TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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Once in conversation a number of years ago, he spoke of the dwin–
dling circle of friends with whom he could speak freely and easily. He
didn't necessarily mean people with whom he agreed or disagreed on
particular issues, though I'm sure that certain kinds of disagreement in
matters of politics and culture made friendship impossible. What he
meant was the kind of immediate sympathy in sensibility that expresses
itself in the rhythm of conversation, in the way people speak to one
another. I myself share the feeling . William had an acute sense of both
the difficulty and necessity of social life. His ambivalence toward it was
one of the very appealing things about him.
William's life was entwined with the journal he founded and edited for
sixty-plus years.
It
is his great legacy to American culture, for which we are
all indebted to him. But there was also a dimension of personality, a charm,
a quickness of intelligence and sensibility, that made him memorable and
endearing, even when one quarreled with him. He will be missed.
JEFFREY HERF
I will always be grateful that William Phillips reached out to some of us
who, like himself and the original editors and contributors to
PR,
began
political engagement on the radical Left and then evolved to liberalism.
In
so doing, he eased and energized our journey of disillusionment,
helped to turn us away from bitterness, and gave us assurance that
changing one's mind had nothing necessarily to do with religious con–
versions. Rather, William reassured me that reassessment was something
that mature and sensible people should do if the circumstances called for
it. He reached across several generations and in so doing helped to keep
a tradition alive that he helped to establish.
It
is his wonderful mix of
kindness, humor, courage, and intelligence that sticks in my memory.
I first met William Phillips in the early 1980s after I'd published sev–
eral most unfashionable essays supporting the position of the United
States and the Western Alliance and criticizing the "peace movements"
during the disputes over nuclear weapons in Western Europe. I had pub–
lished them in
Telos,
a quarterly journal of at times abstruse leftist the–
orizing, which was also a barometer of shifting views among intellectual
veterans of the sixties New Left. William liked and agreed with my 1982
essay about NATO's "double-track decision." He called to tell me, in his
typically understated way, that the essay was "good," perhaps even "very
Jeffrey Herf is Professor of Modern European History at the University of
Maryland.
