My MA thesis on the Irasburg Affair, completed in December 1971, won the Vermont Bar Association Prize, but I never collected my $50 prize. By the time my degree came due in June 1972 I had already enrolled in a PhD program in history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. UMass was not my first choice, but by that time Harvard had learned from its past errors of judgment and refused to admit me to its graduate school for a third time. I could hardly have afforded it in any case. On the other hand, UMass not only offered me a teaching assistantship, but contrary to the usual practice allowed me to begin my studies in the spring semester. I rented a room in Amherst in January 1972, an easy three-hour drive down Interstate 91. Most weekends I returned to Irasburg, where Steffi was tending the new baby and five-year-old Trina while continuing to make jewelry and preparing to join me full-time in Amherst in the fall of 1972.
Vermont in the autumn
UVM Professor Wolfe Schmokel had quite properly cautioned me against pursuing a PhD. The 1960s growth in the job market for fresh PhDs had come to an abrupt halt and gone into reverse. He thought I was making a big mistake to give up a secure position at Lake Region Union High School, especially with two young children to support, and warned me that I was quite likely to face unemployment on finishing my degree. Steffi, however, encouraged me to continue. We had no immediate financial worries, as I was a beneficiary of the GI bill, which in the mid-1960s had been extended to cover my years of military service. Steffi’s flourishing jewelry business, to which I contributed by manning her booths at crafts fairs during the summers, even allowed us to save a little money and pay off the mortgage on our Irasburg home early.
My favorite class in the spring of 1972 was Bob Griffith’s course on 20th-century U.S. history. Griffith, a 1967 PhD from the University of Wisconsin, had written an excellent book on Joseph McCarthy and very much shared the critical perspective on American Cold War policies of the new wave of younger American historians in the 1960s. His class was extremely lively with lots of open discussion and debate. Among my more interesting classmates was young Dennis McNally, who later wrote fascinating books on Jack Kerouac and on the Grateful Dead. He is today one of the leading authorities in the country on both those subjects. Griffith tried to get me to change my specialization to recent American history, but my mind was already made up, despite the fact that the German historian at UMass, Harold J. Gordon (who became my default advisor), represented the very opposite of my own political perspective. Gordon had recently published a book on Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, the obvious objective of which was to discredit the New Left and the sputtering, but still active student movement by drawing wholly unwarranted links to the right-wing Free Corps movement that had led to Hitler’s failed putsch attempt in November 1923. Gordon went so far as to compare the civil rights march in Northern Ireland on “Bloody Sunday” in January 1972 (where thirteen marchers were killed by the British army) to Hitler’s march on the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. Apparently to Gordon all youthful rebellions against constituted authority were the same. Knowing that he would not be able to avoid calling attention to the massive ideological differences between Hitler’s movement and the American New Left, Gordon deliberately excluded all evidence from Hitler’s 1924 trial from his book. Ironically, the book received a favorable review from the British medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough in the New York Review of Books for its challenge to the Whiggish liberal consensus on Nazism, which failed to adequately take the role of proletarian social forces into account. If Barrraclough had read the book closely, he would have realized that Gordon’s dissent from the liberal consensus came not from the socially-oriented left but from the hard-core conservative right.
Gordon harbored an ill-concealed grievance against his Alma Mater, Yale, for having banished him to a second-tier university by neglecting to offer him a position on their faculty. He claimed that he would never get a position at an Ivy League school because he was brought up a Catholic. A colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, Gordon admired the military caste, by no means excluding former German Wehrmacht officers, to whose post-war apologetics he gave rather too much credence. The villains in his narrative of the collapse of the Weimar Republic were the Social Democrats (SPD). When I asked him why he was so critical of the one party in Germany that best represented American values of civil liberties and democratic process, he claimed that it was the SPD that had undermined Weimar democracy by its excessive social welfare demands. Gordon had some more likable eccentricities as well. He had a pet guinea pig who freely roamed around his library, forcing students whom he had summoned to tutorials at his home to keep a close watch over their papers while he lectured in a dreary monotone without notes, guided only by his deeply ingrained conservative biases. He brought his well-trained dog to his office, but sometimes it was difficult to tell whether his terse reprimands were addressed to his dog or to me. In my journal I recorded some of Gordon’s idiosyncrasies and epigrams:
Gordon: “I don’t like people who are holier than me.” My worst fears about Gordon, first raised by the warm acknowledgement that Schmokel gave him in his book, are confirmed. A rabid opponent of the “liberal left”—in this sense he is far to the right of Schmokel—he trembles with rage at the suggestion that Nazism had anything in common with conservatism. Suspecting that a book that I showed him—Reinhard Kühnl`s Die nationalsozialistische Linke—might have taken this line, Gordon said: “I believe in the Sidney Painter way, to go to the primary sources first. If you read secondary sources first, you’re likely to go to the sources with your mind already made up. I believe in the Yale system, reliance on primary sources. At Harvard they put more emphasis on explication de texte. The Harvard people are always telling me I don’t use enough secondary sources.” Very strait-laced students, usually recently discharged junior officers from the army, are attracted to Gordon and call him “sir.” His positivist approach actually makes a virtue of not taking ideas too seriously or going into them deeply; this is one course where a straightforward chronicle of events—with only a rudimentary explanation of causes—is not only acceptable, but desirable. One of his loyal students cautioned me, “Gordon likes papers that assume that the reader knows nothing about the subject.” Gordon’s autocratic manner appears deceptively informal, especially when he slings one leg over the side of his easy chair. His technique is more to ignore rather than subdue, although on occasion he will shout. He browbeats by monopolizing the conversation, in which he displays an undeniable virtuosity, smoothly shifting gears and direction by constantly qualifying what he says in a kind of free association. Taken as a whole his monologue is a mass of contradictions, but because of its spontaneity it appears to be entirely consistent—as indeed it is as a reflection of a closed ideology. When he speaks he leans back genussvoll (with pleasure), and closes his eyes…
Gordon held back by his own prejudices so much that he won’t even read Peter Gay’s book on Weimar culture (subtitled, The Outsider as Insider [1968]), although Peter Gay’s interpretation is colored by the same anti-student-movement bias as Gordon himself subscribes to. Probably Gay’s previous books in defense of Rousseau and the Enlightenment have put Gordon off…
Gordon: “I’m for law and order, although I do think our laws are for the most part no good and we’d probably do best to start over again from scratch…”
Gordon: “Hitler was just as moralistic as Martin Luther King.”
Gordon’s study: shelves of books framing a glass-enclosed collection of hand-guns. The cobwebbed quality of his study. It could be gemütlich, it should be gemütlich, but it is cold, lifeless: everything is dusty and superannuated. It is institutionalized disorder. Things have been lying in the same state of disarray for decades. It reeks of unwillingness to change.
Gordon’s worst moment came in a seminar he conducted with the well-known Russian specialist and chair of the history department at UMass, Robert H. McNeal (1930-1988), who was killed a few years later in a tragic automobile accident. Somehow it came out that I could trace my ancestry to the Baltic-German nobility. Gordon blurted out that the Baltic-German nobility were heavily intermarried with Jews. No doubt he meant this as an explanation of my perversely left-wing views, but I was very pleased. Unintentionally he had exposed his anti-Semitic bias for all to hear. One of my fellow-students told me later that he had been quite shocked, and even Professor McNeal later apologized for Gordon’s uncalled-for remark.
Gordon’s teaching assistant Michael Barrett, today a respected military historian at The Citadel, gave me what I thought was a telling example of Gordon’s problematic influence on his students, as described in my journal on 26 November 1972:
How history gets distorted: Michael Barrett planning to ask his class whether they think the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front, disillusioned with the war, might not have made a highly likely candidate for Nazism. Far more serious than his erroneous assumption that the narrator actually returned from the war is his failure to appreciate the incongruity between the narrator’s values and the values of Nazism. The extent of his misunderstanding: he claims that, after all, the narrator, who was disgusted by the patriotic tub-thumping and the beer-hall strategy with which he was confronted while on leave in his home town, therefore also [like the Nazis] believed in a stab in the back on the part of civilians!
As my advisor and the only Germanist in the history department, Gordon could not be excluded from my oral exam or dissertation committees. Fortunately, I could balance his influence with much more congenial members of the department. I chose as my dissertation supervisor the young intellectual historian William M. Johnston, who had graduated from Harvard College two years after me and had already completed his PhD under Crane Brinton in the mid-1960s. Through Johnston I received what I called “my second Harvard education.” Johnston was conservative and anti-Marxist as well, but he was much more open to critical opinion than Gordon and was genuinely fascinated by ideas and ideologies of all kinds. Unlike Gordon, Johnston’s conservatism reflected the “ethos of scholarship,” a renunciation of all activism and presentism in favor of disinterested contemplation and explanation. One of Johnston’s most endearing traits was his appreciation of defenders of lost causes, the tragic view of life he found best represented in the European rather than the American intellectual tradition. He had just published a massive tome, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, which was, however, panned by the eminent historian Carl Schorske in The American Historical Review for allegedly neglecting the social context of the ideas and the authors he discussed. Johnston was an excellent teacher, generating enthusiasm for his discipline of intellectual history while maintaining strict academic standards, encouraging open debate, and allowing students to pursue specific interests of their own. In my journal I noted “Johnston’s effect of making me suddenly doubt things I say, things I have said before with perfect confidence. His effect of making me aware of my contradictions and inaccuracies.”
Johnston at his best, conveying an excitement about Hegel and the Hegelian dialectic, which far from being exclusive and rigid, will always want to embrace and understand the other side. Johnston is a better teacher than he is a writer. He is especially good in refusing to be caught in sophistries and technicalities, at going to the heart of the matter. I find myself (sometimes deliberately) imitating his expression when listening intently, mouth barely open, lower lip slightly drawn in, eyes focused in midair.
His course on European intellectual history in academic year 1972-1973 remains one of my fondest memories of my time at UMass. From Johnston I also picked up the habit of very close reading of student papers, a practice for which I later gained a positive reputation at Gonzaga University. Students appreciated my very specific stylistic and substantive suggestions, which they found much more helpful than vague comments such as “awkward” or “unclear” or “needs revision.” Gordon, by contrast, used a rack of ready-made stamps—“VAGUE,” “HOW?” “WHY?” and so on—to speed his correction of student papers.
The third member of my dissertation committee was Miriam Usher Chrisman, a pioneering scholar of the German Reformation in Strasbourg in the sixteenth century. Having done most of her research in the formerly German province of Alsace, she could corroborate for me that my study of the Alsatian dramatist and publicist Friedrich Lienhard (1865-1929) accurately reflected the völkisch ideology so prevalent in Germany`s contested border regions in Imperial Germany before and during (and even more so after) the First World War. She gave me encouragement and a sense of achievement; she said that writing her dissertation had been much harder than giving birth to her children. Mrs. Chrisman, as she was called at UMass, had a famous father, also a professor, who once invited a theologian to their house to explain the Trinity to her. She suffered from asthma, which did not affect her when she was speaking, but came to the fore when she was forced to listen to rambling students in class. Her one rather unpleasant trait was talking tough out of the side of her mouth—the product, I thought, of her pre-women’s liberation years in a masculine world.
Lienhard was one of three protagonists of my dissertation on völkisch ideology; the other two were a devoted, but short-lived Wagnerian, Heinrich von Stein (1857-1887) and the influential racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), through whose biography I could establish links between nineteenth-century völkisch ideology and National Socialism. My model was Fritz Stern’s pioneering work on The Politics of Cultural Despair, a study of three prominent German nationalist writers, Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), and Arthur Möller van den Bruck (1876-1925), that first appeared in 1963. Reflecting the affirmative culture of 1950s America, Stern targeted what he considered to be radical outsiders and negativistic prophets of doom who believed that Western civilization was on the path to ruin. Hence the famous title of his book, which added a new phrase to the vocabulary of historians of the German Empire. Influenced by the radical counter-currents of the 1960s, I was more concerned to show how very much part of the monarchist mainstream völkisch ideologists actually had been. After substantial revisions, my dissertation was eventually published as Idealism Debased: From Völkisch Ideology to National Socialism in 1981.
As a student at the U. of Massachusetts in 1973
My closest friend at UMass was a young German exchange student from Freiburg University, Andreas Kunz. He was married to a woman of Lebanese extraction, the daughter of a restaurant-owner in St. Johnsbury, VT, less than an hour from our home in Irasburg. Hence we saw quite a bit of each other both in class and outside the classroom setting. Although Andy was thirteen years younger than I was, politically we saw pretty much eye-to-eye. Heavily influenced by the radical German student movement, he still had strong Marxist sympathies in those days. This did not make it easier for him to get along with Johnston, who called him a “self-hating German.” Johnston did, however, agree with my rejoinder, which was, “He’s better than his elders!” Although Johnston was open-minded and fascinated by all ideas—even those of Marx—he was put off by what he claimed was the “reflex reaction” of Marxists. His real beef against Marx was that he made metaphysics irrelevant, the realm in which Johnston felt most at home. Johnston could not abide the notion that religion and metaphysics were mere “superstructures,” forever doomed to be determined by the “economic base.” Andy would later go on to earn his PhD at Berkeley under the preeminent economic historian Gerald Feldman with a dissertation on the German civil service in the 1920s. This was Andy’s stepping stone to a brilliant academic career in Germany at the Institute for European History in Mainz. Just when Andy lost his left-wing orientation I can’t say, but I do remember his telling me, at the time of German reunification in 1990, that there would be no room in Germany for any party to the left of the SPD. I tried to contradict him, but he brushed my objections aside. Today Die Linke, the Left Party, is very much alive, though bearing little resemblance to its East German predecessor, the SED.
In August 1972 my brother Tempy had a life-threatening auto-accident in France, where he had been working for the brokerage firm Kidder, Peabody for several years. He had to have his damaged spleen removed, but otherwise made a remarkably rapid and successful recovery. In my journal I commented on one of his letters,
fully retaining his objective, descriptive eye despite the battering his body took in the accident. Sign of health: the only lesson he seems to have derived from the accident is, fasten your seatbelts. Because he now believes in this, he has become, in his words, “less of a cynic.” He calls his present hospitalization “without doubt the longest period of wasted time” in his life and frets to get back to Kidder Peabody where things are currently in unrest because a key figure has just quit.
Tempy enjoyed his work, even though he disarmingly confessed to me, “I’d like to make a lot of money, but I don’t know just how.”
Meanwhile, Mama was idolized by many of the local “hippies” for her embodiment of agrarian self-sufficiency, having turned her back on “chasing the almighty dollar” and living quite contentedly off the land. In 1973 Mama was actually featured on the cover of Yankee Magazine as a model practitioner of a newly popular rural lifestyle.
Mama on the cover of Yankee Magazine, 1973
Some of Mama’s “hippie” friends earned some money working with the local construction crew on the home and barn that Aunt Temple was building for Mama on Mama’s property that summer of 1972.
1972 was the most frustrating election year of my long life, the disappointments greater even than they would be in 1980 or in the year 2000. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota had won the Democratic nomination for President, raising hopes not only for an end to the war in Vietnam, where American involvement was winding down under public pressure in any case, but also for a true break with the imperialistic foreign policy that the United States had pursued since the end of the Second World War. On 25 October 1972 I recorded In my journal my sense of helplessness in preventing Nixon’s reelection:
The peculiar satisfaction and strength I got out of the blazing NIXON-AGNEW bumper sticker on a shiny huge new car of one of Steffi’s customers at her Open House. A guest of [our neighbor] Yvette’s had rather provocatively parked her car to block the driveway. When I went over to ask the guest to move, I knew it would be unpleasant. The sticker on Steffi’s customer’s car made me feel more sure of myself and my rights—though I regretted feeling so, for it just proves how unbeatable they are this year.
Who has not felt the inevitability of certain events—despite the fact that you can see what’s coming in the future? The absolute hopelessness of turning things around. The realization that only bitter experience will be able to provide a corrective. It is then that one can share, if not Kissinger’s contempt for intellectuals, at least his conviction that they are not important. Only, where he is glad, I am sorry.
Even news of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in June 1972 could not prevent Nixon’s landslide reelection in November. Nixon used the opportunity to once again escalate the war in the so-called “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi in December. I followed the news on CBS:
Walter Cronkite choking on the irony of Nixon’s annual physical check-up, in which he was pronounced in excellent physical shape, except that he did not get enough exercise! And this while the heaviest bombardment in the history of aerial warfare rained down on Vietnam. Eric Sevareid running scared (of the Administration’s campaign to get locally affiliated stations to reject the national network’s “ideological plugola”): formulating his criticisms in language no one can understand who isn’t already familiar with what he’s talking about.
Mama, who had preferred Eugene McCarthy to Robert Kennedy in the run-up to the 1968 election, but was now firmly in the McGovern camp, compared the public mood to the mood in Germany during the war: even those persons quite opposed to Nazism felt they had no choice but to support them to the hilt in the war to prevent the destruction of their country. She thought the same dynamic might be at work in this country, except that Americans did not risk destruction of their country, only a “loss of prestige.”
The United States finally agreed to stop fighting in Vietnam on 27 January 1973. I had no illusions that the end of active American participation in the war would heal the divisions at home. On January 26th I wrote:
The quite misplaced confidence that the end of the Vietnam War will end divisions at home based on the misunderstanding that the division was caused by the war. But the division was part of the war: it continues even after the fighting has stopped, even if it is temporarily repressed by the energy which the dominant power can now bring to bear against the “enemy” at home.
It was the Watergate scandal that finally brought an end to the Nixon presidency in 1974 and the subsequent end of the Vietnam War in 1975 (two years after the peace accords, which Nixon had ignored by ordering the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia). Incriminating details about the Administration’s direct involvement in the break-in, and later the cover-up, trickled out at regular intervals beginning in January 1973. The Administration had successfully prevailed on the burglars to plead guilty to avoid a potentially damaging trial, but two young Washington Post investigative reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, discovered that the burglars had been paid off to keep quiet from a secret slush fund under the control of the White House. Woodward and Bernstein had been alerted to the fund’s existence by an FBI agent known only as “Deep Throat”, who told the reporters to “follow the money.” His identity was not revealed until after his death in the 1990s. For its enterprising investigative journalism, the Post would receive the Pulitzer Prize. Top presidential advisers Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were forced to quit in April, and in May a special committee under Senator Sam Ervin was convened to investigate the cover-up. The committee hearings led to the disclosure of one incriminating fact after another. Nixon sought to avert the inevitable by firing the special prosecutor in the case, Archibald Cox, who had insisted that the White House turn over crucial incriminating audiotapes of the President’s discussions of the case. The incident became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” when both Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his Deputy William D. Ruckelshouse resigned to avoid having to carry out the President’s order to fire Cox. In 1974 Nixon finally lost his hold on power. In July the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that the President must turn over his tape recordings to the Watergate prosecutor. The House Judiciary Committee under Peter Rodino voted 27-11 to recommend impeachment for the President’s role in the Watergate conspiracy, and in early August, seeing the handwriting on the wall, Nixon became the first President in American history to resign his office.
This was an exhilarating period for me, in retrospect two of the happiest years of my life. The disintegration of the Nixon Administration, with its odious personnel and policies, was exciting to behold. The judicial system functioned as it was meant to, enforcing the law without distinction as to rank or status, and the constitutional conflict between the legislative and executive branches of government ended with a victory of the former, as indeed the Constitution had prescribed. A tragic exception to the generally up-beat development of events in 1973-1974 was the news of the CIA-supported military coup in Chile on 9/11. The brutal killing of Salvador Allende led me to record in my journal “the same sickening feeling as at the death of Kennedy, and the [Soviet] invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.” In early 1974 the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union left me with very mixed feelings. On the one hand it seemed to show the bankruptcy of a communist system that could tolerate no dissent. On the other hand, I was disgusted by the efforts of right-wingers to exploit his expulsion to revive an anti-communist (and anti-Marxist) crusade, based on the totally mistaken claim that Solzhenitsyn was a representative of Western democratic ideas. He soon proved to be as critical of Western democracy as he had been of that other “Western” import into Russia, Marxism. In my journal I wrote, “Why Solzhenitsyn had to go: it is easier to subvert a system based on cooperation ([the USSR] at least in theory), than one based on competition [the U.S.].”
In search of a college-level teaching position at a time of severely declining job opportunities, I attended the annual conference of the American Historical Association (AHA) in San Francisco in December 1973. On transcontinental flights most airlines still furnished the upper deck of the huge Boeing 747s as a lounge open to all passengers, and I remember a delightful flight, sipping cocktails on comfortable couches and conversing with members of the UMass history faculty heading to the same destination. I stayed with my young “godson” Johnnie Van Duyl at his place near Berkeley, commuting by BART to the conference every day. I had only one pre-scheduled job interview, with a committee from San Diego State University that was looking for a combination of specializations in Modern Germany and European Intellectual History. As one of perhaps 50 or 60 candidates being interviewed for this job at the conference, I didn’t think I had much of a chance. However, to my great delight, some months later I was offered the position. I attributed my success to two factors: Having been told that the retiring professor I would be replacing was hard of hearing, I made every effort to speak as loudly and clearly as I could. More importantly—as I was later told by the chairman of the committee—I was the only candidate who had a clear idea of how he would organize a nineteenth-century European intellectual history course. Interested as I was in political ideas, or in the political consequences of ideas, I said I would use the French Revolutionary tradition as my organizing principle, tracking support for or opposition to this tradition in various European countries and analyzing intellectual movements in their relationship to this tradition. I envisioned a course in which I could juxtapose the French and German political and intellectual traditions, a framework in which I could readily draw on my dissertation research on völkisch ideology. The fact that the Latin American specialist Lewis Hanke of the UMass history faculty was the president-elect of the AHA in 1974 didn’t hurt my chances of successfully competing with PhDs from much more prestigious universities, either!
I spent the academic year 1973-1974 writing my dissertation on Stein, Lienhard, and Chamberlain. Chamberlain was the most interesting and most important writer of the three. My unifying theme was the evolution of völkisch ideology from an apparently innocuous and high-minded anti-commercial aesthetic doctrine (Wagnerism) to a virulently racist and anti-democratic ideology (National Socialism) in the span of half a century, in which the trauma of the First World War was, of course, the main catalyst in the transition. The topic involved a thorough study of anti-Semitism, probably the most distinctive marker of German völkisch thought. The one consistent theme, I concluded, in all historical forms of anti-Semitism, from theological and Christian anti-Judaism to the lethal modern economic, political, and racial varieties, was the conviction that Jews were inherently selfish and “immoral,” refusing to accept the prevailing Christian religious creed or to conform to the conventional dictates of gentile society. If the political right stood for received tradition and existing arrangements in all areas of life, it was virtually inevitable that anti-Semitism would become a major ingredient in right-wing thought, and Jews the major scapegoats for all the disruptive changes that modernization, commercialization, democratization, industrialization, secularization, and urbanization entailed. The fateful radicalization of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany occurred in my view in 1920, not only because of the consolidation of Hitler’s leadership of the fledgling Nazi Party in that year, but because of the different reactions of the youthful leaders of the Nazi Party and their older conservative counterparts to the failure of the “Kapp Putsch” to overthrow the Weimar Republic in that same year. While the older conservative nationalists, despite their generalized anti-Semitism, were willing to work with those (few) conservative and German nationalist Jews who supported the establishment of a military dictatorship and an authoritarian government, the Nazis and their extremist allies attributed the failure of the coup precisely to the willingness of conservatives to cooperate with those Jews who shared their conservative and German nationalist ideology. The Nazis came to the fateful conclusion that their project of destroying the Republic and its democratic institutions—necessary preconditions in their view for reversing the results of the First World War and preparing for a renewed war of aggression—could only succeed if all cooperation with Jews, whether “conservative” or not, were suspended. The categorical extrusion of Jews from Germany (and eventually Europe) became in their view the indispensable prerequisite for German expansion.
As it happened, my intensive study of anti-Semitism coincided with the so-called Yom Kippur war in October 1973, which, after initial setbacks resulting from the surprise factor, turned into another decisive Israeli military triumph. The unquestioning American and European support for Israel brought into focus the peculiar symbiosis between Zionism and European anti-Semitism I had already discovered in the völkisch writers I had been studying (but surprisingly also in the works of Theodor Herzl, one of the pioneers of Zionism). On 20 October I tried to put this counter-intuitive symbiosis into words in my journal:
The connection between anti-Semitism and support for Israel: Israel is seen both as a convenient receptacle for the “excess” number of Jews in other countries of the world, but, more importantly, as a vehicle for instilling in Jews the “positive” values of nationalism and militarism. At the very least, support for Israel is seen as an effective way of defusing Jewish skepticism, pacifism, and social radicalism. At its worst it serves as a cover for anti-Semitism at home, and the whole complex of anti-intellectualism that accompanies it.
Although the fundamentalist Christian Zionism of the radical religious right was not yet the powerful political force it was destined to become at the end of the century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dynamic at work in the growth of this malignant reactionary movement was already clearly discernible.
The Yom Kippur war provoked a retaliatory boycott on oil exports by the oil-producing nations of the Middle East and led, temporarily, to long lines at gas stations here in the U.S. and Europe. Mama “loved the energy crisis,” as Ginny put it, which seemed to validate her own decision to give up driving a year or two before. She was impelled to this decision not only by the expense of maintaining a car, but also by her failing eyesight, which sometimes forced her to enlist the aid of her passenger(s) to determine whether the car she saw in the distance was coming toward us or going our way. Unbeknown to us at the time, the oil crisis marked a turning point in American economic fortunes, launching a period of “stagflation” that lasted well into the 1980s, and a redistribution of wealth upwards to the highest income groups that is still continuing today. However, the price of gas was still very inexpensive in the U.S. In 1974 our cross-country trip in our new Volkswagen bus to our new destination in San Diego cost us only a little over $100 in fuel.
I finished my dissertation in the spring of 1974. Steffi took the children on a trip to Germany to visit her mother and father in April, allowing me to devote every waking moment to the completion of this project. On April 5th I noted two “overlapping ambivalences” in the motivations I brought to my dissertation:
One, wanting not to fall into the trap of just joining the winning side and ritualistically condemning Chamberlain and Lienhard as precursors of National Socialism: wanting to show, in other words, the persuasive side of National Socialism. Secondly, wanting to condemn as strongly as I can similar forces on the American scene in the present. How to accomplish both?? I call these purposes ambivalent, because each serves to weaken the other.
In the end I was dissatisfied with the final product not because of the content, but because of its sloppy appearance. Trying to save the cost of a professional typist, I typed the entire manuscript myself on my old portable typewriter. The final copy was marred not only by the inadequacies of my superannuated machine, but also (as I later discovered) by the numerous typographical errors caused by my excessive haste just to get the damn thing done!