Up in Smoke

My dad took me out of kindergarten before the end of the semester, and we flew to Europe. We’re American, but 1961 was a good time for us to be out of the country. My father, C. Wright Mills — a sociologist and pioneering social critic — was embroiled in troubles, both political and personal.

He had earned tenure at Columbia University with books about American society and power structures — White Collar: The American Middle Classes and The Power Elite. Next, in The Sociological Imagination, he addressed prevailing approaches in social studies and the promise of authentic intellectual craftsmanship, reaching an international audience with seventeen translated editions. From that platform he wanted to do some good, so he wrote The Causes of World War Three, a mass market book about the dangers of the permanent war economy, the nuclear arms race, and a failure to plan for peace.

His interest in international topics led him to Brazil to speak at a conference, and soon after that to Mexico. In the spring of 1960, my dad, my stepmom, and I lived in Cuernavaca while he taught a seminar on Marxism in Mexico City. He wasn’t a Marxist, but he thought studying Marx and other Marxists was necessary for a social scientist’s education. In Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, everyone was talking about the recent revolution in Cuba that had ousted Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt dictator. My father wanted to learn more about it, so he arranged to be invited to Cuba.

The Cuban ambassador to the UN, Raúl Roa Kourí, told him that Fidel Castro had read his book, The Power Elite, and discussed it with his men in the mountains of Cuba’s Oriente province before the revolution’s victory. My father spent three and a half eighteen-hour days with Fidel Castro during his research trip to Cuba. Inspired by his interviews with Cubans during sixteen days of that tropical August in 1960, my dad wrote Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba in the imagined composite voice of a Cuban revolutionary, urging U.S. readers to listen to the majority-Cuban point of view at the time.

Listen, Yankee was particularly irritating to opponents of the Cuban revolution because it became a bestseller in the United States, and the Spanish translation was popular in Latin America. My father wrote to his parents saying he received seven to ten letters a day from people all over the world, thanking him for writing the book. He also received hate mail, full of red-baiting. Actually he was more immune to red-baiting than many other politically active intellectuals of his era. Throughout his life, he never joined a communist or socialist group— or any other political party — preferring to remain an independent thinker.

In December 1960, he was scheduled to appear on NBC in a nationally televised debate with A. A. Berle on the topic of U.S. policy toward Latin America, before an estimated audience of twenty million viewers. My father was new to Latin American studies, unlike A.A. Berle, who had been assistant secretary of state for Latin American Affairs under FDR and later ambassador to Brazil. At the time of the debate, Berle was chairman of a task force advising President Kennedy on Latin American policy, urging Kennedy to sponsor the upcoming invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. When Berle wasn’t advising presidents, he taught corporate law at Columbia University.

My father wanted to influence public opinion in the United States to help prevent an escalation of economic and covert military hostility toward Cuba. Following his own advice, he used reason to try to turn the tide of history in a humanist direction. There wasn’t much time. He had worked day and night, completing his manuscript for Listen, Yankee in six weeks. He kept working too hard, cramming for his confrontation with A. A. Berle, drinking too much coffee, allowing himself too little sleep. He became exhausted. Two weeks before the NBC debate, he got a virus and what he thought was bronchitis.

The night before the debate, he had...