In 1984, George Rochberg dashed off an irritated letter to his friend, the Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt, about the Ronald Reagan presidency (“so many small people, luft menschen”) and a film he had recently viewed: “I saw an 1½ hour documentary of World War I … which stunned me with the utter stupidity of what we so euphemistically always refer to as ‘mankind.’ Such pride, arrogance, wrong-headedness, lack of understanding, brutality; such unwillingness on all sides to let go of all the falsities that govern men's behavior when they are in positions of power and authority.” As he wrote to Anhalt with some vigor, “Stick a uniform on someone, give him a high-sounding title, tell him the fate of the country … depends on him—and suddenly everything that is possible to imagine that is against humanity emerges.” Rochberg's commentary was not unusual for the time; ruminations about totalitarianism and the uncritical participation of Americans in their government were common, in part because the year of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 had finally come. Published in 1949, the book had posed serious postwar questions about how governmental control over messaging could “invade and destroy … relationships: children's belief in their parents; close friendships; the love between a man and a woman.” Indeed, Rochberg had always seen a connection between the memory holes of “Orwell's monsters” and the Nazi propaganda machine run by Joseph Goebbels. “When language no longer reflects reality,” he wrote in his journal on New Year's Day, “it becomes a tool of propagandists … and a means not only for deluding others but oneself as well.”

Rochberg was speaking not only as a cultural critic but also as someone whose life experiences and human relationships had been impacted by the political implications of mid-century nationalist rhetoric—whether Hitler's fascist decrees or Roosevelt's description of the attack on Pearl Harbor as a “day that will live in infamy.”