Contents

August 17, 1989 • Volume 36, Number 13

LETTERS

Contributors

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of many books, including The Magic Lantern, an eyewitness account of the velvet revolutions of 1989. His most recent book is Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name. He is currently leading an Oxford University 
research project for the discussion of global free speech norms (www.freespeechdebate.com) and working on a book about free speech.

John Bayley is a critic and novelist. His books include Elegy for Iris and The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature.

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was a Russian poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad, Brodsky moved to the United States when he was exiled from Russia in 1972. His poetry collections include A Part of Speech andTo Urania; his essay collections include Less Than One, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Watermark. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He served as US Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992.

James Chace is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law at Bard College. He is the author of Acheson and, most recently, 1912: The Election That Changed the Country. He is now working on a biography of Lafayette. (October 2004)

Theodore H. Draper (1912–2006) was an American historian. Educated at City College, he wrote influential studies of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution and the Iran-Contra Affair. Draper was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association.

Thomas R. Edwards (1928–2005) was Professor of English at Rutgers and editor of Raritan. His last book was Over Here: Criticizing America.

Gordon A. Craig (1913–2005) was a Scottish-American historian of Germany. He taught at both Princeton and Stanford, where he was named the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1979.

Amos Elon (1926–2009) was an Israeli journalist. His final book was The Pity of It All: A Portrait of Jews In Germany 1743 – 1933.

Anthony Hecht’sCollected Later Poems and Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry were published in 2003. He died on October 20. (December 2004)

Charles Hope was Director of the Warburg Institute, London, from 2001 to 2010. He is the author of Titian.


Brad Leithauser is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He lives in Massachusetts.

William Pfaff’s latest book is The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy.
 (June 2013)

Peter B. Reddaway is Professor Emeritus of Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, which has served as the setting for many of his novels. He won the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, and for Sabbath’s Theater, the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral, and three PEN/Faulkner awards, for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman.

Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, a recent fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the author of biographies of Walter Lippmann and Robert Kennedy.

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was an American novelist, essayist, and playwright. His many works include the memoirs Point to Point Navigation and Palimpsest, the novels The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckinridge, and Lincoln, and the collection United States: Essays 1952–1992.

Larry McMurtry lives in Archer City, Texas. His novels include The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove (winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), Folly and Gloryand Rhino Ranch. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West and, most recently, Custer.

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Stone at Delphi: Seamus Heaney’s Poems with Classical References, Selected and Introduced by Helen Vendler has just appeared in a limited edition. (March 2013)

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. His latest book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles.


Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Edward Witten, a Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been on the board of Americans for Peace Now since 1991. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1990. (December 2009)