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cacy of "peace." William noted that"many beliefs held in the' 3os were
abandoned without being refuted, so that the current revival of left–
wing attitudes was bound to bring confusion. Of course, fear of nuclear
war in the aftermath of Sputnik, the "missile gap," and the Soviet's con–
struction of the Berlin Wall was bound to divide the country. William
thought:
History has a remarkable way of providing-in a Hegelian sense–
the necessary (though not always the right) force for the moment.
And the [anti-nuclear] peace movement looks like just such an
inevitable force.
It
seems almost as though all the bottled-up feel–
ings of wide-eyed hope and fear in the era of the missile have
exploded into the "peace movement"; and through its very chaos,
its spontaneity, its amateurism, the peace movement as a whole
expressed the unusual combination of utopianism and practicality
so typical of political idealism today.
In another way, however, the
'60S
do mark a return to the prob–
lem of the
'30S,
but turned inside out. For the
'60S,
like the
'30S,
are concerned with the revolutionary assault on existing society
promoted by the Soviet Union, but this time the assault relies as
much on military power as on political manipulation.
Then he proceeded to suggest that:
The avant-garde questions of the
'30S
have become the mass ques–
tions of today, and, as has happened frequently in matters of cul–
ture, Western intellectuals have lost their particular stake in them.
The politics of the intellectuals has become the politics of govern–
ments, which means that intellectuals today have no independent
politics. Practical intellectuals are busy telling the government how
to use its power; impractical ones are trying to get the government
to give up its power-by disarmament.
Who could dispute this assessment in the aftermath of September
I I,
200I?
William, who by then was extremely frail, was watching the news
on CNN that morning-with a mixture of disbelief and anger, and with
tears in his eyes. He was devastated, and until he passed away a year
later, kept trying to figure out how the country might fight and eradi–
cate terrorism. There was no limit to William's curiosity about the
world around him. In the penultimate paragraph of his memoir, two
decades before his death, he wrote:
