Books in Brief: William H. Judd: Chronicles of a Statesman

William H. Judd: Chronicles of a Statesman, edited by Edward J. Rozek (Center for Science, Technology, and Political Thought, 403 pp., $16.95).

Ingratitude toward their great men, Plutarch contended, is the mark of strong peoples. If so, the citizens of Minnesota must be an especially masterly breed. The voters of the state’s Fifth District elected Walter Judd to Congress ten times between 1942 and 1962, in the course of which his fellow Republicans chose him as the congressman they “most admired” and his colleagues in the House at large named him as one of its five most influential members. Whereupon in 1962 the home folks ousted this truly remarkable man in favor of a liberal Democrat named Donald Fraser, who is now Mayor of Minneapolis. But Judd, who spent a total of ten years as a medical missionary in China before running for Congress, is a hard man to keep down. Basing himself in Washington (no wonder he didn’t go back to Minnesota!), he has roamed America and the globe ever since, writing, lecturing, and supporting the causes he believes in—most notably, perhaps, Free China. This volume is a collection of his speeches, both during and since his years in Congress, plus three in-depth interviews with him on major figures in recent American politics: Eisenhower, Truman, and John Foster Dulles. Fortunately Walter Judd is incapable of uttering an unclear or uninteresting sentence, so both the speeches and the interviews are as crisp and limpid as a Minnesota brook. His forthright idealism is his finest quality, but it is always informed by a shrewd common sense. The result is a kind of salty knowledgeability that simply transcends sophistication. Priceless oral history, and an indispensable source for the biography that remains to be written.

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William A. Rusher

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William H. Judd: Chronicles of a Statesman, edited by Edward J. Rozek (Center for Science, Technology, and Political Thought, 403 pp., $16.95).

Ingratitude toward their great men, Plutarch contended, is the mark of strong peoples. If so, the citizens of Minnesota must be an especially masterly breed. The voters of the state’s Fifth District elected Walter Judd to Congress ten times between 1942 and 1962, in the course of which his fellow Republicans chose him as the congressman they “most admired” and his colleagues in the House at large named him as one of its five most influential members. Whereupon in 1962 the home folks ousted this truly remarkable man in favor of a liberal Democrat named Donald Fraser, who is now Mayor of Minneapolis. But Judd, who spent a total of ten years as a medical missionary in China before running for Congress, is a hard man to keep down. Basing himself in Washington (no wonder he didn’t go back to Minnesota!), he has roamed America and the globe ever since, writing, lecturing, and supporting the causes he believes in—most notably, perhaps, Free China. This volume is a collection of his speeches, both during and since his years in Congress, plus three in-depth interviews with him on major figures in recent American politics: Eisenhower, Truman, and John Foster Dulles. Fortunately Walter Judd is incapable of uttering an unclear or uninteresting sentence, so both the speeches and the interviews are as crisp and limpid as a Minnesota brook. His forthright idealism is his finest quality, but it is always informed by a shrewd common sense. The result is a kind of salty knowledgeability that simply transcends sophistication. Priceless oral history, and an indispensable source for the biography that remains to be written.