All of this, I know, is recent history familiar to you. But I have been at some pains to review it as the drama of the common man, to point up what happened to him under Eisenhower's leadership.

A perceptive journalist, Sam Lubell, has phrased it in the title of one of his books as The Revolt Of The Moderates. He opens his discourse, however, with a review of the Eisenhower inaugural festivities at which a sympathetic press had assembled its massive talents, all primed to catch some revelation of the emerging new age. The show was colorful, indeed, exuberant, but the press for all its assiduity could detect no note of a fateful rendezvous with destiny.

Lubell offers his book as an explanation of why there was no clue. And I select this sentence as its pertinent summation: ``In essence the drama of his (Eisenhower's) Presidency can be described as the ordeal of a nation turned conservative and struggling -- thus far with but limited and precarious success -- to give effective voice and force to that conservatism.''

I will assume that we are all aware of the continuing struggle, with its limited and precarious success, toward conservatism. It has moved on various levels, it has been clamorous and confused. Obviously there has been no agreement on what American conservatism is, or rather, what it should be. For it was neglected, not to say nascent, when the struggle began. I saw a piece the other day assailing William Buckley, author of Man And God At Yale and publisher of the National Review, as no conservative at all, but an old liberal. I would agree with this view. But I'm not here to define conservatism.