Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

INTERNATIONAL radicalism has lost its spiritual godfather. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, the third Earl Russell, is dead.

Russell was a troublemaker, the classic incarnation of Effete Intellectual, Snobdom. He was the mouthpiece of a moral conscience that ignored national and diplomatic boundaries, no blessing to the men of power throughout the world. No man more clearly understood Machiavelli's aphorism that "the manner in which man lives is so different from the manner in which he ought to live," and no man then proceeded to such un-Machiavellian conclusions.

For Russell, more surely than any great thinker of our day, loved man and grieved for his folly. When he committed his feelings to paper-"Echoes of crics of pain revererate in my heart" -no one laughed. Moral statements having become the property of unct?ous rhetoricians and pious coniving presidents, we tend to hear them with skepticism and anger. Russell's words, however, rang true to almost everyone who heard, because they were complemented by a life style that was manifestly gentle, courageous, and loving.

Russell's life was not studded with the events that fill history texts, the sweeping, panoramic strokes of dashing explorers and conquering generals. His understanded manner thinly veiled an unshakable denunciation of the repressive and life-taking institutions that flourish under the reign of history makers. He was a pacifist, an internationalist, a socialist, again, a humanist long before those stances were fashionable or, indeed, safe.

In a sense, Russell is a martyr for our age. His awesome mathematical mind imbued him with a clean and sharp rational perspective from which he watched the cancerous aberration of power politics with uncomprehending shock. The failure of this compassionate, unassuming, and eminently sensible man to make more than a dent in the unsentimental machinery of world relations-even our most erudite president. John Kennedy, saw him as a quaint,slightly mad thought-peddlar-personifies the impasse that the youth culture's "na?ve" brand of polities crashes against. We should remember Bertrand Russell, for his disappointment is our tragedy.