MEMO FROM THE EDITOR
MEMO from the Editor Symposium Last spring, the Heritage Foundation's magazine, Policy Review, published thirty-nine brief essays under the heading, "The Vision Thing: Conservatives Take Aim at...
...In two hours of skillfully assembled film, the movie presents dramatic archival footage—the cast includes Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Jr., Mario Savio, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, and the Grateful Dead, among others—as well as interviews with a dozen or more activists of the period who look back from their varied and, in some instances, conflicting perspectives...
...The Institute's founders and present and former fellows have been among the leading thinkers and writers of the American Left...
...They had been asked to identify "the ten most important foreign- and domestic-policy priorities for the conservative movement in the 1990s...
...Neither the Institute for Policy Studies nor The Progressive intends this to be the last word—on anything...
...For information about other theater showings, film rentals, and videos, address inquiries to California Newsreel, 149 9th Street, No...
...If you, as a reader of The Progressive, want to participate in that discussion, please send along your comments and ideas...
...We hope, rather, that it may serve as an introduction to a sorely needed discussion...
...A few IPS fellows are to be found among the contributors to the symposium that begins on Page 17 of this issue...
...We'll publish a fair sampling in a forthcoming issue...
...As it happens, a helpful tool for that kind of scrutiny has just been made available...
...Its research and its seminars, often attended by Congressional staff members and mainstream journalists, have provided a serious and continuous rebuttal to official propaganda by challenging the assumptions of the Cold War and other aspects of U.S...
...We were, and this special issue is the product of that collaboration...
...Policy Review isn't on my regular reading list—after all, one can't read everything—-so I knew nothing about "The Vision Thing" until Chester Hartman, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C., called it to my attention...
...You will note, in fact, that some of them disagree quite emphatically with each other...
...I'm grateful, too, for their thoughtful comments, while reserving the right to disagree with their conclusions and recommendations...
...The authors included such right-wing luminaries as Fred Barnes, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Phyllis Schlafly, and Pat Robertson...
...MEMO from the Editor Symposium Last spring, the Heritage Foundation's magazine, Policy Review, published thirty-nine brief essays under the heading, "The Vision Thing: Conservatives Take Aim at the '90s...
...420, San Francisco, CA 94103, or call (415) 621-6196...
...It's a film called Berkeley in the Sixties, an unsentimental but immensely informative portrait of a decade of vigorous and occasionally triumphant activism...
...nineteen agreed to take part, and their responses appear in this issue, along with Chester Hartman's introduction...
...But we went far beyond the institutional boundaries to extend invitations to more than two dozen of the more creative progressives to be found in our country today...
...Berkeley in the Sixties is not a nostalgia trip for aging radicals...
...But there are lessons to be learned...
...I'm grateful to all of the participants for allowing us to disrupt their summer schedules and for complying, more or less, with our tight deadlines and space restrictions...
...some may, in fact, find it quite painful to relive some of the misguided and self-defeating conduct of the movement...
...Some found it impossible, because of other commitments, to meet our deadline...
...A word about the Institute: To call it a left-wing counterpart to the Heritage Foundation would probably please neither institution, so I will merely note that for about a quarter of a century it has played an invaluable role in serving as a progressive presence in the nation's capital...
...foreign policy and by providing humane alternatives to our nation's cruel and profit-obsessed domestic priorities...
...He said his colleagues at the Institute were considering the possibility of "putting together a parallel set of comments from a bunch of progressive folks," and wondered whether The Progressive might be interested in joining the effort and publishing the result...
...If the symposium in this issue is meant to help launch a new (or revitalized) progressive movement in the United States in the 1990s, what could be more useful than a close look at the great radical surge that shook up our culture and our politics in the 1960s...
...The movie opened in September in Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
