Community.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Vietnam conflict - Special Anniversary Section: Who We Are; What We Believe; Why We Believe It

This year is our 20th anniversary and we plan to celebrate the event in a variety, of ways. In this issue, there is a special section of excerpts from what we feel are some of our best or most representative articles from our first twenty years. Next month, there will be a section in which our former editors, including Jonathan Alter, Nicholas Lemann, Walter Shapiro, Mickey Kaus, James Fallows, and Michael Kinsley, tell us how they would like to change the Monthly's "gospel," the ideas about process and policy that have become identified with this magazine, or otherwise modify our approach. Susbsequent issues will include similar special features. We've divided this anniversary supplement into five sections, the first being Community.

The restoration of the American sense of community has been behind many of the causes that the Monthly has championed. We have challenged the forces that divide and separate-from snobbery to credentialism to the adversary system of law and the special interest groups symbolized by PACs. We have deplored the decline of institutions like the public schools that used to bring people together and the resulting isolation of the affluent. We want the rich to do their part by sharing the burden of military service. And we don't want them to take more than their fair share, which is why we oppose Social Security for the wealthy paid for by the taxes of the working poor.

We support radical reform of public education, not only so that the schools will provide a good education for all, including the poor children who need it most, but will encourage children from different social classes to come together. This belief in breaking down class barriers underlies our support for a national service draft that will provide manpower for the military and for the many urgent civilian tasks that face the nation, ftom caring for the elderly to building roads and cleaning up the environment.

From Tilting at Windmills (Addison -Wesley, $18.95, 1988).

Why we were mired in the tragedy of Vietnam was the central question facing the nation as we began publishing The Washington Monthly in January 1969. The war dominated our table of contents for the next several years and led to the formulation of many of the principles that continue to dominate it today.

One theme that soon emerged was the importance of speaking up and listening down. Subordinates in government must speak up, to confront their superiors with bad news, and the people in...