All of our children and Dante Matelli were to dinner with us on New Year´s Eve. Later on, George Barrie and Mary Seuret (?) dropped in. Ann Wizeman and her friend Swan came too. All together we visited the party of Bill and (?) Jacobs, where a group mostly of Princeton High School teachers gathered. We danced a little and walked home in the cold moonlight about 3:00 A.M., laughing at how people everywhere sang "Will auld acquaintance be forgotten" at midnight each year while fewer and fewer people who sang together had ever known each other before.
This afternoon I visited the Velikovskys for two hours. We talked about visitors he had received in the morning, a physiologist from Wisconsin and his wife who, among other things, said that the Mohole excavation, interrupted for lack of funds, had struck a point where the temperature of the stratum, instead of continuing to rise, had unaccountably begun to cool. This could mean, surmised Velikovsky, that the Earth´s crust had been wrenched by an abrupt change in the globe´s speed of rotation, causing enormous friction and a heat that is still being reflected.
We talked also of the reply that Don Price had made to my letter transmitting Velikovsky´s article for publication in Science. Price, as President of AAAS, cannot interfere with "editorial independence" but who guarantees the Editor´s responsibility to science and society? We shall see what Abelson will say about this little proposal of Velikovsky to test the effects of gravity and magnetism upon light, using a fixed star and Jupiter as the props. Velikovsky gave me quite a lecture on the theories of relativity and their weaknesses. I am inclined to agree with him, from the little I know.
We talked long too about the need for a foundation to organize, maintain, and sponsor the utilization of his archive of materials. Bill Dix of the P. U. Libraries would like to store his archive, but Bill is hesitant, will not put himself out for Velikovsky and will not help gather funds for it -- or at least so he seemed to me, when I discussed the matter with him. Anyhow I feel that the archive should form the basis of a foundation. V. is, as always, stubborn and retentive; he does not wish to release anything, even while he avidly solicits help. We made a mock bargain: he promised to finish his next two studies promptly and I promised to get after some money for furthering his work.
January 3, 1967 (or 1966? See a few pages on). New York City
Up at seven, the four boys off to school for the first time in 10 days, Vicki up neat and pretty, ready for a day of work on her term paper before returning to Smith College, the dog Franny trotting around to everyone in turn giving them the affection that no one can give anyone else in the morning haste, I chauffeured by Jill to the Borough Station at 8:45 after writing at my desk for a few minutes. Snow settled hard in all the interstices where cars and people do not narrowly pass.
I read the "Christian Science Monitor" on the train, then scan the "New York News" and "New York Times" on the train and subway, and glance through the ads in the latest APSR for titles of studies that may relate to my new American Government task. Two hours pass before I settle into my office at 80 East 11th Street. R. Kramer and G. Pellathy greet me. We exchange a few words of personal history and work. I review the mail, give Bobby Lewis a chapter of the AG Book to clean up and send off to Eric Weise. I drink a cup of coffee and talk for an hour with Kramer about hiring a person to edit and complete the bibliography of representative government. We speak of Anemogianis as a possible editor. He will call her. At 12:30 I go to the apartment at 7 Washington Square North to make a quiet lunch, an omelette of sweet peppers, string beans, hearts of palm and six eggs, with Labatt´s ale, rye bread, and a bit of Danish cheese.
I go to my Department of Government office at 25 Waverly, glance at my mail, am caught by four students, three in person, one on the phone, smile at pretty brown-faced Norma Venegas, exchange remarks with Professor R. Cashman on several matters, with Professor H. Weiss, with Kemal Karpat with Professor Zartman, with Professor Louis Roling, and with Professor Ralph Straetz, all of whom pass by my door, which I leave open. Miss Miles too has some administrative matter. The girls come in and go out, with this or that trifle. I read and sort mail, Nina Anemogianis comes by and I say: "meet me at 8:00 p.m. for supper after you teach your class," which she agrees to. Bob Hopper comes in, we exchange greetings. (I am by this time rapidly rearranging four shelves of two hundred books and pamphlets, setting aside those which are to be cited in the AG Book). He leaves after coordinating the GS 531000 course work. His wife will bear a child in another month. I reread a paper of mine that Ken Fanda proposes to abstract in 3,500 words and publish; it is on innovation in Reference Retrieval. David Dietz calls and I arrange to lunch with him tomorrow. I finish the sorting and noting job. I read a cordial letter from Allen Ginsberg, returning my poetry manuscript with comments. I get rid of a Ph.D. dissertation too. I ask around for a secretary who may want to work overtime now and then. I close up. It is six o´clock.
I stop at the bookstore and buy a fountain pen (where was my good one lost?) and an Italian-made umbrella, and repair to 7 Washington Square North for more sorting, noting, special reading, a drink, a wash, and expect Nina at 8:00 P.M. She has already poked her head into my office and told me that she talked to Kramer and will not take the job, because she wants to write her thesis. I must think of someone else.
How many fellows have I communicated with! And there were a dozen more hellos, and some kind of exchange with a dozen more. In all, ten before 10 PM [AM?], 22 more by six o´clock. Do I count the personal letters? -- when I read them I converse in my mind and imagine my correspondents -- does he mean this, or that? When might we get together? Then there are all the people of my mind -- those of whom I think -- shall I call them, shall I arrange a meeting, or what will come of our appointed meeting, and all the other imaginary encounters that follow or precede the actual ones. I think there is nothing unusual about such a day, and it has some hours to go. Two days a week are like this. The days with lectures, especially Thursday, bring in many more -- after call I will talk with a dozen, quickly and intensively. In class, we discuss and I do not lecture absentmindedly but in full communication with the audience -- for better or worse. Should I mention the newspapers and the streams of images and ideas that they invoke. And all the other pages of books, of documents, ads, and articles, of signs on the road, and drum beats from the record of East India and the 16th-century Spanish guitars that I listened to as I exercised, shaved and shat? As warm as I am to all of this, as enjoying of it, as necessary as it may be, as useful too, I am always a bit restrained for I seek something that is not quite in it all. I am searching for something that it all shows and that shows it all, this something true that I haven´t known, this mode of expression, this poem of life, this philosophy of being, this technique of discovery, this discovery, this that the rest tends to and that tends to the rest.
* * * * *
Nina A. came -- all blonde in a black Persian lamb coat -- and preferred that we eat in my little apartment. She made a sauce for abalone that was a gift from a Korean acquaintance (I think of the far barrier reefs of Australia when I eat it); we had a salad of raw pepper slices dipped in Israeli humus Baden, Labatt´s Ale, morsels of tinned salmon, rye bread, and, later, coffee and coffee ice milk. I escorted her to the eleven o´clock trains to Bayside, and walked back from Penn Station to Washington Square, purchased the Times, read it, made some notes, and fell asleep at midnight.
January 5, 1967 New York City 8:00 A.M.
Yesterday went to minor editing, brief appointments with students, a few letters, more sorting of books and papers on American government, various telephone calls -- and three involved periods -- with Suzanne Farkas from noon to two-thirty, David Dietz from 5:15 to 6:15, and Martin, to whom David introduced me at the Cedar Tavern and with whom he left me conversing for another hour after he had to go.
Suzanne came ostensibly to hear my criticisms of a paper she is doing for Wallace Sayre at Columbia University. She was worried about its quality. She needn´t have been. It was a design for a study of the organization and influence of the National Conference of Mayors. It was excellent. I said so and explained, too, that it was verbose, lacked detail on the costs -- human and material -- of the study, and mistook the means of communication for the means of power. That she had in common with most scholars; she came to believe that "information and education" was the chief method of the mayors working their will with the Executive. Actually, the mayors have the power -- votes, political support, denial of reciprocity, etc. -- to influence Washington: still, like all power-holders they need means of contact, coming to grips, signaling, cuing the objects of this power. They cannot literally club the Washington people, or arrogantly domineer, or state their demands and walk away. There has to be a complete dressing up and maintaining of their lines of contact. I said to S.: "You accept "information and education" as their method, but ask yourself whether any group of half-educated people armed with volumes of facts and figures who wished to "inform and educate" the national government could even get their stuff accepted, much less read?"
I lent Suzanne my poems, which Allen Ginsberg had just returned. She has a good poetic ear and style. She had only read a few before, and was pleased to see them all together. She told me of life and professors at Columbia: "Professor Sayre sends his regards." She says that Robin is now becoming involved in New York University affairs through his mother, a trustee, and Dean Rosen of Social Service is seeking his help to enlist businessmen in new forms of social welfare. I told her that Richard Cornuelle of the [Navy?] was the man that Robin should bring in on this kind of problem. I mentioned also my intention to get Velikovsky engaged and recognized in some way at NYU. She would be with me on that, I know. So it went. She wore brown furs which I find bring out rednesses in her hair and skin and green flecks in her brown eyes. She wore a plain wool shapeless dress and flat-toed shoes -- like a pregnant high school girl, which, we decided, is the latest style women wish unconsciously to capture that combined delicious feeling of being young, unmarried, delinquent, and with baby, a syndrome much encountered in fact and in the press these late years and a wish that designers have momentarily snipped from the air and materialized.
After this and more, we walked up Fifth for a brief lunch at Schraft´s Restaurant. She taxied uptown, blowing me a kiss, and I went to the Project office where I worked until Dietz came at five fifteen. I hadn´t seen him in three years. He is heavier, looks well, and has still not found himself. His father´s wealth was renounced many years ago because he hated his father. Now his father is beginning to die and he expects, diffidently, to inherit someday in the next two years. He asked for advice about places to work and things to do. He told me stories, in turn, about Sid Rolf, a figure whom I remember in a shadowy way from the University of Chicago. I recollect Jill telling me how Sid had had the influence of an elder brother, greatly admired, on Stud Runil in 1939-1940. Several years ago Laura Bergquist had said that Sid was successfully engaging in the promotion of a shopping center in New Rochelle and had married a wealthy woman and written books. David tells me that the shopping center is a big hole in the ground, possibly bankrupt. Rolf´s wife, he says, is an older woman who is opinionated and difficult. Sid spends time in Paris and New York. He looks for projects. He does not appear to have succeeded, says David, in his strong drive to win happiness through material triumphs. But de Grazia´s principle is: "Nobody succeeds. We simply enjoy relative degrees of failure." I´ll judge Rolf when I have a chance to inspect him closely.
At the bar was a rugged-looking but soft-eyed intellectual type whom David introduced to me as Martin just as he left and who joined me at table. Martin opened a bookstore at 89th and Broadway a year ago. He had been partners with Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco before 1955, then became an Editor in New York. We found the usual points of contacts -- in the two cities, in vaguely known mutual acquaintances, in tastes, in brews, in bookmaking and book-markets. He told me that he is the son of Carlo Tresca (out of wedlock) and the sister of Elizabeth Ann Gurley; what magnificent radical antecedents! His wife joined us, just as I was leaving, I then [stayed - fled?] and ate a steak, napped for an hour, read for three, and again slept.
Apartment AG, housecleaning to 11. East 11th, AG, phone calls, URS to 12. Sloberg for lunch at "Top of the Park" in re my proposals for a new Encyclopedia, the URS, the American Image Projects. He is Francis Keppel´s assistant at General Learning Corporation. He was entranced. Let us see whether he can move the group a bit. Juan Linz 12:15-12:30.
Velikovsky phoned me on January 7, 1967 to say he had heard from T. J. Gordon, Ideas in Conflict. Gordon had sent:
1. Scientific American once refused ad and now refused Cohen quote permission July 1955
2. Rupert Wilke (Yale - 20 years ago) no hydrocarbons on Venus. Ca. 1946. Refused "quote" permit on this letter
3. Asked Dr. Nathan permit to quote from Einstein letter (1955) up to St. Florian. N. refused. Wrote again. Reconsiders and sends falsification
Has given Velikovsky the above material.
We talked for a half-hour on how to handle this and other material. I suggested that I might edit a book of these and other selected materials on "The Living History of Science." He liked the idea.
Glancing through a book of essays on political science research bureaus the other day, I happened on a passage by the late illustrious political scientist of Berkeley, Peter Odegard, who refers to my book, the Western Public as a "gloss" on the 1952 survey by the University of Michigan. I wonder he didn´t say "mere gloss" but that may be because we were friendly. He had not read the book or he could not say only that about it. It is a clear, simple and in several places original working of SRC materials at a time before the SRC book had appeared. However, I make a number of frank statements and predictions, that Odegard, who was a typical pollyannaish yet danger-escrying liberal would object to. I did not find Westerners distinctive, I exposed some weaknesses of Adlai Stevenson, and talked of Eisenhower´s great vote-catching ability. These would irritate Peter and make him find the book mediocre as political science. No doubt the book will rest in limbo, for the Peters are legion. Let someone in the objective future bother to measure the work against its contemporaries, and he will learn how to handle tables with the minimum pretense and without jargon and arrogance; he will see how to handle the problems of political generations in the West and of character-image analysis of open-ended responses to mere queries about a candidate; political activity of people (though I did much more refined work on this a year later -- published in brief in 1957 in the American Way of Government), and of child-parent political party changes; of issue analysis of the Korean war´s place in the voting behavior, and of voters´ views of the other party voters. The prejudices of our "liberal" professors can erase a lot of respectable social science.
The problem is compounded by the failure of men to read. Works are not read and regrettably even many of our famous scholars do not read competently. If I were to sit down with Odegard and explain what I was doing, he would surely have been more appreciative. But everyone rushes madly by everyone else and I am afraid that when he picked up my book, if ever he did, what was in his mind was the frame created when I was lukewarm to his candidacy for the U. S. Senate during a Democratic convention one time in Fresno, and my generally critical attitude towards party ideologists. Peter was of the old prairie progressive type en fond [?], always awaiting the Crusade and energetically leading it wherever possible.
January 10, 1967 Tuesday en route to New York City
Yesterday I hired Anthony Manousos to help organize my files of letters and papers. I will set him up in a little office down the street. He is elated at getting work that he enjoys, at good pay. It ends what has been the worst, and may turn out to have been the best, week of his young life.
Last Thursday at supper-time, while he was in the bathtub, Lt. McGuire of the Princeton Borough Police came with a New Jersey State Policeman, with search and arrest warrants. They searched his room for narcotics and then urged him to give up what he had rather than let the whole house be searched. He must have looked about him, at his embarrassingly jumbled poor home, at his father who is invalided with arthritis and feverish, at his anguished mother and five-year-old adoring sister, and decided to give them what they came for, so he dug up from some crevice his pack of marijuana and surrendered it.
The police took him down to the Borough Station where a half-dozen Princeton University students and a twenty-year loafer named Satwokowsky were being held on the same charges. The group was kept in the old cell there for a little while and then transported to the county jail in Trenton.
Anthony was plenty scared. His distressed mother followed in her old car and watched while the University students and 5 were bailed out, leaving Anthony alone, a juvenile at 17, without bail privileges and no one around to demand his release.
[more undated pages -- I think they belong here]
Thus I am disturbed by the crazy laws and practices governing marijuana and LSD. I had some inkling too of what Anthony meant to his family.
When I telephoned his mother, Mary, she wept and said to my surprise, that no one had helped her and that he was still in jail. I consoled her and said I would get onto the problem in the morning. Sunday at 10 A.M. I visited her. Then I returned and called Larry Caruso, attorney for Princeton University. He is also alternative justice of the peace in the Borough. Larry confirmed that, despite the ambiguities of the laws respecting juvenile incarceration, no one can be held without being brought before a judge, and that bail was inapplicable to a juvenile, but that release to the custody of parents or responsible parties was mandatory unless the judge determined some danger to public safety or the defendant was present. I gathered that Larry would, if pushed, sign his release, but I didn´t want to push yet. So I called the police several times, the jailor twice, the judges of Trenton and in all spent several hours on the telephone. No one would "spring" him, though all were polite and admitted he could not be held. The key to the situation -- short of peremptory demands of the police and the nearest judge, was Juvenile Judge Noden, whose pleasant-voiced and helpful wife reported to be in New York City and scheduled to return late in the evening. A second judge in Trenton left in a call for Noden too. The Princeton police really wanted to ‘teach Anthony a lesson" so they dragged their feet. They might have let him out actually. But the community, in their view, is greatly alarmed about the narcotics problem. Further, they know that in these juvenile cases, little punishment will ultimately be meted out, so they wish to take their retributive steps prior to the hearing on the accusations. A strange business -- the law that is set up for the protection of juveniles results in the abuse of their rights!
As matters developed, whilst we all awaited Judge Noden´s call, he was late in arriving. Next morning, when I telephoned him before going into New York, he apologized, saying that he had not returned until 1:00 A.M. but was already onto the case and indicated that Anthony would be released shortly. He was and came home thin (he fasted for some reason) but looking rested. His mother was delighted, beaming, talkative. He stayed the night. His mother did not know what to do. When she returned, her husband was feeling worse and had to be taken to the Princeton Hospital, where he was placed in a room with five other men, one of whom was insanely ranting. Her little girl, Elizabeth, kept asking for her brother, who was the great light of her life. Anthony slept fitfully and would not eat. He thought of hunger, misery, of killing himself, of the homosexuals calling to one another down the corridor from his cell. He was in solitary confinement.
The newspapers carried the story of the arrests, but because of the law respecting juveniles, did not mention his name. On Saturday, an hour after supper, Jill reported that Anthony had been arrested. Paul had brought the news. (Very little in Princeton remains hidden from the message systems of the young. Actually Paul knew the news within an hour of the time of arrest but did not tell us "because I wasn´t sure that he would be held." I can discover practically anything or about anybody in town by asking one or another of the children. And they give it to us straight, because their special network is the most reliable center of the system and they themselves are trained at home unconsciously for the most part to report the world accurately and calmly, so as to stand up under careful questioning. I do not mean to imply that either Jill or I use this magnificent apparatus any more than we use our motor cars, which are probably among the least used automobiles in the country. We have little active interest in the detailed affairs of the townspeople. Anthony I know because Jessie, his elder, met him three years ago and praised effusively his genius. He was taking college-level Latin and sitting in on University classes, though then only 15 or so. He has studied very little and yet achieves the highest grades. He reads widely and writes stories and poetry. He is imaginative, has the ebullience of the young intellectual with the corresponding underlying despair.
And Jessie pictured his poverty to us, too, his father´s paralysis, his mother working as a waitress at the Esquire Restaurant on the corner of Nassau and Pine Streets, of the sweet baby girl. Later when Jessie left town, Paul would speak of Anthony, for they were classmates, and even though Paul´s closest friends are athletes -- Richie Volz, Peter Starbuck, Allen Willcox, Thuny, et al. -- he is friendly too with Anthony. So I have seen him from time to time. I never [felt] my heart tug towards him; he is too intellectually assured; he scoffs a little too much -- in his mild, smiling, nearsighted way.
Still, when I heard the news, I was concerned. He was a superior boy. That meant right off that he would be misunderstood by the police and authorities. He doesn´t look like much, with his weak voice and physique, though he speaks well.
On My Mind
1. Rent and set up office in Princeton
2. Grade WO exam - January 26 and papers January 27
3. Write Exam in Scope and grade January 27
4. Read Scope papers (Jan. 16, Jan. 17, Jan. 18) (Jan. 28-29)
5. Send poetry to printer (call Farkas first)
6. What´s with Karl Solberg and General Learning Corporation?
7. Select, edit and send BRC (Paul Kurtz) an article on the nature of social science. (Done)
8. Ask Dick Cornuelle WIR
9. Journal update
10. Letter to Cartler
11. Get URS going: Codex II, Codex IA; Codex X
12. Begin the Doctor´s Companion
13. Draft proposal on Conference on Social Invention and Representative Government for 20th Century Fund
14. Work on representative government article
15. Read Books for Methodology
16. Reorganize and edit Chapters ix, X of American Government
17. Go through and sort AG materials.
18. AEI papers: a. computer operations
b. tribunes
c. exempl. legislation
d. sub-legislative corps
e. applied policy science and elite net
f. representative council
g. activities classification
Seven preludes to Legislative Reform. Outside publication
7 x 15 pp. each = 105 pp. or 124 paperback book
19. Prepare 2 vols. of Works for Reserve and Revise outlines.
20. Cath to straighten out Pix history.
Phoned Velikovsky tonight. Elisheva came on the wire too, at his request. I told them what I was doing to institute a Foundation. He was quite subdued. He is not used to having anything taken out of his hands. Both were happy, I could tell, at the thought of something they had talked so much about, moving so quickly to a climax.
* * * * *
Anti-Velikovsky first line of defense is the impossibility of his theories. Then, I suppose, if proved right, it will be said that he was a simple scribe; he read an inscription which told what happened. That position will not endure, either, for he worked in a superhuman way to piece together the shattered mosaic.
How to get things done.
The conversation begins with Carl. He is 14 years old and seriously concerned over the justice of our intervention in Vietnam. He feels that we are violent and bullying. He also feels that there are some reasons on the government´s side: he appreciates the "domino" theory, for example, because of China´s truculence. I am considering whether to accept the Simulmatics Corporation offer (indirectly the Advanced Research Projects Agency) to direct the establishment of a psychological warfare center in Vietnam; Carl knows this too, as I have asked the family members whether they think that I should go.
Livio Stecchini is at dinner, booming out conversation. Livio is a hawk; he believes that all kinds of bad consequences to our international position come from our hesitation in winning a war once we are committed to it.
I explain my position, which I have held now for two years, without noticing any public discussion of it. This is: "We should determine to withdraw in one large movement, perhaps holding an enclave to avoid the massacre of the anticommunists. The movement should be preceded by a declaration that we are justly in Vietnam but cannot continue to assert this world responsibility without the support of the free world. If the free world does not declare its involvement by Date X, we shall no longer be held responsible. They will not. Therefore we debark."
Carl says that this plan sounds good. Why don´t we do it? I explain then at length all the obstacles and actions that are needed to transform idea into policy. He is amazed. Discouraged, too, but I tell him this is to be expected.
Don´t ask me why mankind should survive. I am biased on the subject. Unjustifiably.
We shall have to make a motorboat of the Earth some day. The heavens cannot be counted upon to remain stable. They have not been so far long. One day, a date that may be next month or in a million or more years, we shall find ourselves in disquieting circumstances -- the target of a large comet, victim of a furious solar heat suddenly arisen, or a mysterious shift in orbits. At the moment, man should be prepared to move his one and only vehicle into a more safe or comfortable position. The force needed would be beyond present imagination; yet we know little about force or about mobilizing what we have at hand. Project Motorboat should be launched with the next trillion dollars we have to spare.
* * * * *
Reflecting upon Carl´s question, "Why don´t we do it?" It is always astonishing to see how complicated is the process of influencing a government´s actions. All manner of resistance, sabotage, diversion, hostility and apathy can be foreseen on a plan such as I mentioned at dinner. Their national "commitment" is not a mere word: thousands of well-placed leaders in numerous departments of government are driving in one direction. Many have excellent private reasons, easily translatable into publicly advantageous terms, for persisting in the present policy. We do not know either whether we are quite correct in our estimates. Those in command have the "best" estimates and are prepared to use those estimates as propaganda for all that they are worth. The alternative is always thus handicapped.
As the legal and correct communication of instructions from the public to the steering wheel of policy becomes impossible, the question arises as to "what really can affect government policy in a counteractive way. (It is easy enough to see how to support it.) Here we must reconsider all that the theory of representative government and liberal (not radical) democracy tells us. The mechanics of change are all present. (As is apparent, I can obtain just about as good access to top levels of government as anyone else can.) The decision-making machinery is present and functioning: informal as well as formal means can be used by myself and others. But assuredly nothing is going to happen, except possibly an uneasy armistice, but no informed person I´ve spoken to believes that this will occur until we escalate our bombings and assaults from the air and sea, steps that will alienate completely world opinion, fragmentalize our NATO alliance even more, and possibly bring on increased Chinese and Russian intervention.
It would appear that only a sharp challenge by an opposing party chief would cause a sharp counteractive change in government policy. This is a long way off and highly unlikely. Otherwise, the opposition to the Vietnam war has to take to the streets in demonstrations that have no direct instruction to impart except that they hate the war. From this, possibly, a correct way out may be deduced. Representative government, then does not represent all people, all problems, or the right timing, or many other things at all perfectly or perhaps even very well.
Yet the mob doesn´t either. The French Revolution, the Boston colonial riots, the London mob of two centuries ago and many other crowds have actually had their try at representative government. They have usually failed, miserably, as a technique of rule. So we have, on the one hand, the "mob," and on the other hand the "committed rulers," each in its own way a highly irrational inertial device for guiding a country´s destiny.
Friday and Saturday in Princeton. I edited several notes on the nature of social science for my Works vol. VIII, prepared my 1962 paper on leadership for the BRC Symposium in honor of George Lundburg, and cleaned up the rough transcript of my impromptu lecture on "The Ideal Curriculum of Political Science," so that it can be available to my students next semester. On Saturday afternoon Livio and Dorothy Stecchini visited us. Livio was morose over many things. I took him over to visit Velikovsky. The two had been cool to each other since they clashed so strongly over Livio´s new manuscript for The Velikovsky Affair over a year ago. Livio has been wasting much time over a silly article that Peter Tomkins was preparing for Look Magazine on ancient pre-catastrophic high-level civilizations.
On Sunday I talked and monkeyed around the house with the boys, and walked with Sebastian. At 6:30 I left for New York to meet Ed Greenfield on the Vietnam project. We yammered until 3:00 A.M., first at the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel, then at the Sun Luck Restaurant, and finally at Naomi Spatz´s apartment.
The arrangements that he proposed were finally such that I felt I could not turn him down. They are as follows (see the yellow sheet):
8:00 AM: Arrangements agreed upon as I recall them from last night.
1. $30,000 for the twelve-month period ending January 21, 1968 and $17,500 for the six-month period ending July 21, 1968. Payable in 12 equal installments beginning February 21, 1967.
2. Title: Coordinator of SE Asian Operations, Simulmatics Corporation. Assimilated Rank: Brig. General. Job: To set up and direct a paramilitary action research center at Saigon (plus other Asian possibilities).
3. S. C. buys and maintains $100,000 of Life Insurance Contract for AdeG payable to his named beneficiaries through his named insurance agency. S. C. pays TIAA continuation-of-insurance policies.
4. Stock options paid to AdeG to the amount of ____ shares, in the number of ____ per month, beginning with the signing of contract.
5. Expenses paid as follows:
a. 25% of $30,000 for cost of living equalizer, paid as in (1) above, but only while out of the USA or en route.
b. Per Diem $30 for every day or major fraction thereof while on [word missing] away from New York City or Princeton or Saigon station.
c. Such additional expenses as may be incurred on company business, amounting to no more than $1,000 per month, for which an accounting shall be rendered.
d. All travel expenses, including local transportation, during tours of duty abroad. Travel first-class is authorized.
e. $8,000 for maintaining and paying a personal research assistant/secretary in USA for the first year of this agreement.
6. A bonus for all new work of S. C. originated from or assigned to all areas west of Tokyo amounting to the ratio the total volume of the new work bears to $700,000 multiplied by the total of salary, other payments, and expenses involved in (1), (4) and (5a) and (5b) above, with cash paid in cash, and options in options in proper ratio.
7. A guarantee of a balance of $50,000 to be maintained at all times in Saigon.
Mankind has been partially destroyed, perhaps almost totally so, at times in prehistory. We may be so again. Though we realize this condition to our existence, we gather in crowds around a well into which a child has fallen. Throughout the country the presses publish accounts of the agony of the child, and of the crowds. What is the meaning of this contradiction between fate and concern? Should we weep large tears for the seven-year famine of ancient Palestine, when men ate up one another, according to the Jewish commentators, and walk stony-faced by the well with the child down below in it? And if not, why not?
January 28, 1967 New York Saturday
The past two days were extremely busy. Last evening, however, N. A. came and we ate dinner together late at the Golden Ox Restaurant off 7th Avenue and Sheridan Square. The menu was able to afford me two good lamb chops and a good draft beer. I felt lucky at that, it being a crowded dense kind of place for younger people. I dislike noise and crowds at restaurants and night clubs. Better a frankfurter or bit of cheese in one´s apartment.
Thursday was a long series of examinations and meetings. On the train from Princeton I was hailed by Ruth Velikovsky Baron. She is utterly devoted to her father and believes that I have been his great benefactor. Perhaps I am. I enjoy and am interested in him and his work and ideas; does that make me less of a benefactor? I feel so. It is indeed strange. I do most things because I want to do them, even lust to do them. Yet people regard this selfishness as altruism. N. A., again, said last night that I had been extremely kind and generous to her in a most difficult period -- intending her months of preparing for her examinations and completing her divorce proceedings. Yet I neither helped in the one or the other directly -- perhaps a few words now and then. Marion Palley, that hardheaded demanding bitch, has said so much to others, but I have only written a couple of recommendations for her (one of which has just helped her get appointment to Rutgers), and tolerated her. Anna-Maria writes that I am, and she is so exasperated with most men, including Sebastian; I have simply borne with her moods a little and bought her paintings, the first not impossible considering our infrequent company and the second a selfish sort of behavior, since they are beautiful and inexpensive. Stephanie insists from time to time that I remade her character, tastes, and appearance. Even Jill thinks I am a benefactor, not to mention Louise S and Rosalyn F. What of men though, these being women -- though quite an assortment of kinds of women, a critical, demanding, experienced and independent group? I am not so sure. But Velikovsky himself thinks so. Perhaps Sebastian and Livio do. John Appel and his father Alfred do. So does George Shapiro. I think Dryfoos does. Some of my ABS correspondents, such as David Singer of the U. of Michigan, do. Judging by what they say to me and what they ask me for in the way of recommendations on scant acquaintance, permissions to excuse themselves from examinations and rules, and change of duties and work, some students apparently think of me as a friend in genera. Yesterday afternoon Ed Greenfield told me over and over again that he was deeply grateful for my help. "I feel great, the best I have in a long time, about everything." He also was urging me to help Ithiel pull himself together: "You saved his life." He then said, "You must sit down with A before you go to V.-N." He is concerned over his work. "I want to get you together next week with B.. He knows you and we want him with us"and so on. At one point, I laughed and said that "I am the highest-paid chaplain in the service."
(Greenfield has accepted in most details the letter of agreement that I drew up. Slowly, yet with great rapidity considering the complications of my circumstances and of the interests involved, I move toward the day when I shall be winging away to Vietnam.)
Can it be that those who regard themselves as selfish, or at least insist upon incorporating whatever they do into their ego system, are the altruistic, just as those who are anxious over their courage are the bravest, and those who fear their sins are the saintliest? No, I think all of these parallels have a few grains of truth in them (enough to make a humanist great à la Pascal, de la Rochefoucault, or Pope). But the truth is much more complex and on several levels of meaning. I wonder whether P. Sorokin´s book on Altruism copes well with the problem? The psychologists do little with any of the normal and traditional dilemmas of humanity. Whether they do so because the conventional concepts are hopelessly polluted or because they themselves are is a question.
[Undated pages. I am putting them here because the mention of "Ed" in the first sentence.]
Ed drank constantly for eight hours. I drank much whiskey and rice wine too. When we parted, we were supposed to meet at 9 A.M. at the Tuscany for breakfast prior to entering into conversation with a project monitor and contracting office coming up from Washington. I was up after 3 hours´ sleep (Paul stayed with me the night and left at 8 for his Naval ROTC examination -- at that I woke him up too) and ready to go, though unsteady and not very well. But Ed was collapsed when I phoned him and didn´t finally make it to his office on 41st Street until practically noon. We lunched with Stubbs and Quinn. The government people, and the comptroller of Simulmatics, Hazai, and I did my best to give the Washington people an improved feeling about Simulmatics´ capacity for handling projects properly. Quincy particularly, had been suspicious and unfriendly to the Company.
The day had its other facts too. In the morning I asked Dick Kramer to view an apartment at Washington Square Village, for offices on the Representative Government project. We decided then and there to move in within the next few days. I dictated a few letters, disposed of the mail, and managed an hour´s nap in the late afternoon before receiving Carl Martinson and Bill Casey to discuss their participation in the Universal Reference System.
(7:00 A.M. next morning)
Bill Casey is, says Carl, a wealthy man. Carl has known him at least since they lived together in London during WWII on duty with OSS. Casey is a tall, puckish-faced man, elegantly dressed, with a deep pushing voice, suited to an attorney of distinction. He swears a little as he talks, when he is comfortable, also sprawls and makes noises while he eats; he will not pass up a shelf of books without glancing at a few titles, and interests himself in more than the field of business law when he does so. He is hard-playing, hard-driving, hard-thinking, slightly, almost unnoticeably, defensive (aggressive) before the man with a full intellectual armament. We used first names on this, our second meeting -- about par for the course of acquaintances in America.
Casey, says Carl, spent half a million dollars in the primary last year to beat Steve Derounian, and didn´t quite make it (S. D. lost in the final election to a Democrat, by a narrow margin, too). I believe Carl, who is both honest and informed: he was financial manager of Bill´s campaign. (Incidentally, Bill and I both set the Rockefeller gubernatorial spending in 1966 at ten million dollars minimal, with many millions more in volunteer time and state employees´ time.) Casey obviously pulls out all the stops when he plays.
Casey has made money in years past with a service for lawyers that he has been editing for Prentice-Hall Co. He had also devised and promoted an aperture - microfilm card that netted him much money. He is backing Carl presently on two new letter-services for attorneys, a business law abstracting biweekly and an investment-law biweekly. They are just beginning to receive subscriptions at about $100 a year.
I think these services might go well with the URS and, at a moment in our conversation last night, after we had talked generally and about the URS plans through cocktails at my apartment, and then more specifically and even finally of the exact kind of deal I wanted, I suggested that one or both services be operated along with the URS. I made this suggestion just after I had apparently made a generous offer (I certainly intended it to be so) of a fifty-fifty share in the URS in return for financial backing and the managerial participation of Carl amounting perhaps to $50,000, but possibly less. Since we shall need to spend $100,000 to bring out the political science series of 10 volumes and have already orders on hand amounting to $100,000, I don´t believe Casey will be risking much. Carl is enthusiastic about URS, particularly since it will put him in Princeton more of the time, for that is the most efficient place to work on it, and he lives there. Casey seems to me to be ready to go take the plunge. We left with my offer hanging. We shall know within a couple of days.
Quite a day, as I described it on the telephone to Jill, last night. Who knows what Ed Greenfield will come up with now. I have rescued him from the crisis of the Washington visitors. Will he now renege on his promises? Perhaps he cannot really perform on his agreement with me. No matter. I shall get something that I want out of it. I haven´t decided what it will be, but he is too impacted to get out scot-free. I can see, too, that he is in trouble with Chapman, his Board chairman, and with Ithiel Pool, second largest stockholder and longtime friend and mentor on scientific entrepreneurship. Ed is grateful to me, profoundly so, but his character is such that he feels no basic need to translate gratitude into promises kept. He loves himself in a gargantuan way and forces his environment into his personality. I enjoy him, even like him. He had better watch out, though. His old friends and associates in Simulmatics Corporation are now wary and sour. A couple of errors more and he may find himself with a company but without key clients and associates. This at a time when the Company could begin to run a good profit on a good volume of work.
January 31, 1967 Plan of January 31, 1967
Journal. Ideas Fill.
AEI Book
Seven Preludes to Legislative Research and Representation.
1. Classification of Governmental Activity
2. Congressional Council of Representative Groups in Agencies
3. The Sub-Legislative Corps
4. Congressional Tribunes
5. Exemplary Legislation and Congressional Messages
6. The New Congressional Technology
7. Using Leader Networks for Policy Science
Format: Book; Number of Pages: 140; No. of words: 35,000
7 weeks, 2 by June 1; 2 by September 30; 2 by December 31; 1 by February 28
Publication by May 1968. 50 x 200 = $10,000; $6,000 expenses
