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New Hampshire and at Columbia. It was made by the desperate little
guerrillas of the Vietcong who stormed the American Embassy at
Saigon. It was made by the enraged black mothers in Ocean Hill- Browns–
ville, and by the Mexicans and Orientals in Cesar Chavez' fledgling
union. These untitled, often uneducated and nonwhite activists have
not tried to influence and counsel the administration by memo and
conference. They have actually created history; they have proved great
institutions like the Pentagon and the Democratic Party to be vulnerable.
They have built new institutions and new myths, and they have retired
an American President. Any serious conference in the future, that pre–
sumes to advise presidents and speak for greater cultural freedom, will
have to seat some of those intellectuals who represent the victims and
outsiders, themselves. One can no longer assume that a bunch of
affluent, well-known conferees will speak for anyone except the institu–
tion of conferences. The decisive gift of an Albert Camus, or a George
Orwell, or a Frantz Fanon or a James Agee was his ability to see reality
through the eyes of its victims and casualties. This is also the gift of an
Eldridge Cleaver, a Robert Coles, a Tom Hayden. And it was the
central failure of the closed corporation of scholars who met at Princeton.
The conference itself was carefully structured so that those aca–
demics who most conformed to IACF's values tended to dominate the
sessions and the press coverage. The speakers at the three dinner meet–
ings were George Kennan, Eugen Loebl of Czechoslovakia, Henry
Kissinger and Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein was there as an orna–
ment. Just as
Encounter,
even while one of its editors was an under–
cover CIA operative, still published a small quota of anti-cold-war
pieces, the Princeton conference had its quota of people with some
radical credentials who might just possibly cut up: Lillian Hellman,
Stanley Hoffman, Martin Peretz, who was told that he'd been invited
in order to cause a little trouble, Robert Jay Lifton and Sam Brown.
Five out of one hundred. This proportion, about what
Encounter
used
to allow, was probably instinctively figured out as proper and respect–
able. And, of course, it would have been uncool to invite Irving Kristol
or Sidney Hook. The conference managers wanted to promote, not
expose their politics, and to make the promotion appear like the neces–
sary product of sharp but necessary brief encounters.
George Kennan spoke at the dinner meeting Monday night, still
tracking down youth, a majority of which he thought was "floundering
around
in
its own terrifying wilderness of drugs, pornography and
political hysteria."
If
Kenneth Kenniston had been there he could have
pointed out that fewer than ten percent of the seven million students
