Then in the middle of the campaign Cuba happened. If Hughes had spoken personally to everybody in the state he couldn't have made the population more aware of the possibility of nuclear war. The only trouble was, no matter how concerned people became, they couldn't do a thing about it. The feeling of importance, which crept into the consciousness of the Washington marchers and was pushed aside, gripped the entire population, peaceniks included. Hughes writes of that time: "my support appeared to be melting away. A manic-depressive cycle seized a number of my co-workers."

In his article Hughes gives the opinion that the Cuba incident might have cut his vote in half. He adds "What to my mind it did rather more was to underline a cruel truth which had been present from the start but to which my friends and I had refused to pay attention. Even in its best days my campaign had had an air of unreality." But Hughes never explicitly says why his campaign had this sense of unreality. He implies it was because people will not vote for a candidate with no chance to win. I think that is only part of it.

Prof. Hughes' campaign only had meaning for the voters, for his workers, and for himself as long as the myth persisted that it really made a difference whether someone was interested in "peace." The frustration of the peace marcher, who was so insulted when the State Department did not actually talk policy with him was similar in kind, if not in quantity, to the frustration of the American citizen who stood by watching the drama unfold in the Caribbean. Both felt impotence, both felt despair.

Hughes was saying you should be concerned about "peace." So you were not only concerned, you were petrified. So you couldn't do anything. So why vote for Hughes?

The peace movement, which includes the bulk of the radicals in the country, has been virtually silent since October. The Brandeis Justice last week published an article by the head of the campus peace group describing the "profound sense of despair" that has settled over the peace movement. Tocsin is struggling to recover, but its continued effectiveness is still in doubt.

If the Cuban incident proves to have been the death blow of the peace movement, it would be extremely unfortunate. But if it causes some rethinking about the merits of certain activities, and perhaps turns radical thought to new problems, it could be a blessing in disguise.

First of all, Tocsin and other peace-groups might well realize that the most important work they can do in regard to the international situation is to expand their program of education, both for their own members and the community at large.

But the re-thinking might be broader than that. Bell writes in The End of Ideology, "But where the problems are, as Karl Popper put it, of 'piecemeal technology,' of the prosaic, yet necessary questions, of school costs, municipal services, the urban sprawl, and the like, bravura radicalism simply becomes a hollow shell." And Schlesinger in New Statesman writes "Apart from civil rights, the contribution of the utopian Left to the discussion of domestic issues has been unimpressive."

The Left has not been silent on domestic issues. Michael Harrington's important document, and Goodman, according to Schlesinger, writes "vaguely of diversifying and decentralizing our economy." But radicalism in general, and student radicalism in particular, has not provided the searching thought on crucial domestic problems the country needs from its dissident intellectuals. Nor has it provided the public support many of the Administration's progressive welfare measures could use very well in Congress.

Perhaps in the aftermath of Cuba, as the hard truth about the conduct of foreign affairs in this world is squarely faced, American radicalism might re-discover a traditional but recently neglected area of concern. This is not to say radicals should abandon their role as public critics in the field of foreign policy; but it is to say their talents, both as chastisers of the established and creators of the new, are also needed elsewhere