Word: dears
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DEAR AMERICA by KARL HESS 279 pages. Morrow. $7.95. Back in 1964, Karl Hess was a true believer of the right. As a speechwriter, aide and ideologue to Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, he packaged the slogan that may have helped lose the campaign: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Today, at 51, Hess is a welder. He now opposes war, government in general and most U.S. Government activities. He has become, in fact, an anarchist and a tax resister. As much out of sheer angry cussedness as conviction...
...more American epiphany, Hess was converted by the deep-throated roar of a motorcycle. Many middle-aged men take up cycling -as Hess did in 1965. Mostly what they get is kidney trouble, pavement burns and a chance to act out a few fantasies. As Hess tells it in Dear America, he got secular religion. The need to repair the machines he wrecked led him to welding and, finally, to working as a welder of trucks and construction equipment. "It was there, under trucks, inside buckets, working hard," he writes, "that I faced the final contradictions, the ones that ended...
This radiant vision has long tormented man, and it is quite possible that big government and big business are not the best means to pursue it. In Dear America, Hess often seems possessed of a belief in the perfectibility of human nature that is as simplistic as his Goldwater conservatism-but, like the faith of most converts, totally sincere. As TIME Correspondent Arthur White learned when he visited Hess recently, the man seems to be practicing the classical, nonviolent anarchism he advocates. Hess owns little more than welding tools and the blue denim clothes on his back...
...owes the IRS some $15,000, and to outwit them he has even sold the rights to Dear America to a community organization for which he works. "I can't own anything," he explains in a soft voice. "Those IRS people are Like a gang of thugs." His first marriage, which produced two sons, ended in divorce in 1967. Now he lives with his second wife, Freelance Editor-Artist Therese Machotka, in a three-room flat over a store in a racially mixed Washington, D.C., neighborhood. He exudes what a friend has described as "the ethereal, inexplicable cheerfulness...
...Roosevelt gave us electricity," says Mrs. Woodside. "It changed our lives. I'll never forget it." She and her husband quietly cheered Harry Truman but were offended by his language. Ike was a "dear old man," but not a very good President as viewed from the Woodside corner. John Kennedy they liked immensely. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon got a quick dismissal. So does Ford...