Washington is a dismal place just now. The muddy Potomac, dreary and snuff-colored, stirs slowly and painfully like and old man waking to the agony of his years. Somehow, even the Capitol dome conveys an impression of timidity in pointing …
Last November, 800 Harvard students blocked the path of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, demanding that he consent to a public debate on Vietnam. The demonstrators thereby touched off a controversy on the tactics of confrontation, a controversy which continues …
1) The Heritage of Traditional Society India has been a traditional society for centuries. Writing of the country as it was after the death of Akbar the Great, in 1605 A.D., W. H. Moreland, the distinguished historian of India, observes …
A qualified victory in Southeast Asia was recently claimed by C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times (January 29, 1967). The containment of China—assertedly the basic objective of U.S. policies in Southeast Asia, reaffirmed as such by Secretary of …
Three years after President Kennedy’s assassination, we still don’t know much more than on the day after it. Nor are we ever likely to know more. The Warren Commission and its critics have not produced conclusive evidence of either Oswald’s …
February 10, 1967 It is necessary to date one’s commentaries on China; the events are overtaking us, and only by sheer luck did our articles in the two preceding issues remain topical until they were in the hands of our …
To nobody’s surprise, the amiable man of limited educability and his venomous protege won themselves a thumping victory. Ike, the charismatic non-leader, “manifested” himself here and there, brought his magic aura with him, smiled and tranquilized a restive people. While …
One summer day in 1962, I was walking along Boylston Street in Cambridge toward the Charles River. Hearing my name shouted and the honking of a car horn, I turned and saw the two grinning faces of walrus-mustached Phil Luce …
I had begun this introduction as an analysis of the relationship between DISSENT and the times which the articles in this volume both depict and reflect. More or less inevitably, this led to a consideration of the revival of American …
On a murky January day in 1952, after five months of “investigations” by the Military section of the State Security Agency of Hungary, I was brought before a three-member court-martial convoked by the Supreme Military Court of Budapest. No witnesses …
Definitions, whether of liberty or of other political terms, are neither true nor false. They are useful or mischievous, and in any case they change over time. They are useful, ordinarily, when they enable people to communicate, i.e., to understand …
Like many other people, I have been reading the recent literature on the history and politics of Vietnam. It is a depressing experience, which bears out once more de Tocqueville’s remark that “a true but complicated idea has always less …
“Liberty,” Herbert Marcuse writes, “is self-determination, autonomy … But the subject of this autonomy is never the contingent, private individual as that which he actually is or happens to be; it is rather the individual. . . who is capable …
Delano is entirely typical of the innumerable rural towns that dot the vast stretches of farmland in California’s agricultural valleys. Lying off Highway 99, the main artery through the San Joaquin Valley, it is a thoroughly unimpressive-looking place, with some …
The Great Cultural Revolution which vents its ire against capitalistic hairdos, blasphemous traffic lights, Western books, and revisionist street names baffles the old China hands in Moscow, Washington, and even Havana. What is the meaning of these youthful Red Guards …
