EconAir

Berkeley 1962 - 30 students against racial discrimination I was mildly political in high school. In 1960, I picketed the Democratic Convention that was in L.A. with a small group of radical Quakers protesting atmospheric testing of atomic weapons. The protest was in front of the Biltmore Hotel, where the candidates were staying. We were outnumbered by federal agents with cameras. After our little protest, I wandered into the Biltmore. While loitering in the main corridor, John Kennedy walked by. He was a few feet away. I didn’t think much about it until his brother was assassinated eight years later in a different Los Angeles hotel. Looking back, I was amazed at the lack of security. A kid in a protest just walks into the hotel – no security at the door, no identity checks, very little security (if any) around Kennedy. I guess all the government agents were too busy developing the film they took of our protest and writing detailed reports on how Quakers were threatening America’s secur...

Thucydides A friend of mine recently said that the most “useless” course he took in college was history. Let’s start with Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War . This was a war that took place over 2,400 years ago. What possible relevance could it have for Americans? In this war, Athens and Sparta, the two “superpowers” of Greece, were locked into a long war for the dominance of Greece. Athens, a democracy, had grown wealthy and powerful after the wars with the Persians. They had established an empire in the Aegean Sea, using taxes on Greek cities and islands to glorify Athens, including the Parthenon. Greek mainland city-states, led by Sparta, were jealous and fearful of Athenian power. Like World War I, the war in Greece began with a local dispute far from the major powers, in this case Athens and Sparta.  The climax to the story in Thucydides was that Athens decided to send its formidable fleet and much of its army to attack Syracuse, an ally of Sparta, far...