The details of Margaret Bok’s life are murky; Derek Bok rarely discusses them, and his closest friends know little about Bok’s youth except the occasional anecdote or throwaway line. Margaret moved to Los Angeles, bringing the boys with her, and remarried several times. Hers was not exactly a Quaker lifestyle; she kept glamorous company, mingling with Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley and becoming close friends with Georgia O’Keefe. “Derek’s mother was a remarkable woman,” remembers Harvard law professor Charles Fried, a friend of Bok’s since the 1960s. “She was artistic, engaged, and vivacious.” Nonetheless, the social mores of the 1930s would have meant raised eyebrows over just one divorce. Several would have been highly unusual—even in Los Angeles.

Young Derek grew up surrounded by brilliant and creative adults. When he was 13, for example, he was corresponding with Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and husband of Georgia O’Keefe. Bok, who would tell friends that he attended “a dozen” schools before college, spent time at an Episcopalian boys’ military school named Harvard (which decades later would merge with Westlake School to form Harvard-Westlake). Bok also boarded at Putney, a Vermont school. In college at Stanford, he played varsity basketball and was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He would graduate from Harvard Law School in 1954.

Out of this family crucible of Eastern establishment and West Coast social entrepreneurship, the personality of Derek Bok was emerging. Bok was calm and confident, what people would later describe as “a born leader,” though this said more about the ease of his personality than its origins. While his looks came genetically, Bok was also a product of his experiences, and their diversity kept the serious young man from becoming self-important or boring. One constant appears to have been a deep-rooted desire for stability—perhaps to be expected from a child of divorce—and in 1954, while on a Fulbright scholarship to the École des Sciences Politique in Paris, Bok found it.

Her name was Sissela Myrdal, and she too came from a storied background. Her parents were the famed Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and his equally impressive wife, Alva, a scholar and peace activist. In 1974, Gunnar would win the Nobel Prize in economics; Alva would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her work promoting nuclear disarmament. “I sensed immediately . . . that this was something indescribably new and wonderful in my life,” Sissela would later write in her book Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir. Before meeting Derek, Sissela had felt like “a chaotic shadow.” Now, “a miracle had happened.” The two were married within a year.

By all accounts, Sissela Bok has been the anchor of Derek’s life. Like him, she is serious, intellectual, and interested in morality and public policy; probably the best known of her writings in applied ethics is a book called Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. She is more introspective than her husband; one could never imagine him writing a family memoir.

Bok had been encouraged to consider teaching law by one of his law professors, Kingman Brewster—later the president of Yale—and in 1958, he joined the faculty of the Harvard Law School. There he developed a specialty in labor law, cowriting a textbook with the much-respected Archibald Cox, who would one day be the Watergate special prosecutor. The two grew close, and Cox’s influence upon Bok, explains Charles Fried, meant “a certain kind of sparse New England austerity, no belief in dazzle or bling, an incredible devotion to the public good.”

After Cox joined the Kennedy administration as solicitor general, Bok longed to go to Washington as well—he felt the call of Kennedy’s New Frontier powerfully—but he and Sissela had moved repeatedly since they’d been married, and he did not want to put his family through more upheaval. That missed opportunity would be one of Bok’s great disappointments; he would never again get the chance to work for a White House. Kennedy was shot, Vietnam consumed LBJ, and Richard Nixon was hardly Bok’s type. And, always, Harvard called him.

There were bumps in Bok’s road to the Harvard presidency, but only small ones. Like Larry Summers almost half a century later, Bok would give offense by espousing his views on women. In 1960, Bok spoke to a group of law students’ wives, encouraging them to prepare for careers because waiting could damage their job prospects. “To his amazement,” Sissela recalled, “this mild message was received as practically a declaration of war on motherhood itself. . . . How could he so downgrade their family responsibilities?” The outrage soon faded, but the incident provided Bok an early lesson in how easily the public airing of opinions could spark division.

In 1968, Harvard president nathan pusey appointed Bok dean of the law school. According to Phyllis and Morton Keller in their history Making Harvard Modern, one law professor had warned Pusey that “Bok’s thoughtful skepticism and caution [were] a possible sign that he might not be a bold and vigorous leader in matters of public concern.” Pusey, however, considered such traits desirable in a dean. And though Bok’s father-in-law, Gunnar Myrdal, warned him that administrators were “nothing but failed scholars,” Bok accepted.

He was good at the job and popular—Bok has always been popular. He pushed law professors to pay more attention to scholarship and labored to increase the enrollment of minorities and women. But one incident would define Bok’s tenure as dean and infuse his subsequent persona. In the spring of 1968, several dozen students staged a sit-in at the law-school library to demand that they be graded on a pass-fail basis. (Grades were oppressive.) Bok walked into the library carrying coffee and donuts for the students, then climbed onto a table and announced, “I want to thank you all for coming here to show your concern about the Law School.” As the Times would report, Bok “took off his tweed coat and ‘rapped’ in shirt sleeves into the wee hours.”

As Bok finally dismounted the table, blood rushed to his head and he fainted. “When I woke up,” he told me in our 2003 interview, “I was surrounded not by angry student radicals but by anxious student radicals who thought they might have given me a heart attack or something. They drove me home, and for the rest of the term, I got treated pretty well. Then, after the summer, they felt free to be cranky again.”

Though Bok downplayed the episode to me, others at Harvard took note at the time; many such confrontations between students and campus authority figures did not end so happily. In 1969, the campus would be devastated by the student takeover of University Hall and Nathan Pusey’s decision to call in riot police. The resulting brutality led to a campus strike and psychological scars that would take decades to fade. So when Pusey announced that, after 18 years as president, he would step down in 1971, Bok was a natural candidate to replace him.

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