From a New York Times column by Michelle Goldberg headlined “Requiem for a Liberal Giant”:

There’s an indelible scene in Todd Gitlin’s 1987 book “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage,” in which he and other leaders of Students for a Democratic Society — the leading organization of what was called the New Left — meet with old guard democratic socialists from the journal Dissent. The encounter is worthy of a play; it’s pregnant with both unfulfilled longing for connection and exasperated contempt. “We were scarred, they untouched,” wrote Dissent’s founding editor, Irving Howe. “We bore marks of ‘corrosion and distrust,’ they looked forward to clusterings of fraternity.”

From a New York Times obit by Katharine Q. Seelye headlined “Todd Gitlin, a Voice and Critic of the New Left, Dies at 79”:

Todd Gitlin, whose immersion in the student rebellions of the 1960s laid the foundation for his later work as a writer, a cultural historian and both a voice and a critic of the left, died on Saturday. in Pittsfield, Mass….