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Of the three, I expect I will have to defend the postmodernist claim, because the initial reaction of a twenty-first-century reader might well be how curiously old-fashioned Hilary Conroy’s approach is. I will address briefly the people’s and American-Hegelian aspects and then the matter of old/new at more length.
Hilary Conroy resembles the Howard Zinn who says he would rather research the relatively few times people have stood impressively for peace and justice than add to the weight of research on the many times the Establishment has dominated. Unlike Zinn, however, Conroy characteristically digs up what one might call actively neutral people. The word “active” is important, because my father’s interest involves neutralism not as passivity or a staying out, but as a dynamic situation from which free and good things might flow. In a way, his insistence on active here parallels Gandhi’s use of the word. Gandhi insisted that his method of satyagraha did not refer to passive resistance but to active nonviolence. Yet Conroy is not so much a militant as Gandhi. In Conroy’s embrace of neutrality, he more closely approaches Albert Camus, who often showed us possibilities for an individual’s mediating between competing sides and bringing together people across separations—such as communists and anticommunists or the French and the Germans, Algerians, or Vietnamese. All this, for Camus or Conroy, occurs without embracing an ideology. A powerful application of this actively neutral philosophy would come in 1962–1963, when my father supported John F. Kennedy’s Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles in his proposed mission to see if neutralization might avoid war and provide new uncharted opportunities for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Apparently, the nascent national security apparatus nixed the plan, as documented in Gareth Porter’s, The Perils of Dominance (2005).1