The long road that had taken liberals in this country into the social religion of democracy, into a worship of man, led logically to the Marxist dream of a classless society under a Socialist State. And the USSR existed as the revolutionary experiment in radical socialism, the ultimate exemplar. And by the time the war ended, liberal leadership in this country was spiritually Marxist.

We will recall that the still confident liberals of the Truman administration gathered with other Western utopians in San Francisco to set up the legal framework, finally and at last, to rationalize war -- to rationalize want and fear -- out of the world: the United Nations. We of the liberal led world got all set for peace and rehabilitation. Then suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of another fight, an irrational, an indecent, an undeclared and immoral war with our strongest (and some had thought noblest) ally.

During the next five years the leaders of the Fair Deal reluctantly backed down from the optimistic expectations of the New Deal. During the next five years liberal leaders in the United States sank in the cumulative confusion attendant upon and manifested in a negative policy of Containment -- and the bitterest irony -- enforced and enforceable only by threat of a weapon that we felt the greatest distaste for but could not abandon: the atom bomb. In 1952, it will be remembered, the G. O. P. without positive program campaigned on the popular disillusionment with liberal leadership and won overwhelmingly.