Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

WITHIN THE FAMILY

By Alex Sachare ’71

I worked for Larry O’Brien in the early 1980s, when he was commissioner of the National Basketball Association. O’Brien had come to the NBA from the world of politics, where he was part of the inner circle of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. A former chair of the Democratic National Committee and postmaster general, he’s perhaps best-known as the man whose office in the Watergate complex was burglarized on June 17, 1972, starting the chain of events that brought down President Richard M. Nixon.

O’Brien was a politician who practiced the art of the compromise. He believed that when you had opposing sides, you sat them down at the bargaining table and kept them there until they reached an agreement, and the best agreement was one that neither side loved but both could live with. If only one side left the room happy, he felt he hadn’t done his job as a mediator and a negotiator.

That’s why the NBA hired O’Brien in 1975, at a time when professional basketball was a troubled sport with two warring leagues, teams facing bankruptcy and economic chaos. O’Brien quickly achieved a merger agreement between the leagues and a pact with the players’ union that would pave the way for an era of prosperity under the leadership of Commissioner David Stern, a young lawyer who had served as the NBA’s outside counsel and was brought into the league office by O’Brien. Stern, a 1966 graduate of the Law School, soon will complete his tenure as chair of Columbia’s Board of Trustees, but I digress.

I thought of O’Brien and the idea of never being able to make both sides happy when we started receiving feedback about our July cover story on New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg ’69, a conservative. I observed that both in volume and tone, these letters and e-mails paralleled those we received shortly after we ran a cover story in January about Columbia’s other U.S. Senator, Barack Obama ’83, a liberal. It doesn’t seem to matter whether we profile a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat; either way, we upset some of our readers, and we hear from them.

I take this as a good sign. I like when alumni react to our articles. I enjoy positive feedback, welcome story ideas, appreciate constructive criticism, acknowledge our shortcomings and accept negative rants. Reaction is good. Feedback is even better.

The fact is that the College has two alumni serving in the U.S. Senate, one a conservative who graduated in the ’60s and the other a liberal who graduated in the ’80s. I’m glad we profiled both and I’m glad we put both stories on our cover. The College should be proud that it helped mold these civic leaders of diverse viewpoints.

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next