It is with sadness that we report the passing of Melvin J. Lasky, prolific author, ardent anti-Communist, indefatigable and much beloved editor. A native New Yorker, Mel was graduated from City College in New York in the same class as Irving Kristol and Seymour Martin Lipset. He was posted to Berlin in World War II, and it was there that he made his early career, starting the magazine Der Monat (The Month) soon after the war ended.

Der Monat was one of several magazines funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization created by more than one hundred European and American intellectuals in 1950 to wage war—a war of ideas—against Stalinism and totalitarian ideology. The Congress was a liberal organization, but one uncorrupted by the virus of Communist fellow-traveling. Mel had a distinguished career in Berlin editing Der Monat, but he really came into his own when he moved to London in the late Fifties t ...

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