88
JACK NEWFIELD
in colleges have sampled LSD or marijuana, and he could have repeated
what he's already written, that the "committed political activists are
rarely intensive drug-users." But that sort of informed and activist
opinion wasn't what was wanted, and so Kennan could go on to sug–
gest a "drastic stiffening of public authority - the imposition of some
sort of public discipline in areas of our life in which such discipline has
never before been applied. . . ." Kennan concluded with a display
of charity, not for the absent New Left, but for President-elect Richard
Nixon: "Change, fortunately for us, is now in the air. We are in the
midst of a great governmental transition. New faces are about to appear
on the national scene; and it implies no disrespect for the old ones
to believe that the appearance of new ones is a good thing and comes
at a good time. . . . The new Administration must be given a fair
opportunity to show what it can do. . . ."
Although Kennan had made many of the same points eleven
months before in a famous
New York Times Magazine
article, the
daily
Times,
in the impressed person of Mr. Oates, chose to publish
the text of Kennan's remarks the next day. It was the only speech in
all the world that week that the
Times
printed in full. But that's
what the newspaper Establishment is - all that's print to fit.
Tuesday afternoon the conference had reached its nadir of major–
ity irrelevance and minority frustration. As I sat through the afternoon
session in Whig Hall, I began to imagine that the conference had been
taken over by some satiric-minded Yippie body-snatchers. Like Daniel
Bell rising to say that goals were not so important to the post-indus–
trial society as means; an optimistic echo of his influential tract on the
end of ideology. Bell, however, despite his zest for the future, also said
that he had refused, on principle, to join a committee at Columbia
on African Studies, since he had already served on committees for
Latin American and Asian Studies.
A few minutes later, R. M. Soedjatmoko, an economist and the
Indonesian Ambassador to the United States, began to speak "out of
a deep sense of frustration." "This conference," he said, "is in danger
of missing its purpose. The American crisis is larger than just the
Negro. What is the New Left? What is its thrust? We have to know
more about why the self-confidence of the liberal is faltering. The crisis
in America is deeper than just the economic or political level. What is
the nature of the malaise of suburbia? What do the underground
churches mean? We have lulled ourselves at this conference, and per–
mitted ourselves to speak only about familiar problems in familiar
academic and social science language. We have to talk about the
