Ernest May; was Harvard dean, adviser to the 9/11 Commission
Musing about "Uses of History," a popular course he taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Ernest R. May spoke in 1985 about the challenge of teaching politicians and graduate students to solve the problems of the present by examining the past.
"Historians are trained to explore the complexities of what happened," he told the Globe. "It's very hard for us to look instead at what-ifs."
Even scrupulously documented events pose difficulties, he said, because elected officials sometimes misinterpret history's lessons and base important decisions on that skewed understanding.
"Analogies are more an impediment than a help if they're not looked at closely," Dr. May said. "They're captivating because they save thought, they simplify, and they get you past the question of whether you need to act at all."
A scholar whose work ranged from a ground-breaking eighth-grade history textbook to serving as senior advisor for the 9/11 Commission, Dr. May died Monday at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of complications following surgery. He was 80 and lived in Cambridge.
He had taught for more than a half century at Harvard University, where he also served as dean when Vietnam War protests roiled the campus.
"He was first and foremost a teacher, and if he was asked by somebody, 'What do you do?' he would say, 'I'm a teacher,' " said his wife, Susan B. Wood. "He taught for 55 years at Harvard, and that is something you only do if you love teaching."
Lecturing without notes as he paced at the front of his students, Dr. May began teaching at Harvard in 1954 and extended his reach beyond the classroom by writing or coauthoring more than a dozen books.
His first book, "The World War & American Isolation 1914-17," was published in 1959. The American Historical Association awarded Dr. May the George Louis Beer Prize for the best work of the year.
With John Caughey and John Hope Franklin, he published "Land of the Free" in the mid-1960s. The eighth-grade textbook hewed to primary sources and introduced the role minorities played in US history, unlike many textbooks in use at the time. It also raised the hackles of some conservative groups by pulling no punches.
A section on US Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican notorious for his anticommunist crusade and hearings during the Cold War, noted: "It is not certain that he drove a single communist out of the government, but he made many persons miserable."
Among Dr. May's other books was "Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers," published in 1986 and written with Richard Neustadt, with whom he taught "Uses of History" at the Kennedy School. Two years later, the book garnered the first Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, which is administered by the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
That book, based on their teaching, used case studies of historical events to guide present-day policymakers in making decisions.
While Dr. May drew his immediate audience from graduate students and people in power - President Bill Clinton packed "Thinking in Time" for a Martha's Vineyard vacation in 1997 - his writing style was never stuffy, and readers of all kinds took to his books.
"He had the rare gift of writing books that were quite deep even to the specialist, yet utterly accessible, even to someone with no formal training in history at all," said Philip Zelikow, the White Burkett Miller professor of history at the University of Virginia, and coauthor with Dr. May of "The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis," a 1997 book that became the basis for the movie "13 Days" that starred Kevin Costner.
"To borrow Theodore Roosevelt's old phrase, Ernest was someone who spoke softly, yet carried a big mind," Zelikow said. "He would invariably let others do most of the talking while he ended up doing most of the thinking."
Born in Fort Worth, Dr. May grew up in Texas and went to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1951.
At Harvard, where he was the Charles Warren professor of American history, Dr. May was 40 when he was appointed dean in 1969. Students protesting the Vietnam War and other issues had staged an occupation of his predecessor's office. Just weeks into Dr. May's tenure, they filled his office, too, locking arms to prevent him from leaving.
While serving as dean until 1971, he initiated a reexamination of all aspects of the school's undergraduate curriculum. For a year after stepping down, he served as associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, simultaneously filling the post of director of the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics from 1971 to 1974.
"Ever since its creation, the institute has been perhaps the most joyous part of Harvard," he told the Globe in 1977. Politicians and students make a bubbly combination, exhilarating to see and hear, and exciting to the mind."
Throughout his administrative years, he continued to teach classes and taught in the public realm, too, augmenting his books by writing articles for magazines, giving interviews to newspapers, and sending letters to editors.
Dr. May, his wife said, "considered himself extraordinarily fortunate to spend his life studying, teaching, and writing history. It was a profession that suited him perfectly. And he could not have imagined for himself a better academic home than Harvard. He and Harvard fit together hand in glove."
Several years ago, Dr. May published "Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France," then found himself, with a host of others, as a National Book Awards finalist for the final report of the 9/11 Commission.
"My job was to produce the historical narrative," he wrote in The New Republic in 2005. "For this task, I had two comparative advantages. The first was a long career as a historian. The second was a lack of historical bias."
That nonpartisan approach to capturing the unfolding arc of history for generations to come, he said, was key to his calling.
"We are the ones who, in the end, shape ideas about what was right and wrong in the past and what, based on experience, would be right and wrong in the future," he told the Globe in 1965.
In addition to his wife, Dr. May leaves a son, John of Wenham; two daughters, S. Rachel of Syracuse, N.Y., and Donna of Los Angeles; and three grandchildren.
A service will be announced. 