Free Harvard Rules by Richard Bradley

caricature of Summers in the New Yorker showed a man with a stubby body, a disproportionately large head, and massive, beagle-like jowls, carrying around packets of money like a stork.
    But under Rubin’s tutelage, Summers began to evolve. He knew that if he wanted to become more than a deputy secretary, he’d have to conform to the Washington way of doing business, and he worked to smooth his rough edges. “Larry just got sick of being called a bull in a china shop,” one of his colleagues said. Socially, he started to move in high company. He and Victoria bought a 3,300-square-foot house in Bethesda, Maryland, the affluent suburb bordering Washington, from a Washington lobbyist. The couple started attending the Clintonite “Renaissance Weekends.” Summers played tennis with Alan Greenspan and Washington Post editor David Ignatius at the tony St. Alban’s Tennis Club. Not exactly fleet of foot, Summers wasn’t a natural player; his strength was in his strategy, the angles and diversity of his shots, his positioning on the court. “I play a lot better than you’d expect, looking at me,” he said.
    Sometimes, the same rule applied to Summers’ practice of politics. Former Clinton White House adviser Dick Morris recalled an instance in which Summers felt so strongly about a policy, he went behind Rubin’s back to promote it. “In early 1996, I met with Rubin and Summers at the Treasury Department to talk about the tax cuts President Clinton was proposing as part of his long-sought budget deal with the Republicans,” Morris said. “We had a long talk during which Rubin did most of the speaking. At one point, however, he had to duck out of the office to take a call and left Summers and me alone. As soon as Rubin closed the door behind him, Summers leaned over the table and, in a conspiratorial whisper, said that one of the proposals I had been making—cutting the capital gains tax, which Rubin opposed—might be feasible if the cut were applied only to families selling their homes…. Larry told me not to tell Rubin, but he would send me the data. Rubin came back in, and Larry clammed up.”
    The following day, according to Morris, Summers did indeed send him information that Morris used to make the case for the tax cut to Clinton. “That was the genesis of the current exemption of capital gains taxes on the first $250,000 of profit on home sales per person.”
    Summers could never become humble, but he could at least act it. So he learned to preface his opinions, as Rubin did, with softening phrases such as, “I’m not an expert on this, but…” Or, “It’s just one man’s opinion, but…” Or, “It seems to me that…” Perhaps remembering the criticism of the Harvard CUE Guide, Summers began to speak more slowly, biting off words in groups of two or three before pausing, sometimes seeming to catch his thoughts after just a single word. But still, he couldn’t hide the effort it took to rein in his opinions. The contrast between the often dumbed-down language of politics and Summers’ intellectual impatience was too great to disappear entirely. The effect of Summers’ makeover was that “he waits till the end of the meeting to tell you your idea is idiotic, instead of interrupting in the middle of it,” said Washington pundit Mara Liasson.
    Even as Summers’ personal transformation continued, his professional life was increasingly demanding. The Mexico problem, it turned out, was not the end of international financial crises but rather the beginning. Starting in Thailand in 1997, a series of financial panics would sweep Asia, and it would fall to Larry Summers, more than any other individual, to resolve them. At Harvard, few people outside the economics and government departments, the business school, and the Kennedy School were paying much attention to Summers’ work. But