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PARTISAN REVIEW
no less fearful in their eyes for failing to affect their personal desti–
nies. It might have been
more
alarming, like a sword of Damocles still
not deigning to descend. I used to tell Hannah Arendt that McCarthy
could not last on the American political scene, but she did not believe
me. Her expressed fear, then and later, was for our State Depart–
ment, which she expected to be emasculated by the McCarthy cam–
paign. She was right about that, positively prescient, but in reality
that was only the visible, admissible part of her fear for our country;
at the same time, quietly, she was looking for signs that concentra–
tion camps were opening. Well, when you remember Nixon, that is
not such a joke.
In fact, though, it did not happen, or has not yet happened–
whichever you prefer. But for Hannah Arendt and many of her
friends, the original trust she had had in the protection of this coun–
try for her right of free thought vanished on the spot and was never
fully restored. Once again, under Nixon, in the last years of the
Vietnamese war, she became apprehensive. She actually talked about
emigrating back to Europe
fast,
while there was still time. That she
was willing to accept the prospect of being a refugee twice, two times
over, made me understand finally the absence of assurance she had
been living in for roughly thirty years without my taking note of it.
She was not prudent or "careful" in what she wrote- think of
Eichmann
-but in the practical sphere, the sphere of daily life, she exercised
what was sometimes an extreme prudence- a prime political virtue
according to Aristotle. Though she knew herself to be an outstand–
ing, even inspiring teacher, I cannot imagine her having taken part
in any of the teach-ins about the war in Vietnam.
It
was not that she
hid her opinion about that conflict- she simply steered clear of en–
listment in the political process that seemed inevitable to so many
opponents of the war. And yet when I became impassioned about
finding a means of resisting the war for people like ourselves too old
to practice draft resistance in any of its forms, she was the
only
per–
son willing to listen attentively to the argument I put forward. I had
worked out a formula for tax resistance. When I had finished, she
nodded, "You are right, of course.
It
would be the way." And there–
upon she sighed. What the sigh meant, I think, was complex: first,
that I would never get the original nucleus I needed for twenty-five
prominent people to start the movement; and, second, that, if con–
trary to her expectations and her judgment of prominent people, I
did round up twenty-five, she might feel compelled to join us, con–
trary to all dictates of prudence. Friendship and intellectual convic-
