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.