Late in the Eisenhower Administration, a band of liberal Democratic Congressmen decided that their party and their country needed "new ideas." They set up a sort of study group, asked intellectuals from various fields to help out by drafting papers on foreign and domestic issues. This "Liberal Project," as it was called, died off—partly because the papers were on the heavy side, and partly because on Election Day 1960, five out of the dozen or so members of the group lost their seats in the House of Representatives.
But now, a year and a half later, the defunct Liberal Project is making news as it never did in its lifetime—and some Democratic Congressmen are disavowing it as if it had been a plot to smuggle narcotics or blow up the Capitol.
Ev & Charlie. Posthumous notoriety came to the Liberal Project when Doubleday & Co., Inc. published a batch of the intellectuals' "new idea" papers on foreign policy and defense. California's Representative James Roosevelt, a founder and leader of the Liberal Project, supplied an introduction for the volume. Unexcitingly entitled The Liberal Papers, the book might have remained obscure, except that Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen and House Minority Leader Charles A. Halleck pounced on it at their weekly joint press conference. Ev and Charlie attacked The Liberal Papers as "astounding," "incredible" and "a menace." "This Democratic-sponsored book," rumbled Dirksen, "could well be renamed Our American Munich" If the proposals urged in the book were adopted, he charged, these events would take place: 1) Red China would be admitted to the United Nations—with U.S. sponsorship, 2) The inhabitants of Formosa would vote on whether they wanted their island to become part of Red China, 3) West Germany would be demilitarized, and 4) NATO would shrivel into an "Atlantic alliance" of the U.S., Britain and Canada.
These policies, said Dirksen, would amount to "surrender." Hoping to throw the book at the Democrats, G.O.P. National Chairman William E. Miller blasted it as "the Democratic-sponsored surrender plan." sent state G.O.P. officials a directive urging that The Liberal Papers be made a "major issue" in the upcoming congressional campaigns.
As the Liberal Project members still in Congress, the G.O.P. National Committee named (in addition to Jimmy Roosevelt) California's George P. Miller, Michigan's James G. O'Hara, Wisconsin's Henry S.
Reuss and Robert W. Kastenmeier, Pennsylvania's William S. Moorhead. New Jersey's Frank Thompson.
Never & Never. Men named on the list scrambled for cover. George Miller protested that the G.O.P. must mean somebody else. But when the G.O.P. substituted the name of another California Congressman. Clem Miller, he protested, too. "I enter a categorical denial." he said.