Revolution

“This is the revolution of the new generation,” he wrote. “It is both necessary and inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all people in America.”

The establishment thought him a fool. Newsweek’s Stewart Alsop called the book “scary mush”, while Harvard academic Charles Fried, who later became president Reagan’s solicitor general, scorned Reich’s “fascination with anything that will procure novelty on the cheap.” On the left, activists disparaged Reich’s faith in painless change. Around the same time “Greening” was published, the Black Power movement was at its height and antiwar activist Tom Hayden was advocating a nationwide network of “liberated zones”, in constant battle with government forces.

But young people – and some older ones – were inspired by Reich’s book, with one fan letter reading, “Right on. You’ve managed to put into words what we have known for a long time.” Garry Trudeau introduced Reich as “Professor Green” for his Doonesbury comic. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner would credit Reich with persuading him to collaborate on an interview with the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.

“I thought his enthusiasm a little ... naive, but, what the hell,” Wenner wrote of the 1972 meeting with Garcia. “God knows, Charles ‘Consciousness III’ Reich Meets Jerry ‘Captain Trips’ Garcia could turn into something of its own.”

Many lives were changed by “The Greening of America”, including Reich’s. Uncomfortable with fame, he left Yale in 1974 and moved to San Francisco. He let his hair grow longer and began having relationships with men. In his 1976 memoir “The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef”, he wrote that he had sensed he was gay since childhood.

“I think I feared most the discovery and exposure of my secrets,” wrote Reich, who is survived by his nephew and by his niece, Alice Reich.

Reich was born in New York City in 1928, an awkward child who grew up in an affluent household, attended progressive private schools and graduated from a top liberal arts college, Oberlin University. Idealistic, but unfocused, Reich enrolled in Yale Law School after a family friend convinced him that the legal profession was a path to public leadership.

Reich’s 20s and 30s were a giant step from Consciousness II to Consciousness III. A gifted legal thinker, he became editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal, clerked for (and idolized) Supreme Court Justice Hugh Black and was hired by a top Washington firm, Arnold, Fortas & Power. In Washington in the 1950s, he was part of “a world which all of us believed to be at the center, and yet typical, of American life.”