Books, Arts & Manners: The Old Acheson and the New

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, by Dean Acheson (Norton, $15)

While I was reading this book for review, I had a conversation with a friend of my parents who is a life-long liberal. In the course of that conversation, she expressed a number of opinions which not only were in essential agreement with present-day conservative doctrine, but might indeed have been taken from the pages of national review. So far so good, but when I mentioned Richard Nixon, Alger Hiss, Joseph McCarthy, it was back to the stock liberal responses of the early 1950s. There was no hint of recognition that today’s radicalism, the seizure of Columbia, the bombing of buildings, murder, arson, the flying of Vietcong flags, is the direct outgrowth of the liberalism of the Roosevelt-Truman era. Nor, since to recognize that would be to tear up the whole fabric of her political life, should such recognition be expected.

JL

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Jared C. Lobdell

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Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, by Dean Acheson (Norton, $15)

While I was reading this book for review, I had a conversation with a friend of my parents who is a life-long liberal. In the course of that conversation, she expressed a number of opinions which not only were in essential agreement with present-day conservative doctrine, but might indeed have been taken from the pages of national review. So far so good, but when I mentioned Richard Nixon, Alger Hiss, Joseph McCarthy, it was back to the stock liberal responses of the early 1950s. There was no hint of recognition that today’s radicalism, the seizure of Columbia, the bombing of buildings, murder, arson, the flying of Vietcong flags, is the direct outgrowth of the liberalism of the Roosevelt-Truman era. Nor, since to recognize that would be to tear up the whole fabric of her political life, should such recognition be expected.