DEMOCRATS: In Search of a Voice

Where's the voice, however soft, One would hear so very oft?

—John Keats

Did he have any comment, a reporter asked Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson in Washington one day last week, on Adlai Stevenson's sniping at the Eisenhower Administration's foreign policy? "Mr. Stevenson," said Johnson stonily, "can speak for himself."

Johnson was setting no party policy, but he had made a point: in the wake of Eisenhower's victory, the Democrats are in desperate need of a voice. Even Minnesota's liberal Senator Hubert Humphrey, a red-hot Stevensonite. agreed. In the months ahead, he said, party leadership "will be essentially congressional."

But the return...