The Blog   12:00 AM, Jun 24, 1996 • By DAVID FRUM Widget tooltip
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts  As a
columnist for the New York Times, Tom Wicker stood for 25 years
among America's preeminent liberal journalists. What he said in
the thousands of pieces he has published since the mid-1960s, he
is saying again in Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America
(Morrow, 218 pages, $ 25). It is as if none of the ideas that
have transformed American thinking about race in the past
quarter century has reached Wicker in his writer's lodge in
Rochester, Vt.  Reading Tragic Failure is a peculiarly
claustrophobic experience, like a weekend in colonial
Williamsburg or Nantucket. Fully one-quarter of the footnotes in
the book refer the reader to articles in the New York Times.
It's jarring to put it down and return to the contemporary world
of e-mail, personal computers, and 1997 model year cars. The
book isn't a defense of liberalism, because it won't engage with
any of the conservative critique of lib