August 2, 1982

[Left]

Although I was somewhat surprised [in my second year of graduate study at Cornell] to be given a TAship for Walter LaFeber's course in American foreign policy and thought the assignment did not reflect well on me (since it was not my specialty and had few duties), my experience in the course turned out to be invaluable. I learned a great deal about American history, and much that would lead me to an anti-war position. I also met, in my fellow TAs, several men who would be good friends for a couple of years, F_ A_ and Jim Chapin [who, sad to say, died several years ago]. And sitting in on LaFeber's lectures was simply entertaining; LaFeber was a brilliant lecturer.

F_ and I (and Jim Chapin) were "radicalized" together toward the war in Vietnam in LaFeber's course. Both Jim and I wer positively in favor of US intervention in the fall of 1965, although F_ was less so. I recall one animated conversation in which Jim fantasized driving a column of tanks up Vietnam and into China itself. We all shared the assumption that if American democracy was to mean anything at home, it had to mean something for others (that is, they too had to share our social-economic political system) and Vietnam was the place ot "draw the line" in Asia to protect "our way of life." Only my recognition that the broad American public also also unquestioningly accepted this ideological rhetoric saves me from embarrassment in recalling these views.

LaFeber's course quickly disabused us of the fatuousness of our unexamined ideology. Soon all three of us were "new left" historians, advocating the "open-markets" critique of US foreign policy of William Appleman Williams.

My radicalization did not come soon enough, sadly, to save my friendship with R_ A_. My old friend has [had] visited me in a memorable visit our first year in Ithaca, and at the end of that year wrote a letter opposing US involvement in Vietnam. I responded with a 50-page letter justifying our involvement. Now, the next year, I retracted all my old views, and in a letter R_ informed me that he had changed his mind, too; now he favored our involvement!

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Making My Mind

• Intellectual Life in Books (August 14, 1980)
• Honors Student and Intellectual Adventure Incompatible (August 18, 1980)
• Influence of Teachers (July 1, 1981)
• Consciousness Raising (July 6, 1981)
• Looking from Village to the World (July 23, 1981)
• From Shock to Shock (August 7, 1981)
• Grinding Down, Freshman in College (August 8, 1981)
• Freshman Horizons Expand (August 12, 1981)
• Philosophy (September 10, 1981)
• Discovery and Rational Reconstruction in the History of Science (September 12, 1981)
• Undergraduate Seminar (September 13, 1981)
• Unmasking Ideology (September 16, 1981)
• Graduate Research in the Intellectual Life (July 31, 1982)
• Left (August 2, 1982)
• Graduate Disillusionment (August 4, 1982)
• Doctoral Research: Jump Starting the Dead Battery (August 13, 1982)
• Communing with Einstein (August 18, 1982)

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Politics Is A Window

• Earliest Political Memories (November 5, 1980)
• Distant Rumors of War (July 15, 1981)
• Left (August 2, 1982)
• Reject (August 5, 1982)
• Hesitant Activist (August 31, 1982)
• Student Rebellion (July 9, 1983)
• Culture As Politics (August 2, 1983)