What 'Jeffrey Epstein' means about Harvard and America’s imperial elite
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal exposes not just individual corruption, but a deeply entrenched Harvard-centered elite network shaping American imperial power.
The torrent of disclosures regarding Jeffrey Epstein is difficult to process, much less respond to, because of their content and their scope. Repeated emails from and to Epstein on subjects like Jews’ superiority to “goyim” and the desirability of colonial wars for plunder offend the eye as well as even the battered assumption of human decency.
The presence in the emails of outsized public figures ranging from Noam Chomsky and Stephen K. Bannon to Lawrence Summers and Howard Lutnick shock because of their scope: the sheer number of prominent people who appear to have, temporarily or not, nullified their ideologies or their marriages or their images to spend time in Epstein’s circle. The analyst Thomas Karat has suggested, based on carefully parsing the timing and the discrepancies of the files’ release, that immobilizing the reader from a considered response may in fact be the release’s point. The Scottish constitutionalist and activist Sara Salyers made a version of Karat’s argument when she spoke about “the overwhelming feeling” of “hav[ing] woken up on an alternate, dystopian, universe” where “the scale of the insane evil…is so huge that it’s impossible to see how to begin putting anything right.”
Helpful responses to that question of “how to begin putting anything right” came from the British whistleblower Halima Khan, who said on X that Epstein “was involved in too much to be the work of one person”; that “Epstein is a project and the man we know is just the face and the fall guy”; and, in a subsequent tweet, that “we may not be explicit victims of Epstein but we are all implicit victims of Epstein.” These notions of broader networks of perpetrators and victims strike a chord. They are first of all demonstrably accurate, as shown by the investigative journalist Whitney Webb, who has written definitive books on Epstein’s connections to a network of “transgenerational organized crime interests…and major factions within both American and Israeli intelligence.” They are also deeply suggestive about the real “moral” of the Epstein story which powerful players may want obscured: how institutions that America uses to justify its global prerogatives have been corrupted by Epstein’s Jewish Zionist networks and their allies.
The clearest case of this corruption is also the heart of Epstein’s activity, “connecting” different “worlds” which formed the basis for his “success.” Namely, Harvard University: America’s beacon of education to the world since the 1630s; created by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge; and the seeder of America’s leadership class. Investigating Epstein’s role at Harvard and the players who made it possible shows that Epstein’s story isn’t confined to financial or intelligence networks, which many people reasonably consider intrinsically corrupt. It extends to an educational network which he and his backers have systematically corrupted in the name of power, profit, pleasure, and social control.
In many ways, this story starts in the late 1960s, when the WASP arbiters of Harvard whose networks had directed its affairs since its founding were caught between a radical rock and a reactionary hard place. This was the result of Harvard students’ response to what they accurately called “Harvard’s undeniable ‘complicity’ with the military-political-intellectual machine…prosecuting the profoundly immoral war” in Vietnam. The counter-response of the WASPs, a crackdown on activists, had ended with police on campus and the apparent split of the Harvard community between “radicals” and “reactionaries” on the faculty and in the student body. To fix the problem, the Harvard Corporation, which oversees the university, brought in Derek Bok, a conciliatory WASP, as President. Bok brought in Henry Rosovsky (a Jewish Zionist economic historian whose wife, Nitza, was a member of one of the early and prominent Jewish settler families in Palestine which became one of the founding families of Israel) to serve as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Harvard’s most powerful dean responsible for “more than 1,000 tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty; more than 7,000 undergraduate students; and thousands of graduate students.”
An instructive description of Rosovsky comes from the memoir of Martin Peretz, a Harvard lecturer and the publisher of The New Republic, which he remade into America’s most powerful Zionist magazine, as well as an admirer of Rosovsky, to whom he dedicates his memoir. In the memoir’s telling, Rosovsky “was essentially a conservationist, a builder” who “filled the gap left by the collapse of the Protestant veneer at Harvard”; “loved institutions, especially great universities”; and was successful because he “listened to everybody; he thought that they all had something to say.” Another way to say this is that Rosovsky was a fixer: appointed to put a kinder face on Harvard’s unwillingness to reform its connections to Washington’s military corporate complex that had been revealed by Vietnam. And this is precisely what Rosovsky did over the next 20 years. After his retirement, these efforts earned him a seat on the Harvard Corporation, a nearly unprecedented distinction for a member of faculty.
Rosovsky’s other, quieter legacy came in the area of personnel. Before Rosovsky’s tenure, no Jewish or Jewish Zionist faculty member had risen so far in Harvard’s administration. Since Rosovsky’s tenure ended in 1991, four Jewish American Zionists have been among the six presidents who occupied University Hall, and this is a reflection of broader university shifts. These shifts are elucidated in a telling passage from the memoir of Rosovsky’s close ally Peretz about the parties Peretz and his wife, an inheritor of the fading WASP elite, held at their Cambridge home for Jewish Zionists and their allies in Harvard’s environs:
Moshe and Michal Safdie, architect and artist…decided to get married…in our garden. Larry Summers would sometimes be there. Already he was a wunderkind, [a Harvard PhD] one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard’s history…Jill and Yo-Yo Ma weren’t Jewish, but they were honorary Jews, which is what you become when you get really close to me…[Future United States Supreme Court Justice] Stephen Breyer, a law professor at Harvard…and his wife, Joanna…became friends of ours… Leon Botstein was not quite of this crowd but adjacent to it…[he] made a name for himself as the architect of Bard, a college in Annandale-on-Hudson…[helped] by the periodical contributions of George Soros, the most recent of which, pledged in 2021, was a half-billion dollars.
This intimate list of luminaries bears rewinding.
It was Moshe Safdie who, nine years after he married in Martin Peretz’s garden and not long after he “did the plans for [Martin Peretz’s] remodeled kitchen” commenced the designing of a new student center for “Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, the Jewish student organization,” to be named after Henry Rosovsky. Financing for the project came from four donors, one of whom was listed in The New York Times as “Leslie H. Wexner, chairman of the Limited” and another “Jeffrey Epstein, president of Wexner Investment Company.”
It was Larry Summers, the “wunderkind” who in 2001 became Harvard’s president, who in 2003 would be described by Vicky Ward in her Vanity Fair profile “The Talented Mr. Epstein” as, along with Henry Rosovsky, part of Epstein’s Harvard “fan club.” According to Ward, Summers was also a key player in the inception of “the Epstein Program for Mathematical Biology and Evolutionary Dynamics” (later the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) at Harvard, which included an office for Epstein at the university. According to the profile, Epstein was “reluctant” to attach his name to the Program until “Summers persuaded him” and after Wexner gave his approval.
And it was Leon Botstein who, according to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, “did not just pursue Mr. Epstein hoping to raise money” for Bard College, where he was president, but “did so repeatedly”: making “frequent visits to Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse,” and hosting “Mr. Epstein and his entourage [when they] hopped by helicopter to Bard’s lush campus in the Hudson Valley.” In the process, Epstein connected Botstein to Woody Allen; Botstein helped one of Allen’s daughters secure acceptance to Bard; and Botstein “personally received $150,000 for consulting fees…from a foundation created by …Epstein” which Botstein “donated…to the college as part of a $1 million gift [Botstein] gave that year.”
These networks begat their successors.
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Photo credit: Zeinab el-Hajj, Al Mayadeen English.