Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  More years passed. At seventy-seven, Camille was viewing his past five years as the happiest in his life. He had a new love; he was whipping men thirty years his junior at squash; he was nurturing a beautiful garden. He was also deeply involved in the community at Trinity Church. Perhaps I had been wrong to dismiss his hospital trust in a loving Christ so offhandedly.

  At eighty, Camille threw himself a potluck supper birthday party. Three hundred people from his church came. He provided the jazz band.

  At eighty-two, Godfrey Minot Camille had a fatal heart attack while climbing in the Alps, which he dearly loved. His church was packed for the memorial service. “There was a deep and holy authenticity about the man,” said the bishop in his eulogy. His son said, “He lived a very simple life, but it was very rich in relationships.” Yet prior to age thirty, Camille’s life had been essentially barren of relationship. Folks change. But they stay the same, too. Camille had also spent his years before the hospital looking for love. It just took him a while to let himself find it.

  By the time Godfrey Minot Camille was eighty, even Aristotle would have conceded that he was leading a good life. But who could have foreseen, when he was twenty-nine and the Study staff ranked him in the bottom 3 percent of the cohort in personality stability, that he would die a happy, giving, and beloved man? Only those who understand that happiness is only the cart; love is the horse. And perhaps those who recognize that our so-called defense mechanisms, our involuntary ways of coping with life, are very important indeed—the missing piece I mentioned above. Before age thirty, Camille depended on narcissistic hypochondriasis to cope with his life and his feelings; after fifty he used empathic altruism and a pragmatic stoicism about taking what comes. There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the seventy-five-year-old Grant Study (and exemplified by Dr. Godfrey Minot Camille). One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away. And that is why I offer Dr. Camille’s story as a sort of outline of the terrain we’ll be covering through the rest of this book.

  CONCLUSION

  Pictures are worth a thousand words, but sometimes they speak more to the passions than to reason. Numbers don’t lie, but sometimes they do. Together, however, pictures and numbers can keep each other honest, and that is why I offer in this book a bifurcated exposition of what appear to me (so far) to be the ultimate (so far) lessons of the Grant Study.

  One is that positive mental health does exist, and to some degree can be understood independent of moral and cultural biases. But for this to happen, we must acknowledge our value judgments and define them operationally, and we must prove the validity of our definitions not by persuasive argument, but by documented outcomes. This is important. Eighty years ago it was common to hear Hitler and Stalin called great leaders, and Churchill dismissed as a disastrous failure of a statesman. It will be another eighty years before we’ll be able to rank realistically the leadership skills of Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush father and son, and Obama. In presidencies, in studies, and in lives, the proof of the pudding is in prolonged follow-up—not for years, but for decades. More on this throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 7.

  The second lesson is that once we leave the study of psychopathology for positive mental health, an understanding of adaptive coping (explored in Chapter 8) is crucial. As in the inflammations and fevers of physical illness, what looks like trouble may be the very process by which healing takes place. As we become better able to endure life’s slings and arrows, our coping mechanisms mature, and vice versa.

  The third lesson is that the most important influence by far on a flourishing life is love. Not early love exclusively, and not necessarily romantic love. But love early in life facilitates not only love later on, but also the other trappings of success, such as prestige and even high income. It also encourages the development of coping styles that facilitate intimacy, as opposed to ones that discourage it. The majority of the men who flourished found love before thirty, and that was why they flourished. I will discuss some of the vicissitudes of intimacy in Chapter 6.

  But—this is the fourth lesson—people really can change, and people really can grow. Childhood need be neither destiny nor doom, as Chapter 5 will make clear. So does the story of Dr. Camille, a model of posttraumatic growth.

  Lessons Two, Three, and Four are closely related. Throughout our lives we are shaped and enriched by the sustaining surround of our relationships. The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points, at least to me, to a straightforward five-word conclusion: “Happiness is love. Full stop.” Virgil, of course, needed only three words to say the same thing, and he said them a very long time ago—Omnia vincit amor, love conquers all—but unfortunately he had no data to back them up.5

  A fifth lesson, to be expanded in Chapter 4, is that what goes right is more important than what goes wrong, and that it is the quality of a child’s total experience, not any particular trauma or any particular relationship, that exerts the clearest influence on adult psychopathology. Consider Camille’s “year in the sack.” Let me repeat myself: what goes right is more important than what goes wrong.

  A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change, and so do the factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either. Inheriting the genes for alcoholism can turn the most otherwise blessed golden boy into a trainwreck (Chapter 9). Conversely, an encounter with a very dangerous disease liberated the pitiful young Dr. Camille from a life of dependency and loneliness.

  The final lesson is that prospective studies really do elucidate life’s mysteries. I’ve given only a tantalizing taste of this lesson in Chapter 10, because it really does involve mysteries, and we are a long way from solving them in full. Yet it is likely that when they are solved, it will be with the help of lifetime studies like this one. The Grant Study has given us seventy-five years of real behaviors—not just trues and falses, not just A, B, C, D, or none-of-the-aboves—on which notions old and new about a rewarding life can be tested, retested, and refined.

  Even as they first set out, the originators of the Grant Study were beginning to gather exactly the evidence that contrarians like me would need to disagree with them. I inherited an orchard planted and nurtured with great care by a group of dedicated gardeners. For forty years I harvested its yield and took it to market. And since it is on follow-up that our theories stand or fall, my successors will continue the harvest when I no longer can. But credit for the fruit goes back to Arlie Bock, Clark Heath, and Lewise Gregory Davies who gave it the place and the time to grow, and to Charles McArthur who fertilized and pruned it once they had hung up their trowels. The creation of the Study is a life story all its own, and in the next chapter I will tell it.

  3

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE GRANT STUDY

  The sign on the door read “The Grant Study of Adult Development.” Financed by W. T. Grant, the department store magnate, and run by Harvard’s Health Services Department, the study proposed to investigate “normal” young men, whatever that might mean.

  On that particular afternoon, I was a sophomore, just turned nineteen. The Depression and a six-month siege of polio had been the sole departures from an otherwise contented, if not stimulating, life.

  —BENJAMIN BRADLEE, A Good Life, 1995

  In this chapter, i record the Grant Study’s seventy-five-year history for posterity—to be pondered, skimmed, or skipped at the reader’s pleasure. It’s the story not only of the Study, but also of seventy-five years of social sciences in America and the worldviews that came and went over that period. The research program of the Grant Study was directed by Clark Heath, M.D., from 1938 until 1954, by Charles McArthur, Ph.D., from 1954 to 1972, and from 1972 until 2004 by me. Since 2005, Robert Waldinger, M.D., has been the director of the Study.

  In the academic year 1936–1937, Arl
en V. Bock, M.D., became Oliver Professor of Hygiene at Harvard and chief of the student health services. In a report to President James Conant, he proposed broadening the scope of the Department of Hygiene and the role of the college physician. As a first step, he suggested a scientific study of healthy young men. Bock believed that health should be as much a central focus of medicine as pathology. As his proposal gained ground, he became more explicit about the kinds of issues he had in mind: the problem of nature vs. nurture; connections between personality and health; whether mental and physical illnesses can be predicted; how constitutional considerations might influence career choice. But his primary interest was: What is health? That question (and others that grew out of it) inspired the Grant Study for seventy-five years, and in this book I will start to answer it.

  In his report to Conant, Bock cited “the stress of modern pressures” which, he felt, “the current generation of students had to face largely unprepared.”1 And he thought that Harvard should be addressing these pressures.

  As time passes, it seems logical to expect a different emphasis on the work of the Department of Hygiene than has been customary because of the growing complexity of human relations and the need to turn men out of the University better qualified to take their places in the affairs of life.2

  To further this goal, Bock enlisted the support of his friend and patient William T. Grant, owner of the chain of stores bearing his name. Funding began on November 1, 1937, with the arrival of the first check from what would soon become the Grant Foundation, in the amount of $60,000 ($900,000 in 2009 dollars), and President Conant and the Harvard faculty approved Bock’s project.

  Originally called the Harvard Longitudinal Study, it soon became known as the Harvard Grant Study of Social Adjustments. (This name reflected a major business preoccupation of Grant’s—namely, what makes a good store manager.) After Grant withdrew funding in 1947 the name was changed again, this time to the Harvard Study of Adult Development. But colloquially it has always been the Grant Study, and I will follow that convention here. (In 1967, when I was new to the Study, I naively asked why it was called this. A more senior investigator replied with a straight face, “Because it took an awful lot of grants to keep it going.”)

  The Grant Study got under way in the fall of 1938, in a squat redbrick building on Holyoke Street in Cambridge, next to the Department of Hygiene. Its multidisciplinary aims were reflected in the composition of the original staff: an internist, a psychologist, a physical anthropologist, a psychiatrist, a physiologist, a caseworker, and two secretaries. Dan Fenn, Jr., editor of the Harvard Crimson at the time, said of the eight pioneers that they were “working on what might one day be one of Harvard’s important contributions to society, the analysis of the ‘normal’ person. . . . They may be able to draw up a formula which will easily and correctly guide a man to his proper place in the world’s society.”3

  In 1939, Harvard celebrated the opening of the Grant Study with a conference. Alas, I can find no record of what was discussed under its aegis, but it brought together a group of scientists of international distinction, who in their own ways shaped the Study profoundly. One was Adolf Meyer, who was the founding chairman of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and the new Study’s patron saint. Meyer was perhaps the greatest advocate in America of a long-range view in psychiatry. He had come to this country in 1892 to look at the way the brain changes after death. Ten years later his interest had shifted from the neuropathology of the dead to the adaptive neurophysiology of the living. Meyer insisted that the study of psychiatry was the study of lives, and published a famous, if rarely read, paper on the value of the “life chart.”4 In this he pleaded with his fellow psychiatrists for “a conscientious study of the mental life of patients,” insisting that “we need less discussion of generalities and more records of well observed cases—especially records of lifetimes—not merely snatches of picturesque symptoms or transcriptions of the meaning in traditional terms.” As the sagas of Adam Newman and Godfrey Camille have already made clear, the Grant Study made Meyer’s dream a reality. Originally planned to last fifteen to twenty years—a mightily ambitious goal even today—it has now been making “records of lifetimes” for seventy-five years.

  America’s greatest physiologist, Walter Cannon, was at the conference too. Like Meyer, Cannon has been a role model for the Study throughout its existence. It was he who formulated the concept of the fight-or-flight response, and as a Harvard professor he wrote a classic monograph on physiological homeostasis, The Wisdom of the Body.5 Psychological homeostasis has been an enduring concern of the Grant Study, and I chose the title of my book The Wisdom of the Ego in homage to Cannon.6

  President James Conant was present; he led Harvard through World War II, and served—importantly if less publicly—as civilian administrator of the Manhattan Project, where he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. Arlie Bock was there too.

  Arlen Vernon Bock, once described by the Harvard Gazette as “blond, brisk, brusque, benign, belligerent, and always busy,” was a no-nonsense physician.7 He had grown up one of eleven children on a farm in Iowa, and Harvard Medical School accepted him even though no one on the admissions committee had ever heard of his college. Bock began his career in the 1920s with a Moseley Traveling Fellowship for the study of medicine in Europe, following which he undertook a study of the physiological adaptation of men living in the high Andes. This experience led to his interest in physical fitness and positive health.

  Bock and his colleague John W. Thompson (also at the conference) were pioneers in the study of normal human physiology, and in 1926 had helped found the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, where physiologists, biologists, and chemists studied men’s ability to adapt to physical stress. There they developed a technique of exercising subjects by having them step on and off locker-room benches, which is still part of modern cardiac testing.8 The Laboratory was officially located on the campus of the Graduate School of Business Administration, but it sent teams traveling around the world, from the tropics of the Canal Zone to the Andean peaks. Its work eventually led to the decision of the United States Air Force to equip its new high-altitude bombers with supplementary oxygen.

  Bock had an expansive vision, and he never stopped inveighing against medicine’s tendency to think small and specialized. Writing to accept the directorship of the Harvard Department of Hygiene, he asserted that medical research paid too much attention to sick people, and that dividing the body up into symptoms and diseases could never shed light on the urgent question of how to live well. It was he who first conceptualized the concept of positive health; sixty years later, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman would take Bock’s challenge into the new field of study we call positive psychology.

  Even after the Grant Study got under way Bock’s close affiliation with the Fatigue Lab continued, and it’s worth noting that he himself walked two miles a day until his death at 96. He never forgot that “normal” and “average” are not the same thing—20/20 eyesight is normal, but unfortunately not average—and his interest was not in elucidating average fitness, but the best fitness possible. To accomplish this, it seemed sensible at the time to study an elite sample of men. And that’s what the Grant Study did.

  For its first seventeen years (from its beginnings in 1937–1938 until Charles McArthur assumed the directorship in 1955), the Study was dominated by its founder Arlie Bock, its first director, Clark Heath, M.D., and its social investigator, Lewise Gregory. It was the dedication and kindness of these three people that created the loyalty and gratitude that bonded the men to the Study until death did them part.

  THE PIONEERS

  Clark Heath, M.D., who served as director from 1938 to 1954, was a promising research scientist. He had once worked with Professor William Castle, a co-discoverer of vitamin B-12. He was also the staff internist, but his job description covered far more than that, and it expanded steadily over the years. He was responsible for the budget,
for all necessary reports, for planning for the future, and for putting together case summaries of the Grant men. Still, it was not his administrative skills that made him so important to the young Study, but his clinical gifts.

  The files of those early years make clear just how completely Heath epitomized the warm and caring physician. As each man joined the Study, Heath gave him an unusually complete two-hour physical exam. That was part of the Study routine. But until he left Harvard, returning Grant Study alumni came back to him voluntarily, seeking consultation for themselves and their families. When they needed more than mere medical advice, Heath saw a number of these ex-students for psychological counseling.

  Lewise Gregory (later Davies), a perceptive Virginian, was the third member of this key trio. Bock needed a social investigator to interview all the Study members and their families. Gregory’s only professional education was secretarial school, but Bock chose her for her dazzling interpersonal skills and her innate talent as an interviewer. After her death, Charles McArthur, the second director, described her technique for a staff member who was writing a brief (unpublished) history of the Study. “When she would visit a student’s family, she would sit daintily with her legs crossed, affix her large blue eyes on the conversationalist, and the smitten parents would bare their lives to her.” She was an attentive and sympathetic listener, and the loyalty she engendered among the participants and their families would last a lifetime. She also endeared herself to the Study men as a big sister. (A very pretty one. And her sister was Margaret Sullavan, the movie star.) Miss Gregory was invaluable in bringing lost sheep back into the fold, and the Grant Study’s attrition rate—the lowest of any similar study in history—is a tribute to her diligence and her diplomacy.