Humor is not the primary métier of The New Republic nor, for that matter, of liberalism. But there’s a small tradition that includes this cute, fairly mild satire by a very young Philip Roth, mocking both Eisenhower and the Power of Positive Thinking. During the seventies, Woody Allen wrote regular send-ups for the magazine. The magazine most regularly deployed humor, and to great effect, during the eighties and nineties, a period when it gleefully attempted to overthrow the oppressive orthodoxies of liberalism. It was a style that fit the cause.
—Franklin Foer, former TNR editor, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America
… He [Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota] told me this fascinating story about President Eisenhower. Mrs. Judd had been having a visit with Mrs. Eisenhower who told her, “Ike goes into bed, lies back on the pillow, and prays out loud, something like this: ‘Lord, I want to thank You for helping me today. You really stuck by me. I know, Lord, that I muffed a few and I’m sorry about that. But both the ones we did all right and the ones we muffed I am turning them all over to You. You take over from here. Good night, Lord, I’m going to sleep.’ And,” added the President’s wife to Mrs. Judd, “that is just what he does; he just turns over and goes to sleep …”
NORMAN VINCENT PEALE, DECEMBER, 1956
The man of deep religious conscience and conviction traditionally speaks to his God with words of awe, love, fear, and wonder: he lifts his voice to the mysterious bigger-than-space, longer-than-time God, and his own finiteness, ignorance, and sinfulness grip his spirit and carve for his tongue a language of humility. Only recently Mrs. Eisenhower revealed to a White House guest the words the President himself speaks each night to the Lord from the quiet of his bed. As the President himself is half-way through his fifth year in office, it would perhaps be fitting to examine the short prayer which has helped to carry him through to the present, the prayer with which he attempts to crash through the barriers of flesh and finitude in his quest for communion with God.
To imagine the tone of voice with which the President delivers his prayers one need only read the closing sentences as Mrs. Eisenhower reports them. “You take over from here,” the President says aloud. “Good night, Lord, I’m going to sleep.” The President’s tone is clear: if one were to substitute the word “James” for “Lord” one might hear the voice of a man calling not to his God, but to his valet. “I have polished my left shoe, James. As for the right, well—you take over from here. Good night, James, I’m going to sleep.” The tone is a chummy one, as opposed, say, to the tone taken toward Cinderella by her despised stepsisters; “Sweep the floor, wash the clothes, polish the shoes, and then get the hell out of here …” The President addresses his valet as he does his God, as an equal. Where the theologian, Martin Buber, has suggested that man is related to his God as an “I” to a “Thou,” Mr. Eisenhower’s tone would seem to suggest that the I and Thou of Buber’s thinking be converted into the more democratic You and Me.
