n August 1964, presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote Lyndon Johnson a spare but revealing memorandum. The Republicans had just nominated Barry Goldwa- ter in San Francisco, rejecting if
not humiliating the Rockefeller-led, inter- nationalist wing of the party. Bundy sensed a golden opportunity for LBJ to court the "very first team of businessmen, bankers, et al." orphaned politically by Goldwater. And the key to these people, claimed Bundy, was a Wall Street lawyer, banker, and d...
n September 1939, just over a
week after Hitler's invasion of Po-
land and Britain's declaration of
war, Walter Mallory, the executive
director of the Council on Foreign
Relations, and Hamilton Fish Arm- strong, the editor of its journal, Foreign Af- fairs, went to Washington to see how the Council could help prepare America for what they expected would be another world war. Meeting with high State Depart- ment officials, they worked out an unprece- dented arrangement under which the Council w...
Baltzell, 1964), or The Higher Circles (G. William Domhoff, 1970). Today, the authors' precise in- ventories of the social institutions that were thought to sustain the ruling elite seem antique, almost comical. "A person is considered to be a member of the upper class," Domhoff wrote in introducing one such inventory, "if his sister, wife. mother, or mother-in-law attended one of the following schools or belongs to one of the following groups. . . ."
In retrospect, Baltzell...
Sometimes events overtake us. When we at the WQ first learned
about this article last spring, we were eager to bring it to our
readers. It seemed to us that James Billington's argument that the
Soviet Union was in the midst not of a revolution but of what he
calls a "fever break" was vitally important. We were not alone. In
late May, Billington, the Librarian of Congress and a leading histo-
rian of Russian culture, was invited to present his paper at the
residence of the U.S....
John Noble Wilford
History has not been the lumbus. Such, it seems, is the fate of histori- same since Christopher cal figures whose deeds reverberate Columbus. Neither has through time. he been the same The Columbus story surely confirms the throughout history. axiom that all works of history are interim
During the five cen- reports. What people did in the past is not
-
tunes since his epochal voyage of 1492, Co-preserved in amber, a moment captured lumbus has been many things to m...
here are two images from my
youth that I shall never be
able to shake. There was that
clear Saturday afternoon in
October when I rode my bi-
cycle downtown to see a show at the Rialto, only to look up at the marquee and see the chilling announce- ment, "20 lanes of bowling." No movie I have ever seen has jolted me more.
The thousands of hours I spent in Allen- town, Pennsylvania's wondrous Rialto The- atre formed the core of my adolescent edu- cation. I learned "lessons" i...
The reunification of Germany has stirred old fears that were buried after the Nazi period. When historian Robert Darnton went to Berlin in 1989, he rediscovered layers of such anti-German fears within himself. He also discovered, as the Wall came down, a changed Germany. East Ger-mans, far from denying their Nazi and communist past, were eager to confront it. The more the Germans challenge their past, Darnton SUE-gests, the less anxious one can be about the German future.
by Robert Damton
always wishe...
Jencks, a prominent Northwestern so-ciologist, and Peterson, a Har- vard political scientist, attests.
The underclass is not really new, Jencks observes. The "lower-class" lives described in Elliott Liebow's 1967 book,
Tally's Comer: A Study of Ne- gro Streetcomer Men, for ex-ample, are "very similar. .. to the lives described in more re- cent writing on the under- class." But has this class of people been getting larger? Jencks's answer (contrary to news media reports) is...
John Stratton Hawley
induism-the word, the conception are not altogether clear.
and perhaps the reality One heard of the "goodly habits and obser-
too-was born in the vances of Hindooism" in a Bengali-English
19th century, a notori-grammar written in 1829, and the Rever-
ously illegitimate child. end William Tennant had spoken of "the
The father was middle- Hindoo system" in a book on Indian man- class and British, and the mother, of ners and history written at the beginning...
induism-the word, the conception are not altogether clear.
and perhaps the reality One heard of the "goodly habits and obser-
too-was born in the vances of Hindooism" in a Bengali-English
19th century, a notori-grammar written in 1829, and the Rever-
ously illegitimate child. end William Tennant had spoken of "the
The father was middle- Hindoo system" in a book on Indian man- class and British, and the mother, of ners and history written at the beginning of course, was...