INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
255
cause he stands for the bigger bully who is at once less available and
more threatening. (Castro himself may be glad to exploit his role 'as
~~t
in
order to bind more firmly to
him
both the Corrum,mists
powers on whom he has become dependent and the Latin Americans and
many others who will be brought to his side if he can
provok~
th,e
United States sufficiently so that we in tum will contine to respond
vin–
dictively rather than magnanimously.) Indeed, candidate Kennedy's
energetic election campaign drove him toward this very trap, not only
.by his specific attacks against Communism "ninety miles from hom,e;"
but also by the general tenor of his criticisms of a do-nothing, .easy–
going Administration. (His election coincided with the defeat of a
number of liberal Democratic Congressmen, such as Byron Johnson,
Charles Porter, and William Meyer, who had belonged in Congress to
the small, brave but not willful band of "peace Congressmen." The.ir
defeat also reflected the arousal of Protestant fundamentalist bigotry
against a Catholic in the White House even in areas where it was all
right for a Catholic to occupy the State House.)
In the last years of the benign Eisenhower Presidency, his supporters
themselves had tended to grow somewhat restless and disaffected. Though
their Republican ideology favored decentralization and federal inaction,
even men of the type who would enjoy Eisenhower's company at golf
or hunting or bridge in South Georgia, had become uneasy at the
growing signs that the United States could no longer play world police–
man with impunity; or that we might some day be unable to 'roll back
the tide of Communist advance while going about our business as be–
fore. Hence the propaganda about national purpose began to hit home
among those who once would have thought a national purpose
a:
viola–
tion of laissez-faire and perhaps a form of spurious religiosity as well–
as if the new nationalism of the rising nations (including the -Com–
munist ones) were being echoed here at home just as other militant
nationalistic tactics were becoming attractive in the name of freedom.
Thus Eisenhower left for the country, and for his successor, a legacy of
feeling that there ought to be someone in charge, perhaps the more so
since there was obviously no one in charge of our sprawling
nietrop~
olises, our wasting natural resources, and our increasingly complicated
and ambiguous ties to the rest of the globe. Eisenhower and good times
together helped to revive still powerful currents of evangelical fervor,
traditionally hostile to cities, complexity, foreigners, "softness," irreligion,
and skepticism toward crusades. And, as suggested in the earlier essay,
the old-American Puritan virtues can now often be trumpeted . b¥
