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Entering New Worlds, by Max M. Kampelman
- Abstract
Max Kampelman had a front-row seat at many of the central political dramas of the post-World War II era: the rise of McCarthyism, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the McGovernization of the Democratic party, the defeat of world Communism by the resurgent democracies of the West. It is thus hardly to be wondered at that this veteran Democratic-party insider, who concluded his remarkable career as Ronald Reagan’s chief arms negotiator, should have written so engrossing a personal and political memoir.
For one who came to be regarded as a prototypical cold-war liberal (a term of derision in fashionable circles), Kampelman arrived at his views on the need for military preparedness by a rather unconventional route. Born to Jewish immigrants from Romania in 1920, Kampelman attended yeshiva schools in his Bronx neighborhood and then the uptown campus of New York University as an undergraduate and a law student. Under the tutelage both of a Reform rabbi at NYU and of Quakers at a college summer camp, he came to believe that democracy was the political expression of the Jewish religious ethic—and that the democratic cause was best served through pacifist commitment. He would go on to make a career based on the former proposition, which necessarily entailed abandoning the latter.
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