I'm sure it wasn't all Summers' fault. I know very well how difficult and politically correct members of the Harvard community can be. I'll never forget giving a talk at the Radcliffe Institute many years ago, only to have an audience member suddenly erupt into a bizarre, enraged monologue to the effect that I had no right to my opinions, and indeed no right to be there at all.

Nevertheless, the main problem lies with Summers. What goes on with people like this, who turn gold into rocks, and doom themselves to failure as leaders despite their enormous gifts?

One of Summers' old friends said yesterday that he "always had to be the smartest kid in the room." That rang a bell: when you were in school, how well did you like that kid?

Very bright people are sometimes either socially inept, insecure, or feel disempowered around others. Despite their huge intellects, they feel like stupid outsiders. So they may use their intelligence as a club to force others to their will. They often have no understanding that other people need to be respected; at some fairly deep level these other people don't really exist for them. Sometimes, as with several true geniuses I've worked with over the years, the lack of social/political sense was bred into them, in a home rife with paranoia, that gave the basic message that other people had to be finessed or vanquished with a combination of intellect and conviction.

Of course it doesn't work that way. People feel unimportant, bullied, and condescended to. Rage builds, and it's only a matter of time before the genius/leader is either marginalized or, like Summers, chewed up and spit out.

Perhaps it's no accident that Summers' biggest backers in the Harvard community have been the undergraduates, for whom all such issues of power and control are largely non-existent.

The saddest thing is that these people usually have absolutely no awareness that any such problem exists. They are thick as mud in this area, despite their computer brains. If they get so much as a clue, they quickly retroflex into denial: it's simply too emotionally dangerous.

"A strong leader is not just someone who can name a goal or force a change," Mary C. Waters, a Harvard sociology professor, said yesterday, "but someone who can bring out the best in people and find ways to encourage teamwork."

That sounds like a plain vanilla, garden-variety comment, but given Mr. Summers' personality, it's an understatement, and a profound one at that.

Some of this problem comes with the territory: it takes several months of dating before the sexual chemicals diminish to the point that people can begin to see things straight. They also fail to ask whether the person they're dating might not be sneaking into their lives by virtue of a personal blind spot. Is there something that allows the person to appear attractive to them when the actual case is that they're simply familiar, and negatively familiar, at that? If people turn off their radar, no wonder they get missiles dropped on them!

But the most common mistake, and the one easiest to fix, is that people get so caught up in their wishes for a wonderful new relationship that they fail to look for and take in new data about the person, and instead simply accept what they're being spoon fed. No wonder that they see nothing - until they've been trapped, chewed up, and are ready to be spit out.

Here some simple dating rules that can help you stay safe:

1. Fall in love (or in sex) only up to a point ; reserve a part of yourself to uncertainty. It's just fine not to know how far you can go with this person; you just met!

2. Ask yourself why the other person is so particularly appealing. When you get an answer, muse on how that leaves you vulnerable, and whether you've ever encountered the same situation in the past; if so, how did you get hurt? This will give you a clue as to your possible blind spot - and a remedy in either your heart or your action.

3. Ask yourself, over the first several months of your relationship, what you really know about the person; not what he or she tells you, but what you've validated via other, multiple, reliable sources. If you haven't validated it, the data is worthless.

4. Don't be afraid to go get that data. In the new century it's our responsibility to get the information we need. If someone we're contemplating an involvement with has a problem with our learning about them, look out! Either they've been in a cave for the last decade, or they've got something to hide. Good people should have no reason to keep you from talking to friends, co-workers, ex wives and significant others, etc.

Involve yourself keeping these ideas firmly in mind, and it will be far less likely that you'll ever need to be posting on one of these sites for the dating-exploited.

All three had been savvy and hardworking, and did a fine job of conveying the world�s complexity. So why was Jennings first, in both the ratings and the hearts of the viewers?

The answer could be read in each man�s body, face, and speech. Jennings gave all kinds of cues that he was both accessible and affectionate. He talked to us, not at us, and welcomed us to his experience. You could see it on his face. Not so the others.

Brokaw, like Jennings, had a bloodhound drive to get the story. This drive could constantly be heard in his voice and seen in his eyes. In his youth, he'd been an international reporter of legendary stamina. He was a consummate professional. But his posture was rigid, and his clipped Nebraska speech seemed shorn of emotion. There may have been warmth in the man, but it rarely showed. He was the Sergeant Friday of network news: just the facts. As he matured, a tense, rigid glower covered his face. When it broke, you saw a certain weariness, as if he was supremely burdened with the world. Perhaps it says something that he capped his career by writing the Greatest Generation books, which dealt with buried emotions. The package was tough and cool, and said "don't get too close."

Rather came out of hardscrabble Texas, and communicated a very un-Brokaw-like warmth; but it was the heat of vast insecurity. He seemed quietly frantic, as if he feared being dragged back to the sagebrush if we didn't love him. It was Lyndon Johnson all over again. The more he pressed his cadenced, Texas voice into our ears and stared at us goggle-eyed through the camera, the more deceptive and unlovable he seemed. With Rather there was no sense of command, no ease or grace, only endless, anxious petitioning. He got more extreme as he got older: in the last few years he seemed a kind of well-meaning but crazy uncle, weather-beaten, unpredictable, given to odd language and weird behavior.

Then there was Jennings. His biography says little of why people took his death so hard. A Canadian broadcasting executive's son, he quit high school for the family business, did well in his 20�s and came to the U.S., flopped as a pretty boy television host, then "went straight" as an international reporter and found his calling. He was a dashing, Sean Connery/James Bond look alike. He had four marriages; the last one worked.

But why did people like him? First, there was the bearing, his body wide open to us, suggesting genuine involvement, despite his cool, Scots-Canadian background. Beyond elegance, he communicated a sense of relaxed self-control, which made the audience feel more able to experience the days' events without recoiling. His jaw was never clenched, unlike those of his two competitors. Unlike Rather, he was not hunched forward, pleading to be loved: his eyes sparkled warmly, but his body posture said "respect me first, like me second."

Then there was the way he smiled. Brokaw labored to smile, as if removing several layers of facial armor in the process. It never seemed genuine. Rather�s smile seemed anxious and bizarrely disembodied. By contrast, Jennings looked straight at us, from the center of his self, seemingly with caring and warmth. His smile said he liked us. We liked him back.

Jennings' voice was pure music. It kept the viewer soothed through many tough-to-watch stories. He loved jazz, and used his wonderfully timbered voice as an improvisational instrument, constantly changing rhythms, volume, phrasing, pitch, and other factors. It took listeners for a musical ride, uniting them with the content. Everyone got to play in the band. By contrast, the staccato voices of Rather and Brokaw pushed us back, into the role of passive listeners. We couldn't participate.

Finally, there was Jennings' easy sense of engagement with the material itself. He always seemed fascinated with his subjects; they were never pawns in the journalism game, and there was never any intrusiveness or condescension. The pacing, the diction, and most important that passionate involvement with people and their situations gave us true insights, and even more important, the message that Jennings was reporting out of his sweet spot, for the pure joy of it. It made for stories at once universal and personal, professional and fresh - just like good jazz. By contrast, Brokaw and Rather edited their stories with determined objectivity, which felt dogged rather than fascinating, and in the end gave us less insight than dense balls of fact. It was a huge difference.

Maybe Jennings' family knows how he got this deck of good traits. I don't pretend to. Perhaps he matured through personal failures, successes, and a reporter's contact with poverty and pain. Perhaps it was the storied love for his children. What's clear is that with age he became involved rather than withdrawn; sweetened, rather than embittered; freshened, rather than worn. And he shared himself with everyone watching, saying every way but out loud: "here are some good things I've found in myself and in this world. Take as much as you want."

That was rare. No wonder he got the ratings, and the love.

Since 9/11 we've come to realize that forces external to personality have been at play in these disasters. In the case of the 9/11 terrorists, we found men in their 20�s, recruited to do the deed on the basis of a purported commitment to Islam, the romance of it, and the honor they both bring to their families and supposedly find in heaven after their deaths. These were middle class kids, some upper-middle, not poor people. Now, in the latest round, we have four boys from a poor city in northern England, apparently recruited by a presumed mastermind, respected and honored for their commitment, probably for the first time in their lives, then no doubt sent to a madras for further ideological grounding, and finally to their deaths in the subways. It seems likely that their poverty and, as they see it, the racism of white Christian Englishmen had produced a deep anger and desire to get even, which was probably exploited by their masters, who used it to fuel the religious fervor. A glorious death which takes out the oppressor: what could more honorable?

However misguided, their positioning in the political system leaves young adults vulnerable to such exploitation. Look at Chechnya; look at Kashmir; look at Israel/Palestine; look at Iraq. The list goes on and on. As long as these men and women perceive themselves to be demeaned and exploited, they will be vulnerable to anyone who promises some combination of freedom, respect, independence, and power. In their minds, bombs simply break chains.

Maybe there are personality variables that predispose to suicidal violence in the name of God. But unlike the domestic pathological personalities that we've seen run amok here, the psychotics, the eruptive stress disorders, and the rest of the usual psychiatric suspects, the psychopathology of the international terrorists isn't of primary importance.

The fact that they're not necessarily troubled, either by their own deaths or the fate of innocents in their line of fire, should make us afraid. Beyond that it should make us think about the conditions that keep these young people committed to their murderous cause

They can't resist attempting to read the personality of the defendant, no matter the judge�s instructions to stick to the facts. The tendency is so deeply embedded, they could no more stop it than they could stop breathing. They certainly did it with Michael Jackson. They saw him as a bizarre personality, and likely a child molester.

What's terrific is that they judged Jackson not on their intuition, but on the evidence. Under our legal system we hope that juries will have the intelligence and judgment to do just that, put the testimony before their �people read.� The Jackson jury members actually put their fore-brains first, and their people reads second�, and came in with a verdict based on the actual evidence, or lack thereof. While they acknowledged that Jackson may have been guilty, they followed the law by determining whether guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They saved their primary people-reading for the witnesses, where it belongs. They found the prosecution�s testimony to be flawed and unreliable. Fair enough. The acquittal was justified.

Contrast this with the O.J. verdict some years ago, in which the jury appeared to have �read� the case strictly along racial lines; or the Scott Peterson case, in which circumstantial evidence was seen as damning given the defendant�s apparent profile as a psychopath, and the fact that the victim was an appealing, pregnant woman.

Peterson and Jackson may well have done the things they were accused of; conceivably, O.J. did not. Even more important is the question of whether the trials were fair ones. In the Michael Jackson case the jury got the process right. We should celebrate the fact that they stuck to the evidence, and didn't convict merely because they read him as tragically weird.

The man was speaking his mind in a place renowned for it's alleged openness to opinions of various stripes, even with volatile issues such as this one. Still, everyone knows that Harvard is in fact a set of competing forces calculated to bring down unpopular opinions, especially if they are right of the academic crowd. But deny the president free speech? How can this be? Especially as psychologists expert in the study of human development have clearly stated, since the flap began back in January, that the research about intellectual differences in the two sexes is ongoing, and that definitive statements concerning it cannot yet be made .

The answer is that Mr. Summers' way with the faculty over the course of his tenure reportedly has been imperious, controlling, and condescending. Such behavior makes people very mad very quickly, and creates in them an instantaneous, and very strong, desire for revenge. One faculty member noted that it was this, over and above the issue of women's innate intellectual differences, that has got the Harvard president into trouble. So it's not the "what" of a person's behavior, it's the "how." Are the issues tangled? Are people confused about what they're actually talking about? You bet!

The same thing happened with Martha Stewart. Sure she broke the insider trading law. However, there was wide latitude as to sentencing. She was sent to jail in West Virginia for a crime, all right, but it wasn't basically for insider trading. Nor was it just to �send a message� to other potential insider traders. It was at root for being an imperious bitch, a cold-hearted, nasty, condescending harridan who preaches taste as if it could paper over all sorts of personal nastiness. Nobody likes a hypocritical, imperial mom, except those who grew up with one, and have become addicted. They're the folks who form the core membership of cults, in their various overt and covert, legal and illegal incarnations.

Perhaps the come-uppance of both of these public figures will serve them as agents of personal character change. This happens with some people, who may even unconsciously seek it, while fighting tooth and nail to avoid such a confrontation with reality. But don't hold your breath. Mr. Summers and Ms. Stewart are so entrenched that I doubt they're reachable. Most often such people simply pretend to change, as real change is painful. But you never know. Hope springs eternal!