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The denials got more and more insistent as criticism of the Liberal Project mounted. Declared New Jersey's Thompson: "I am not now and never have been a member of that Liberal Project." Wisconsin's Reuss: "I never took any part in the so-called Liberal Project. I never went to any meetings or read any papers or had anything else to do with it." Michigan's O'Hara: "I never met with this group and discussed policy. Never. Never. Never.
Never. Never." Republicans found the spectacle delightful. Jeered Dirksen at last week's "Ev and Charlie Show": "We have witnessed The Liberal Papers turn into The Run-Out Papers." Black & White. The Congressmen's reluctance to be linked with The Liberal Papers was understandable, especially in an election year. Various papers in the book do advocate the courses listed by Dirksen, plus other varieties of disarmament and disengagement.
The papers are the work of intelligent men, but they are nearly all afflicted with the strange liberal assumption that the cold war is somehow the result of U.S.
hostility toward Russia and Red China, and not the other way around. According to the University of Illinois' Psychology Professor Charles E. Osgood. writing in The Liberal Papers, the great fault of U.S. foreign policy is that emotional distortions of reality create an "oversimplified world," turning the complex greys of reality into stark black and white. But if nonliberals see the two sides in the cold war as black and white, the authors of The Liberal Papers see them as similar shades of grey—and that, too, is an "oversimplified world."