Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (13 page)

We already knew from freshman physicals that the Grant Study men did not differ significantly from their classmates in such attributes as height, visual acuity, eye color, hay fever, or history of rheumatic fever. Twenty-five years later, it appeared that they did not differ significantly in future occupation, either. A quarter of each class became lawyers or doctors; 15 percent became teachers, mostly at the college level; 20 percent went into business. The remaining 40 percent were distributed through such other fields as architecture, accounting, advertising, banking, insurance, government, and engineering. There were a few artists of varying persuasions. The same proportions held true of the Study men.

But by the reunion years, critical differences had appeared, and some of them are summarized in
Table 3.3
. The comparison isn’t perfect. Alumni who have not enjoyed relatively smooth sailing in life, love, and career often decline to complete reunion questionnaires. While 92 percent of the Grant Study subjects completed this one, in the table they are being compared to a 70 percent sample of their classmates, probably self-selected for health and success. Even with this selection bias, however, the Study men seemed to have striven harder for success in college and in life than their classmates. Their mean IQ of 135 was only minimally higher than the 130 of their classmates, but a far higher percentage of them graduated with honors. They tended to take fewer sick days. A point of interest: this 1969 analysis was the first time a computer was used to analyze Grant Study data. At that time, the Harvard computer (quite a concept now!) filled
a
whole building. Data had to be submitted on eighty-column punch cards, often carried half a mile through the snow to the computing center, and data turnaround could take several days.

Table
3.3
Responses to a Questionnaire Distributed at the 25th Reunion of the Harvard Class of 1944

Very significant = p<.001; Significant = p<. 01; NS = Not significant.

Given their apparent ambition and greater striving, it wasn’t surprising that the Grant Study men were more likely than their classmates to have exceeded the success of their fathers by the time they were in their late forties. However, the selection of the Grant Study men favored conventional definitions of success. Stoics outnumbered Dionysians in the Study; the achievement bias in the selection process probably worked against stable youngsters who were more interested in private contentments than in chasing brass rings, and artists whose development takes longer and is frequently less remunerative. Furthermore, capacity for intimacy had been valued less highly in the selection process than the capacity to grin and bear it. One staff member
defined a “healthy” person as “someone who would never create problems for himself or anyone else,” and many of the Grant men lived up to that ideal. One boasted that what he enjoyed most in life was “being beholden to no one and helping others.”

Even taking this into account, the extent of the men’s successes as they entered middle age was striking. Four members of the College cohort ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential cabinet; one was a governor, and another was president. There was a best-selling novelist (no, it was not Norman Mailer, even though he
was
Harvard class of ’43), an assistant secretary of state, and a Fortune 500 CEO. And while the average man in the College cohort had the income and social standing of a successful businessman or physician, he displayed the political outlook, intellectual tastes, and lifestyle of a college professor. At age forty-five, the Grant Study men’s average income was about $180,000 (in 2009 dollars) a year, but fewer than 5 percent of them drove sports cars or expensive sedans. Despite their economic success, they voted for Democrats more often than for Republicans, and 71 percent viewed themselves as “liberal.”

I JOIN THE GRANT STUDY AND RE-INTERVIEWS BEGIN

I had arrived at the Grant Study in 1966, supported by an NIMH Research Scientist Development Award. McArthur allowed me to design the next two regular questionnaires. Perhaps the most important change I instituted at the time was to begin collecting physical exam data every five years, including chest x-rays, EKGs, and standard blood and lab work. The exams began as the men turned forty-five (1965–1967) and have continued since then, through age ninety (2010–2012). This prospective record of objective physical health distinguishes the Grant Study from the other great longitudinal studies of personality development.

My
approach differed from Charles McArthur’s. I wasn’t a social psychologist, but an M.D., and in psychoanalytic training. My early studies of recovery from heroin addiction and acute psychosis had left me impressed by the involuntary adaptive coping mechanisms that resilient men employed. My youthful preference for blacks and whites and either/ors had given way to an appreciation of—and a serious interest in—the reality and power of incremental adaptation. Now, at the Grant Study, I could investigate these mysteries to my heart’s content.

The questionnaires, concrete as they were, were an invaluable source of information. The men’s idiosyncratic responses to standard questions revealed the adaptive styles and behaviors that colored all the other facets of their lives. As one man put it, “We reveal ourselves whenever we say anything.” One man sent in a questionnaire two years late because he had just found it under his bed; I wasn’t surprised to find evidence of passive aggression in other areas of his existence. We didn’t have to depend on words or dream reports, because (as I’ll show in
Chapter 8
) the Study’s prolonged and repeated opportunities for observation allowed us to see so-called ego defenses made tangible in concrete behavior. During the years that we overlapped, Charles McArthur was an enthusiastic supporter of this interest.

In 1967 I also began obtaining two-hour interviews of the men, because no questionnaire can convey a person’s flavor the way a face-to-face meeting can. This was the first systematic interviewing since Margaret Lantis’s tenure in the early 1950s, and the new practice of re-interviewing about every fifteen years has continued through my directorship up to the present.

My second major research interest, maturation, came to life shortly after I joined the Grant Study. My father died when he was forty-four and I was ten. I retained an indelible memory from 1947, my thirteenth year, of his twenty-fifth reunion book, where photographs
of barely post-adolescent college seniors sit next door to the portraits of mature forty-six-year-olds. When the Grant Study men returned for their twenty-fifth reunions beginning in 1967, I experienced my interviews with them as eye-openers; I myself was still a callow thirty-three, but I understood right away that I had unconsciously been waiting for this encounter for twenty-five years. After that, my interest in adult maturation competed with my interests in defense and resilience.

The single most personally rewarding facet of my involvement with the Grant Study has been the chance to interview these men over four decades. The magic of transference hasn’t hurt. I am fifteen years younger than they, and when I began, I could not forget that I had been in kindergarten when they had entered the Study. I wanted to call them all “Sir.” But they invariably treated me as respectfully as college sophomores would treat a Study physician. I met no condescension, and because I already knew so much about them, the interviews were often remarkably intimate. But they reinforced a belief that the questionnaires had already inculcated in me: that however they may try, people can never neutralize their personalities.

There was an intensity to many of the interviews that was both gratifying and surprising. Often talking with these men was like resuming an old friendship after a period of separation, and that made me feel a little guilty, for I had done little to earn the warmth and trust that they offered. But I soon discovered that whether the men liked me or I liked them had less to do with me than with them. The men who found loving easy made me feel warmly toward them, and left me marveling at my tact and skill as an interviewer. In contrast, the men who had spent their lives fearful of other people and gone unloved in return often left me feeling incompetent and clumsy, like a heartless investigator, vivisecting shy innocents for science.

With some of the men the interviews felt like psychiatric consultations;
with some like newspaper profiles; with some like talks with an old friend. I learned to associate a man’s capacity to talk frankly of his life with positive mental health. With maturity comes the capacity and the willingness to express emotion in meaningful words.

I learned quickly that the men’s responses to me paralleled their ways of relating to people in general. One man, for example, evaded the first few questions I asked him, and then turned to me and said expansively, “Well, let’s hear about you!” At first I thought I had just been inept, but then I saw a comment from a staff psychiatrist in 1938: “This boy is more difficult to interview than any I have encountered in the group.” One of the warmest, richest personalities in the Study invited me to his home for breakfast at 7 a.m., cooked me a soft-boiled egg, and then extended the interview well past the two hours that I had requested. This in spite of the fact that he was working a sixteen-hour day, that he was moving his entire household to New York in two weeks, that his son was graduating from high school in eight hours, and that he himself had just suffered a devastating business reversal that was front-page news. Far less busy but more socially isolated men would put me off for a week and then meet me in the most neutral setting possible—two of them chose airports!

Some men came to Cambridge to be interviewed, but in most cases I went to them—to Hawaii, Canada, London, New Zealand. One man—only one—seemed very reluctant to be interviewed. But once the interview began he allowed it to extend through his lunch hour, and gave me a lengthy, exciting, and startlingly frank account of his life. Other men readily agreed to see me, but retreated behind ingenious obstacles. Two took every opportunity to interpose their large families between themselves and me when I visited, while others kept their families well out of sight the whole time I was there. There were cultural differences, too. All the New Yorkers and most of the New Englanders saw me in their offices, and few offered me a meal. Virtually
all the Midwesterners saw me at home and invited me to dinner. The Californians were evenly divided. Several wives were openly suspicious of the whole enterprise. One spoke so stridently into the telephone that sitting across the desk from her husband I could hear her refuse to see “that shrink” under any circumstances.

Between 1967 and 1970, I re-interviewed a random 50 percent sample of the Study classes of 1942–1944. In 1978–1979, Eva Milofsky, the social-worker daughter of Sigmund Freud’s personal physician Max Schur, re-interviewed the rest. Most of the surviving men were interviewed again as they reached retirement age around 1990, almost half by me and the rest by the very gifted Maren Batalden, M.D., whose work will appear in more detail in coming chapters. When the surviving men were about 85 (2004–2006), they, and their wives, were interviewed once more by Robert Waldinger and his team. The Grant Study is probably unique in having obtained so many interviews over so many years. And since the administrative reorganization in 1970, the Study has managed to track the men from the Glueck Inner City cohort in a fashion virtually identical to our follow-up of the College cohort; both cohorts are now included as subjects in any major Study publication.

To keep reliably in touch with two cohorts over many years is a tough business, and for the last twenty years that business has been in the hands of Robin Western, MFA, our reincarnation of Lewise Gregory. Western has been a tactful and insightful interviewer and a skilled detective, finding our strays and luring them back to the Study. She has been a meticulous and skilled archivist, maintaining seventy years of collected data in manageable order. She’s been a key research colleague, planning every questionnaire and wheedling the men’s physical exams (with the men’s written permission, of course) out of their doctors’ offices and into ours. To top it all off, she’s been a wonderful
friend.
If the Grant and Glueck Studies are now among the longest in the world, much credit goes to the perseverance and thoroughness of Robin Western.

Every time I settle down to analyze this wealth of material, yet another of the many richnesses of longitudinal studies becomes clear. No single interview, no single questionnaire, is ever adequate to reveal the complete man, but the mosaic of interviews produced by many observers over many years can be most revealing. One member of the Study, for example, was always seen as dynamic and charismatic by the female staff members, but as a neurotic fool by the males. One shy man from a very privileged background came across to a staff member from a similar milieu as charming, but a colleague from a working-class family thought he was a lifeless stick.

Some concealed truths emerged only after the Study members had been followed for a long time. One reticent man was thirty before he revealed that his mother had had a postpartum depression following his birth. This had not emerged either in his psychiatric interviews at nineteen or in Lewise Gregory’s family interview. One man kept his homosexuality secret until he was seventy-five, another until he was ninety. In general, few of the men acknowledged a wife’s alcoholism until they were over sixty-five. They were far more honest about their own alcoholism, extramarital affairs, and tax evasion.