A Word Edgewise

Boston—If you examine the structural division among liberal and conservative commentators on American foreign policy, an interesting pattern emerges. The liberals are basically divided between the descendants of Henry Wallace and the heirs of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson. The conservatives too suffer from a split personality: there the ideological anti-Communists encounter the hard-nosed capitalists, the characters who aren’t interested in Soviet barbarism but in Soviet bucks.

The liberal quandary can be put aside for the moment, except to note the strange love affair between the Henry Wallace family and the capitalist rope salesmen. Revisionist historians, who look on the cold war as one vicious American conspiracy after another against peaceloving Soviets, seem to have a special affinity for “enlightened” capitalists such as the late Cyrus Eaton. There is some sentiment that our Export-Import Bank should loan Moscow the money to buy the rope Lenin once said capitalists would compete to sell to Bolsheviks—the rope to hang capitalists.

JR

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John P. Roche

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Boston—If you examine the structural division among liberal and conservative commentators on American foreign policy, an interesting pattern emerges. The liberals are basically divided between the descendants of Henry Wallace and the heirs of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson. The conservatives too suffer from a split personality: there the ideological anti-Communists encounter the hard-nosed capitalists, the characters who aren’t interested in Soviet barbarism but in Soviet bucks.

The liberal quandary can be put aside for the moment, except to note the strange love affair between the Henry Wallace family and the capitalist rope salesmen. Revisionist historians, who look on the cold war as one vicious American conspiracy after another against peaceloving Soviets, seem to have a special affinity for “enlightened” capitalists such as the late Cyrus Eaton. There is some sentiment that our Export-Import Bank should loan Moscow the money to buy the rope Lenin once said capitalists would compete to sell to Bolsheviks—the rope to hang capitalists.