“An engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer, and choreographer” was how Fuller described himself; for a few other people “crackpot,” “megalomaniac,” “enfant terrible,” or “Gyro Gearloose” did as good a job more economically. Convinced that man, through technology and planning, could become superman and “save the world from itself”; that “Spaceship Earth” was a large mechanical device that needed periodic tuning; that “the entire population” of that earth “could live compactly on a properly designed Haiti and comfortably on the British Isles”; that the geodesic dome, a sphere composed of much smaller tetrahedrons, was the most rigorously logical structure around; and that he himself had “a blind date with principle,” “Bucky” flew tens of thousands of miles annually, visiting Khrushchev’s Moscow and everybody else’s college campus with equal élan, waving excitedly from behind Coke-bottle glasses for up to six hours at a time. (Annually, that is, except for the year during which he refused to speak at all, to anybody, including his wife.) His ultimate conclusion: The universe is governed by relatively few principles and its essence is not matter but design. P.S. He may have been right. In 1985, scientists discovered a spherical carbon molecule, which, because it’s reminiscent in its structure of a geodesic dome, they dubbed a “buckyball”—or, more formally, a buckminster fullerene—and which has subsequently spawned a whole new heavy-breathing branch of chemistry. KATE MILLETT (1934–)
Whatever their personal feelings about women in combat boots, you’d have thought men would be open-minded enough to admit that, for a chick, Millet had guts. An academic turned activist, and one of those unstoppable Catholics-in-revolt, she was always willing to walk it like she talked it. While Betty Friedan, the supply-sider of sisterhood, was still dressing for success and biting her nails over whether or not it was OK to have lesbians as friends, Millett was out in full drag, holding the Statue of Liberty hostage, chronicling her affairs in vivid—not to say tedious—detail, and telling women it was time to get out from underneath, not just figuratively but literally. But it all paid off eventually: Sexual Politics became a bestseller, its once-revolutionary thesis was accepted as basic feminist canon, men started having trouble getting it up, and Betty Friedan began to wonder if having your own corner office and your own coronary was really all it was cracked up to be.
Not that Millet herself necessarily got to spend much time gloating over her ideological ascendency; diagnosed as manic-depressive in 1973, she rebelled against her lithium regimen seven years later and spent the early Eighties being chased around by men in white coats, an interlude she chronicled in her 1991 memoir, The Loony Bin Trip. Today, older, wiser, and presumably back on lithium, she runs a women’s artist collective on her Christmas-tree farm in Poughkeepsie, New York. MALCOLM X (1925-1965)
The Last Angry Negro, before he got everybody to stop saying Negro, Brother Malcolm (né Malcolm Little and a.k.a. Red, Satan, Homeboy, and El-Hajj Malick El-Shabazz) was one of the first to come right out and tell the world what he really thought of honkies. Although in his days as a radical—which, in what was to become a trend, followed closely on his days as a dealer/pimp/burglar/convict/Muslim convert—Malcolm never actually did much, he managed, through sheer spleen, to scare the socks off Whitey, make Martin Luther King Jr. reach for the Excedrin, and provide a role model for a generation of black activists who were ready to put their muscle where Malcolm’s mouth had been. Whatever folks thought of his politics, everyone had to admit that Malcolm had charisma: At one point, the New York Times rated him the country’s second most popular campus speaker, after Barry Goldwater. Malcolm mellowed considerably after Elijah Muhammad booted him out of the Black Muslims (and Muhammad Ali dropped him as his personal spiritual advisor). Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after that that he was gunned down by an informal firing squad hired, various rumors had it, by the Muslims, the U.S. government, or the Red Chinese. Whatever— he was immortalized by the bestselling autobiography coauthored with Alex “Roots” Haley. A symbol of black manhood and righteous anger for the next three decades (and, some social observers have suggested, a direct progenitor of “gangsta” rap), Malcolm briefly became a matinee idol—and barely escaped being reduced to a fashion statement—when director Spike Lee based a movie on the autobiography in 1992. ERNESTO “CHE” GUEVARA (1928-1967)
The peripatetic Argentine revolutionary who became a model of radical style and, along with Huey Newton, one of the seminal dorm posters of the Sixties. Although he did have a catchy nickname (it translates, roughly, as “Hey, you”) and a way with a beret, the main points to remember are that he was the number two man, chief ideologue, and resident purist of the Cuban revolution, and that he wrote the book on guerrilla warfare. He also showed all the kids back in Great Neck that a nice middle-class boy from Buenos Aires, with a medical degree, no less, could make good defending the downtrodden in the jungles of the Third World. His split with Fidel over the latter’s cop-out to Soviet-style materialism (Che was holding out for the purity of Chinese Marxism) didn’t hurt his reputation, either; nor did going underground for a couple of years, during which, it later turned out, he was in all the right places—North Vietnam, the Congo, various Latin American hot spots. Unfortunately, his revolutionary theories were a little half-baked, and when he tried to implement them down in Bolivia, he ran smack into the Bolivian army—a colonel of which summarily executed him, thereby creating an instant martyr. HUNTER S. THOMPSON (1939-2005)
The one journalist you could trust back when you were a sophomore at the University of Colorado. A sportswriter by training and temperament (he was Raoul Duke in Rolling Stone magazine, although you may know him better as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury), Hunter, as we all called him, became a media star by inventing “gonzo journalism,” a reportorial style that was one step beyond New Journalism and two steps over the edge of the pool. Gonzo journalism revolved around drugs, violence, and the patent impossibility of Hunter’s ever meeting his deadlines, given the condition he was in. It assumed that all global events were engineered to make you laugh, make you famous, or kill you. For the record, Hunter really did fear and loathe Richard Nixon, with whom he shared the rampant paranoia of the day; once he’d finished cataloguing the various controlled substances he’d supposedly ingested to ease the pain of the 1972 presidential campaign, he was a shoo-in as the Walter Cronkite of the Haight-Ashbury set. By the end of the decade, however, the joyride was over. Dr. Gonzo, arriving in Saigon to cover the evacuation, learned that he’d just lost his job as top gonzo journalist and with it his medical insurance. Failing to convince the North Vietnamese that he’d be a major asset to their cause, he filed his expenses and caught the next plane home. It wasn’t long after that that college kids started thinking that maybe there was life outside Hunter’s hotel room; worse, history rounded a bend and they discovered John Belushi. For over a decade it was hard to think about Hunter at all, much less care what he might be freaking out over—or on—this week. But he turned out to be smarter or luckier than his copy had led us to believe; he resurfaced in the early Nineties, along with bell-bottoms and platform shoes, as the subject of three, count ’em, three, biographies, which, he pointed out, was more than Faulkner had had during his lifetime. True, he was often portrayed as a drug-addled shell, cut off from the rest of the world and mired in the past (or, as he once referred to himself, “an elderly dope fiend living out in the wilderness”). And he certainly didn’t appear to be enjoying his golden years; even his voluntary exile in a small Colorado town was disrupted by baby boomers—the very people Hunter referred to as the “Generation of Swine”—who invaded nearby Aspen, building million-dollar homes and complaining bitterly about Dr. Gonzo’s tendency to shoot firearms and set off explosives while under the influence, which he was at least daily. But when Thompson died in 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, an awful lot of people seemed to take the loss personally. Loyal supporters, including many high-profile writers and journalists, mourned the passing of an icon and, with it, a healthy sense of outrage over the hypocrisies of American life. WILHELM REICH (1897-1957)