my hungry term won't exert before I crack it

In his meetings
with Vice-President Richard Nixon and Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and
Johnson, his tone is always that of a Labour negotiator, a
quasi-socialist, with nary a word said by him about God, nary an effort
made to communicate as a minister of the Gospel to wayward Christians
(Kennedy and Johnson being rather more wayward as Christians go, one
would guess, than were Nixon and Eisenhower). Had Nixon, as an example,
been addressed as a Quaker: --Mr. Vice President, how can you as a white
Christian gentleman deny to your black Christian brothers the rights and
freedoms which you enjoy?-- it seems to me that it would have left a
good deal less --wiggle-- room. --Let my people go.-- Reverend King as
Aaron, addressing Richard Nixon as Pharaoh. There were any number of
approaches that made more sense when standing on the moral high ground
(as Martin Luther King surely was) than to function as a
secular-humanist-quasi-socialist mouthpiece for a run-of-the-mill
Marxist like Bayard Rustin. Certainly, Martin Luther King had
demonstrated, time and again, his oratorical skill in the striking --
just so -- of the --right note,-- le mot juste -- and nowhere more
exaltedly than in his --I have a dream-- speech delivered in front of
the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963.

I have a dream that, one day, every valley shall be exalted, every hill
and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain and
the crooked places will be mode straight and the glory of the Lord shall
be revealed and all flesh shall see it together . . .

It is hard to imagine any occasion in human history when the words of
the fourth and fifth verses of Isaiah's monumental and awe-inspiring
40t


.

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