My father studied political science at Berkeley during the 1950s, first as an undergraduate and then, after a brief stint in the Army, as a graduate student. To hear Dad tell it, to have been in Berkeley in the 1950s was to have been in an intellectually and politically transformative place—a place far more intellectually and politically transformative than even the Berkeley of the '60s, feted though that decade at that university has been.1
For my father, perhaps no single person was more responsible for that atmosphere of intellectual and political transformation than Sheldon Wolin. When Dad came back to campus to pursue his PhD, he was sure that he was going to study international relations, and he was unsure whether he would follow up his doctoral degree by returning to the military or remaining in the academy. It took very little time for the recently arrived Wolin, along...
