Samuel Beer, 97; Harvard professor influenced statesmen

"Sam's lectures were remarkable for their objectivity," Melvin Richter, then a professor of political science at Hunter College at City University of New York, said in 2001 during a 90th birthday gathering at Harvard for Professor Beer. "Often students were completely convinced by the first set of views, only to find the second set equally persuasive."

Professor Beer could be very persuasive, whether the audience was a student, a politician, or a historian in England. A professor emeritus at Harvard, where he taught for more than 35 years, Professor Beer died April 7 at his home in Washington, D.C., after his health failed swiftly in the past few weeks. He was 97 and divided his time between residences in Cambridge and Washington.

With Soc. Sci. 2, he influenced scores of political thinkers and policy makers, and counted among his teaching assistants Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger. Professor Beer also was well known for Western Thought and Institutions, a course he taught at Harvard for three decades that melded elements of political theory and comparative government, and which acolytes recalled as serving up history and political science in equal measures.

"He was larger than life, an extraordinary personality," said Stanley Hoffman, the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser university professor at Harvard. "He had many lives. He had the life of a scholar and he had the life of a politician. He also was a sportsman, and one of his sports consisted of parachuting from planes, and he did that for a very long time. He didn't give it up until one time, when he was not exactly a youngster, he twisted his ankle upon landing."

Valued for his sharp intellect and discerning editing eye for graduate papers, Professor Beer had a presence that made him a force beyond the walls of Harvard. He formerly served as chairman of the political organization Americans For Democratic Action, and was an early vocal supporter in academia for the first US Senate campaign of Edward M. Kennedy.

"Sam Beer was a wonderful mentor to me over the years and a lifelong friend," Kennedy said in a statement. A former student of Professor Beer at Harvard, the senator called him "the most popular and most beloved of my professors."

In 1962, Professor Beer "was often at my side in the campaign, briefing me on a wide range of issues and making a real difference in the outcome," Kennedy said.

When the senator was recuperating from a 1964 airplane crash, "Sam was there for me again," organizing seminars in the hospital to brief Kennedy on domestic and foreign policy issues.

With students, Professor Beer "conveyed not so much his opinions, which we were all interested in, but his character," said Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard who first sat in one of Professor Beer's classes as a sophomore in 1950. "If there ever was such a thing as a manly man, he was the one. His confidence, his courage, his passion - this was what was behind him being much more political than many professors, even political science professors."

Professor Beer was political even before he was a professor, writing speeches for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 and 1936 before briefly becoming a journalist and working as a reporter for the New York Post and Fortune magazine.

"I was sort of a sub-ghost," he told the Globe in 1982 of his speech writing. "I wrote some things for Roosevelt, but none of them were flamboyant phrases that everyone remembers."

Referring to Roosevelt's acceptance speech when he was nominated in 1936 for a second term, Professor Beer added: "In fact, I opposed the 'Rendezvous with Destiny' speech because it seemed pretty corny."

Once established in academia, Dr. Beer became a professor that journalists sought for quotes filled with context and candor that could resonate through the decades, such as when he told the Globe in 1961 that "politics in Massachusetts forms a really vicious circle. To pinpoint the main causes of corruption and ineffective government, we can narrow it down to three: a fragmentation of power and responsibility in the state government and in both parties; poor leadership from public officials; and public apathy and suspicion."

Born in Bucyrus, Ohio, Samuel Hutchison Beer graduated in 1932 from the University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree. As a Rhodes scholar, he studied at Balliol College in Oxford, England, and had intimations of the ominous rise of Nazism while visiting Germany.

"He told me he was out taking a hike once and was standing in the bushes and he heard a noise of kids coming and marching," Mansfield said. "He stepped back so as not to be seen and there was a Hitler brigade on the march in the countryside. He looked at that and knew trouble was on the way."

Professor Beer married Roberta Frances Reed in 1935 and, after his stints at the Post and Fortune, received his doctorate in political science from Harvard.

His wife died in 1987, and he married Jane K. Brooks in 1989.

During World War II, he served in the Army and was stationed in Germany, then returned to teach at Harvard. He published his first book, "The City of Reason," in 1949, but his mid-1960s book on politics in England established Professor Beer as an internationally eminent scholar. In the United States, the book was called "British Politics in the Collective Age"; in England, it was titled "Modern British Politics."

Writing in the journal British Politics three years ago, Michael Moran, a professor of government at the University of Manchester in England, called it a "masterpiece . . . the most influential 'advanced' text in the teaching of British politics for a generation."

"Once I encountered Sam's paradigm, I was never the same," Joel Krieger, a political science professor at Wellesley College, said at the 2001 gathering to honor Professor Beer. "Whenever I considered British politics, I would hear Sam's voice and thought about the questions he would have asked."

Retiring from Harvard in 1982, Professor Beer became the first Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. professor of American politics at Boston College, a position created to honor the former speaker of the US House.

"I think political rhetoric, vulgar as it may be, is a kind of mass poetry," he told the Globe that year. "And therefore I don't terribly like this overintellectualizing that professors are liable to impose upon politics. I like the way politicians naturally talk."

In 1998, Harvard awarded an honorary doctorate to Professor Beer, who was the Eaton professor of political science emeritus.

"Everyone has a favorite professor in their life, and Sam was certainly mine," Kennedy said. "Sam was one of a kind - brilliant, amusing, lively, incredibly articulate, a reformer at heart with a unique ability to teach and inspire, and what I learned from him has served me well for more than half a century. I'll miss him very much, and I'll never forget him. I might not have been a senator without him, and I'm certainly a far better senator because of him."

In addition to his wife, Professor Beer leaves two daughters, Katherine of Cambridge and Frances of Toronto; two stepdaughters, Alison Brooks of Washington, D.C., and Camilla Brooks of New York City; six grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; a great-grandson; and a step-great-granddaughter.

A service will be announced.