Submitting.
Born in New York in February 1924, his father remained a Marxist in the United States and his mother a strident supporter of President Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression.
He studied at Antioch College in Ohio, a liberal university which had been the first in America to receive women and blacks. He credited the institution with shaping his fundamental humanism.
He enlisted in the US army in 1944, as an interpreter in Russian. After the liberation of Berlin, he became president of the American Veterans’ Committee of the city,in which capacity he was invited to take tea with the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had heard of the charity work his committee had done.