Press Release in Hard Covers

...Arguments at some length are offered in its defense and additional buttressing is supplied by pertinent quotations from Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert A. Taft and even Barry Goldwater...

...Brooke does have a few good ideas to offer...

...Although at great pains to convince us that most of the Democratic party's domestic programs of the past two decades have been good and desirable, he tells us that the various Deals have been marred by one "fatal flaw...

...Essentially, though, Brooke seems too afraid of offending anyone to the right of the Communists and the left of the Birchers to have very much to say...

...We are not, however, allowed to accept this daring proposition on faith...

...The trouble is that Brooke is much better at belaboring the obvious than he is at making distinctions...

...Be that as it may, Brooke's book tries to make three main points...

...Having exhausted the trivially true, Brooke moves on to the obviously false for his third and major point...

...One may well ask what possible government measure in Brooke's opinion would not encourage the stout citizenry to help themselves...

...After the Deluge) and there certainly is a need for a coherent statement of progressive Republican principles...

...the Democratic party's lack of interest in helping people to help themselves...

...This may, of course, be the actual result of many Democratic programs, but I think Attorney-General Brooke would be hard-pressed to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that this is even the unconscious goal of most Democrats...

...Instead of what we were promised (valid solutions from a Republican viewpoint to major problems), we have a Medicare program for Democratic slogans of the '30s...

...The Democrats, according to Brooke, generally prefer to have a lot of people on the Federal dole or on government-created jobs rather than standing on their own feet...

...A "business corps" of experienced American managers teaching entrepreneurship might well do more to raise living standards in the under-developed countries than the rest of our economic aid programs...

...Moreover, if progress is to continue against all the social evils that Brooke lists, it is likely to come through the co-operation of various private and public agencies working in different spheres and on different levels...

...But this book is not it...

...The fact that this press release in hard covers has been eagerly hailed by some liberal Republicans and much of the press as a serious blueprint for strengthening a major party is, I think, a revealing commentary on the state of practical political thought in this country...

...Most progressive Republicans want to strengthen state and local governments so they can expand necessary public services...

...After writing at great length about the Republican party's unique devotion to the principle of helping people to help themselves, he makes it clear that in his view almost any government intervention in the economy, from minimum wage laws to a department of transportation, accords with the principle...

...Slum schools, for instance, might attract better teachers if higher pay were offered...

...For evidence, the reader has only to pause another moment on the jacket, where among the "Valid solutions to current problems" we are promised is the new and provocative recommendation that "unemployment" be "relieved by employment...

...Second, he insists (with even more passion) that times change...

...The fact is, however, that The Challenge of Change, is one of the least important political books since then, including the published statecraft of Harold Stassen and the Honorable John W. Bricker...

...in fact, he shows little understanding of how society works or progress comes about...

...The Republican party certainly is at a crossroads in this year 2 A.D...

...But Brooke thinks the states and cities have had their day and that only the Federal government can cope with modern problems...

...After all, the War on Poverty, perhaps the most publicized Democratic program, is explicitly designed to get people off the dole...

...He continually equates social services or public services with governmental operations, completely forgetting what no Republican should forget, that most "welfare" services in this country are private and that the private sector is by no means dead yet...

...He shows no appreciation whatever for the role of the states...

...At one point, for example, he writes that "it is time to confront a troublesome question": whether or not our major parties should be polarized along liberal and conservative lines...

...From this great law of nature he draws a corollary, namely, that the Republican party, like the Democratic party, has changed with the times in the past and must do so again...

...As a matter of fact, what proposal in this ostensibly Republican book could any Democrat (except a conservative one) possibly disagree with...

...Brooke is sealed in the Johnsonian consensus...

...He urges us to become at least as capitalistic as Kosygin and to harness the power of the profit motive to promote public goals...

...he believes them all to be popular, necessary and, considering they are run by Democrats, fairly effective...

...In his innocence, Brooke regards all "welfare state" measures from the ICC to Urban Renewal as pretty much alike...

...Nor is the above an isolated lapse by an overeager blurb writer...

...The entire opus (signed by the Republican candidate for Senator Saltonstall's seat) reads as if it were hastily written by a Harvard Young Democrat too busy to give the job his undivided attention...

...First he argues (with some passion) that two strong parties are needed for an effective two-party democracy...

...5.95 Reviewed by ROBERT SCHUETTINGER Assistant Professor of International Relations Catholic University of America The dust jacket of Massachusetts' Attorney General Edward Brooke's half-heaited bid for the intellectual vote assures us that we have in our hands "one of the most important books by a Republican since Wendell Willkie's One World...

...After much hedging and discussing of the pros and cons, Brooke states as his considered conclusion what should have been the subtitle of his book: "I can add nothing to this venerable debate...