The Liberal Line

For some time now the Liberal propaganda machine has been all dressed up and no place to go. It has no foreign policy to sell. It has no candidate for President, either to boom or beat. It has no current levelling mission: the great live issue on the levelling front-can the white Southerners circumvent last year’s judicial ukase for desegregation in the public schools?-is clearly one on which propaganda is wasted (since Supreme Court justices can, nowadays, be counted on to propagandize themselves). Even the Gray plan, therefore, hasn’t given the machine any place to wear its Sunday clothes. In other words the machine, for lack of practice, is on the point of forgetting what itistobe really mobilized behind something. And everyone knows a machine rusts when it stands too long unused.

The Eastland Committee’s unprovoked attack on the lowly New York Times has, happily, now provided an opportunity for a major workout, in which every ounce of energy expended has gone into one or another of two of the machine’s highest-priority long-term operations. Namely: 1) inhibiting effective exposure of the scope and character of Communist infiltration of basic American institutions, and 2) undermining the power and prestige of Congress.

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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For some time now the Liberal propaganda machine has been all dressed up and no place to go. It has no foreign policy to sell. It has no candidate for President, either to boom or beat. It has no current levelling mission: the great live issue on the levelling front-can the white Southerners circumvent last year’s judicial ukase for desegregation in the public schools?-is clearly one on which propaganda is wasted (since Supreme Court justices can, nowadays, be counted on to propagandize themselves). Even the Gray plan, therefore, hasn’t given the machine any place to wear its Sunday clothes. In other words the machine, for lack of practice, is on the point of forgetting what itistobe really mobilized behind something. And everyone knows a machine rusts when it stands too long unused.

The Eastland Committee’s unprovoked attack on the lowly New York Times has, happily, now provided an opportunity for a major workout, in which every ounce of energy expended has gone into one or another of two of the machine’s highest-priority long-term operations. Namely: 1) inhibiting effective exposure of the scope and character of Communist infiltration of basic American institutions, and 2) undermining the power and prestige of Congress.