I have not lived among famous people. My comrades were lovely men and women rarely celebrated or even mentioned in the mass or mainstream media. But I did meet briefly with people like those described below. If they were called back from the dead, they probably wouldn’t remember the meeting, but it is still vivid to me. Think of these encounters as a circumstantial but still useful introduction to my politics, a quick glimpse in preparation for the more extended memories that come after. (Judy, who appears several times in these sketches, is my wife and comrade of many years. Marty Peretz and Jeremy Larner are friends from Brandeis University days. Dissent is a political magazine of the democratic left that I wrote for over seven decades, from the 1950s to the 2020s; it is featured in several of the following sketches.) Wayne Morse He was the Republican, and later Democratic, senator from Oregon in the period immediately after World War Two. In 1947, he proved himself the most liberal Republican since Abraham Lincoln by filibustering for ten hours against the Taft–Hartley labor — actually anti-labor — law, trying to prevent the Senate from over-riding President Truman’s veto. (He failed.) I can claim no credit for Morse’s liberal heroism, but I had urged him to do exactly what he did. I was twelve, politically obsessed and very pro-union. Sometime in the months when Taft–Hartley was being debated in the Senate, my mother took me on a trip from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where we lived, to Washington, D.C., to visit with a high-school friend of hers, who worked in the city in some political capacity. She knew Morse and invited us to talk to the Senator on behalf of the labor movement. So we did, and I told the Senator — and he listened! — that the people of Johnstown, a strong union town in those days, wanted him to oppose the law. Or something like that. I went home very proud of myself, and until today I tell union friends that I lobbied against Taft–Hartley (which has never been repealed). C. Wright Mills He was a left-wing sociologist, the author of The Power Elite, a favorite academic of the New Left of the 1960s, who wrote for Dissent (until, after embracing Castro, he didn’t). He was a visiting professor at Brandeis University in 1952–1953, which was my first year there. He was given an office in a building on campus that also served as a student dormitory (it was early days at Brandeis and space was scarce). My room was right next to Mills’ office. On March 5, 1953, Mills burst into my room (I don’t think he knocked), very excited, and told me that Stalin was dead. He stayed to make sure I understood that this was important. Isaac Deutscher He was a self-proclaimed “non-Jewish Jew,” a renowned biographer of Trotsky, and a defender of, or apologist for, Soviet communism. I met him once, in a state of belligerence. My wife and I were living in London in 1964. I had by then written a number of articles for Dissent, one of them critical of British intellectuals who defended the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956. I didn’t mention Deutscher and I don’t remember what he wrote about Hungary; probably nothing good. He had appeared once in Dissent, with a too generous reading of Soviet politics, which elicited a harsh response from the editors. Dissent, which was founded and edited by my teacher and friend and comrade Irving Howe, was a magazine of the anti-communist left, which was, then and now, my own politics. One day in the spring of 1964 we received a dinner invitation from Ralph Miliband, an English leftist, the author of Parliamentary Socialism, a sharp critique, and the father of David and Edward, future parliamentary socialists and rivals for the leadership of the Labor Party. We arrived at the designated time, and Ralph welcomed us — and then Deutscher, also a guest, lying in wait, as it were, stood up and, without any greeting, angrily told me that I should stop writing for Dissent. It was wrong to write for that magazine: “There is no such thing as an anti-communist left!” Ralph jumped in with some mollifying remark, and the rest of the evening was ruled by English politeness. I don’t remember what we talked about over dinner. I never saw Deutscher again. Benazir Bhutto She was twice prime minister of Pakistan, probably one of its better prime ministers, assassinated in 2007. Many years before that, in the early or middle 1970s, she was a student in a course I taught at Harvard on war and morality. She wasn’t in my discussion section; I didn’t know her. One day I was lecturing on humanitarian intervention, using as an example and defending the Indian intervention to stop the brutal repression of dissidents in East Pakistan in 1971 — an intervention that led to secession and the creation of Bangladesh. Suddenly a young woman — it was Benazir — jumped up to tell me that I was wrong; passionately, she defended the Pakistani government’s effort, as she described it, to hold the country together. I responded as best I could, without passion. I never encountered her again; I don’t remember what grade she got in the course. But the story doesn’t end there. A classmate from those days met her in Europe during a year when she had been in political exile — she was for decades a figure of controversy in Pakistani politics — and they recalled her dramatic intervention in my class. Benazir told her, so the friend reported to me, that she now thought that the Pakistani repression was wrong. Hearsay, I know, but I repeat the report anyway. Noam Chomsky I debated him in a Harvard lecture hall sometime in the early 1970s. It was, I think, our only meeting, though we had some angry exchanges in the press before and after
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