How can one dismiss the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr? Because his special brand of intellectually inflected political conformism fits so handily in this modern age of outright attacks on citizens, by their own government? Of drone attacks on civilian populations, argued by government agencies to be the locus of terrorist activities? Of preemptive war against states possessing weapons of mass destruction? That he is a Christian Theologian add luster to his varied career as political apologist for the Cold War and the National Security State. While some might even argue that he is the thinking man’s Billy Graham, with a more persuasive intellectual resume.  With his ally Mr. Schlesinger singing his praises, as an intellectual leader, and with their creation of what was to be the ADA, a refuge of Liberals anxious to establish their credentials as anti-communists: freedom of political expression for right and left wing social democrats only! One need only read Mr. Schlesinger's tedious and self-congratulatory diary entries of the period; with his penchant for the use of the word 'commie', to identify political dissidents of that benighted age in America.

As for Mr. Niebuhr’s status as political philosopher, he has an intellectual breadth and a seemly ever changing, evolving set of ideas tending toward conservatism as he aged. The addition of the fallen nature of ‘man’, the sine qua non of the Christian mythology, appealed to the deep stain of Puritanism still active in the American consciousness: the world historical battle between good and evil as background. He was a public intellectual with something to offer Liberal and Conservative thinkers, a kind of Cold War Pragmatist, perfect for our age of suspicion, our age of terror, peopled by intellectual pretenders of all stripes.

Political Observer