The latest cautionary tale in the news concerns a man who had his fifteen minutes of fame, enjoyed the trappings of power for decades, and now, at 70, is suffering quite a fall from grace.
While his precipitous fall is certainly deserved, it is unclear whether it’s deserved for the reason that caused it.
Larry Summers was once an academic with an interest in politics. Entering college at 16, he was educated at M.I.T. and Harvard, and became an economics professor in his twenties, quickly attracting the attention of power-brokers in Washington. Having cultivated a reputation as a moderate, he served on the Council of Economic Advisors in President Ronald Reagan’s first term, then served as an economic advisor to the calamitous Dukakis campaign in 1988, and then won the plum title of Chief Economist at the World Bank.
All these credentials got him further credentials, with cabinet posts in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and in between, he served as President of Harvard University.
Today, at 70, he’s a respected economics professor who sits on various boards and gets booked for lucrative speeches by speakers’ bureaus and on behalf of such leftist NGOs as the Center for American Progress.
At an age when most Americans are watching their budgets and hoping their Social Security and their 401K will be enough to survive, Larry Summers can write his own ticket.
What a resume!
But all is not rosy in the Summers household – because his name showed up in the Epstein files.
The news of the day is that, within the trove of Epstein correspondence that the House of Representatives recently released, lots – and lots – of emails were discovered between Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein.
These emails – the released ones, anyway – don’t have any smoking guns in them to indicate any lawbreaking on Mr. Summers’ part. Current reporting indicates that Summers – then in his 50s and early 60s – thought of Epstein as an advisor, a mentor in the ways of extramarital romance.
Larry Summers, now a former university president and White House advisor on his second marriage, would repeatedly ask Epstein how best to turn his mentoring relationship with some young woman into something more, and Epstein would give him friendly counsel – as if Epstein himself was some kind of young Errol Flynn rather than an old perv who for years had had to get his female employees to recruit girls on his own behalf.
Larry Summers spent his entire life building this resume, trying to turn himself into the player he dreamed of becoming, and when he was finally there, when he’d reached the ultimate in his career track and then some, he was still unfulfilled; he still felt a need to cheat on his (second) wife, apparently without knowing how to do it without rather pathetically detailed coaching.
Unless there’s more to be revealed – and of course, that’s certainly possible – it’s unlikely that Summers will suffer prosecution for any of this. He isn’t currently accused of participating in the child abuse and teen sexual antics that Epstein is most famous for. Summers may never have committed any sexual crimes at all, for all we know.
But in some ways, this fall from grace may be just as big a punishment, for him, in his world.
In the circles in which Larry Summers has traveled for the past 40-plus years, the retirement years are spent giving speeches, touring the world on other people’s dimes, and continuing to pull in a great salary as a part time celebrity professor. One or two classes per semester should do, with the teacher’s aide handling all the testing and the grading of papers. Heck, if you play your cards right, your T.A. can create your PowerPoint slides too, so there’s nothing for you to do but show up and talk for 50 minutes. Piece of cake.
And if you’re the kind of old man who likes to hit on the coeds, well, they really don’t enforce the fraternization rules on celebrity professors the way they do on regular professors, do they?
The drumbeat to release all the Epstein files, such as they are, has claimed scalps already; Summers’ is just the latest, and it won’t be the last.
Summers intends to keep on teaching at Harvard; we don’t yet know what Harvard’s opinion of that choice is.
He would have liked to keep on making speeches, but now that this news came out, those speaking gigs are drying up like the Dust Bowl in The Grapes of Wrath.
And at 70, he’s still young enough to have been a well-paid expert on the TV news shows, but that’s likely gone now as well.
All the opportunities that this lifetime of resume cultivation should have brought him are gone now. He may finally have to rely on his savings (don’t feel too sorry for him; with a net worth estimated at $40 million, he and his wife won’t be starving any time soon, though they might not be dining in the same room all that often either).
What’s interesting about this story, Gentle Reader – to yours truly, anyway – is that his fall from grace really wasn’t caused by any of the kinds of scandals you’d expect. He’s not charged with antics at Epstein’s island, or having (successful) affairs with the coeds, or playing fast and loose with the department budget.
But he committed the greatest of crimes in the current environment: at a time when Jeffrey Epstein was exposed as having constantly worked to acquire contacts among the rich and famous, Summers turns out to have worked just as hard to be acquired by him.
These seven years of emails, remember, came after Epstein was first exposed and imprisoned in the 2000s. Summers befriended the guy and carried on all this correspondence after all that.
So this isn’t quite a morality tale of the sort we usually see in Washington. There was no special prosecutor hired to build the case against Summers; we aren’t discovering that he sold secrets to the enemy or spent some agency into bankruptcy while it was under his care.
Rather, this is all too common a tale of Washington, DC and New York City, a tale of the upper echelons of politics, academia, and the NGOs that rule much too much of our modern world.
Too many people set out in these careers and climb for the sake of climbing, never fully appreciating the good that they could do if they used these positions nobly, looking instead for ways to use them to serve their own selfish purposes.
We now see that this once-respected man, a financial mind, a Secretary of the Treasury in fact, at the peak of his fame and respectability, was just seeking out circles of machers, hoping to clumsily turn his fame into invitations to exclusive clubs, or to turn unsuspecting aides into mistresses.
How misspent was his entire career, if such was his array of goals at the end of it.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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