This month in Harvard history

March 6, 1965 — Around noon before the Harvard-Yale swimming meet, a portrait of H. Choteau Dyer ’57 (painted by Peter Cook) is unveiled in the Indoor Athletic Building (now the Malkin Athletic Center). A gift of Dyer’s parents, the painting commemorates the 1957 varsity swimming captain who died of leukemia in London in August 1961. Timothy Jecko, Yale’s 1958 swimming captain, provided the frame. Dyer’s former House Master, John Finley, performs the unveiling in the presence of Dyer’s former coach, Harold S. Ulen.

March 10, 1968 — Before a full house at Sanders Theatre, Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy — former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and former adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — debates U.S. Vietnam policy with Government Professor Stanley Hoffmann. Moderating is John K. Fairbank, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History. Bundy is in town to deliver the three 1968 Godkin Lectures, which will bring him back to Sanders on the following evening.

April 1861 — A student chronicler at the Divinity School describes responses to the start of the U.S. Civil War: “The patriotism of some of the students was beyond all computation; several being ready to bear arms, they were stationed a few hours a day as guards at the Cambridge Arsenal. It being a rather ‘dull business’ the ardor of some was cooled down almost to the state of desertion. The country was safer than they knew. [. . .] Quite a number, however, of the school from the first opposed the war spirit, and retained their anti-war principles throughout the year.”

April 1910 — The Andover-Harvard Theological Library formally comes into existence. Owen S. Gates, former Librarian of the Andover Theological Seminary, becomes the first librarian of the combined collections.

From the Harvard Historical Calendar, a database compiled by Marvin Hightower