Robert McNamara’s “insider account of Vietnam policy-making,” as the book jacket calls it, raises three issues. One is the way in which vital decisions were made, the reasons why the men who made them were “wrong, terribly wrong,” and the …
A quiet revolution took hold in New York City during the humid summer months. WNYC FM and AM, the public radio stations owned by the city since 1922, were put on the selling block by a Republican mayor set on …
We mourn the death of our friend and comrade, former Dissent editor George Eckstein.
REPORTER: What happened to the Republican revolution of the late 1990s? DISSENT: First we should clarify what we mean by the Republican revolution. From 1994 to 2000 Republicans made massive cuts in government spending, transferred power from the federal government …
The main points of Lani Guinier’s essay deserve vigorous assent and criticism. She links debates about racial justice with arguments about representation in ways that are theoretically powerful and ambitiously democratic. Guinier wants blacks to gain a fuller and more …
Thirty years ago in a 1965 speech delivered at Howard University’s commencement, Lyndon Johnson set out the terms on which his administration intended to pursue affirmative action. More than civil rights legislation was needed in order to achieve racial equality, …
It was 1968, and I had applied to graduate schools in the field of French literature. Someone from Tufts University—a male dean or department chair, I can’t remember—called to say the faculty had accepted my application. In fact, he chatted …
Racial preference, the policy for which “affirmative action” is a deliberately misleading euphemism, is endorsed by its defenders as a means for achieving many worthy ends. Of one thing there can be no doubt: racial preference has been the chief …
Eugene Goodheart is a fine literary critic, but in “Freud on Trial” (Spring 1995) he fails to establish that Freud’s undoubted “suggestiveness” and “persuasiveness” are grounds for his permanent value as a psychological thinker. As Goodheart says, the fact that …
I had planned an editorial on Bosnia for this page—a diatribe against the moral blindness and complacency of European governments and the leadership failure of our own, against the cowardice of NATO and the weakness and confusion of the UN, …
Environmentalists have an ambiguous, even paradoxical, attitude to European integration. Many advances in environmental protection—in relation to water quality, air pollution, or habitat protection—have come from European Union (EU) legislation. Yet many environmentalists, particularly “deep greens” or fundamentalists, remain opposed …
Modem life, precisely because it is fraught with so many problems, needs technological creativity as we need air to breathe. How else can we meet successfully such global challenges as the destruction of the environment, poverty, the population explosion, and …
Before 1982, if your Social Security benefit came to, say, $419.43 you would receive a monthly check of $419.50. If you began collecting Social Security in 1982, however, and were entitled to the same benefit, your monthly check would be …
Gregg Easterbrook begins his 745-page opus with a summary of what he calls “ecorealism,” which is essentially the view that the war to preserve a habitable earth is all but won or will be by the year 2000, and that …
In conversation with Granville Barker, George Bernard Shaw once bragged that the comedy of his plays was the sugar that he employed to disguise the bitter socialist pill. How clever of the audience, replied Barker, to lick off the sugar …
