Books: Liberal to a Fault

ALL OUR YEARS (373 pp.)—Robert Morss Lovett—Viking ($3.75).

On the evening of March 27, 1944, a strange and moving scene took place in a park at St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands. Crowds of natives, "shaking and kissing my hands, some kneeling and weeping," gathered to say goodbye to Government Secretary Robert Morss Lovett.* Officially he had resigned. His boss, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, had not wanted to fire him. But the Dies Committee had charged him with subversiveness and Communist sympathies. Lovett's real crime was old-fashioned liberalism. It made no real difference that the U.S. Court of Claims later called...