The Correspondent

The Correspondent was a publication produced at Harvard University (with no official connection to the university) between 1961 and 1965 with articles and opinion on foreign and defense policy of the U.S. by critics and academics sympathetic to the peace movement. Originally called The Committee of Correspondence Newsletter, it was edited very briefly by Nathan Glazer and subsequently by Roger Hagan.

The publication provided a forum for dissent concerning the major issues of the period, particularly the civil defense - thermonuclear war fright and various cold war events, the cybernation issue in its early phases, and the growing focus on a war in Vietnam with the transition from the Kennedy to the Johnson administrations. Editorially it sought to be critical of dominant foreign and defense policy in the mold of its editorial board, while the principal editor, Hagan, considered independent journalist I. F. Stone his role model.

The most active among its large board of editors were David Riesman, a professor of sociology a Harvard, whose politics were hard to pin down but who was characterized by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as primarily a counter-cyclical thinker, and Erich Fromm, the neo-Freudian psychoanalyst based in New York City and Mexico who occupied an ideological position few Americans yet understood, a non-communist Marxist. Peak circulation of The Correspondent was about five thousand subscribers, but these were sufficiently effective in national affairs that LIFE magazine, still a Henry Luce product, roused itself to editorialize against it. After Hagan left at the end of 1964, moving to Seattle to earn more money in a broadcasting company, the journal, by then a quarterly rather than publishing six or more times a year, was edited by Nancy Evans with participation of Richard Hathaway, Michael Brower, and Barry and Nancy Phillips.