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standard anti-Communist liberalism of nearly all the participants. And
that a certain kind of anti-Communist liberalism, personified by John
F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, Robert
McNamera, McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson and
Averell Harriman - was indirectly responsible for the war in Vietnam.
And anti-Communist liberalism is still the soul of IAGF.
The style of thinking of the conference managers was exemplified
by
whom they invited to speak for the American young. The confer–
ence was held during the week that saw uncoordinated,
ad hoc
student
demonstrations, sit-ins, protests, take-overs and riots on over thirty
American college campuses, including such usually tranquil outposts as"
Pembroke and Fordham. The conference took place during the week
when the new $12.00 Beatles album sold 200,000 copies, and when
New York City was disrupted by a strike of high school students. I
suspect the revolt of affluent American youth (now one must speak
even of the affluent adolescents) is at least as significant as the interior
military politics of NATO. The best of several new generations seems
to
be
rejecting the root middle-class values of the culture - material–
ism, status, family, puritanism, religion, patriotism, liberalism. They
are creating an adversary culture. They have been liberated by afflu–
ence, television, drugs, mobility and birth control pills. They don't want
to live in split-level suburbia; they don't want to work for bureaucratic
corporations, the government or Wall Street law firms; they don't want
to make love according to the marriage manuals. This is new, and it is
growing. As the
Berkeley Barb
said recently, "The high schools are
uncontainable. Che Guevara is 13 years old, and he has stopped doing
his homework."
But it wasn't the editor of the
Berkeley Barb,
or any representatives
of SDS who were invited to discuss these phenomena. Or even older,
sympathetic observers like Kenneth Kenniston or Edgar Friedenberg.
Instead it was holders of youth establishment titles - the editors of
The Harvard Crimson
and the
Columbia Spectator,
and the president
of NSA. I am not suggesting that New Left types should have domin–
ated the conference. (Maybe, in fact, they would have found good
reasons not even to attend if invited.) I am not saying that any of these
worthies who were invited should not have been invited. I am saying
that the activists and intellectuals associated with the New Left
should
not
have been systematically exiled,
especially since so many of the
foreign delegates kept asking what the young radicals believe, what is
their theory of change and what is their vision of the future. And
I'm saying something else - that the discussion of any subject would
