Becoming a Dissentnik

Now that I am about to become an ordinary Dissentnik, I want to describe how that happened once before—in 1954, when I held the first issue of the magazine in my hands. I grew up in the Popular Front, reading Max Lerner and Izzy (I.F.) Stone in the daily newspaper PM. When I was eleven, I wrote a childish "History of World War Two," which ended "Russia fights not for the lust of conquest, but to end conquest." (I had long forgotten where I got that line until a friend told me: it came from Franklin Roosevelt's address to the nation on D-Day, 1944—but FDR wasn't talking about the Russians.) Paul Robeson's "Ballad for Americans" was my idea of high culture. At thirteen, I was editing and writing a little newsletter for my friends and relatives, called Between the Lines.