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In 1945, the Harvard Corporation voted to permit freelance journalists and war veterans who formerly worked as newspapermen to apply for Nieman Fellowships in Journalism. The new policy applied to the Nieman class entering in September 1945. "The former rule limiting the Fellowships to persons in journalistic employment at the time of application has been changed to permit qualified newspapermen, leaving war service, to apply for a year of study without first reestablishing themselves in newspaper work," the Harvard Alumni Bulletin explained. "This will make possible for some a refresher year between their war absence and resumption of their former occupation."

John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, with Walter Cabot (left) and Sidney Weinberg.

U.S. Presidents and Honorary Degrees

After George Washington's Continental Army forced the British to leave Boston in March 1776, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers voted on April 3, 1776, to confer an honorary degree upon the general, who accepted it that very day (probably at his Cambridge headquarters in Craigie House). Washington next visited Harvard in 1789, as the first U.S. president. Since then, a few other men who were, or were to become U.S. presidents, have received honorary degrees:

John Adams, LLD	1781
Thomas Jefferson, LLD	1787
James Monroe, LLD	1817
John Quincy Adams, LLD	1822
Andrew Jackson, LLD	1833
Ulysses S. Grant, LLD	1872
William Howard Taft, LLD	1905
Woodrow Wilson, LLD	1907
Herbert C. Hoover, LLD	1917
Theodore Roosevelt, AM	1919
Franklin D. Roosevelt, LLD	1929
Dwight D. Eisenhower, LLD	1946
John F. Kennedy, LLD	1956

In 1929, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then governor of New York, was chief marshal at Commencement and delivered an address that in some ways presaged his presidency. Back in Cambridge for his 25th reunion, Roosevelt told the graduates: "May I add a personal plea to the Class of 1929. We have long suffered throughout the nation from the disinclination of educated men to take part in public affairs. This has resulted in part from a tendency to sneer at a certain type of so-called politician, and in part from a lack of definitive human interest in questions of government. Too often the tendency is to let government, both local and state and national, take its own course just so long as it does not interfere with the business, convenience, or pleasure of the individual. I do not mean for a moment that taking an interest in public service is a life task or a profession. It is rather an avocation which should be entered into by every man as a part, great or small, of his daily life. "There is a feeling today, on the part of many of our citizens, that much the easiest way out of our political questions will be to find some popular, able, economically sound Mussolini to act as a complete dictator and administrator for all governmental functions. But it is worthwhile to give passing thought to the earlier days of our history during which our ancestors set up the first successful republican form of representative government. Its creation and subsequent development, on wise lines, was due to the personal, active interest taken by a large proportion of the population, not by the wisdom of an oligarchy or a dictator."

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