JEFFREY HERF
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ical movement, was precisely its radicalism, they mean that people
in such movements have a way of taking premises to logical or illogi–
cal conclusions in a manner that tamer political thought does not do.
This radicalism was there from the outset, driving us from impatient
reformism to apocalyptic visions of revolution in a space of five years.
I have very fond recollections of the period from 1965 to 1968.
Grinnell and Madison were, in different ways, very intellectually in–
tense. I read the canon of new left books by C. Wright Mills, Her–
bert Marcuse, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Paul Goodman, Mal–
colm X, Frantz Fanon, Simon de Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, as
well as Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Even more important, I also recall
very fine teachers at the University of Wisconsin, such as the Euro–
pean historian George Mosse and the sociologist Hans Gerth. Madi–
son also was noted for a stimulating left-wing intellectual community
of younger professors, graduate students, and undergraduates. The
idea of a conservative intellectual would have struck me as a com–
plete contradiction in terms. But I thought of myself as much as an
intellectual as I did as a leftist. The openness and playfulness of the
former would become a greater hindrance to me as my radicalism
deepened. My experience of those years was not of anti-intellectual–
ism but of defending ideas that really were new to me, especially
Marcuse's version of critical theory, neo-Marxist theories of imperi–
alism, and critiques of American mass culture, as well as taking very
seriously John Kennedy's idealistic appeals. In retrospect, it seems
odd that at the age of nineteen I was pretentiously describing myself
as an "intellectual." Intellectuals, I thought, were distinctive because
they placed everyday events in some very large context such as His–
tory, Totality, or the Dialectic, and because they had the special role
of making moral judgements. Like Old Testament prophets, intel–
lectuals spoke truth to power. My father, who escaped from Nazi
Germany in 1937, had urged me to do that, though I forgot that the
power he had in mind was a very different one from that of the J ohn–
son administration. I forgot just how much he loved this country.
I approached the war in Vietnam with the mixture of moralistic
self-righteousness and intellectual pretension that was then considered
the moral thing to do in American universities. I had no patience
with refusal to face facts. The appeal of the new left was precisely its
radicalism. The war in Vietnam was no "mistake" but a normal
product of "the system."
I remember feeling rather embarrassed by efforts of people in
the antiwar movement to discredit American documentation of North
