especially when the life is as productive and consequential and touched so many other lives so deeply as john blum's i am afraid i have been known to intimidate others as he long ago did to me. so i take the necessity of brevity of these remarks not as a limitation but as a challenge. the challenge to live up to john's striving to render life in words both clear and few. words were john's stock in trade. his tools, his natural medium, his greatest love. he savored them, crafted them with the pride and care of the master workman. he found precisely the right words to restore theodore roosevelt's reputation, reduce woodrow wilson's, secure henry morgan's new deal to life, make sense of the postwar years and unapologetic patriot and self-styled democrat that he was probed the shortcomings as well as the excellences of the american left. he then found the words to capture his own life in a compelling narrative whose art reaches from new york to hand over to harvard to south pacific to harvard again and to yale. whether his words flowed onto the page or out over the roads of wrapped students in the law s