Academy-based intellectuals had had little contact with policy makers and military officials in the Eisenhower years, and anyone proposing nuclear disarmament to that point had been accused of being Soviet agents or dupes.
However, Meacham and his most active regional AFSC Peace Education Secretaries, especially Robert Gilmore of New York City and Russell Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized that even by gathering a few dozen prominent academics and writers, and bringing into the group leading non-communist pacifist thinkers like Rev.
The publication was called The Committee of Correspondence Newsletter, and it was published monthly, and later bimonthly and finally quarterly, from January 1961 through Autumn 1965, and carried articles, letters and responses from a growing circle of academics, journalists and young activists whose names would be better known in later decades.
In time the “Committee” became the “Council” because of objections from a woman's social organization that claimed prior use of the name, and the Newsletter was ultimately renamed The Correspondent, in innocent ignorance of the use of that term in divorce cases.
Fromm made contributions to help cover expenses, and two other donors were found who gave more, one a friend of Martin Peretz, then an instructor on the Harvard political science faculty, subsequently publisher of The New Republic.
Hagan, Peretz, Robert Paul Wolff, Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, Michael Walzer, Michael Maccoby, Chester Hartman and later Todd Gitlin, were all members of a political discussion group in the Harvard - Brandeis neighborhood which met and argued fitfully in those years, coalesced at times to aid a campaign such as that of Prof. H. Stuart Hughes in his run for Senate, and fell apart again, morphing later into a wing of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with a new crop of recruits.
The Seattle connection came about because David Riesman had agreed, contrary to his general rule, to write an introduction for a book edited by a friend at Doubleday, Adam Yarmolinsky, because he found it unique and charming, although he had never met the author.
A. J. Muste, and contributing editors law professor David Cavers, economist Kenneth Boulding, physicist David Inglis, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, historian H. Stuart Hughes, Marcus Raskin, Director of the Washington think tank Institute for Policy Studies, and Stewart Meacham and Robert Gilmore of the American Friends Service Committee and SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy).
Cambridge meetings were rare but drew Brandeis and Boston University professors, including Herbert Marcuse, an old colleague/antagonist of Erich Fromm's from the thirties years at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.
The period covered the last gasp of Republican foreign policy (i.e. John Foster Dulles), the entire Kennedy presidency with its Central Intelligence Agency invasion of Cuba, its Berlin crisis, its battles over a test ban treaty with Russia, the resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and showdown with Khrushchev, the Kennedy assassination and the beginning of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, and the growing involvement in Vietnam, as well as the civil rights battles leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.