John Foster Dulles was the exemplar of Mills’s “crackpot realism.” He was a “wise man” who, in sober and solemn tones, advocated positions that were the height of madness. “We are at a curious juncture in the history of human insanity,” Mills wrote in The Causes of World War III, his 1958 jeremiad against the growing fever for the final conflict. “In the name of realism, men are quite mad, and precisely what they call utopian is now the condition of human survival.”
