Robert Pickus

Peace organizer, pacifist, and educator; founder of the World Without War Council, Berkeley (1921-2016).

Robert Pickus was a Jewish/Quaker pacifist and peace organizer who headed peace-education work for the American Friends Service Committee and helped write the influential 1955 pamphlet Speak Truth to Power. He founded the World Without War Council in Berkeley and co-authored To End War with Robert Woito, published in the winter of 1969-70. In 1961 he launched Turn Toward Peace, an effort to coordinate non-communist peace groups — a parallel to Fuller's own World Design Science Decade initiative of the same year. Gene Keyes's 1970 essay-review "Bucky and Pick: Two Grand Designers of a World Without War" paired Pickus's To End War with Fuller's Utopia or Oblivion as two comprehensive grand strategies for interdicting war.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. Pickus's connection to R. Buckminster Fuller was thematic and generational rather than collaborative — there is no evidence the two ever met. Both launched ambitious peace initiatives in 1961: Fuller's World Design Science Decade, a ten-year student-led effort to triple the use-efficiency of world resources to serve all of humanity, and Pickus's Turn Toward Peace. Gene Keyes, writing from Southern Illinois University where Fuller was loosely affiliated, argued that both men shared a comprehensive grand strategy and a mind fast enough to "sweep in larger patterns" than their contemporaries. Fuller himself recognized the kinship, sending a handwritten letter urging Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins to publish Keyes's essay pairing them. Both efforts, Keyes noted, suffered "magnificent organizational failures."

See Also

• Buckminster Fuller and Robert Pickus — Gene Keyes's essay-review pairing the two
• Gene Keyes — author of the essay-review

Sources

• Buckminster Fuller and Robert Pickus — compiled topic page for the Gene Keyes essay