A Very Private Public Citizen

As a member of the “Corporation,” Harvard’s elite governing board, Grenville Clark wrote an important treatise on academic free- dom. He fought a successful public battle with his good friend President Franklin Roosevelt over FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937. He refused pay while serving as a private advisor for the Secretary of War of the United States during the Second World War, and he worked closely with the NAACP to uphold civil rights for African Americans during the tumultuous 1950s and ‘60s. Clark devoted his last decades to a quest for world peace through limited but enforceable world law, rewriting the charter of the United Nations and traveling the globe to lobby the world’s leaders.