HARVARD SQUARE has been gripped, while you were away, by the sprinkling of Summer that passes for Spring around here. The winds are generous, gushing, the fading-blue sky spreads milky sunlight–and the humans below etch jaunty patterns. The lights change to a fixed “DON’T WALK” for traffic to contentedly break into a shuffle. Just then […]
MCGEORGE Bundy haunted Harvard last week, bringing back with him a conception of society and man’s role in it that has recently come to be discredited around here. His argument, astringent and eloquent was, despite weaknesses, ultimately reassuring. The Godkin topic was “To Govern for Freedom in an Age of Explosions,” and Bundy’s message was […]
THE fork of “liberalization” that is jabbing all of Communist Europe these days has two prongs: “Cultural Freedom” and “Political Liberty.” It is easy in an advanced capitalist country to forget sometimes how closely inter-related the two are. European Communist reformers, however, have never lost sight of this close connection–indeed, they sometimes disguise their political […]
The public must exercise its “maximum practicable participation” in the governing process, McGeorge Bundy said last night in the concluding Godkin Lecture. But such participation, he said, can only come about if the Executive power is strengthened. “The way to give a share of power to the people,” he said, “is first to give real […]
Read More… from Bundy Urges People into Government; Asks ‘Maximum Practical Participation’
McGeorge Bundy warned yesterday that the “existing system of government in the United States, already dangerously weak, needs a double dose of reinforcement–to meet both its present and future responsibilities.” He was delivering this year’s second Godkin Lecture. Recognizing the present weakness at all levels of government–state and local as well as legislative and judiciary, […]
Read More… from Bundy Sees Dangerous Weakness In Present System of Government
ATTACKING the immorality and illegality of the Vietnam war could conceivably shame people into stopping it but this is unlikely. Human beings are remarkably impervious to the calls of conscience when acting on self-interest. The most fruitful argument, then, is one that attempts to show that the American interest is not, in fact, advanced by […]
THE President’s Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (read Riots Commission) will probably recommend, unsurprisingly, that up to $20 billion be spent in the cities over the next five years. Skeptics have doubted that such large outlays will ever materialize. They reason that the health of the economy as a whole depends on such heavy Federal […]
THE Dylan of John Wesley Harding appears touched with grace. The snarling pieties of Highway 61 Revisited, the lucid and patient degeneration in Blonde on Blonde, seem to have been blotted from his memory. Instead, Dylan reaches further into his past for a starting point–and only a starting-point. The new album is a unique and […]