Today's Liberals Put Liberty League to Shame

Insight on the News, Sept 2, 2003 by Ralph De Toledano

Byline: Ralph de Toledano, INSIGHT

Back in the early 1930s a group of tycoons, mostly members of New York's Union League Club, formed an organization called the Liberty League. Vehemently against the New Deal, it raised loud cries against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his policies and his Brain Trust. FDR, it anguished, was "a traitor to his class" and a whited sepulcher. His program, they averred with some accuracy, had been lifted in toto from Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas, though it was shy about noting that the National Recovery Act was based on the "corporativism" of Benito Mussolini.

The Liberty League was laughed out of existence by New Yorker cartoonists, who depicted its members looking out over Fifth Avenue and snorting that doomsday was here and Josef Stalin lurked in the bushes. The New York Times and much of the media turned their heavy artillery on the white-haired leaders of the League, as if they represented a fascist "wave of the future" and were proof positive of the reactionary nature of the opposition to FDR and the Democrats.

Well, as they used to say, time marches on. The Liberty League could have held its meetings in a phone booth, and the Republican Party, outgunned and outvoted, did little more than jettison its so-called isolationism and, the war over, gave the Democrats enough votes to torpedo its racist Southern wing and enact civil-rights legislation for which it got no credit.

Turn now to 2003. The Democrats, who under President Bill Clinton clamored for war against Iraq and pointed quiveringly to its weapons of mass destruction, have put the Liberty League to shame with their frothing hysteria against the Bush administration, in cries of hatred never before heard in this country. The New Republic, which for a while supported the war on terrorism and an onslaught against Saddam Hussein as a means of supporting Israel, bedecked President George W. Bush in sackcloth and ashes. The New York Times reverted to the days when it was glorying in Stalin and Adolf Hitler and discovered evil incarnate in the Bush White House.

There is little point now in rebutting the sound and fury or the propaganda of the "liberal" read, left reactionary media and the Democrats. They are now back in the days when Dan Rather, in his cowboy boots, made himself a national reputation by grossly insulting on TV a president of the United States. But I am constrained to respond to a mailing piece by the New York Review of Books, a neo-Marxist/neo-Freudian publication which years ago brought grins to the music world by subjecting Beethoven to Hegelian analysis. The envelope harrumphs that "this president wants to overthrow the rules that have governed international life for the last 50 years" and in boldface promises, "Inside: The Evidence."

The evidence? "To an extent that we could not at first imagine, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have transformed the politics and the policy of the United States. A president of dubious legitimacy ... has used his wartime aura to silence critics, and greatly enlarge presidential power and suppress civil liberties."

Author? Anthony Lewis of the New York Times.

There is not one statement in those roughly 50 words just quoted that is not false and I would suggest that Lewis knows them to be false. He and I go back quite a way first to the early 1940s when we used to meet in New York's Town Hall at New Friends of Music concerts. Tony used to look down his nose at me because I worked for a small antifascist, anticommunist newspaper. In 1960 Tony was indiscreet enough to remark to a friend that he had been assigned to review my book, Lament for a Generation. "I haven't read it yet, but I'm going to cut it to pieces," he said, and he did.

Lewis denied making the remark, although it was made to a person of impeccable reputation. Tony moved onward and upward, becoming a kind of Maureen Dowd-in-drag. No book of mine, however great its sales, ever again was reviewed in the Times or listed in its best-seller reports. Though Tony never achieved the fiction status of those stellar Times reporters, Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews, or such owner offshoots as John Oakes, he fitted in with a journalistic regime that must have founder Adolph Ochs spinning in his grave.

Some day, perhaps, the present left-reactionary paranoia and its bursting hatred will be psychoanalyzed though not by those who gave the treatment to Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon, or others who had the temerity to cry havoc. Since then, the New York Times has been subjected to the kind of moral scrutiny it hates but doles out freely itself. It will, of course, end up preaching ethics to the trade, once its journalistic transgressions have been forgotten, and we will be presented with a new batch of Anthony Lewises.

Ralph de Toledano is the dean of Washington columnists and a frequent writer for Insight magazine.