Recently I wrote in these columns of the accelerating revolutionary mood on the nation’s campuses. It is now clear that I underestimated the scope and depth of the looming student rebellion: for that rebellion is not only occurring now on American campuses, but throughout the world.

The tragic murder of Senator Robert Kennedy points up an interesting fact about all the recent assassinations and assassination attempts that has gone unnoticed: that every single murder or attempted murder was of a leader of what may broadly be called the “Left” — John Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, Malcolm X, “Red Rudi” Dutcshke, the West German student leader, Medgar Evers, and the Reverend Martin Luther King. How is it that among this spate of murders, no right-wing leader has been assassinated?

Whether it fizzles, as it seems finally to be doing, or triumphs, there are many lessons to be learned from the phenomenal month-long French Revolution of 1968. First, it gives the lie, once and for all, to the widespread myth that revolutions, whether or not desirable, are simply impossible in the modern, complex, highly technological world. When the mythologists were confronted with the Chinese, Vietnamese, Algerian, and Cuban revolutions, all clearly triumphant, they said: Oh, well, perhaps there can still be revolution in the underdeveloped countries, but not in the Western world.

One of the most powerful forces in the system of conscription slavery in this country is also one of the most secret and least known: your friendly local draft board. Until very recently, the membership of each local board was shrouded in total secrecy. Even now, when official policy is at last to make the names public, it is virtually impossible to rout out the names from the Selective Service bureaucracy, and to answer such vital questions as: How are the draft boards selected? Who selects them? And on what criteria?

Campaign year 1968 is rapidly educating the American people to the futility and the undemocratic nature of the electoral process. For in the face of all the polls and other expressions of public opinion that reveal McCarthy and Rockefeller as by far the most popular of their respective parties, the party hacks who run the Democratic and Republican conventions are determined to nominate their choices: [Hubert H.] Humphrey and Nixon.

For several years some of us have been proclaiming, unheeded, that the New Left was very different from the Old; that this was not just another embodiment of the old Liberal-Socialist-Communist attitudes and coalition. Now the press is beginning to catch on; everyone knows that the fiery leader of the French student revolution, Daniel (Danny the Red) Cohn-Bendit, is an anarchist and not a socialist, that Red Rudi Dutschke, the German student leader, has at least anarchist tendencies, and that anarchist views permeate the New Left in the United States. C.L.

When they finished nominating Dick Nixon at Miami Beach, the Republican delegates were far from happy at a job well done; instead, they were gloomy, glum, and dispirited. And why not? They had just nominated a two-time loser, a man who had not won any election for eighteen years, a man who inspires no enthusiasm anywhere in the country, a man consistently behind Nelson Rockefeller in the public opinion polls.

In all the stupefying tedium, hypocrisy, and flatulence of the Republican National Convention, there was only one refreshing moment of truth and candor: when the convention’s youngest delegate got up to speak. Paul W. Walter, Jr., twenty-one years old, had unexpectedly won his primary in Cleveland on an anti-Vietnam platform. Now he arose to second the clearly futile, sad, but somehow noble candidacy of Harold E. Stassen for president. To a bored and unheeding audience, Paul Walter addressed these words:

Mr. [Stephen P.] Halbrook’s article in the May Outlook is a veritable curiosity, akin to the talking dog or the two-headed man. If nothing else, Mr. Halbrook’s portrait of Mao Tse-tung as libertarian and free enterpriser is certainly original. The tone of his thesis, however, has an all-too-familiar quality; one is reminded of nothing so much as the most starry-eyed of the Stalinist tracts of the 1930s: when we were treated to a picture of the happy and productive Soviet society.

One of the longer lasting aspects of the Great Ecology Scare of the 1969–70 intellectual season (a craze which seems to have faded away since the orgiastic exercises of “Earth Day”), is the Population Hysteria. The Left has clasped to its collective bosom the idea that population growth is the root cause of our Environmental Crisis, and Zero Population Growth clubs have sprouted over the nation’s colleges. Young men and women solemnly take the pledge never to have more than two children and thereby cause population growth.