"MALCONTENTEDNESS MAY BE THE BEGINNING OF PROMISE."

—Randolph Bourne, "Twilight of Idols"

My own faith in the explanatory power of the old ideologies began to waver in the mid-seventies, when my study of the family led me to question the left's program of sexual liberation, careers for women, and professional child care. Until then, I had always identified myself with the left. I grew up in the tradition of Middle Western progressivism, overlaid by the liberalism of the New Deal. I believed in the Tennessee Valley Authority, the CIO, and the United Nations. In the bitter debates about foreign policy that began to divide liberals in the late forties and fifties, I sided with those who advocated continued efforts to reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union. I shared my parents' regret that Franklin Roosevelt's overtures to the Russians had been abandoned by his successors—unwisely and prematurely abandoned, as it seemed to us. Harry Truman was no hero in my parents' circle. His policy of containment, his constant warnings against appeasement, and his ill-advised attempt to co-opt the internal security issue (which only whetted the appetite for tougher measures against domestic "subversion") did not appear to have made Americans any safer in the world. On the contrary, the world seemed to become more dangerous every day.

The mass media have tried to idealize the fifties, in retrospect, as an age of innocence. They did not seem that way to me or to most of my contemporaries. A chronic state of international emergency led to the erosion of civil liberties at home and the militarization of American life. Under Joseph McCarthy, anticommunism reached a feverish pitch of intensity; nor did McCarthy's fall widen the boundaries of permissible debate. Critics of containment, like Walter Lippmann and George Kennan (after I955), found it difficult to get a hearing, and their plea for "disengagement" from the cold war made no impression, so far as my friends and I could see, on American policy. We felt more and more helpless in a world dominated by huge military establishments, both of them girding them

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