Short answers, pulled from the story.
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a German-American philosopher and political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He is best known for One-Dimensional Man (1964) and Eros and Civilization (1955), and for becoming the pre-eminent theorist of the New Left student movements in the 1960s and 1970s.
In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse argued that advanced capitalist societies create false needs and false consciousness geared to commodity consumption, absorbing the working class into the system and eliminating the capacity for critical dissent. He wrote that people find their identity in objects like their automobile and household equipment, making them extensions of what they own.
Repressive tolerance, outlined in Marcuse's 1965 essay of the same name, is his argument that permitting repressive speech under the guise of neutral tolerance silences marginalized voices and props up existing power structures. He called for "liberating tolerance," defined as intolerance of right-wing movements and toleration of left-wing ones.
During World War II, Marcuse worked for the US Office of War Information and then, from March 1943, the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. He served as senior analyst in the Central European Section and was regarded by colleagues as the leading analyst on Germany. After the OSS dissolved in 1945, he headed the Central European section at the US Department of State.
The media applied the title because Marcuse's Marxist scholarship and his willingness to speak at student protests made him the leading intellectual voice of the New Left student movements in the 1960s in the United States, West Germany, and France. Marcuse himself deflected the label, saying it would have been more accurate to call him the grandfather of the New Left.
Marcuse's ashes were buried in the Dorotheenstadtischer cemetery in Berlin in 2003, after being rediscovered in the United States. He had died on the 29th of July, 1979, in Germany, ten days after his eighty-first birthday.