Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II is famous for having a gift with words. Teaming with the equally legendary composter Richard Rogers, the pair dominated Broadway and beyond with iconic additions to the theater, including Oklahoma, South Pacific and The King and I.
For Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, however, a sixty-year old television interview with a young Mike Wallace may be among his most poignant legacies. In that March 1958 interview, Hammerstein admitted to being liberal and even agreed with conservative author Ayn Rand who charged that the majority of the writers in the country subscribed to liberalism.
“We need her to hold us back, and I think she needs us to pull her forward,” he told Wallace.
That line stuck with Noonan, “because liberals and conservatives do need each other, and the right course can sometimes be found in the tug between them,” as she put it.
She closes her column by lamenting how little of such moral modesty and candor we see nowadays from our public figures on either side of the political divide.
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