![]() ![]() Gov. 1a professor, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Government, Harvard, Tennessean, Rhodes Scholar, poet, counselor to six Presidents, contributor to Allied victory in two world wars and the Cold War, advocate of Earl of Oxford as True Shakespeare, and father of Ward E. Y. Elliott. The senior Elliott was born in 1896 in Murfreesboro, TN, went to the Webb School, Bell Buckle, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. He was one of 18 Elliotts to study under a Webb. No Webb has ever studied under an Elliott. He was an artillery battery commander in World War I and a member of the Fugitive Poets (William Pratt, Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry In Perspective, J. S. Sanders and Company, 1991). At Oxford he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics under A.D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol College, met William Butler Yeats, John Marshall Harlan the younger, and V.K. Krishna Menon, and introduced the then-new forward pass to the Balliol Rugby Club, taking them to the University championships. There they got cold feet, declined to use the forward pass, and were trounced by Magdalen College. The forward pass has since been expressly banned in rugby. His dissertation and greatest book was The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (1928). It presciently condemned the then-emergent doctrines of fascism, syndicalism, and communism as amoral and despotic. Alfred North Whitehead described it as very heavy going.
As Dean of the Harvard Summer School he also founded the Harvard International Seminar, directed by his student and protégé, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was the first unconverted Jew ever to be appointed to Harvards Government Department. He scoured the world for emerging leaders and brought them to Harvard for a summer of discussions and classes. Many, such as Israels Yigal Alon, and Japans Yasuhiro Nakasone, went on to become heads of state. Kissinger himself went on to become White House National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford. Canadas Premier Pierre Elliott Trudeau was also an Elliott student and protégé. He retired from Harvard in 1964, taught for several years at American University in Washington, D.C., and eventually retired to his farm in the Blue Ridge, a redoubtable father, Shakespeare-lover, Lincoln-admirer, elder statesman, Cold Warrior, and inspirer of greatness to the end. He died in 1979 and is buried in the family plot in Murfreesboro (read the eulogy.) |
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