MARTOV: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY, by Israel Getzler. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. 246 pp. $12.50. People who have experienced political defeat like to console themselves with the thought of historical vindication. The past has rejected them, the future …
Senator George McGovern has expressed the fear that the might of American institutions will be rallied in “a war against the young.” Irritated with campus dissent, itching for a chance to crack down on radicals, handed convenient pretexts by the irresponsible …
A presidential candidate may not need a policy, but a President does. Nixon’s election seems, in part, to have been due to his skill at gathering the support of those discontented voters who, for a variety of reasons, wanted to bring …
Trying to understand the world we live in can drive a man out of his mind. The different levels of public life we can more or less make out. It’s the connections among them that are hard to grasp. Here …
First an admission of error, and then a few analytical notes. A few weeks before the Presidential election I began to recognize that I very much wanted Nixon defeated. That could only mean, Humphrey elected. I had written in Dissent that I …
The following conversation was taped toward the end of August, 1968. In addition to BAYARD RUSTIN, the well-known civil rights leader and Executive Secretary of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the participants included IRVING HOWE, editor of Dissent; Tom KAHN, …
In last year’s U.S. pavillion at the Montreal World’s Fair I noticed a sign reading: Hall of the Great Society —Emergency Exit. Let’s take that exit right now! After the obscene happening at Chicago that went by the name of Democratic …
Politics in France has always been conducted as a branch of the drama: that was one reason Marx found it so rich a subject for historical narrative. Writing about the French Revolution, he remarked upon the regularity with which the …
We do not know why the United States has been subject in the last few years to a wave of political assassinations. Nor do we think anyone else knows. There is the conspiracy theory, convenient for those who like their …
For all of three days there was hope. Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run again; a bombing pause, of sorts, had been declared for North Vietnam; Hanoi’s response indicated that negotiations might at last begin to end the war. …
Right now, a bimonthly is not exactly the most convenient medium for commenting on the rapidly shifting and enormously exciting political events of the past few days. It would be foolish, a few weeks before these words reach print, to …
Surely, the time has come to end the Vietnam War. Leave aside, for the moment, the urgent moral considerations. Leave aside, also, the incontestable political reasons. The point has been reached where even motives of what might be called national …
Objection after objection has been made that by obstructing [Dow Chemical] recruiters, we have been denying others—the recruiter and those who wish to see him—the right of free speech and assembly. In a sense, this is true. . . . …
A major trend seems to be at work in American politics. The consensus of support for the Vietnam War is well an the way to disintegration. For the first time, if the polls can be trusted, a majority of the …
Right now John Lewis is a homeless man. Chairman of SNCC during its most active and heroic period, one of the first Freedom Riders, arrested innumerable times in the Deep South, and a vividly radical speaker at the 1963 March …
