The author of Meeting at Potsdam writes sharply and engagingly of the Kennedy-Johnson years and the "collapse of politics" after Vietnam and Watergate. For the author, lamed by polio at 14 but clever, gifted and high-spirited, political activism in the 1960s was theater, religion, psychotherapy, the thrill of life. Sounding sometimes like Henry Adams, then like a Yankee Saul Bellow (in the antic dialogues with real or phantom interlocutors), Mee shows how the burden of expectations put on political action finally proved too heavy for the nation, as for himself. L.D.
