About the first thing Derek Bok did when he returned to Harvard as president was to get rid of Larry Summers's chauffeur, and the limousine, too, the black Lincoln Town Car that had often been seen parked in front of Massachusetts Hall, waiting for Summers to stroll out the door. Bok drove a VW Beetle when he was president the first time, and he drives a Toyota Prius now. Chauffeurs are not his style. Then Bok got rid of the presidential valet, the man who had helped pick out Summers’s clothing. And the cook at Elmwood—Bok wasn’t moving into the president’s mansion and didn’t need a personal chef. And the chief of staff, too, part of Summers’s coterie of twenty-something aides who had trailed the Washington-style president around campus like ducklings on Boston Common.

Then, last October, Harvard’s temporary president gave some advice to its incoming president, whoever that may be. Addressing 50 onlookers gathered in Boylston Hall, Bok recounted that when he first became president, in 1971, the mood on campus was volatile. The faculty was bitterly split between conservative and liberal caucuses, and the students seethed with anger and frustration over Vietnam and civil rights. “The only thing my wife and I talked about,” Bok joked, according to the Crimson, “was: ‘How long until I get out of this madhouse?’”

It took him five years to get a handle on the insanity, Bok told me in a 2003 interview for my book Harvard Rules, well before Lawrence Summers’s presidency died at, yes, the end of its fifth year. (Bok, who dislikes profiles of himself, declined to be interviewed for this one.) Only then did Bok start to feel comfortable in the office, to develop an intuitive sense of how the power of the presidency could be channeled and how it could be squandered. Its primary authority was the power of suasion. “You have to convince other people to focus on particular problems, to reach a consensus,” he said in Boylston Hall. “You can’t do that if you have a peremptory authoritarian style.”

Above all, the president must maintain his integrity. “If a president comes out and tells something that’s exposed as a clear lie . . . the moral authority just disappears, and the president isn’t effective,” Bok said. “When something like that happens, they always resign.”

The speech provoked murmurs of surprise throughout Harvard. Weren’t such provocative remarks out of character? White-haired, level-headed Derek Bok, his many friends and admirers will tell you, is a man of discretion. After his retirement in 1991, he broke with Harvard tradition by returning to the university and keeping an office in the Kennedy School. Ex-presidents don’t generally linger around campus; it would be awkward, like having a dinner guest who won’t leave. But during the 15 years he maintained an office at the Kennedy school, Bok meticulously avoided mucking around in the work of Neil Rudenstine and Larry Summers.

So it did not escape the audience that Bok’s description of what a president should not do was exactly what Larry Summers had done. Summers was no consensus-builder; he governed by vigorous exertion of the formal powers of his office, according to those who liked him, by fear and fiat, according to those who didn’t. And, thanks to incidents at two faculty meetings, many professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences believed that Summers had flat-out lied to them, and that those lies reflected a chronic truth deficit. That belief eviscerated his presidency.

So it certainly looked as if, while ostensibly giving advice to the next president, Bok was really offering a critique of the previous one. As one of his friends puts it, “Derek didn’t work for 20 years to see Harvard fall apart once he was gone.” If Larry Summers was chosen by the Corporation to embody a modern approach to the Harvard presidency—an aggressive, activist approach—Derek Bok stands as a reproof of that model. For the moment, Bok seems able to do no wrong, but whether his old-school style can or should endure beyond his interim presidency is less obvious.

This is a curious year for Harvard, and in some ways a precarious one. The university has never before had a president serving a second term, or one whose tenure will be a mere 12 months. The legacy of Summers’s presidency is an abundance of question marks. Foremost among them is the identity of the next president. Other vital jobs also require filling, including the deanships of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the medical school, and the design school. And there are broader questions: How will fundraising be affected by the recent turmoil? What will happen to Summers’s unfinished agenda, including curricular reform and the new campus in Allston? How will the university soothe the bitter feelings left in the wake of Summers’s ouster?

Perhaps no one is better suited to address such uncertainty than Derek Bok. From 1971 to 1991, Bok deftly presided over a university emerging bruised and battered from the most fractious period in its history. Elevated to the presidency after just three years as dean of the law school, he tamped down the emotions racing across campus, restoring Harvard to stability and a focus on education rather than politics—and, for the most part, he made it look easy. After a couple of years in office, Neil Rudenstine suffered a breakdown and took an abrupt leave of absence. But Bok entered Massachusetts Hall looking relaxed, confident, and young for his age—40—and when he left office 20 years later, he looked pretty much the same.

Last February, Bok only reluctantly accepted that Larry Summers’s presidency was imploding. He sympathized with Summers in the way that, say, former presidents of the United States feel a special bond with each other regardless of party. It didn’t hurt that Summers had courted Bok, asking his advice on issues such as plagiarism at the law school. Bok had also served the Summers presidency by agreeing to try to mediate a dispute between Harvard and star economist Andrei Shleifer, a friend of Summers’s who had been accused by the U.S. government of committing fraud. Summers “didn’t have a lot of respect for Neil Rudenstine,” says an administrator who knows all three presidents. But, according to one professor, “Derek was useful to Larry, so Larry treated him very respectfully, and Derek appreciated that.”

By mid-February of last year, though, Bok could no longer deny that Harvard was about to lose a president. So when Corporation fellows Jamie Houghton and Nan Keohane asked him to return as interim president, Bok didn’t hesitate. He did, however, dictate some terms. If he came back, he would not socialize at night, because he had to pace himself—he is 76, after all—and Sissela, his wife, had never cared for the hostessing duties of a presidential spouse. And he would not fundraise, because he doubted that the financial pleas of a temporary president would fall on receptive ears. The big-money guys want a long-term relationship.

Still, there was never any real doubt that Bok would say yes. “There is no institution I care about more deeply,” he said of Harvard at the time. And everyone knew that if Bok said no, Harvard’s options quickly became unattractive. His appointment brought instant relief to the campus, and in his first faculty meeting last fall, the assembled professors gave Bok a standing ovation.

He is surrounded—protected, really—by clichés: That he is patrician, aristocratic, Waspy. That he comes from old money. That, with his square jaw and ski-jump nose and Gregory Peck haircut, he looks like a movie star. The stereotypes obscure what is most intriguing about Bok—the nuanced ways in which his family shaped the leader he would become.

Derek Curtis Bok was born on March 22, 1930, and yes, his family was rich. But it was also spirited, outspoken, and quirky. His grandfather, Edward Bok, was the second editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, then one of the world’s most profitable magazines. Edward Bok was an enterprising editor: In the pages of his magazine he dared broach the taboo of venereal disease, and he stopped accepting advertisements for patent medicines, a censure that galvanized support for the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. His autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

Edward Bok was not only smart enough to edit his magazine vigorously but to marry the daughter of its owner, one of the richest men in America, Cyrus H.K. Curtis. The union helped ensure Edward professional longevity (he held his position from 1889 to 1919) and access to a substantial fortune. In 1930, when Edward himself died, he left a fortune of some $16 million—$187 million in today’s dollars—to his wife and two sons, one of whom was Derek Bok’s father, William Curtis Bok.

A Philadelphia lawyer and judge, Curtis Bok refused to be categorized solely by his profession. He gardened, played the piano and bassoon, and sailed across the Atlantic in a 42-foot ketch. He wrote novels about the law, depicting “judges whose reputations stemmed from their ability to make prisoners and witnesses say ‘ouch’ at regular intervals, but back of it lay the palisades of prejudice and fear and before it the glorious green pastures of the public press.”

In addition to quite a lot of money, Curtis Bok inherited from his father a streak of progressive optimism so robust it verged on utopianism. Edward Bok had founded a $100,000 prize for the most viable plan “under which the United States may co-operate in bringing about and maintaining the peace of the world,” as the New York Times put it in 1923. In 1932, Curtis, determined to learn about the great promise he believed was contained within the Bolshevik Revolution, spent several months laboring at a machine in a Russian factory. Upon his return to the United States, he would become an outspoken advocate for American diplomatic recognition of the new nation.

Curtis Bok had married Margaret Adams Plummer of Ardmore, Pa., in 1924. They had three children, including Derek, but the marriage foundered, perhaps because of Bok’s idiosyncratic pursuits. During his time in the Russian factory he had dispatched Margaret and the children home to the United States to live on their own. In 1933, Margaret filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty, a move reported in the society column of Time magazine. Derek was just three.

One year later, Curtis Bok would marry Nellie Lee Holt, a Nebraska-raised Quaker who had studied European youth movements in preparation for work as a women’s educator. He died in 1962, leaving a fortune the New York Times put at $1 million. If the Times was right, Derek Bok may have felt the effects of that quintessential Wasp trait, the ability to dramatically shrink a fortune in the course of a single generation.

But Bok may also have inherited money from other family members. Margo Howard, a writer and social acquaintance of the Boks’, remembers a story she heard from one of Derek’s law-school classmates. While the two were studying together, an uncashed check fell out of one of Bok’s books. The clearly visible amount: $10,000. According to Howard’s memory of the story, an embarrassed Bok explained, “Oh, God, they just keep sending me money.” Bok has never been one for conspicuous consumption. To this day, friends joke that Bok is loath to pull out his wallet; he’d rather carry his luggage into a hotel than tip a doorman. When it comes to Harvard, however, Bok has been generous: In 1985, according to two sources familiar with the gift, he gave $1 million to support public service initiatives at Harvard.

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