Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism - Tapa dura

This volume is both a chronicle of liberalism at the barricades, and a saga of a man desperately seeking peace in an interior world haunted by secret and forbidden desires. Allard Lowenstein's rise and fall in the 1960s and 70s made him emblematic of liberalism's strange fate in post-war America. He was at the forefront of the fight against racism and the Vietnam War at a time when liberalism came under attack from both radicals and conservatives. Without Lowenstein, Mississippi's "Freedom Summer" and the "Dump Johnson" movement could never have happened the way they did. Chronically insecure about his appearance, his Jewishness and his sexual urges toward young men, Lowenstein compulsively sought the approval of the beautiful and the gentile, and the companionship of a bevy of "best friends". In both his political and personal lives, staying in motion - "never stop running" - became a metaphor for his struggle to escape his demons - right up to his tragic assassination by one of his "best friends". William Chafe is the author of "The American Woman" and "The Unfinished Journey".