March 1967
In This Issue
Explore the March 1967 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
On the Writing of Contemporary History
“The increase in the velocity of history means, among other things, that the ‘present’ becomes the ‘past’ more swiftly than ever before.”
G. H. Hardy: The Pure Mathematician
Said one mathematician to another: “The number of my taxicab was 1729 . . . rather a dull number.” Said the second: “No, Hardy! No . . . It is the smallest, number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”This and many other anecdotes and insights bring to life the great Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy as remembered by his friend and pupil C. P. Snow. This is the second of two ATLANTIC excerpts from Lord Snow’s forthcoming book, VARIETY OF MEN.
Cheese: Best of Both Worlds
The Laws of Probability and Bureaucratic Style
The author is assistant to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a farmer teacher of English composition.
Hairpiece
ELINOR GOULDING SMITH, who lives in New York City, has been writing for the ATLANTIC since 1943.
Small Talk
No Man on Ocracoke
Lancaster County Tragedy
The Long-Singing Singers
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
Israel
Potpourri
The New Calcutta
The Education of Robert McNamara
The second most powerful man in Washington is also the second most controversial, writes Douglas Kiker, the ATLANTIC’S Washington columnist. How six years in the Pentagon have changed Robert McNamara is detailed in these pages; how McNamara has changed the Pentagon is described, beginning on page 56, by his onetime special assistant.
How the Pentagon Works
“The expanding universe” that is the United States defense establishment consumed nearly $60 billion last year, more than half the national budget (and the President has asked for additional funds this year), commands the services of some 4 million persons, sustains a high proportion of American industry, and maintains an arsenal that could demolish the planet. Only a major revolution in management and planning techniques could produce the mixture of efficiency and control that makes the system servant rather than master of the republic. From the standpoint of a participant in that revolution, Mr. Yarmolinsky explains the techniques and tools by which the civilian controls and directs the power of the Pentagon. He was a Special Assistant to Secretary of Defense McNamara and later a deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he is now a professor of law at Harvard and a member of the Kennedy Institute of Politics.
Washington
A Gothic Abc
Against a Backdrop
From Ogden, Utah, Mr. While went to California, graduated from Stanford, worked as a cabbie, service station, attendant, and newspaper reporter, He is now a writer on the staff of the NEW YORKER.
Ignazio Silone: A Study in Integrity
For too long, says Iris Origo in this intimate study of a writer and his work, Ignazio Silone was “undervalued both as a thinker and a writer” in his Italian homeland. Today at sixty-six, the author of such powerful and lasting books as BREAD AND WINEand SCHOOL FOR DICTATORSis enjoying prestige long due him, and as co-editor of the magazine TEMPO PRESENTE,scans the political and social scene. The author of this portrait is a close friend of Silone’s. Her several biographical works include LEOPARDIand THE LAST ATTACHMENT.
Early Thaw
Birthday in the House of the Poor
Bernard Malamud
“Malamud’s work celebrates not a people, but the individual . . . who endures,” says the author of this examination of THE FIXER (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and other novels that establish Bernard Malamud in the forefront of living American writers. Mr. Featherstone is a graduate student at Harvard.
In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year
Points North
The Lapps, when questioned, about the possibility of attracting tourists to their country, shrug and sigh. “It’s a problem.” Yet Phoebe-Lou Adams found many enticements during her visit there, among them a ride behind a reluctant reindeer.
