As printed on both jacket and cover-board spine, the subtitle of Forty Years against the Tide (Regnery Gateway, $18.95), by Senator Carl T. Curtis and Regis Courtemanche, and with an introduction by Russell Kirk, is “A Washington Memoir”; while, according to jacket front and title page, it is “Congress and the Welfare State.” Of the two, the second is the more accurate: Too often, in the course of this volume of 443 pages, the amiable senator disappears from view beneath the onset of the tide he so staunchly battled for forty years.
Still, the text, as history, has a power quite unrelated to autobiography. The writing is clear, dignified, elegant, and at times eloquent: The authors have a gift for making bureaucratic legislative history appear exciting, while the accounts of the labor-racket investigations of the late Fifties, the Billie Sol Estes case, and the Bobby Baker case are models of their kind. (There is a quaintness, a picturesqueness, about yesterday’s political scandals that makes reading about them as much fun as reading a good travel book.) However, the first chapter, “The Road to Washington,” gives such a vivid sense of Nebraska society in the early part of this century as to leave the reader—or anyway this reader—somewhat disappointed when, with the ensuing chapter, the little homelinesses of autobiography drop from the picture.
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