Throwing the Book

Late in the Eisenhower Administration, a band of liberal Democratic Congressmen decided that their party and their country needed "new ideas." They set up a sort of study group, asked intellectuals from various fields to help out by drafting papers on foreign and domestic issues. This "Liberal Project," as it was called, died off--partly because the papers were on the heavy side, and partly because on Election Day 1960, five out of the dozen or so members of the group lost their seats in the House of Representatives.

But now, a year and a half later, the defunct Liberal Project is making news as it never did in its lifetime--and some Democratic Congressmen are disavowing it as if it had been a plot to smuggle narcotics or blow up the Capitol.

Ev & Charlie. Posthumous notoriety came to the Liberal Project when Doubleday & Co., Inc. published a batch of the intellectuals' "new idea" papers on foreign policy and defense. California's Representative James Roosevelt, a founder and leader of the Liberal Project, supplied an introduction for the volume. Unexcitingly entitled The Liberal Papers, the book might have remained obscure, except that Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen and House Minority Leader Charles A. Halleck pounced on it at their weekly joint press conference. Ev and Charlie attacked The Liberal Papers as "astounding," "incredible" and "a menace." "This Democratic-sponsored book," rumbled Dirksen, "could well be renamed Our American Munich" If the proposals urged in the book were adopted, he charged, these events would take place: 1) Red China would be admitted to the United Nations--with U.S. sponsorship, 2) The inhabitants of Formosa would vote on whether they wanted their island to become part of Red China, 3) West Germany would be demilitarized, and 4) NATO would shrivel into an "Atlantic alliance" of the U.S., Britain and Canada.

These policies, said Dirksen, would amount to "surrender." Hoping to throw the book at the Democrats, G.O.P. National Chairman William E. Miller blasted it as "the Democratic-sponsored surrender plan." sent state G.O.P. officials a directive urging that The Liberal Papers be made a "major issue" in the upcoming congressional campaigns.

As the Liberal Project members still in Congress, the G.O.P. National Committee named (in addition to Jimmy Roosevelt) California's George P. Miller, Michigan's James G. O'Hara, Wisconsin's Henry S.

Reuss and Robert W. Kastenmeier, Pennsylvania's William S. Moorhead. New Jersey's Frank Thompson.

Never & Never. Men named on the list scrambled for cover. George Miller protested that the G.O.P. must mean somebody else. But when the G.O.P. substituted the name of another California Congressman. Clem Miller, he protested, too. "I enter a categorical denial." he said.

The denials got more and more insistent as criticism of the Liberal Project mounted. Declared New Jersey's Thompson: "I am not now and never have been a member of that Liberal Project." Wisconsin's Reuss: "I never took any part in the so-called Liberal Project. I never went to any meetings or read any papers or had anything else to do with it." Michigan's O'Hara: "I never met with this group and discussed policy. Never. Never. Never.

Never. Never." Republicans found the spectacle delightful. Jeered Dirksen at last week's "Ev and Charlie Show": "We have witnessed The Liberal Papers turn into The Run-Out Papers." Black & White. The Congressmen's reluctance to be linked with The Liberal Papers was understandable, especially in an election year. Various papers in the book do advocate the courses listed by Dirksen, plus other varieties of disarmament and disengagement.

The papers are the work of intelligent men, but they are nearly all afflicted with the strange liberal assumption that the cold war is somehow the result of U.S.

hostility toward Russia and Red China, and not the other way around. According to the University of Illinois' Psychology Professor Charles E. Osgood. writing in The Liberal Papers, the great fault of U.S. foreign policy is that emotional distortions of reality create an "oversimplified world," turning the complex greys of reality into stark black and white. But if nonliberals see the two sides in the cold war as black and white, the authors of The Liberal Papers see them as similar shades of grey--and that, too, is an "oversimplified world."

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