Abstract

Editorials

The article focuses on several current issues in the United States. The jolting announcement by U.S. Steel of an across-the-board price increase represents a calculated political ploy in the classic tradition of power politics; the economic motivations were of minor importance. Along with labor leader George Meany, Big Business resented the President's intervention in the steel negotiations; but Meany and other statesman of labor, Jimmy Hoffa, who is not a statesman, did not go along, muted their resentments and decided to cooperate, while the executives of Big Steel nursed theirs in private and plotted their revenge. In its National Affairs Department, Newsweek, echoing a theme that is receiving increasing attention from the press, suggests that "perhaps the uneasy peace between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the nation's liberal intellectuals was ill-fated from the beginning; perhaps discomfort on the Left was destined from the start." In this view, in the 1960 campaign Mr. Kennedy managed to make himself acceptable to the labor movement, the campus liberals, the editors of the "low-circulation but influential intellectual magazines," etc., but "he never was really one of the visceral liberals."