Living in the Past

THE FIRST NEW DEAL by Raymond Moley. 577 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $12.50.

Raymond Moley's star faded more than a generation ago, after briefly generating power and light for the U.S. President he served. He and Franklin Roosevelt made a curious, and before long incompatible, pair: the brilliant Columbia University professor on whose counsel F.D.R. placed the highest value at first, and the headstrong political pragmatist who eventually came to count few men's counsel above his own. For Moley, disillusion set in soon. He left Washington in September 1933, after only six months as presidential assistant, emissary and speech collaborator. In this book, he builds a private monument over the grave of what he calls the First New Deal.

By Moley's reckoning, the death occurred in 1935, as the President set course for reelection. During his first years in office, Roosevelt had performed a remarkable patch job on a sick economy. But the closing of the banks, the departure of the gold standard, the proliferation of alphabetical emollient agencies -- the AAA, the CCC, the SEC, the WPA, the NRA -- had done more than restore public confidence. In Roosevelt's mind, Moley says, the relative success of these measures supported the conviction that he was a political messiah, the only man who could conduct the country to its rendezvous with destiny.

"I concluded," Moley writes, "that Roosevelt was determined to ask for a vote of confidence -- not for something that he proposed to do in the future, but for himself." The New Deal's new direction appalled Moley. "Roosevelt substantially reversed the policies of the Democratic Party. The old Democratic affirmation of the constitutional integrity of state and local authority was abandoned. The Federal Government intervened, first slowly but later massively in areas hitherto reserved to the states and the communities. I could not remain a Democrat when the nature and objectives of that party had so completely departed from its earlier faith."

It has been argued that what seemed like radical new policies to Moley were already implicit in the First New Deal. But for Moley the break was total. Not only did he turn Republican, but in a Newsweek magazine column, and in several books, he has continued to lick the wounds that his political philosophy suffered during that brief alliance. Much in this volume only echoes what Moley wrote in After Seven Years, an equally unhappy appraisal of the New Deal published in 1939.

Lives sometimes focus not on a major triumph, but on a major disappointment. Raymond Moley, now 80, has chosen to linger in a departed yesterday that let him down.

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