Word: intelligentsiae
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Sandy Vogelgesang's The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War is not the first nor will it be the last book that asks how and why the intelligentsia failed to arouse the nation's conscience. Nor is Vogelgesang's the book that will provide the answer to that question...
VICTOR HUGO once proclaimed that "there is nothing so powerful in all the world as an idea whose time has come." For countless American youth and those among the leftist intelligentsia who had labored for five years as the conscience of a nation, the triumph of an idea could not have seemed closer than when Lyndon B. Johnson told a stunned, nationwide television audience on April Fool's day, 1968, that he would neither seek nor accept nomination for another presidential term...
...focus is on what such spokesmen of the Intellectual Left as Norman Mailer '43, Norman Podhoretz, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Irving Howe and Dwight MacDonald wrote at each particular stage and how four particular "little magazines" reflected the vacillating fortunes of the intelligentsia. Because the study is an historical one that traces a written record of intellectual thought, Vogelgesang can avoid answering the very questions her survey raises and conclude that "the reaction of the U.S. Intellectual Left to the Vietnam War still begs its own response...
...failure that is not as easy to forgive, however, is Vogelgesang's reluctance to call the intelligentsia to task for its mistakes and miscalculations of the 60s and its acquiescence to a government that in the 70s has not only increased the American government's illegal activity abroad, but also mounted an unprecedented attack on civil liberty and the nation's constitution...
...light of the increasing protest to American policy that was growing on college campuses? Why had they not come forward when the initial bent of American policy in Vietnam was being openly set by the Kennedy administration? Did it have something to do with the closer relationship between the intelligentsia and Kennedy? There is no clear answer for these questions and the answers must necessarily vary among the vast spectrum of individuals and journals that Vogelgesang considers spokesmen for the Intellectual Left. But since Vogelgesang purports to offer a history of intellectual thought and involvement in the Vietnam debacle...