Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (3 page)

A fundamental paradox is my fifth and final reason for writing this book. Despite all the changes I aim to document, we are all still the same people—the men who joined the Study seventy-plus years ago, and I, who came to direct it in 1966. One of the great lessons to emerge in the last thirty years of research on adult development is that the French adage is right:
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
People change, but they also stay the same. And the other way around.

A NOTE ON THE LIFE STORIES

I will be making my points in this book not only with numbers, but also with stories. The biographies of all living protagonists have been read and approved by them. All names are pseudonyms, but these narratives are not composites. They accurately depict the lives of real individuals, with the one stipulation that I have carefully altered some identifying details according to strict rules. I may substitute one research university for another, for example, but I do not substitute a research university for a small college, or vice versa—Williams College for Swarthmore, perhaps, but not for Yale. I allow Boston as an acceptable interchange for San Francisco, and Flint for Buffalo, but neither for Dubuque or Scarsdale. I have made similar narrow replacements among types of illnesses and specific careers. In this way I have striven to remain faithful to the spirit of these lives and maintain
their
distinctive flavor, while altering the letter to ensure privacy. From time to time a prominent member of the Study has made a public comment relating to his participation in it. When I have quoted such comments, I have not disguised their authorship.

THE LIFE OF ADAM NEWMAN

Let me begin my history of the Grant Study with a story that illustrates many of the themes that have intrigued, enlightened, and confounded me over our years together. The protagonist is Adam Newman (a pseudonym), whose life—seemingly different with every telling—confronted us constantly with the realities of time, identity, memory, and change that are the heart of this book.

Newman grew up in a lower-middle-class family. His father was a bank worker who never finished high school. One grandfather had been a physician, the other a saloon owner. There was relatively little mental illness in Newman’s family tree. Nevertheless, his childhood was grim. His mother told the Study that her first way of dealing with Adam’s tantrums was to tie him to the bed with his father’s suspenders. When that didn’t work, she took to throwing a pail of cold water in his face. Later she spanked him, sometimes with a switch. Adam became extremely controlled in his behavior. He maintained a strict belief in and observance of Catholic teachings, and concentrated on getting all A’s in school. His father was more lenient than his mother, but also more distant. “He only recognized that I was one of his children about once a month,” Adam said. There was little show of affection in the family, and in Newman’s 600-page record there is not a single happy childhood memory recounted. Rereading that record for this book, I see too that Newman says almost nothing about his father’s death when he was seventeen.

In high school, Adam was a leader. He was a class officer in all
four
years, and also an Eagle Scout. He had many acquaintances, but no close friends. When he was a sophomore at Harvard, a few of his intake interviewers for the Study described him as “attractive,” with “a delightful sense of humor.” Others, however, described him as aloof, rigid, inflexible, repelling, self-centered, repressed, and selfish—the first of a lifetime of clues that this was a man of contradictions.

Newman’s physical self was scrutinized minutely when he entered the Study, because the scientific vogue of the time was that constitutional and racial endowment could predict just about everything important in later life. He was described as a
mesomorph of Nordic race with a masculine body build
(all presumably excellent predictors for later success), but in poor physical condition. He was among the top 10 percent of the Grant Study men in general intelligence, and his grades were superior. As in high school, he had many acquaintances but few friends; he joined only the ornithology club and, eventually, that least social of fraternities, Phi Beta Kappa. One psychologist observed that he was “indifferent to fascism,” and Clark Heath, the Study internist and director, noted that he “did not like to be too close to people.”

In short, Adam lived mostly inside his own head. His personality was described as
Well Integrated,
but he was also considered a man of
Sensitive Affect, Ideational,
and
Introspective;
you’ll hear more about all these traits as we go along. He gained distinction in the psychological testing on two counts: for his intellectual gifts, and for being “the most uncooperative student who ever agreed to cooperate in our experiments.” In psychological “soundness” he ended up classified a “C,” the worst category. (For much more on the assessment process, see
Chapter 3
.)

The Study psychiatrists, informed by another theoretical fashion of the period, were more interested in Newman’s masturbatory history than in his social life at college. They took pains to classify him as
cerebrotonic,
as opposed to
viscerotonic
or
somatotonic.
(These terms imply constitutional distinctions between people who live by the intellect, by the senses, and by physical vigor, but they were never satisfactorily defined.) It’s also worth noting here, and it will come up again, that the early Study designers never put to the test their deep belief that body build is destiny. That had to wait for many years, even though opportunities for an empirical trial soon became available.

As a nineteen-year-old sophomore, Newman took a hard line on sex. He condemned masturbation, and he boasted to the Study psychiatrist that he would drop any friend who engaged in premarital intercourse. The psychiatrist noted in his turn, however, that although Adam disapproved of sexual activity, he was “frankly very much interested in it as a topic of thought.” Newman told the psychiatrist a dream, too: two trees grew together, their trunks meeting at the top to form a chest with two drawers side by side, suggestive of a naked woman. He would wake from this dream, which visited him repeatedly, filled with anxiety.

To my mind, there was no adolescent in the Study who better exemplified psychoanalytic ideas about repressed sexuality than Adam Newman. And it was typical of the Grant Study’s approach at the time that while Freud’s theories were carefully explained to Newman (who vigorously rejected them), no one asked him about dating or friendships.

He was as dogmatic politically as he was sexually, and he regularly tore up the “propaganda” he received from the “sneaky” college Liberal Union. He claimed a commitment to empirical science both as an idea and as a career, but he also remained a practicing Catholic, attending Mass four times a week. When an interviewer wondered how his religious and scientific views fit together, he replied, “Religion is my private refuge. To attack it with my intellect would be to spoil it.” More contradiction.

It
wasn’t until ten years later, when the scientific climate had shifted away from physical anthropology toward social psychology, and relationships had become a matter of interest, that the Study recorded that Newman had had few close friends in college besides his roommate, and that he had dated only rarely. In part this may have been because Adam was working to pay all of his college expenses himself, and was also sending money home to his fatherless family. But it’s also true that he met early a Wellesley College math major who would become his wife and “best friend forever.”

Adam went to medical school at Penn. He didn’t want to minister to the sick, but he did want to study biostatistics and avoid the draft. He married during his second year there, but except for his wife he remained rather isolated. He had no more interest in World War II than he had in patient care. On graduation he fulfilled his military obligations with classified research at Edgewood Arsenal, America’s research locus for biological warfare, and he continued in that work after the war. By 1950, Dr. Heath, the Study director, noted that Captain Newman, shaping the Cold War’s nuclear deterrents but never seeing patients, was making more money than any of the other forty-five physicians in the Study. One of Newman’s unclassified papers was “Burst Heights and Blast Damage from Atomic Bombs.”

Despite these oddities, the record shows that by 1952, when he was thirty-two, Newman was steadily maturing. He was settling into a lifetime career in the biostatistics that he loved, using his leadership talents to build a smoothly running department of fifty people at NASA. His ethical concerns were engaged professionally too; in the 1960s his group participated in President Johnson’s plan to put the military-industrial complex to work on the economic problems of the third world. His marriage would remain devoted for fifty years, by his wife’s testimony as well as his own. It was an eccentric marriage—the two of them acknowledged each other as best friend, but neither
had
any other intimate friends at all. But many Study men with bleak childhoods sought marriages that could assuage old lonelinesses without imposing intolerable relational burdens, and Adam Newman seems to have found one. Perhaps this is why, unlike many men with childhoods like his, he effortlessly mastered the adult tasks of Intimacy, Career Consolidation, and Generativity (see
Chapter 5
) so early in his life.

Furthermore, whereas before he had denied intense feelings, perhaps out of fear of being overwhelmed, he was becoming more able to handle them. During the Study intake proceedings when he was nineteen, he described the atmosphere at home as “harmonious, my mother affectionate and my father the same.” He was given a Jungian word association test (despite its preoccupation with physique, the Study did try, in an eclectic way, to measure the complete man), and Newman associated the word
mother
with
affectionate, kind, prim, personal, instructive,
and
helpful.
But the seasoned and tolerant social investigator who interviewed his mother experienced her as a “very tense, ungracious, disgruntled person,” and Adam’s sister commented, “Our mother could make anyone feel small.” It wasn’t until 1945, six years after he left home and five years after his initial workup, that Newman was able to write to the Study of his childhood, “Relations between me and my mother were miserable.” “I don’t remember ever being happy,” he went on, and he recalled his mother having told him that she was sorry she had brought him into the world.

At age sixty, he took the sentence completion test developed by Jane Loevinger at Washington University to assess ego maturity.
11
The stem phrase was:
When he thought of his mother
. . . and Newman’s response was . . .
he vomited.
Yet it would be an oversimplification to say that he went on to become steadily more conscious of difficult feelings, especially the painful relationship with his mother, because at age seventy-two he could not believe he had ever written any such answer.
People are complicated; memory, emotion, and reality all have their own vicissitudes, and they interact in unpredictable ways. That’s one of the reasons prospective data are so important.

The young Newman was extremely ambitious. “I have a drive—a terrible one,” he said of himself in college. “I’ve always had goals and ambitions that were beyond anything practical.” But by thirty-eight he had gained some insight into the “terrible” drive of the college years: “All my life I have had Mother’s dominance to battle against.” This realization caused a change in his philosophy of life. Now, he said, his goals were “no longer to be great at science, but to enjoy working with people and to be able to answer ‘yes’ to the question I ask myself each day, ‘Have you enjoyed life today?’ . . . In fact, I like myself and everyone else much more.” He hadn’t become a hippie; it was 1958 and that scene was still some years away, and in fact Newman’s fierce ambition was still burning in his heart. This was just another manifestation of the complexities of the man.

By the time he was forty-five, the laid-back freedom of his thirties was once more in abeyance as he battened down the hatches to deal with rebellious and sexually liberated daughters. Identifying unwittingly with his mother, he was now insisting that “greatness” be the goal of his intellectually gifted girls. Twenty years later, one daughter had still not recovered from his pressure. She described her father as an “extreme achievement perfectionist,” and wrote that her relationship with him was still too painful to think about. She felt that her father had “destroyed” her self-esteem, and asked that we never send her another questionnaire.

I wish I knew what happened between them in Newman’s later years, when he had mellowed remarkably. Alas, I do not. But I do know that Time continued to wreak its changes. Occasional backsliding notwithstanding, Newman became more flexible than he had once been. The tectonic shifts of the sixties, and being father to such
adventurous
progeny, loosened him up sexually. He stopped disavowing Freud’s theories. As his daughters reached adulthood, he (reluctantly) abandoned his prohibitions against premarital sexuality. He stopped fearing the “sneaky liberals” and began to share the view that law and order was “a repressive concept.” In fact, he came to believe that “the world’s poor are the responsibility of the world’s rich.” He quit his job in the military-industrial complex and put his scientific books under the house “to mildew.” At sixty he was solving agricultural problems in the Sudan, using statistical knowledge gleaned in the planning of retaliatory nuclear strikes. The man who had gone to Mass four times a week in college proclaimed, “God is dead, and man is very much alive and has a wonderful future.” In fact, as soon as Newman’s happy marriage had begun buffering the terrible loneliness of his childhood, his dependence on religion had diminished greatly. Eventually he became an atheist. In mid-adulthood his mystical side was being expressed in meditation, and he began teaching psychology and sociology at the university level.