selves for some apocalyptic confrontation and seemingly impervious to the promptings of humanity or even to a realistic assessment of their own national interests.

The rapidly unfolding events of the early sixties pushed me farther to the left. Unlike many of my Harvard classmates, I did not welcome John Kennedy's election or the resulting Cambridge-White House connection. Kennedy's foreign policy—and the international scene continued to dominate my political reactions at this time—seemed even more reckless than Truman's. I was not impressed by the "best and brightest," having had some acquaintance with their kind. To me, the migration of Harvard to Washington meant the political ascendancy of Route 128, home of the high-tech industries that were springing up on the periphery of Boston. This vast suburban sprawl, founded on the union of brains and military power, furnished visible evidence of the military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower called it.

Eisenhower's farewell address stirred me far more deeply than Kennedy's inaugural, with its call to get America moving again. Eisenhower's warning became one of my reference points in the politics of the early sixties, along with Dwight Macdonald's article on the 1960 election, explaining why he did not plan to vote for either candidate. That article led me in turn to Macdonald's political memoir of the thirties and forties, a slashing, witty, and moving indictment of the warfare state. I began to read other social critics who spoke to my sense of foreboding, to the feeling that we Americans had somehow entrusted our destiny to an implacable war machine that ground on almost wholly independent of human intervention, mindlessly going about its business of destruction.

The writings that gave shape and direction to my thinking in the early sixties—Randolph Bourne's war essays, C. Wright Mills's Power Elite, William Appleman Williams's Tragedy of American Diplomacy, John Kenneth Galbraith's Affluent Society, Jacques Ellul's Technological Society, Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, Norman O. Brown's Life against Death—contained certain common themes, I now see: the pathology of domination; the growing influence of organizations (economic as well as military) that operate without regard to any rational objectives except their own self-aggrandizement; the powerlessness of individuals in the face of these gigantic agglomerations and the arrogance of those ostensibly in charge of them.

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