Bookshelves

COMMENDABLES

 

Nightfall for Liberalism? by Richard John Neuhaus

 

George Parkin Grant: English­ Speaking Justice; Notre Dame; $4.95 paper.

 

“Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good-‘conservatives’ included. Insofar as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human good, it is difficult for me to consider as sane those who would deny that they are liberals.” In this spirited fashion, George Parkin Grant launches us upon a brief but painfully lucid examination of why liberal democracy may have reached the end of its tether.

Grant may be Canada’s major public philosopher, but his work, to our great’ loss, is almost unknown south of the border. In this essay he argues that we in the English-speaking democracies have become incapable of intellectually defending the liberty that we affirm. And, at bottom, we cannot defend it intellectually because in modern modes of reasoning we have no place for moral judgment. That this is the case is evident in our floundering about in search of a definition of justice, the primary public virtue. And, of course, nobody flounders more energetically than John Rawls of A Theory of Justice. One of the chief merits of Grant’s little book is its incisive critique of the untenability, not to say absurdity, of Rawls’s very influential argument. But I get ahead of myself.

“There was a time,” writes Grant, “when lip service had to be paid to Christianity. In our present world, lip service must be paid to liberalism.” The “two basic facts about our moral tradition” are, first, that liberalism is the only form of political thought which “can summon forth widespread public action for the purposes of human good,” and, second, that liberalism today is naked of its theoretical defense. It is naked to its enemies, and they are legion. There are ideological enemies such as totalitarianism of the “left” and the “right.” But Grant is most exercised about the enemy of “technology.” Technology is his word for modern, scientific forms of power that conflate the ability to do something (techne) with the reason for doing it (logos). In the face of the technological juggernaut of government and corporate power, liberty stands little chance unless it is defended by a superior “logos” that is theoretically articulated and popularly affirmed. Liberty is not so defended today.

In its beginnings liberalism had such a defense, whether utilitarian or contractarian. “Among those who wrote political philosophy since Hobbes and Locke,” says   Grant, “there has been little more than the working out in detail of variations on utilitarianism and contractualisrn, their possible conflicts and their possible internal unclarities.” But Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and even Kant all had an ontological or metaphysical grounding for their theories. Rousseau saw the need for a civil religion built upon uniting truths. Locke’s notion of contract was premised upon a “state of nature” which assumed prior realities to which social order must be responsive. And Kant’s pure reason posited a moral absolute from which issued duties of categorical force. In sum, all these thinkers understood that liberty must be grounded in something other than the “value” of liberty.

But today’s people such as Rawls would ground both liberty and equality in nothing more than the preferred “values” of deracinated persons designing a just society from behind their “veil of ignorance.” In their ignorance, Rawls is careful to stipulate, they know nothing about themselves other than their interest in protecting their own wants. This is light years away from Aristotle or Plato and the assumption of a shared understanding of the good, but it is also a radical break from Kant’s tenuous notion of an ordering reason.

The English-speaking democracies could for a long time muddle through, Grant argues, because such morally eviscerated philosophy interested only a few intellectuals. The actual content and practice of justice depended upon a. popularly affirmed religion, Mainly Protestant. But now such philosophy has largely penetrated and undermined Protestantism, and the time has come to pay the piper.

In all this, Grant does not hesitate to acknowledge that he is saying · what Nietzsche saw 100 years ago. It is as though Nietzsche’s time has come around at last, and on this Grant sounds very much like Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue). Nietzsche’s scorn, writes Grant, was not turned primarily upon revealed religion and other presumably authoritative souces of truth and morality. He is most critical, rather, of those intellectuals who dismantle such authorities but refuse to recognize the consequences. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. Or, as Grant puts it, Nietzsche’s “greatest ridicule is reserved for those who want to maintain a content to ‘justice’ and ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ out of the corpse that they helped to make a corpse.” In illustration of the point, Grant offers an ex­ tended and devastating critique of the logic of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which eliminated abortion law. His point is that the effort to distinguish between a member of the species and a “person” is utterly arbitrary and intellectually vacuous once we have abandoned-as Roe v. Wade does most explicitly abandon-any understanding of the good for which human beings are fitted.

English-speaking justice could survive. There are “the old and settled legal institutions which still bring forth loyalty from many of the best practical people.” But we do not have, he believes, the tradition of thought which can revitalize for our time the truths from which those institutions emerged. In what is called higher education today, “there is little encouragement to what might transcend the technically competent, and what is called ‘philosophy’ is generally little more than analytical competence.” Grant’s doleful conclusion: “This lack of tradition of thought is one reason why it is improbable that the transcendence of justice over technology will be lived among English-speaking people.” English­ Speaking Justice is a tour de force that deserves to be read widely and digested slowly.

One can suggest, ever so tentatively, some reasons for hope that Grant over­ looks. For instance, the regnant fatuities of political philosophy could in coming years be challenged successfully by religiously grounded intellectual alternatives. For another instance (although this is not an entirely happy prospect), intensified international confrontation with the totalitarian alternative to democracy might force English-speaking intellectuals to a radical reexamination of their premises. Against all determinisms, we must insist that history is marked by the unpredictable, both tragic and serendipitous. But those who do propose more reasons for hope than does George Parkin Grant must also live with the suspicion that they may be whistling in the darkness which he so powerfully describes.          cc

 

Daring Moderation by Steven Hayward

 

James V. Schall: The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy; University Press of America; Lanham, MD.

 

Father Schall is a very busy man. He seems to publish another book before the ink is dry on the last one. We should be grateful for his limitless energy, for he clearly has assumed a Herculean task. Schall belongs to a religious order-the Jesuits-that is notoriously radical at present. Schall’s mission, therefore, is not mere academic antiquarianism. Schall seeks to recapture the classical and medieval understand­ ing of the limits of political action, now abandoned by political ideologues who ignore the metaphysical nature of man. The glory of medieval philosophy is that it synthesizes the two great traditions in the West, that of Reason and Revelation, or of Athens and Jerusa­ lem. Classical philosophy and Chris­ tian revelation both taught that man is an “in-between” link in the chain of creation, that man’s soul has an eternal, transcendent dimension that could not be perfected solely through political arrangements. Hence, the classical and medieval political message can be summed up in one word: moderation. Modern thought has overthrown­ perilously, experience would suggest­ this understanding of human being; with the Roman poet Horace, we must again remind ourselves that however often we try to expel human nature with a pitchfork, it comes back in through the window.

So pervasive is the modern denial of man’s nature that even our conservative President is given to quoting Tom Paine’s axiom of modernity: “We have it in our power to begin the world anew.” We have power, it is true, but unless we recapture the sense of mode­ ration, of the limits of politics, that the classic and medieval Christian philosophers instinctively understood, man’s power over nature will only result in the Gulag. “Christian and medieval theory,” Schall concludes, “is not merely an historical account of certain outdated philosophers and theologians, but an essential foundation for political thought itself.”                cc

 

Mocking the Booboisie by Brian Murray

 

Edward A. Martin:  H.  L.  Mencken and the Debunkers; The University of Georgia Press; Athens.

 

Between roughly 1915 and the mid­ l930’s, H. L. Mencken was one of America’s most widely read, widely quoted authors. In addition to turning out daily copy for the Baltimore Sun, Mencken produced several books as well as essays on a variety of subjects for The Smart Set and The American Mercury. Undoubtedly, Mencken’s wonderfully witty prose style contributed much to his appeal, as did his carefully developed persona. For throughout the 20’s Mencken was the preeminent bad boy of American letters. He was outrageously arrogant, impatient, and curmudgeonly.

Of course Mencken was also much more   than   a   wisecracking   crank – more, certainly, than the ”brawling vulgarian” that Paul Elmer More liked to make him out to be. He was one of the most erudite writers of his generation, and – though he himself some­ times spouted nonsense-one of the most astute. As Mencken’s writings repeatedly show, he loathed those reformers and ideologues who ascend to power by playing to the baser emotions of gullible blockheads. He understood that all sorts of horrors are possible when language· is inflated, abused. To his credit, Mencken championed civility and rational inquiry; he attacked pre­ tension, quackery, schmaltz, and cant.

As Edward A. Martin reminds us in H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers, The Sage of Baltimore was by no means the only prominent writer of his period to produce satire of a most pungent kind, Ring Lardner, Nathanael West, and Sinclair Lewis, among others, regularly- hyperbolically-expressed their belief that American culture was being cheapened by the rampant spread of ugliness and banality. West, for one, presciently identified the Hollywood movie industry as the nation’s prime polluter of culture. In his 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, West chillingly shows how Hollywood has from the start prospered by selling “prurience and sentimentality” to a public that is ever eager for mindless escape and titillation.

In his preface, Professor Martin notes that his book is not so much “a survey of the satire of the period” as a description of the “attitudes” that were shared by that generation of satirists who, in the wake of the Great War, followed Mencken’s lead. As such, it succeeds. Martin perceptively notes, for example, that while Mencken and such fellow “debunkers” as Lewis and Don Marquis “ridiculed American provincialism, puritanism, and the traditional, moral values of Americans,” they themselves believed in progress, culture, and learning – “a basic triptych on the altar of American faith.” Moreover, Martin notes, one finds in much of their writing “a persistent love and nostalgia for aspects of what they ridiculed and for a simpler, rural way of life.”

Still, Martin does describe many of the lesser-known satirical writings of the Mencken era; and so, like a good “survey,” his study provides a real sense of who was mocking whom during the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover years – a time when newspapers and magazines, seeking truly mass circulations, first began their breathless coverage of starlets and geniuses-of-the-month. Such quirky but intriguing works as West’s The Dream Life of Balsa Snell (which ridicules aestheticism) and William E. Woodward’s Bunk (which targets mediocrity in general) deserve at least the limited attention that Martin accords them.        cc

 

IN FOCUS

 

Red Sunset by Clyde Wilson

 

Oliver Lange: Defiance: An American Novel; Stein & Day; Briarcliff Manor, NY.

 

This 1971 novel, originally entitled Vandenberg, has been reissued in an apparent attempt to capitalize upon the interest aroused by the film Red Dawn. Lange tells a convincing tale of the occupation of the U.S. by the Soviet Union. Not great literature, it is a genuine novel and, as they say, “a good read.”” Skillfully told with a variety of viewpoints and devices, it recounts the experiences of an alcoholic middle­ aged artist who is disillusioned by his countrymen’s passive acceptance of occupation and who futilely attempts to mount a guerrilla resistance in the New Mexican mountains. Aside from a good story, the novel’s chief merit is its sobering and all-too-plausible scenario of the surrender of a sybaritic, solipsistic people-hypnotized by media, burdened with gadgetry, enervated by top­heavy institutions and ethnic heterogeneity, and immobilized by the habit of excusing others’ atrocities and their own inaction.    cc

 

Good Beginnings by William C. Rice

 

Peter Davison: Praying Wrong; Atheneum; New York; $9.95.

 

Peter Davison’s greatest asset may be the fact that, unlike most contemporary American poets, he’s spent his adult life outside the academic world. His position as poetry editor at The Atlantic Monthly – one of the few large­ circulation magazines still giving space to contemporary poets – ensures that he gets enough bad poems in the mail every day to know how to avoid the common errors that poets make.

The   first   point   of optimism – that Davison is capable of a wide audience-is borne out in his most recent book, Praying Wrong, a collection of his work from 1957 to 1984. Davison writes not of sabbaticals and professorial ennui, nor of vacations on Cape Cod and brief sexuo-intellectual entanglements. In­ stead, he writes about animals, friend­ ship, religious faith, marriage, children, death, and the passage of time. His language isn’t marred by the Latinate cant of English departments; in­ stead it is graced by Anglo-Saxon precision and liveliness. And his tone is generally placid, unself-conscious, the very opposite of the tedious egocentrism common to new poetry. The best of his recent work, such as “Remembering Eurydice,” a eulogy for his deceased first wife, even attains primitive simplicity and chilling beauty:

I have lost the best of women.

Once again the water irrigates

the scars, the gravel…

Now we can barely remember,

while woods and grasses

which remember nothing

offer us all we have to keep

but the stone that cries her

name.

But unfortunately, the second cause for optimism-that Davison might avoid the pitfalls common to current verse-goes largely unfulfilled. If he distinguishes himself by language independent of mainstream solipsism and by unmodish subjects, he’s still, in his lack of poetic form and lack of clarity, indistinguishable from the general run of poets today.

The earliest poems in Praying Wrong display respect for the conventions of meter and rhyme. They’re verse in the traditional sense, intelligible on first reading:

The corner of the eye

Is where my visions lie.

A startle, or a slant

From squirrel, bird or plant,

Tums hard and fast if seen

By eyes asquint and keen.

But Davison quit writing poems in strict forms some time ago. With the exception of two good villanelles, the most that can be said for his rhythms is that they never jar. It is a gracefully broken meter that differs little if at all from free verse.

The lack of clarity is even more frustrating. Davison would probably like to distance himself from the cult of inaccessibility that isolates contemporary poets from the common educated reader, for his poems do hang together better than most. But he hasn’t gone far enough. All too often, we are left puzzled: What is he talking about? Unlike other poets, Davison isn’t glib in his indirectness, but he does too little to elucidate the sources of his inspiration, to help the willing reader toward an appreciation of his art.

The very license of indeterminacy that Davison appropriates, however, turns against him as his poems – many of them long by current standards ­ progress. They often have good beginnings. But then, rather than create a text_ as one would architecture or a piano sonata, Davison unleashes ‘his associative faculties, to the befuddlement of the reader. The poem offers little coherence from this point, refer­ ring only now and then to its now obscure or even lost origins. When the conclusion comes, it ‘is sudden, too often seems strained, weak, or perfunctory. The childhood recollections of “Questions of Swimming,” after excursions into a landscape of intellectual puzzles, are forced into a vague sort of cliché at the close: “Which is the other shore? I Could it be the place where a boy could watch / a man . . / set out, swimming, for a farther shore?” In “The Ram Beneath the Barn,” Davison terminates his entertaining anthropomorphisms with bathetic suddenness:

“But in this March we stare each other down / two rams caught in a thicket by the horns.” One can everywhere find examples of good beginnings, of thoughts that aren’t completed, of non sequiturs that form nothing more than a vague mood, and of strained conclusions. But Davison’s talent calls for a different observation.

If bad poets, plentifully supplied by the academic world, wish to defend and enjoy the formless, incoherent state to which they’ve reduced contemporary poetry, that’s fine: even if they abandoned their doctrines against poetic meter and rhyme and simple intelligibility, they’d probably still not expand the audience for new poetry. But if a man of Peter Davison’s. powers and experience were to pick up the gauntlet, it seems probable that he-and others who’d no doubt follow him-could save contemporary American poetry from the discredit in which it’s held by its potential readership. We can only hope that Peter Davison, with Praying Wrong behind him, will accept the challenge.                cc

 

Eye-Openers by Sandra Sider

 

Roger Shattuck: The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York.

 

The Innocent Eye is a collection of 22 essays by critic and historian Roger Shattuck. Divided into three main sections, the book spans 20 years of critical writing, though most of the essays come from the last decade. These representative selections demonstrate Shattuck’s continuing concern with the creative process as focused in French literature and art of the 20th century. Writers and artists considered here include Balzac, Baudelaire, Valery, Artaud, Malraux, Monet, Stravinsky, Magritte, and DuChamp.

Four new essays, first published in this collection, display Shattuck’s ear­ nest involvement with artistic con­ sciousness. His usual whimsy and playful wit are noticeably absent in these four pieces-hardly surprising for a writer immersed in the self-destructive course of modern society and the awe­ some responsibility of self-realization or attempting to interpret Apollinaire’s visual poem “Ocean-Letter.” Shattuck’s concern with the foibles of modern culture culminates in his afterword, “The Innocent Eye and the Armed Vision.”

Shattuck calls for a critical disarmament, which he likens to Keats’s “negative capability,” Rimbaud’s “deregle­ ment de taus les sens,” Brecht’s “Verfremdungeffekt,” and Ruskin’s “innocence of the eye.” He calls for faith in the particular (obviously based in a particular culture) rather than the abstraction of semiotics or the absurdity of textuality. Shattuck argues that a “responsible education” (which one assumes would include travel, historical research, and interdisciplinary studies) might teach us “tolerant wisdom in the face of what we both know and don’t know.” Such training (the “armed vision”) does indeed liberate the eye to explore works of art from all cultures with renewed candor and wonder.

The problem with The Innocent Eye is that Shattuck addresses his plea to critics, who must resort to the limita­ tions of language for their critical interpretations of art. The “innocence” of the passive eye must always be compromised by the all-too-active critical tongue. The best that we can do is to keep our minds as open as our eyes. cc

 

Grendel Redivivus by E. Christian Kopff

 

Marijane Osborne: Beowulf: A Verse Translation With Treasures of the Ancient North; University of California Press; Berkeley.

 

This is a beautiful book, artfully craft­ ed, fitting attractively on a coffee table, though somewhat outsized when you try to put it on a shelf. Scattered on the page next to the translation are pictures of Anglo-Saxon art, to give the reader a feeling of that ancient culture, distantly related to our own. The translation itself is straightforward, composed in a meter echoing without reproducing the metrical pattern of the original. Although Osborne fights shy of the difficulties of the meter, after Kennedy and Chickering among translators, Lewis and Tolkien among scholars, and Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and John Peck among poets, it is getting harder to treat the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line as an obstacle to fine verse, instead of a challenge.

When Osborne confronts the density of Anglo-Saxon poetic diction and its verbal music, she typically prefers to simplify. Some may feel that she is ironing out the creases along with the wrinkles. So firma hyrde, “shepherd of sins,” used of the monster Grendel, becomes “that cruel fiend.” In pedantic contrast, a number of Old English words, are kept in the text and translated in the notes. These range from essential Old English concepts like wyrd and shope (“bard,” spelled scop in Old English texts), common words like sarks and athelings, for which equivalents or paraphrases exist.in English, and words like thane and byrnies, which do survive in 19th-century literature and should be familiar to readers of, say, Sir Walter Scott.

The frequent Germanic compounds of the original are consistently avoided. The result is an anomaly. The transla­ tion is well-fitted for an undergraduate translation course on the epic or “Great Books,” since its simplicity of language does not put too great a strain on the current undergraduate while signaling to the only slightly better-read graduate instructor when to pause to comment on “Fate in Beowulf’ or “The Role of the Bard in Anglo-Saxon Epic.” The work, however, is an oversized book, loaded with artistic pictures that invite the reader to peruse slowly and thoughtfully.

Osborne and the Yale Anglo-Saxon scholar Fred Robinson each contribute an essay to the volume, the latte on the background of the poem. Intelligent and useful though both essays are, most readers will still need Charles Kennedy’s introduction to his translation (now in paperback from Oxford), since that essay presents the scholarly “problems” of Beowulf, summarized from Friedrich Klaeber’s standard edition, in a clear and sometimes original fashion. It can­ not be said that Osborne’s translation is a definitive advance over Kennedy as a whole, though it certainly is in parts. The package is attractive, though, and the Beowulf amateur will derive much pleasure from it.cc

 

Modern Mobs by Richard A. Cooper

 

Elias Canetti: Crowds & Power; Continuum Books; New York; $9.95.

 

On the stage of history, the crowd plays a dramatic and often critical role. Our own era has seen many powerful and ferocious crowds. Indeed the Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti, a Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who lives in London but writes in German, contends that the crowd springs from the hunting packs of our primitive ancestors. As befits its violent origins, the crowd seeks to “dis­ charge” its energy against a target, usually human, In the crowd’s fascination with incendiary destruction, Canetti sees the survival of ancient passions. Driven by a “will” to subsume everyone under its banner, the crowd seeks to destroy those who stand apart. Canetti’s belief that the quest for power within crowds is the desire to be the solitary survivor surveying the silent crowd of the dead explains why so many of -our modern leaders have presided over hecatombs of corpses. It is in war that modern crowd behavior best illustrates Canetti’s thesis of hunting-pack origins. Crowds and Power, however, suffers from some of the worst faults of 19th­ century writing: the substitution of analogy for proof; the careless use of explorers’ accounts; and the question­ begging concept of vestiges from the primeval past. How do we know that the crowd is a vestige of the hunting pack? Canetti does not say. His concept of vestiges requires acceptance of racial memory, an inherited unconscious memory of the species’ past. Canetti creates a “metahistory,” a history of what might have happened if only we accept his conclusions.

Canetti examines unionism and union strikes-with its language of “Brotherhood” and “Solidarity”-as prime modern examples of crowd behavior, but curiously, he omits any discussion of Georges Sorel’s compatible conception of the general strike as myth. Given the role of the crowd in 20th-century revolutions, it is even more curious that Canetti barely mentions National Socialism and Communism. Consider the Nazi Party’s name: National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Every single word refers to a crowd. “Party” is most congenial to Canetti’s thesis: the political party was a “pack” organized for the pursuit of power. In ideology and practice, National Socialism was statist and collectivist. The “race,” the “volk,” and the “Aryans” are all crowd symbols.

If the crowd and its link to power is primeval in origin, as Canetti says, why does it persist? Canetti docs not consid­ er how modern politicians have deliberately reinforced the crowd mentality in the public schools and through propaganda and military conscription. Few people today can resist the influence of those who engineer mass conformity.

Canetti’s Crowds and Power. forces the question: How can we defuse the crowd’s explosive potential? Our future requires an answer Canetti does not supply.      cc

 

 

The Politics of Gullibilityby Gary S. Vasilash

 

Gregory O’Brien: Lenin Lives; Stein & Day; New York.

 

The degree to which Americans live in a media-contrived world is well illustrated in Gregory O’Brien’s slim novel Lenin Lives! Mr. O’Brien shows the distortions in this world by imagining what would happen should the Soviets one day claim “they have performed a medical feat of sensational proportions: the resurrection of Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin.” O’Brien follows the story through newspaper re­ ports, magazine articles, and transcripts of TV and radio broadcasts. At first, the oracles of information call the whole thing a tasteless hoax. Sixteen days later an LA Times editorial concludes: “In our news space, we have until now dealt gingerly with Western sensitivities on this matter by placing the name Lenin in quotation marks. Beginning with today’s edition we have stopped. Lenin lives.” The proof? No medical exam, not even finger prints, but in­ stead charisma and manners of bygone days. Surely O’Brien has given us a caricature. But how often does the insatiable American audience demand much more of it visible or invisible talking heads?          cc

 

 

A Fighter & An Oiler

Russell Pulliam: Publisher: Gene Pulliam, Last of the Newspaper Titans; Jameson Books; Ottawa, IL.

 

Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier: Dirksen of Illinois: Senatorial Statesman; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL.

 

While national politics is largely an East Coast affair and the national media split their operations between New York and California, recent biographies remind us that the Midwest has provided some of this century’s leading figures in both. Son of Methodist missionaries, Eugene C. Pulliam was born on May 3, 1889, in a sod hut in Ulysses, Kansas. After learning the fundamentals of newspaper journalism in Kansas City, he went on to become one of America’s leading publishers, ion-trolling four metropolitan dailies and a string of smaller papers. Son of a design painter, Everett McKinley Dirksen was born (with his twin brother Thomas) on January 4, 1896, in Pekin, Illinois. After polishing his rhetorical skills as an amateur thespian, while earning his living as a baker, Dirksen successfully ran for Congress in 1932 and eventually made his way up very near the top-the Republican leader of the Senate.

Both were hardworking and ambitious men. Both acquired reputations as staunch Cold Warriors and conserva­ tive Republicans. More specifically, both were influential in starting Barry Goldwater’s political career, both were supporters of LBJ’s Vietnam War efforts, and both were critical of the New Left and the 60’s counterculture. Yet a major difference in character between the two men may be more significant than any similarities. Early on, Pulliam realized that his “instinct for a good fight, his bluntness…[meant]he could never make it in public service.” In contrast, in his first successful con­ gressional campaign, Dirksen adopted “a pragmatic, nonpartisan approach, which involved a certain amount of expediency.” Arguably, Dirksen’s career rested upon pragmatism and expediency.

Pulliam was made of different stuff. He firmly believed that “the other man has a right to be heard” and was one of the first to run full op-ed pages in his papers, but he was fearlessly candid and outspoken in his own views. He could be a “table-pounding, argumentative, [and] cantankerous” exponent of his positions. Dirksen didn’t pound tables; he made compromises. He described himself as a “moderationist” and took “The oil can is mightier than the sword” as his maxim. He preferred the saving “Nothing is eternal except change” over 2ny set of “doctrinaire principles.” Pulliam, who never minced words in criticizing the sensationalistic and liberal biases in his own profession, won “grudging admiration for his independence and convictions”; Ev won the different kind of respect accorded those who grease the wheels of political accommodation.

On occasion, Dirksen was compared to his boyhood idol, Abraham Lincoln, but the S