(7 of 7)
Last week a gleam of cheer crept into Pundit Sullivan's column as, perked up by local election results (see p. 15), he wrote: "We now know, since Tuesday, that the tide has turned, away from the Democrats and in favor of the Republicans." It was one of the first such gleams in months. Along with gloom at New Deal doings, there has lately crept into his dispatches a note of despair at his own inability to make citizens understand their peril. "No amount of explanation seems able to make the country see. . . ." he writes. And: "I am not sure that enough of the public can be brought to see the deeper implications."
To bolster his lonely position Pundit Sullivan on occasion even invokes the verdict of history yet to come, as when he wrote last month: "I suspect historians years hence will say the election of Mr. Roosevelt, and the steps he took, amounted partly to a holding back of recovery. . . ."
If time's verdict is indeed against the New Deal, historians years hence may point to Pundit Sullivan as an authentic prophet. But certainly those future historians, searching the pages of Our Times for the record of a U. S. era, will write Mark Sullivan down as one who knew and loved that time & country well.
*;0n Mark Sullivan's living-room bookcase now stands a foot-high memento of one such trip—an inscribed photograph of President Hoover happily hauling in a whopper (see cut, p. 41). But his relations with Herbert Hocver as President are not yet history to Mark Sullivan, and he will discuss them only casually.
*Pundit Kent's column ("The Great Game of Politics") is carried by 115 newspapers, Pundit Lawrence's ("Today in Washington") by 131, Pundit Lippmann's ("Today & Tomorrow") by 159.