Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THE POLITICS OF MODERNITY Perhaps because the very language of political dialogue has been deteriorating, The New Leader has rarely published an essay as informing and as honest...
...As a political scientist who has read C. Wright Mills, Roche knows, as well or better than I, that the power that can be depended upon to guide the nation along that way is not the power of any political administration, whether liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic...
...Niebuhr who surely, despite the "Triumph of Primitivism" (NL, August 17), cannot really believe that the liberal God is dead...
...He begins it with my statement, "Nobody knows why Lenin picked Stalin...
...It is equally necessary to make two further points...
...Nor is there any fact to buttress Feuer's hinted deduction that Lenin had "homosexual components...
...But today the term "liberal" is freely applied to the moral neuter, the money-changer, the value defaulter, the fixer, the compromiser, the poll-taker's integer who takes the "middle way," or, God save the mark, the American way...
...or "liberating...
...It is fair also to credit Kennedy with the intellectual agility, rare among successful politicians, required to master contemporary economic thought on fiscal policy...
...In all my research I have discovered no evidence to bolster the assumption...
...These are the political realities of our global machine culture, which is currently at war with itself...
...Elsewhere, in North Vietnam and in China, power remains in the hands of the Communist ideologists, which is why we have had a confrontation in Southeast Asia and are likely to have others...
...A biographer should know everything possible but should not venture into the impossible...
...Was I acting like a liberal when, as Randolph's public relations consultant at the time, I helped him to implement the threat...
...It is fair to give President Kennedy credit for "proposing major tax reductions with the concomitant of an unbalanced budget as a technique for stimulating long-range economic growth...
...By declaring the ideological bankruptcy of liberalism and calling for a receivership, recapitalization, and fresh programming, he has almost convinced me against my better judgment that liberalism is a political philosophy, and that a "liberal" party, which we have never had, would be capable of guiding this nation into the politics of modernity...
...also something from Dr...
...Fiscal stimulus will have been purchased at too high a price if essential Federal spending on health, cities, and education is reduced because of tax priorities...
...All this is more complicated than knowing, yet it comes as close to knowing as we dare hope...
...Roche's frankness in admitting that while American liberalism has had some usefulness in the past, it is not adequate to the future, makes one wonder whether Roche is not, perhaps, a social revolutionary under the skin...
...What is a liberal...
...It is the power of the Technological Imperium, the triumvirate of industrial, political and military elites, the nonpartisan Establishment which Kennedy did not challenge when he succeeded Eisenhower, and which Goldwater cannot successfully challenge when and if he succeeds Johnson...
...It is partly because, in Feuer's terms, "every Lenin needs a Stalin," but even more because the system Lenin built needed a man of Stalin's character, and in this connection I offer a sketch of Stalin's personality...
...It is a price which President Johnson is paying with more evident enthusiasm...
...But I do not leave it at that...
...Was A. Philip Randolph a liberal in 1941 when, by threatening a Black March on Washington, he blackmailed the "liberal" FDR into issuing the executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee...
...The emphasis is on the word "know...
...San Remo, Italy Louis Fischer...
...DEAR EDITOR THE POLITICS OF MODERNITY Perhaps because the very language of political dialogue has been deteriorating, The New Leader has rarely published an essay as informing and as honest as John Roche's "Kennedy and the Politics of Modernity" (August 17...
...Columbia, New Jersey James Rorty With much of John Roche's retrospective view of the Kennedy years I agree...
...The root of the word means "free...
...Actually, I know better...
...This is a price which President Kennedy had already begun to pay before his untimely death...
...A somewhat similar Establishment came to power in Russia with Khrushchev, which is why he backed away from the Cuban confrontation and is unlikely to risk another...
...One writer, according to Feuer, finds Lenin "undersexed and later impotent...
...Here, with your permission, I should like to comment on one of Professor Feuer's paragraphs...
...I elaborate at length on the theme and show why, in my opinion (which I think cogent, and which, I am glad to see, Feuer accepts and summarizes) Lenin chose Stalin...
...LENIN I greatly appreciate Lewis S. Feuer's favorable, and to me very valuable, review of my book, The Life of Lenin (NL, August 3), which reached me here...
...Now how does anyone know such a thing...
...What, for example, is liberal about the Negro revolt...
...This is simply not the century of the liberal, any more than it is the century of the common man...
...His first policy proposals—area redevelopment, manpower retraining, increases in minimum wages, and extensions of social security benefits—cost little and reflected the natural interests of an ex-Senator from a depressed industrial region...
...When President Kennedy came somewhat belatedly to fiscal remedies, he selected the more conservative alternative before him, tax reduction...
...But I must demur on Roche's favorable evaluation of Kennedy's economic policies...
...John F. Kennedy will not have truly dispelled the myths of old economics if the conviction grows that fiscal policy means only tax reduction and never substantial increases in public spending...
...It is the century of the revolutionary, in politics as in science, technology and the arts...
...Let's have more from him on the subject...
...New York City Robert Lekachman Professor of Economics Barnard College Columbia University The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Obviously many liberals like Roche think like social revolutionaries and even, on occasion, act like social revolutionaries...
...When crises in Berlin, Laos, and Cuba impelled the President to seek additional military appropriations, he seriously contemplated raising taxes to finance them, in spite of the economy's sluggish condition, and did promise a balanced budget in the fiscal year of 1962...
...All the evidence suggests that at least up to the celebrated Yale speech on economic myths (June, 1962) Kennedy, in spite of Economics A at Harvard, believed in balanced budgets and, indeed, in many of the myths which he castigated...
...I do not know, nobody knows, why Lenin picked Stalin...
...I was also pleased to see the use he made of my material, quoted and unquoted, to launch some of his most valid points...
...An author with a sense of responsibility does not step in where angels fear to tread...
...My second point is more serious...
...In the first place President Kennedy during the bulk cf his brief tenure was a fiscal conservative...
...There are depressing signs that this is indeed the understanding of the "new economics" which is gaining public currency...
Vol. 47 • September 1964 • No. 19
