Books, Arts & Manners: A Cabal of Mandarin Doves

The Limits of Intervention, by Townsend Hoopes (McKay, $5.95)

There was a time, during the early halcyon days of the Johnson Administration, when the Pedernales had taken on the aura of a second Tiber, when the strange, meddling little ideology known as liberalism seemed destined to run the country for years and years to come. It had held sway over the body politic since the New Deal, and Johnson’s massive victory over Goldwater had an almost millennarian ring to it. The doyens of American liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger, Walter Lippmann, James Reston, all came forward to sing the praises of the Great Commoner who had just been so resoundingly elected to the White House. If anyone had suggested in those rosy days that American liberalism would be dead in 1969, the victim of its own zealotic omniscience, he would have been quickly consigned to a lunatic asylum.

PW

About the Author

Peter P. Witonski

Featured Tags

The Limits of Intervention, by Townsend Hoopes (McKay, $5.95)

There was a time, during the early halcyon days of the Johnson Administration, when the Pedernales had taken on the aura of a second Tiber, when the strange, meddling little ideology known as liberalism seemed destined to run the country for years and years to come. It had held sway over the body politic since the New Deal, and Johnson’s massive victory over Goldwater had an almost millennarian ring to it. The doyens of American liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger, Walter Lippmann, James Reston, all came forward to sing the praises of the Great Commoner who had just been so resoundingly elected to the White House. If anyone had suggested in those rosy days that American liberalism would be dead in 1969, the victim of its own zealotic omniscience, he would have been quickly consigned to a lunatic asylum.