A Professor Like No Other: Sam Beer

by Sheldon M. Stern

Dr. Stern was Historian at the JFK Library for 23 years. In the early 1980s, he was the first scholar to listen to and evaluate all the still-classified Cuban missile crisis tape recordings. He is the author of Averting the ‘Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis(2003), The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis(2005), and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality(2012), in the Stanford University Press Nuclear Age Series.

On the morning of September 22, 1964, I took the 2 hour general oral exam in the Harvard Ph.D. program in history and then went home to wait for the Special Delivery letter informing me of the outcome. Soon after, my wife and I opened a celebratory bottle of champagne. I could never have imagined at that moment that the most important thing in my life that day would not turn out to be the general exam. Later that afternoon I walked over to Lehman Hall to look at announcements of openings for teaching fellows for the fall semester. I spotted one for an undergraduate course I had on occasion heard about: “Social Sciences 2: Western Thought and Institutions,” taught by Professor Samuel H. Beer. I walked over to his office in the basement of Littauer Center and found Sam at his desk surrounded by books and papers of every description. He asked about my background and interests, told me about the history of Soc Sci 2 and offered me the fellowship.

The Soc Sci 2 lectures were held in a large theater-like hall that seated more than 300 students. (More than 600 routinely applied for admission.) The sections, taught by 6-8 graduate students in history, politics, sociology, economics, etc. aimed to flesh out the historical and methodological issues raised in the lectures and the reading. The course, which was launched in 1946 as a general education “experiment,” began with an examination of the rationalization of royal power during the 12th century reign of England’s King Henry II. Subsequent topics included the English Civil War of the 17th century, the French Revolution, the 19th century British reform movement, and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Over three decades, more than 10,000 undergraduates took the course and 150 Teaching Fellows (TF) taught the sections.

Sam’s lectures, however, were unlike anything I have seen before or since. He was a superb and charismatic teacher. But, rather than endorsing a particular position or interpretation, he engaged in an open dialogue with himself, in essence sharing his critical thinking process about history and political theory with his students. Over my four years on the teaching staff, he often revised his lectures, questioning what he had earlier taught and explaining why he had changed his mind. He cared deeply about providing his students with reliable historical information but, more importantly, he tried to get them to confront timeless historical and ethical issues. He was scrupulously dispassionate and non-partisan, and students often pressed the section leaders to reveal whether he was liberal or a conservative. The only lecture he never changed was the course finale in which he read from and commented on a series of interviews he had conducted in Germany immediately after the fall of Hitler. You could hear the proverbial pin drop in the room that day, punctuated only by a sob or gasp of horror.

But, for the TF’s, the high point of the week was often the two-hour Friday afternoon meetings in Sam’s office. We discussed the reading and the lectures and sometimes exchanged student papers in order to see how differently the sections were taught. Wine and beer were available, but Sam preferred fine Kentucky bourbon. He would often invite other professors (Ken Galbraith came several times), former section leaders, and politicians (such as Congressman Thomas O’Neill and Senator Edward Kennedy).

One afternoon we arrived to find an elderly, rather stiff and formal German gentleman, as the guest. He had been a high judicial official in the last government of the Social Democrats during the Weimar Republic. He talked about how German civilians managed to survive the Nazis, developing what he called the “Deutsche Blick”—always looking behind and to each side before saying anything in a public space. On another occasion, the guest was Pitirim Sorokin, who had been Alexander Kerensky’s secretary in 1917, just before the Bolsheviks seized power. Sam later recalled, and the TF’s would surely agree, “Those Soc Sci 2 meetings provided me with a never-ending education.”

Several members of the teaching staff defended students in 1967-68 for disrupting classes and trying to ban ROTC on campus. Sam was proud of his service in World War II, and unimpressed by what he judged to be the shallow and ahistorical thinking of many student radicals. He always spoke his mind: when a TF returned from a semester of thesis research in Poland and noted the paucity of concerts, opera and theater in Warsaw, Sam retorted matter-of-factly, “That’s hardly surprising, they killed all the Jews.”

Over the subsequent decades, especially after I became Historian at the JFK Library in Boston, I saw Sam when he attended public programs at the Library, visited him in his office and spoke to him in connection with his service on the Library’s Document Declassification Review Committee. In one particularly memorable incident, the Committee was deciding whether to declassify a remark made by former President Truman in a phone conversation that JFK had secretly recorded. Truman claimed that his biggest problem was keeping his wife “satisfied,” and most of the Committee members decided that this apparently sexual reference should be closed. Sam objected, arguing that he had known Truman and “that was exactly how he spoke! I like the way politicians naturally talk.”

We periodically met for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, usually around his July birthday. In 2004, I arrived early and suddenly Sam came bounding up the stairs looking much the way he had in the 1960s. (He was 93.) Email, however, became our regular means of communication in his final years. In 2008, a few months before his sudden decline and death, he playfully emailed that “expecting difficulties” getting my driving license renewed, “I prepared thoroughly only to have the Register flip me through with a smile and ‘See you in five years.’ I’ll be 102 by then!” But he also commented with characteristic insight about the recent election: “What will that mass movement Obama has created do now? Lobby his program through our fragmented, dilatory political system. For gloomy thoughts I found myself recalling Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses (1930). As out of date as Soc Sci 2!”

In late 2009 I visited Sam’s grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery. A line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is carved on his modest grave stone: “The valiant taste of death but once.” A fitting epitaph for the only person in my experience whose temperament, integrity and kindness evoke the most splendid passage in that play: “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man.’