THE LIBERAL RETREAT

...Fearful of losing all contact with those whom it helped into public office, the organization has sometimes remained silent when it should have spoken out, failed to exploit issues that eventually became great popular campaigns, muffled positions that were deemed "embarrassing" by particular candidates...

...But Mr...

...it also placed his Administration in an even more defensive posture with respect to the Communist issue at home...

...In part, of course, the optimism was unjustified by reality...

...We live in a time when most of our best political men—whether they call themselves Republicans, as John Sherman Cooper does, or Democrats, as Hubert Humphrey does—are torn and troubled because the circumstances of our politics prevent them from being "to thine own self true...

...The liberal landscape did not appear much more promising when one scrutinized the state of Americans for Democratic Action...

...To the orthodox Republican commentators and politi-cos who had so long protected a prize property, President Eisenhower now ceased to be indispensable...

...Without ADA American politics would have been far duller and shallower than it has been during this time of accommodation...

...Truman spent his last two years in office leading the democratic resistance to a Communist assault abroad while seeking to prove to his countrymen that he was neither a captive nor an agent of Communism at home...

...It seems to me we are paying far too high a price for the alleged stability we have achieved under a system in which hypocrisy and deceit are the required rituals of political behavior...

...There have been fewer positive victories...

...Eisenhower countered Stevenson's profound sense of doubt with the cliches of certainty...

...It was a leading factor in the rout of the U.S...

...Despite all the battles won, all the outposts captured, all the conservatives vanquished, the condition of anything that might be described as a movement of organized liberalism in the United States was inescapably poor...

...It is also questionable whether any man could repeat what was indisputably Stevenson's moral victory of 1952...

...Far more consequential is the loss of spirit among those who have never been bought...

...And it was never quite the same after the 1952 debacle...

...he was counseled to concentrate on such "bread-and-butter" issues as the high cost of living, but unhappily the Democrats were no more prepared than the Republicans to advocate the kind of economic controls that might have given meaning to the debate...

...Conceivably only the threat of a third party effort could achieve that result and, as the disastrous Wallace experiment proved, such a threat has no meaning unless it has the support of organized labor...

...Neither will we make honest men of our political spokesmen as long as they must live two lives...

...ADA has become primarily a meeting ground for those with sentimental ties to the liberal and radical past, a sort of Alumni Association that recruits too few of its members from more recent liberal classes...

...Now, suddenly, exile was over, the conservatives were routed, and a new crew of liberal militants catapulted into office...

...When an industry-union wage agreement results in a sudden, arbitrary increase in the price of milk, many thousands are caught in what they justly view as a squeeze...

...Harry Truman was the product of a rough political machine...

...Indeed, such a possibility would be far less remote if it were not for the total failure of the Republicans to make any serious effort to enfranchise the Southern Negro, and to make his enfranchisement a turning point in Southern politics...

...Not until late—¦ too late—in his Administration did he begin to suspect that there was no fatal contradiction between brain power and political power...

...Was it possible that no man could successfully "talk sense" to the American people...

...Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi retained his seat, his seniority, and his chairmanship of a major Senate committee...

...Has it a program commensurate with its responsibilities...

...The Democratic breakthrough was spectacular...

...Yet there may well have been deeper meaning in the steady collapse of the Eisenhower mythology...

...It was a major whipping-boy of the 1952 campaign because some of Mr...

...It has also exercised an effective veto power on the ambitions of numerous political careerists whose records it has systematically exposed...

...Let it not be forgotten, however, that the federal loyalty program and all the cruel excesses associated with it began in the time of Mr...

...Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, was a founder of Americans for Democratic Action.—The Editors...

...but what they really believe, I think, is not that the initials ADA are anathema to the voters, but that the spirit of forthright liberalism which its initials evoke is somehow irreconcilable with the needs of ambitious Democratic candidates...

...Jimmy Hoffa is a shabby vulgarization of unionism...

...Would any man be able to overcome the massive, concentrated power of television and press once the White House was occupied by a Republican —any Republican...

...In the course of this exercise he finally laid to rest the illusion that there was any serious link between Mr...

...alliance that has lost nearly all validity...

...Indeed, any mature labor leadership ought to re-examine critically the self-imposed alienation of many of the large unions from ADA—and imagine what ADA might have been if it had had full-fledged labor support...

...Because of the identity of many of its founding fathers, ADA was often called a "government-in-exile...

...Such men will never be able to live with themselves in full harmony as long as the unrealistic division endures...

...The voting returns were plain enough...

...One would need far more detailed study of individual contests to determine whether an ADA endorsement hurts a candidate more than it helps him, as so many Democrats have now concluded...

...Should a reinvigorated liberal-labor alliance prevail within the Democratic Party, this might well mean the launching of a third party project by the disaffected Dixiecrats...

...I have no vested interest in ADA's continuance, and neither do most of the men who give their time and energy to the service of the organization...

...ADA may similarly boast that it spoke out clearly and forthrightly against McCarthyism in a time when respectable political leaders were finding all manner of excuses for maintaining an undignified silence...

...He had, after all, won the nomination after a bitter struggle with the conservative troops rallied under the Taft banner...

...Unfortunately, the center has become so thronged that one can hardly recognize the faces in the crowd...

...Men continued to say that "Ike is a good guy," but the evidence mounted that he was unlikely to produce anything new in any sphere...

...But I do not intend to add my voice to those who seek to blame the frustrations of liberal man on the ineptitudes or inadequacies of ADA...

...so did others only a trifle less obnoxious and clamorous in their confidence that they belonged to a master race...

...Democrats generally capitulated to what they accepted to be the tone of the times...

...But a recognition of these achievements scarcely justifies the fashioning of any legend of Mr...

...But the architects of this non-aggression pact are not immortal, and younger men may eventually refuse to extend it...

...Was labor leadership so alienated from its members that it could no longer be taken seriously as a political force...

...By the end of 1952 the visions of resurgence had crumbled...

...It had been increasingly unable to secure the public blessing of well-known political figures, including many who felt a sense of identity with its program...

...Now there are too few moments when that tradition is reaffirmed...

...Truman as liberal leader...

...In the old house-ad line of the liberal weeklies, its influence has been far greater than the subscription rolls would indicate...

...In an age when the conflict over civil rights has become so central to our political future, I do not exclude the possibility, dim though it may seem at this time, of a complete reshuffling in which the Republican Party would become the vehicle of liberal political endeavor...

...But that is hardly any reason for the rest of us to let their ordeal govern our lives...

...They have, after all, but one life to give for the Presidency...

...They were deftly exploited by such apostles of rectitude as Sherman Adams and they confronted Stevenson with the insoluble dilemma of defending or disowning the stains of a Democratic era...

...This was most painfully true of his conduct of domestic affairs...

...the Republican rout was almost total...

...That ADA could have been effectively smeared as "pro-Communist" or "soft on Communism" is, among other things, a commentary on the sad incapacity and/or mendacity of a large section of the press in the long night of the McCarthy miseries...

...But Mr...

...New York state was one of the few places where the trend was reversed, but there was little comfort for the Republican faithful in this news...

...But it seems to me the proposition is worthy of consideration by any labor leader who takes a serious view of politics...

...Though it is hard to see how the result could have been different, the "pros" eagerly selected ADA as their scapegoat and the amateurs were never quite capable of answering back...

...It had signally failed to inspire the allegiance of any substantial number of young men and women...

...That ADA had recorded significant achievements in its decade of existence was beyond dispute...

...No doubt Stevenson's defeat helped shape the cynicism and withdrawal that marked the years immediately afterward...

...His response to the Korean crisis was instinctive, courageous, and unwavering, just as had been his conduct when the Russian threat to Greece and Turkey became acute in 1947...

...It has given them support, encouragement, a platform from which to speak, a refuge to which they could turn...

...In the early years of his Administration he betrayed an insistent distrust of any men who came bearing unconventional ideas...

...but there is a day of reckoning for all forms of self-deception...

...But such innovators are rare indeed on both sides...

...But the weakness and irresolution he soon manifested in combat—or non-combat—with McCarthy dimmed these extravagant hopes...

...George Gallup, and the Democratic Congressional landslide that accompanied his victory...

...he fully and freely associated himself with the cause of each Republican stalwart, as well as with the most ancient economic doctrines of Hoover Republicanism...

...Then, suddenly, the Eisenhower honeymoon ended...

...But in recent years "compromise" has become almost an end in itself, and it is the liberal who is deemed extremist when he voices any strength of conviction...

...But since it was no less hostile to the intolerance of the McCarthy dogma than it was to the Communist brand of totalitarianism, it swiftly evoked the combined fury of the Messrs...

...Has it the will and the power to realize the promises implicit in its rhetoric—can it end the threat of depression, eliminate poverty, build a society as democratic in its economic relations as in its political forms...

...Nelson Rockefeller had assiduously withheld any commitment to national or international Republican policies...

...on economic issues the Catholic vote in Congress is generally more liberal than that of the President...

...Had the McCarthy distortion of liberalism captivated so large a section of the electorate that no man suspected of liberal associations could function effectively in the political arena...

...Too often in the past many chieftains of labor have looked derisively at the liberal movement, as if suggesting that the eggheads were pretty innocent fellows who had never met a union payroll and could not conceivably matter much on the battlefields of politics...

...He gave his all to the Republican flag, and it was not enough...

...There is some reason to doubt that the South will risk all its perquisites of Congressional seniority by another comparable rebellion...

...The hopes were high, the challenge seemed clear...

...This is an elegant but unconvincing rationale for the continuance of an Will It Come to This...

...It is such episodes, duplicated annually in so many areas, that incite the cry of "a plague on both your houses...

...There was a flurry of excitement when the President appeared likely to bow out of the 1956 race after a succession of physical reversals...

...But for nearly two years the White House time and again retreated under fire...

...Truman...

...they can be overcome...

...A press that had been so often muted in deference to the sanctity of the symbol began to murmur querulously...

...Johnson himself was described by columnist William S. White, who has long served as carrier of the Johnson message to the masses, as still entirely convinced that "the quiet tone and the centrist policy are the facts of political life...

...Many suggested that the result was in no way a repudiation of the Eisenhower Administration, which seemed like another way of saying that Mr...

...Such a concept is an absurdity in America...

...Eisenhower could not be held accountable for any of the policies and programs of the government he nominally headed...

...It does not understand what Mr...

...Similarly, there is no evidence that the Catholic vote is a monolithic mass of conservatism...

...Stevenson himself, cursed by history with the misfortune of running twice against the nation's great-white-father symbol, never quite recaptured in 1956 the style and spirit of his first campaign...

...One might say that Mr...

...Truman was something less than a resolute, adventurous liberal crusader...

...It might even be said that each party would still represent a coalition, but each coalition would be united by certain recognizable common denominators of belief...

...It was a caucus organized and run by ADA that was primarily responsible for the success of Hubert Humphrey's fight for a clear-cut civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic Convention...

...it was instrumental in unfolding the truth about the last major domestic Communist enterprise—the Communist-run Progressive Party which bewitched Henry Wallace into running as its candidate for President...

...In an age when the quest for human equality has become our central domestic concern, this union of incompatibles becomes increasingly grotesque...

...For labor has found itself increasingly isolated from the independent electorate, and, on occasion, from its own rank-and-file...

...Probably ADA did more than any other single agency to expose the frauds and the fallacies, the double-think and double-standards through which the Communists tried to entrap American liberals in the late 1940's as they had in the mid-1930's...

...But Southern conservatism is an invaluable asset...

...In the course of its lifetime it has enrolled at one time or another—but not simultaneously—upward of 50,000 Americans, and successfully solicited the sympathy of a good many more for particular projects...

...There is no shortage of great themes for political combat, but rather a loss of nerve among most of our political warriors...

...But neither can I lightly discount the wide areas in which "business unionism" finds itself in daily collusion and cohabitation with the industry in which it happens to be located, and utterly unmindful of the larger considerations which ought to unite it with both the disorganized of the North and the disfranchised of the South...

...On the one hand, the leadership of the Democratic Congressional delegation continued to rest with Senator Lyndon Johnson and Congressman Sam Rayburn, the two Texans who have long prided themselves on their ability to repress what they deem the excessive militancy of such men as Senators Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas...

...Whatever his virtues and vices, Mr...

...the style of his campaign was set in his plea for dissent before the American Legion...

...Perhaps it is entirely healthy and even defensible for many middle-aged men to devote all their days and nights to contemplation of their Presidential chances, even in this agonized interval...

...It has also provided an initial home for a number of men who were seeking entry into political life but found themselves temporarily thwarted by the condition of the political machines in their areas...

...I am aware of the argument that a clear-cut political realignment would create the peril of French fragmentation...

...the scope of the liberal gain was massive...

...This was a solid accomplishment, too often cynically forgotten by those who have tried to depict ADA as a creature of sly subversion...

...There was no indication that either Johnson or Rayburn interpreted the results as any form of rebuke to their long records of passivity and their quiet partnership with Mr...

...but were there any sure signs that their triumphs constituted something more memorable than a big day in their own lives...

...The nation had unmistakably swung to the left...

...that the notorious Smith Act prosecutions—in which we found ourselves prosecuting men not for what they did but for what they dreamed of doing—were undertaken by Attorney General Tom Clark in the same epoch under a statute approved by Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...More basically they are the product of three major tendencies in recent years: the McCarthy assault, the cult of "moderation" which developed in its aftermath, and the flight from politics that has been at least partially induced by those phenomena...

...Out of the Auto Workers Union has come a Walter Reuther, just as Paul Hoffman emerged from the auto industry, each apparently capable of seeing beyond the narrow horizons of the contract negotiation...

...the image of him as a pillar of decency had been sufficiently strong to persuade some liberals four years earlier that he would make an exemplary candidate on the Democratic ticket...

...it was hard to detect in him any deep impulses of Wilsonian idealism or the tough-minded pragmatism of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...such phenomena are partially symptoms of the nouveau riche union bloc...

...It put the Communists out of business in many places...

...its undergraduate affiliate, Students for Democratic Action, seemed to be forever quarreling with what it regarded as the hand of restraint imposed by the elders...

...Given the level of press behavior and the comatose state of much of the nation, it is questionable whether anything Stevenson could have done would have substantially reduced the margin of defeat...

...The Communist aggression that began in Korea in June, 1950, destroyed any chance for domestic innovation...

...Too many people have come to believe, with some documentation, that "the big union" is now as contemptuous of any large public interest as the entrenched corporation, and that much of our inflationary problem represents a tacit conspiracy between these organized forces...

...McCarthy, Nixon, and all their lesser imitations...

...The mood of defeatism was lightened for some, of course, by the great expectations promoted by the Eisenhower publicists...

...he was as liable as any backward Republican to view such characters as "longhairs," and the exodus of New Dealers from government began soon after he took office...

...The yearning for change was nationwide...

...it was as if his fresh words had already become cliches...

...It gives assurance that all interests and policies are weighed and considered within the party before interparty issues are framed...

...Stevenson's close associates—among them Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Wilson Wyatt—had undeniable ADA links...

...I can hardly document the point, but it is my profound suspicion that, by the time of the 1958 Congressional elections, Dwight D. Eisenhower had become something of a fabulous—if still beloved—bore...

...the build-up of General Eisenhower as savior represented the best promotion campaign that money could buy...

...four years later the originality of phrase and manner that distinguished his initial effort had acquired a familiar sound...

...Truman was also the victim of circumstances beyond his control...

...but no union voice is raised to ask whether the price rise is warranted or even to acknowledge that the price of milk has any relevance to the union's operations...

...some of them are taking far greater personal risks in the battle for decency than any Northern liberal...

...Granted the complexities created by ADA's own schizoid structure— neither political party nor formal caucus within either party—its difficulties cannot be that easily defined...

...Now we are all more than a decade older, perhaps a trifle wiser, and, looking back over the ten years that have elapsed, we may well ponder how the opportunities were squandered, the "mandate" so largely ignored...

...It is not the corruption and double-dealing unveiled by the McClellan Committee that matters most...

...The politics of labor suffers from the same faceless-ness and aimlessness that pervade the old party organizations...

...The fact remains that he pleaded plaintively and at length for a Republican sweep...

...there could be no third term...

...At the time of its formation in 1947 ADA was widely heralded as the beginning of a momentous liberal-labor coalition, designed not only to frustrate the Communist effort to infiltrate and manipulate American liberalism, but to provide the base for a major new political thrust by independent liberal and union forces...

...The scandals that beset the Truman Administration plagued Stevenson throughout the long autumn...

...it was heavily pop ulated with former New Dealers who had found life uncongenial in the aggressively anti-intellectual atmosphere of the early Truman regime...

...But the center has proved less than vital, and the left is too often indistinguishable from the center...

...His surrenders to McCarthy and his equivocation in the battle for civil rights had all occurred before his re-election...

...Eisenhower...

...In these great moments, and in his espousal of such efforts as the Point Four program for American aid to underprivileged nations, Mr...

...The unhappy truth is that, as of the moment of the liberal landslide of 1958, ADA still bore little resemblance to the massive liberal-labor alliance envisaged by its founders...

...Many individual politicians who called themselves liberal had won elections...

...With Stevenson's defeat came demoralization in many liberal areas...

...No liberal party—and no conservative party—can hope to impose a doctrinaire will without some appreciation of both the variables and vagaries of our complex national and local life...

...They shunned new ideas, shared in the general levity about "eggheads," and increasingly tried to prove that they were as respectable and uncreative as their adversaries...

...Yet the grip of the Southern bloc daily dilutes that strength...

...The strongest case that had been made for him by such able supporters as August Heckscher, Jr., then chief editorial writer of the New York Herald Tribune and articulate spokesman of "modern Republicanism" in the pages of that journal, was that Eisenhower's election would somehow cool the passions and smother the prejudices stirred by the McCarthy crusade...

...To many young men and women his campaign that year must seem like their last encounter with the wine of political idealism...

...Much of the American press never fully perceived or acknowledged the irony...

...And before I am quoted out of context, let me hasten to add that I am not proposing a mass expulsion of Southern Democrats and Northern Catholics from Democratic ranks...

...In A Democrat Looks at His Party, Dean Acheson offered a quiet case for the continued duality of the Democratic organization: "The most conservative leaders in the party come from the South...

...I neither discount nor deride what ADA has done, especially in contrast with the disorganized futility and studied inertia that have pervaded much of both the intellectual and labor world...

...With all of that, ADA could not be described in that 1958 hour of national liberal triumph as the fulfillment of its founders' dream...

...Yet now, somewhat more than a decade after its birth, ADA still looms infinitely larger in the dark imaginings of its critics than it does in real life...

...With the Democratic victory in the 1948 elections, American liberalism returned to power...

...But is the left equal to the tasks imposed on it...

...He was generally depicted as a man of good will and generous impulse...

...In subsequent years it has been commonplace to identify the attack on our domestic freedoms with the name of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...

...Most of the press obediently accepted the dictum that there was no office more hospitable to convalescence than the Presidency, particularly when the patient happened to be a Republican...

...No one can state with any confidence that any candidate could have defeated Dwight D. Eisenhower that year...

...The Democratic condition is rendered worse by the theory advanced in some places that the party must woo back those legions of conservative Catholic voters who began to defect as far back as 1940, and whose symbol of rectitude remains Joseph R. McCarthy...

...Can the Fair Deal succeed where the New Deal failed...

...Eisenhower and what some of his more liberal adherents have described as "Eisenhower Republicanism...

...there were eminent Catholics resisting McCarthyism long before many men of other faiths had found their voices...

...conceivably he would have done better than many of his fallen brethren if his name had appeared on the ballot...

...In a major sense, the election altered the relationship of political forces in America," Ross continued...

...yet in a sense he has filled a vacuum created by the general decline of union morale...

...But that it had fallen far short of the expectations of its creators was equally clear...

...Although multitudes of workers—especially in the South—remain unorganized, too many of labor's giants now seem as dedicated to business as usual as the men they meet across the bargaining table, and as hostile to innovation...

...On this and a number of other issues ADA has provided the stimulus of a sort of American Fabian society...

...Rather I think the moment is approaching for a full-scale reappraisal of whether the present political divisions in the country make any sense, and whether there can be any great liberal revival so long as liberalism remains essentially wedded to that divided house called the Democratic Party...

...I happen to think the equation is often too capriciously drawn, and that corporate power, bulwarked by the massive propaganda institutions at its command, is too carelessly likened to the strength of the union machines...

...To the conventional political animal, ADA somehow signifies "trouble...

...I have been told that Stevenson's own disposition was to stress the failures and follies of Administration foreign policy...

...To judge by nearly all the public evidence, liberalism and independence had carried the day...

...but his bold call for the suspension of nuclear tests was viewed with dismay by most of "the pros...

...There are many Southern Democrats groping earnestly for an honorable resolution of the desegregation conflict...

...Stevenson told a country weary of hot war in Korea and cold war in the world that there were no quick and easy solutions— and many Americans preferred to believe there were...

...Although it had many individual members in California and other western states, it had few flourishing chapters west of the Mississippi...

...he knew it, and reveled in the knowledge...

...It is time for a new beginning...

...Such a man was hardly likely to inspire a younger generation or to impart new dimensions of nobility and purpose to the cause of liberalism...

...But there were differences now...

...did his failure mean that humility to the point of self-deprecation was a fatal disqualification for public office...

...Truman was a robust, spirited figure who labored long and hard in a world he never made...

...Adlai Stevenson campaigned valiantly and unconventionally, creating a sense that there was a new voice abroad in the land...

...As long as the present soggy stalemate lasts, as long as many men feel that the muddle way is the road to the White House, as long as ADA is viewed as a band of pariahs by many figures in the Democratic community, one will find it difficult to tell the beat generation that it ought to stop pouting and start shouting...

...Nixon would call the "rules of the game...

...This sometimes causes impatience among Northern liberals...

...Many factors may contribute to this paralysis, perhaps most important of all the unspoken but continuing arrangement between conservative Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats that dominates so much of the business of Congress and provides so many comforts and conveniences for those on both sides...

...It seems to me far from demonstrated that ADA is in truth the "kiss of death" to any aspiring politician, as the backroom strategists like to contend...

...Many of his advisers were plainly convinced that a repetition of his lofty tactics would be disastrous...

...It had received steadily less, rather than more, financial support from major labor unions...

...I do visualize a political upheaval in which men of broadly parallel ideas would find themselves in the same structure, capable of communicating with each other and feeling something more than Senatorial courtesy about each other's ideas...

...Certainly it had swiftly and decisively attained (with the help of some monumental Communist blunders at home and abroad) one of its avowed objectives...

...At the moment there is unquestionably a vastly higher percentage of liberal strength within the Democratic Party...

...But we should not be intimidated by the prospect of a bolt for it is probably only such a cleavage that can pave the way for more authentic political alignments...

...If there were those who feared that ADA's endorsement might somehow be prejudicial to them, there were others who had learned that ADA could effectively draw distinctions that many independent voters recognized...

...Time and again Stevenson said what he believed in places where it seemed least expedient for him to do so...

...To that possibility one can only respond that the last time a Democrat reached the White House it was in the face of two third-party movements, one sponsored by the Dixiecrats and the other by the Communists...

...Stagnation and stalemate seemed to be the essential characteristics of political life...

...That many of them believe this is beyond dispute...

...In 1949 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote with grand expectations of the emergence of a "vital center," alternately known as "the non-Communist left," in the United States...

...But he was incapable of giving continuity or new direction to the movement of liberalism...

...There will always be need for areas of compromise within our political system...

...It had been in eclipse (even though nominally in office) for nearly a decade— its decline began with the outbreak of war in 1939 and reached its low point with the Republican sweep of 1946...

...Within the broadly defined categories of "liberal" and "conservative," men would, I think, find their identities...

...So wrote Irwin Ross in Strategy for Liberals early in 1949, in the jubilant aftermath of Harry Truman's remarkable triumph over Thomas E. Dewey and Dr...

...David Dubinsky, Walter Reuther, James Carey (and Hugo Ernst until his death) have been almost alone in the constancy of their devotion...

...I do not like to deprive liberals of the sense of absolute power they may fleetingly achieve when they read William Buckley's or Westbrook Pegler's or David Lawrence's accounts of ADA's dominance of the politics and culture of the country...

...But I am not awed by the danger...

...But recent American experience— bulwarked by events in Britain—may hint at a reverse truth: that labor, especially in its latter-day condition of power and bureaucratization, has lost touch with those segments of public idealism which are vital to its effectiveness in the political arena...

...He could gruffly pay his rhetorical respects to progressive legislation, but he was neither creative nor original in this realm...

...It is "impractical," and darn near starry-eyed...

...in the primitivism of industrial conflict, unions brought dignity to thousands of individual lives, and a sense of moral values to the economic jungle...

...Many of the ultimate misfortunes of his Administration are traceable to his tendency to let the standards of the political clubhouse prevail in the higher echelons of government...

...Once upon a time the labor movement was the catalyst of the strongest idealistic emotions in our society...

...I know it was said in many places that the gale which swept so many Republicans out of office was in no way aimed at the President...

...it has stimulated serious public debates in a time hostile to candid controversy...

...I know this will be viewed as extremist talk in some places...

...Truman rose far above the humdrum political community which spawned him, and achieved an authentic place in history...

...Was it possible, men began to ask anew, that he was "too good" for our kind of politics...

...It produced noble exhibits of selflessness and sacrifice...

...Nixon, he did so in the manner of a girl who decides to be seduced only because she knows that rape can create so ugly a scene...

...but the political medicinemen and the specialists agreed that a second term would be entirely consistent with his rehabilitation, especially if conducted in large measure on the playing fields of Augusta...

...Yet the desire to recreate the past is actually stronger among those Democratic traditionalists who yearn for a revival of the "Roosevelt coalition" and fail to understand that the new issues of a new day make such a revival implausible...

...But it was predominantly a negative triumph designed to pave the way for the emergence of an affirmative political vehicle...

...Wech-sler's book, Reflections of An Angry Middle-Aged Editor, which is being published by Random House...

...Liberals are often accused of displaying a fatal nostalgia for the simplicities of the struggles of the 1930's...

...It was not that his second term was much more conspicuously lacking in vigor or enterprise than his first...

...he steadfastly insisted on discussing "state issues" alone and, when he finally and reluctantly accepted the insistent embrace of Mr...

...Such were some of the morose meditations that gripped the liberal community as the magnitude of Stevenson's loss became apparent...

...But I suspect that if it did not exist it would have to be invented, even for the small number who give it active support and the larger number who derive some sense of relationship with political society from the fact of its existence...

...the result, in fact, is not "compromise" but stalemate, not the achievement of the possible but the enthronement of the status quo, not moderation but immobility, not the clear delineation o? public issues but a spreading sense that there are no longer any important public questions on which men may reasonably be asked to give more than equivocal answers...

...he matched Vice President Nixon in his prophecies of the socialist doom that a Democratic success would bring...

...Communist movement in the 1948 campaign...

...Here was an organization conceived in important measure as a counter-offensive against the Communist drive at a moment when the American Communist movement was displaying its last signs of real life...

...Organized liberalism emerged with a strength, a mandate, and an opportunity unmatched since 1933...

...What I have ultimately in view is not the emergence of two monolithic political organisms imposing rigid "party discipline" on their members...

...When I write of labor's participation in a political realignment, it is with full awareness of the decline of labor's status in the electoral wars...

...But there was genuine reason for liberals to moderate their cheers...

...it has put more ideas in currency than its revenue would seem to permit...

...But we will have nothing truly recognizable as a liberal movement as long as disingenuousness remains the fashion of our politicos, and independent liberals remain aloof from ADA because "it has been smeared...

...he was, one might say, a radical George Babbitt...

...And Mr...

...My own view is that ADA and liberals generally ought to take off all the gloves, even at the expense of divorcement from some political luminaries, and dedicate themselves to forcing a showdown within the Democratic Party...

...And too often, perhaps, many of us in ADA have suffered from increasing inhibitions in public statement and speech precisely because this attack has been so widespread and unrelenting...