In Brief

What I Think, by Adlai E. Stevenson. 240 pp. New York: Harper & Brothers. $3.00

The Greek proverb has it that cabbage thrice warmed-over would be the death of a man, but Liberals never weary of their standardized pap—not even when it is served out from the same old pot for the hundredth time. Mr. Stevenson has been cerebrating in public for so long and with such fidelity to the orthodox cant of his faction that no one, surely, will buy this book in the hope of surprising him in the act of thinking an original thought. His admirers, of course, will hasten to fill their plates with the familiar stew, compounded of platitudes and predigested sophistry. The rest of us have no need to learn from these pages that Mr. Stevenson believes, for example, that we have a sacred mission to shovel our money into every sink-hole, domestic or foreign, in which it can be lost with maximum damage to our moral integrity at home or to our prestige and power abroad. The fact that he is far more literate than most of his fellows makes him one of the clearest symptoms of the disease of the will that has so deeply infected our country—of the death-urge that, operating from the dark subliminal consciousness of our Leftist intellectuals, is driving us somnambulistically to the precipice over which nations disappear from history.

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What I Think, by Adlai E. Stevenson. 240 pp. New York: Harper & Brothers. $3.00

The Greek proverb has it that cabbage thrice warmed-over would be the death of a man, but Liberals never weary of their standardized pap—not even when it is served out from the same old pot for the hundredth time. Mr. Stevenson has been cerebrating in public for so long and with such fidelity to the orthodox cant of his faction that no one, surely, will buy this book in the hope of surprising him in the act of thinking an original thought. His admirers, of course, will hasten to fill their plates with the familiar stew, compounded of platitudes and predigested sophistry. The rest of us have no need to learn from these pages that Mr. Stevenson believes, for example, that we have a sacred mission to shovel our money into every sink-hole, domestic or foreign, in which it can be lost with maximum damage to our moral integrity at home or to our prestige and power abroad. The fact that he is far more literate than most of his fellows makes him one of the clearest symptoms of the disease of the will that has so deeply infected our country—of the death-urge that, operating from the dark subliminal consciousness of our Leftist intellectuals, is driving us somnambulistically to the precipice over which nations disappear from history.