Courtesy Swarthmore Peace Collection

n case you missed the announcement in the last issue of this magazine, David McReynolds, staffer in the WRL National Office since 1960, retired this past Jan. 1. David keeps saying, "Radicals don't actually retire," and certainly he'll continue to be a prominent and important presence in the League. But 38 years is a long time, and many people don't remember WRL without David on the staff. His departure is a major event in the pacifist community, which we're marking with this issue of the Nonviolent Activist (see stories, pages 4 and 6) and with our gala celebration of his career this coming May 1

There's no one quite like David. The office isn't the same without him. Meetings aren't the same without him. Now we find ourselves thinking about him and appreciating him in ways we never made explicit when he was part of our everyday work life. While so many of his peers moved to positions with more money or more security or more prominence in the world beyond the peace movement, David stuck with WRL and secular pacifism because he truly believed (and still does believe) in the power of nonviolence.

And we truly believed in David. We believed in him because of the political depth he brought to our discussions, because he could always see the forest as well as the trees, because his internationalist vision and class analysis helped us see the connections between militarism at home and militarism abroad, and because beyond the confines of WRL his eloquence helped others see those connections.

We also enjoyed him. We relished the fact that he is always David, that the depth of his commitment has never buried his idiosyncrasies. Who else would come back from a trip to the Soviet Union with half of his slides showing cats of all shapes and sizes? Who else could respond with intelligence and depth of argument at the spur of the moment to any media person who calls on any topic: former Yugoslavia, Iraq, government spending priorities, or the evolution of the United States from a small nation with an isolationist foreign policy and anti-militarist traditions to the status of sole superpower with the world's largest standing army and a nuclear arsenal capable of global holocaust? Who else would write-in the most controversial article the Nonviolent Activist has ever printed-a passionate argument against vegetarianism? None of us always agreed with David; often enough, all of us disagreed with him. But if you disagreed with him, you had to be prepared to back up your position, because he was always ready to back his up.

For all those reasons-and because to many in the world outside WRL David was WRL-his retirement is the end of an era. Now, those of us to whom the next era of WRL's legacy has been entrusted will work extra hard to honor the foundation laid so well by David (and many others) in the struggle for a just and peaceful world.