86
JACK NEWFIELD
have come to life if the Bells, Brzezinskis and Kennans had been
challenged by informed radicals rather than by essentially mini- and
sentimental ones.
On the second day of the conference I questioned Shepard Stone
about the absence of Tom Hayden and Carl Oglesby. (Stone, the
president of the IACF, is a former lieutenant with U.S. Army Intel–
ligence, who, between 1954 and 1967, was director of International
Affairs for the Ford Foundation.)
NEWFIELD:
Can you explain why no representatives of the New
Left are here?
STONE:
Well, I've been out of the country for a while. I don't really
know who
is
in the New Left. Martin Peretz is here. Doesn't he qualify?
NEWFIELD:
I wouldn't think so. Peretz has recently attacked SDS,
Ramparts
and the Conference for New Politics, and he was finance
chairman for Gene McCarthy.
STONE:
Well, we did invite three Negroes. Although I'm afraid
Mr. Hamilton didn't come.
One last point on the subject of the conference's form. Not a single
American poet, painter, composer, architect or filmmaker was invited,
a point effectively made by Lillian Hellman during the discussion.
And the one advertised novelist - Saul Bellow - did not show up.
This says something about the sensibility of IACF. They've elevated
corporate and cold-war values above humanist and creative ones. They
had the president of McGraw-Hill Publications but didn't invite Nor–
man Mailer or Stanley Kubrick. They would rather invite Edwin
Land, identified in the press handouts as a "corporation executive and
inventor," than invite Robert Lowell, or Sontag or Bob Dylan. They
would rather invite John Oakes, the editorial-page editor of the
New
York Times
to insure friendly and generous coverage, than Norman O.
Brown or Eldridge Cleaver.
Eldridge Cleaver! When I suggested to a British Labour Party
M.P. at Princeton that Cleaver should have been there, he laughed.
But Brecht would have understood why he laughed: "A man who
laughs has simply not yet received the terrible news."
There were only a few days of hopeful history made during 1968,
and they were not made by the government-university-foundation com–
plex: the academic experts riding the gravy train of foundation grants,
university lectureships and White House invitations. History was not
made by the editor of
Commentary,
or the director of the Research
Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia, nor even by the president
of NSA. Instead, it was made by apocalyptic, pot-smoking kids in
