Jonah Raskin was 10 in 1952, during the height of the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War. His father was an attorney, among the vast intellectual class swept up in McCarthyism, the campaign to expose suspected Soviet sympathizers. Raskin’s father was never accused. Still, Raskin only learned much later the extent of his parents’ communist ...
If you ask Edward Lebowitz why he went to medical school, you might be surprised by his answer: the war in Vietnam. “This was the greatest influence on my decision to become a doctor,” said Lebowitz, now 75 and a clinical professor of radiology at Stanford University. “I have no idea what I would have ...
If the stakes weren’t deadly serious, the high-speed car chase through rural Alabama in 1965 might have seemed like a scene from The Dukes of Hazard. Bruce Hartford, then a young civil rights worker, and three volunteers with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been holding a workshop in non-violence in Brantley, a town with ...
Michael Blecker joined the army in 1967 to get out of Reading, Pa. “Our generation’s model of manhood was the early John Wayne war movies: Wayne never flinched and always won, that’s what we wanted. Plus the GI Bill made the Army very attractive.” Nine years later, as a law student at the activist New ...
