brewster was able to avoid much of the violence that afflicted other campuses rocked by student protests. It was probably no coincidence that, three decades earlier, he was a prominent student protestor against the U.S. entering WWII. By the '60s, he was part of a loose-knit group of liberal patricians that included presidential advisers McGeorge Bundy and Cyrus Vance, New York City mayor John Lindsay and Episcopalian bishop Paul Moore. In his first book, Kabaservice (who has a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Yale) deftly traces the professional and personal connections linking these men who were born to privilege but had a "genuine wish to be of service to the nation," and reveals how they tried to invest government and academic power structures with the flexibility needed to cope with the social upheavals of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. Not only President Bush but John Kerry and Howard Dean attended Brewster's Yale, and Kabaservice's history offers valuable insights into a crucible that help shape their political character—not just through Brewster's actions, but through the powerful backlash from conservative alumni. The presentation is meticulous, and the considerable detail about the overhaul of Yale's undergraduate admissions process is crucial to understanding just how completely those changes reshaped the school's student body—by admitting not only more diverse but also smarter students. The story is further enlivened by frequent off-campus forays that reveal not only how the '60s affected Yale but how Yale affected the '60s. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Kingman Brewster, president of Yale University, is the centerpiece of this absorbing look at the liberal establishment, men of privilege who nonetheless espoused principles of equality. Kabaservice chronicles the lives of a core of powerful men from their youth at Yale University, at a time when Yale was the preserve of the children of privilege. Among the circle of friends were ambitious young men driven to reset the nation's social agenda: McGeorge Bundy, advisor to Kennedy and Nixon, forever dogged by his involvement in the Vietnam War; Cyrus Vance, advisor to Nixon and Carter; John Lindsay, mayor of New York; Paul Moore, the archbishop of New York; and Elliot Richardson, Nixon's attorney general. Brewster himself oversaw the conversion of Yale from a bastion of the children of the wealthy to a more open institution valuing merit more than money, and balancing conflicting social forces when the campus erupted during the tumultuous 1960s and '70s. Kabaservice explores the ambitions, ideals, and tragic missteps of these high-born, influential men and their efforts to reshape America. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Geoffrey Kabaservice has produced a balanced and judicious look at the role played by Kingman Brewster and his establishment friends during the turbulence of the 1960s. Most were Republicans with liberal and reformist instincts. Caught between old-guard conservatives and radical activists, they helped their institutions, and their nation, make the transition from an aristocratic to a more meritocratic system. It is a compelling tale of honorable men, noble ideals and wrenching change." --Walter Isaacson, co-author The Wise Men



Book Description
How liberalism and one of the most dramatic eras in American history were shaped by an influential university president and his powerful circle of friends

Yale’s Kingman Brewster was the first and only university president to appear on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and the last of the great campus leaders to become an esteemed national figure. He was also the center of the liberal establishment—a circle of influential men who fought to keep the United States true to ideals and extend the full range of American opportunities to all citizens of every class and color. Using Brewster as his focal point, Geoffrey Kabaservice shows how he and his lifelong friends—Kennedy adviser McGeorge Bundy, Attorney General and statesman Elliot Richardson, New York mayor John Lindsay, Bishop Paul Moore, and Cyrus Vance, pillar of Washington and Wall Street—helped usher this country through the turbulence of the 1960s, creating a legacy that still survives.

In a narrative that is as engaging and lively as it is meticulously researched, The Guardians judiciously and convincingly reclaims the importance of Brewster and his generation, illuminating their vital place in American history as the bridge between the old establishment and modern liberalism.



About the Author
Geoffrey Kabaservice received a B.A. from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. from Yale, where he lectured in the history department. He is currently a manager with the Advisory Board Company and lives in Washington, D.C.



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A capable evocation of an American brahminate: the eminent liberal intelligentsia that led Ivy League schools and major cities through tough times-and that led America into Vietnam. The principal players in former Yale history lecturer Kabaservice's drama are gone: Cyrus Vance died in 2002 at the age of 84, having served several Democratic presidents and other elected officials, including his friend John Lindsay, who "appointed Vance to the four-member Knapp Commission to look into police corruption; the investigation presented a major headache for the mayor as the commission turned up evidence of widespread police graft and inaction on the part of City Hall." Lindsay died two years earlier, having seen New York through some of its hardest years; his successor, Ed Koch, "particularly enjoyed scapegoating the patrician ex-mayor," laying the blame for the city's woes at Lindsay's door. McGeorge Bundy, the architect of much Johnson administration Vietnam policy, died in 1996, disgraced; his friend Elliot Richardson died in 1999, similarly fallen from grace. All outlived their great friend Kingman Brewster, the visionary president of Yale, who took the university into the coed age and gave Richard Nixon fits by espousing a variety of left-of-center causes. Indeed, Kabaservice notes, Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger considered a statement Brewster made that questioned whether black revolutionaries could "achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States" to be the most seditious thing he had heard uttered in his lifetime. This constellation, writes Kabaservice, formed the heart of American liberalism, a cause that made considerable headway in the early Cold War era but then gave waybefore the radicalism of the New Left and the resurgence of the Old Right. Their failure to speak to the "broad American middle, whether defined in terms of class or of outlook," made liberalism irrelevant and paved the way for Reaganism and Bushism. Fine cultural history, especially welcome in a time when the L-word is a pejorative. Agent: Michael Carlisle/Carlisle & Co.


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