Word: vogelgesang
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...VOGELGESANG traces three stages of intellectual thought about the Vietnam war as the 60s wore on: the view she says persisted until February 1965 of Vietnam as a lapse in judgement; the perception of the war as an exercise in immorality, a view that lasted until December 1966; and the notion faded by the time of Nixon's rise to power, that the war reflected the political illegitimacy of the government in Washington. The book follows the writings of "key" leftist intellectuals and journals of the time to illustrate their changing perceptions and campaigns to align first with emerging campus...
...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...
...survey of issues and interpretations fielded in The New Republic, Partisan Review, Studies on the Left, and The New York Review of Books offers a complete and poignant record of intellectual opinion through the 60s. For that alone the book is worthwhile. And, while one can criticize Vogelgesang for not offering more insight into the very questions she raises, her effort to do so probably would have failed where her portrayal of the "long dark night" does not: The perspective and insight necessary to realistically assess the long term effect of the Intellectual Left's view of morality...
...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...