How Liberals Survive in Washington

Early in 1953, so a Washington fable goes, a blackboard in one of the government office buildings was discovered bearing the chalked observation: “The Republicans have been in long enough. It’s time for a change!”

Over four years have passed since then, but the change has not come. What, then, has been happening to the New Dealers of yesteryear—the bright young men who arrived in the capital with nothing but their Ph.D.’s, their battered flivvers, and their ideas for changing the world?

Of the reality of the change there can be no doubt. It is true that no new social legislation had been enacted since the conservative bipartisan coalition gained control of Congress in 1938. It is true that FDR himself ostentatiously dismissed “Dr. New Deal” and called in “Dr. Winthe-War”; that, despite his genuine sympathy for their objectives, President Truman was less at ease with liberal intellectuals than FDR in the yeasty New Deal days; and that the difference between the two parties in Congress, hardly discernible at present, was never very wide or deep. The hardening of Washington’s arteries started long before 1953.

Nevertheless, 1953 did make a real differe...