Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers
An exacting, scrupulous historian of political ideas, Gottfried has never taught at an upper-tier university. That career disappointment is an evanescing leitmotiv in this memoir, which is far more concerned with what Gottfried learned from and enjoyed about his favorite acquaintances, most of them colleagues in academe and the world of philosophical-historical-political publishing, including Will Herberg, Paul Piccone, Peter Stanlis, Christopher Lasch, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Thomas Molnar, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, John Lukacs, and the Marxist father of the sexual revolution, Herbert Marcuse, whom Gottfried, though at the opposite end of the political spectrum, admired for his pedagogical liberality and European good manners. From outside the academy he recalls his entrepreneurial father, independent conservative scholar Russell Kirk, libertarian Murray Rothbard, columnists Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan, and a figure almost as surprising as Marcuse in this context, Richard Nixon, whose knowledge, conversational panache, and personal warmth charmed Gottfried. Discussing his favorite people brings out a becoming modesty and a humane intellectual seriousness in Gottfried, which make him another—possibly the most—winning personality in the book. --Ray Olson