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Some of Reich's critics target him personally as a "self-promoter" and "pamphleteer" -- in part, no doubt, out of resentment of his productivity and fame. These chafe many economics professors because Reich, often described as an economist, does not hold a degree in that subject. He received his degrees at both Dartmouth and Oxford in interdisciplinary studies -- history, philosophy, politics, economics -- and earned a law degree from Yale. Despite * his decade of teaching at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Reich is not a tenured professor; nor, friends say, has he sought that title. With characteristic wit, he pens some of his correspondence under a letterhead proclaiming himself the "Thorstein Veblen Wizard of Political Economy." To the criticism that few of the insights in his books are original, friends say Reich considers synthesis as important as discovery. As he once wrote in another context, "Often, greater rewards flow to quick and clever followers than to brilliant and original inventors."
Reich was born in 1946 with a rare condition later diagnosed as Fairbank's disease, in which the lower spine fuses and the upper legs don't grow properly. In June he had to undergo painful surgery on his hip joints; when he was a child, the condition and his size kept him from participating in sports. But he compensated by writing and illustrating his own books (starting at age six) and with music and humor and theater. He grew up in South Salem, New York, about 40 miles north of Manhattan, the son of Republican parents who owned a pair of women's clothing stores.
A quick study and natural leader, Reich was elected student-government president at Dartmouth College. During the summers, he worked with inner-city youngsters, as an intern to Senator Robert Kennedy, as a campaign volunteer for Senator Eugene McCarthy. He met his future wife Clare Dalton, a Briton who now teaches law at Northeastern University in Boston, on his first day at Oxford. After returning from England and earning his law degree at Yale, Reich clerked for a federal appeals judge in Boston. He then worked for seven years in Washington, first as an assistant to Solicitor General Robert Bork, then at the Federal Trade Commission during the Carter Administration.
Reich and Dalton moved to Cambridge in 1981 and reared two lively boys, now 11 and 8. They also began swapping visits with their friends Bill and Hillary. The last time Bill Clinton stayed with Reich was in the spring of 1991, when President Bush was winning 80% approval ratings. Yet Clinton, chatting on the porch of Reich's big old Victorian home, nonetheless seemed determined to run against Bush. One reason, Clinton said, was to promote the ideas of investment in the future that were contained in The Work of Nations, which had just been published. A mutual friend, playing devil's advocate, raised several arguments why Clinton should not run, but Reich recalls with a grin, "I just sat there wagging my tail."