National Trends

Dulles’ Vanishing Shade

I reflected as the triumphal procession of last Tuesday, Nikita S. Khrushchev cheek by jowl with the President of The United States in an open car, wheeled into 14th Street from Independence Avenue between the Mint and the Department of Agriculture, that it had left behind the memorial to a Thomas Jefferson who set great store by the liberties of the citizen. Along 14th Street the pure perpendicular of the monument raised to Washington loomed to the left; a shaft honoring a victorious revolutionary untouched by the twentieth-century’s gruesome passion for liquidating the defeated foe. Except for the elevation of the Monument grounds, the slave-master of Moscow could have seen the memorial to the Lincoln who freed the Republic’s slaves almost a century ago.

Dulles’ Vanishing Shade

I reflected as the triumphal procession of last Tuesday, Nikita S. Khrushchev cheek by jowl with the President of The United States in an open car, wheeled into 14th Street from Independence Avenue between the Mint and the Department of Agriculture, that it had left behind the memorial to a Thomas Jefferson who set great store by the liberties of the citizen. Along 14th Street the pure perpendicular of the monument raised to Washington loomed to the left; a shaft honoring a victorious revolutionary untouched by the twentieth-century’s gruesome passion for liquidating the defeated foe. Except for the elevation of the Monument grounds, the slave-master of Moscow could have seen the memorial to the Lincoln who freed the Republic’s slaves almost a century ago.