For a New Order of Priorities at Home and Abroad

As the Presidential Campaign progresses and the possibility arises of major changes in foreign and domestic policies, it seems appropriate to review some of the major events of the past year or so and their effects on the American people. I think we will all agree that it has not been a happy time for the Executive, for Congress or for our country. The divisions among us are deep and the problems that beset us seem intractable. The center of our troubles is the war in Vietnam--a war that has isolated the United States from its friends abroad, disrupted our domestic affairs and divided the American people as no other issue of the 20th Century has divided them. (There has arisen, as of this writing, hope that peace negotiations will soon begin in Paris. At this early stage it is difficult--and perhaps unwise--to comment on their prospects, except to express the wish that they will, indeed, occur and will bring the war to an early end.)

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The St. Louis Cardinals are a superior baseball team, but in the 1967 world series, most Americans outside of the St. Louis area itself rooted for the Boston Red Sox. Why was that? Was it because the Red Sox were better sports, or better players, or better looking? Certainly not; the Cardinals matched their rivals on all these counts and in the end they showed themselves to be the stronger team. Why, then, couldn't they match the Red Sox in popular affection? Because they had committed one of the worst crimes in Christendom--the crime of being top dog. Top dogs are not very popular, as a rule, just because there are so few of them. The underdogs are a vast majority in the world, and when, now and then, one of their multitude soars to the top in a sport or in politics or in some other highly visible pursuit, millions of other underdogs take heart, catching as by electric impulse the magic message: That could be me up there, at bat or on the pitcher's mound or in the high councils of power.

Our heritage reinforces our instincts; most of us have been raised on David and Goliath; and by the time we reach adulthood, we have been thoroughly indoctrinated--one might even say brainwashed--in the belief that every time a little guy knocks down a big guy, it is reason for rejoicing. Few people stop to think about the merits of the case, about the possibility that the top dog may have reached the heights by diligent and honest labor or that his cause may be virtuous and true or--unthinkable thought--that the little guy might just possibly be venal, self-seeking or otherwise unworthy.

That is what the Cardinals were up against. Like the Yankees before them, they had committed the crime of succeeding too well. They were Goliath; the Red Sox were David. They were the wicked stepmother; the Red Sox were Cinderella. The Cardinals were King John, the wicked queen and General Cornwallis; the Red Sox were Robin Hood, Snow White and George Washington. Their success was won by skill and courage and luck against overwhelming odds. They won in the only way that millions of underdogs could ever imagine themselves winning; and when in the end they lost, as had been probable right from the start, it seemed, nonetheless, as though something impossible had happened. Goliath had beaten David; the prince had eluded Cinderella; and a million hearts were broken.

The United States is not the St. Louis Cardinals; the Viet Cong are not the Red Sox; and the war, God knows, is not a game. But there is something pertinent in the metaphor.

America is top dog in the world and, although we may be convinced that we are good top dogs, most people around the world are convinced that there is no such thing. Because we are rich, we are perceived as voracious; because we are successful, we are perceived as arrogant; because we are strong, we are perceived as overbearing. These perceptions may be distorted and exaggerated, but they are not entirely false. Power does breed arrogance and it has bred enough in us to give some substance to the natural prejudices against us. Much to our puzzlement, people all over the world seem to discount our good intentions and to seize upon our hypocrisies, failures and transgressions. They do this not because we are Americans but because we are top dogs and they fear our power. They are frightened by some of the ways in which we have used our power; they are frightened by the ways in which we might use it; and most of all, I suspect, they are frightened by the knowledge of their own inability to withstand our power, should it ever be turned upon them. They are, so to speak, tenants in the world at our sufferance, and no amount of good will on our part can ever wholly dispel the anxiety bred by the feeling of helplessness.

What do these feelings about American power have to do with the war in Vietnam? They go far, I think, to explain why our war policy commands so little support in the world. Anxiety about America's great power predisposes people, even against their better judgment, to take satisfaction in our frustrations and our setbacks. The French, for example, who well understand the importance to themselves of America's weight in the world balance of power, nevertheless seem to derive some satisfaction from seeing more than half a million Americans fought to a stalemate--or worse--by a ragtag army of Asian guerrillas. Seeing the Americans cut down to size like that is balm for the wounds of Dien Bien Phu, salve for the pride that was lost in the days of the Marshall Plan, when France survived on American generosity. If our military failures in Vietnam have this effect on the French, as I believe they do, think what they must mean to the real underdogs of the world, to the hundreds of millions of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans who can easily identify themselves with the Viet Cong guerrillas but could never see themselves in the role of the lordly Americans. There may even be people in our own country who feel some sneaking respect for a resourceful enemy, an enemy who, in a curious and purely emotional way, may even remind them of the ragtag American revolutionaries who humbled the mighty British Empire almost 200 years ago.

Such attitudes, it will be argued, are irrational and unfair; and so, in large measure, they are. People, it will be said, should be rational and should act on their interests, not their emotions; and so, indeed, they should. But they don't. I might be able to think up some good reasons why elephants should fly, but it would not be rewarding; elephants cannot fly and there is nothing to be done about it. So it is with men; they ought to be cool and rational and detached, but they are not. We are, to be sure, endowed with a certain capacity for reason, but it is not nearly great enough to dispel the human legacy of instinct and emotion. The most we can hope to do with our fragile tool of reason is to identify, restrain and make allowance for the feelings and instincts that shape so much of our lives.

That brings me to one of the most important of the many flaws in our war policy in Vietnam--its failure to take account of people's feelings and instincts, especially those pertaining to top dogs and underdogs. American policy asks people to believe things that they are deeply reluctant to believe. It asks them to believe that the world's most powerful nation is not only strong but motivated by deeply benevolent and altruistic instincts, unrelated even to national interests. Even if that were true--and on occasion it probably has been true--nobody would believe it, because nobody would want to believe it.

This is an extremely serious problem for the United States, because the success of its stated policy in Vietnam ultimately depends less on winning for its own sake than on persuading the world that American aims are what American policy makers say they are. That is the case because the war, as often explained by the Secretary of State and by others in the Administration, is said to be an exemplary war, one that will prove to the Communists, especially China, that wars of liberation cannot succeed, and prove to the rest of the world that America will not fail to honor its commitments, to whomever made and for whatever purpose. It is a war--so say our policy makers--to inspire confidence in the United States and to prove certain points; and once these points are proved, it is said, we will withdraw, within six months of a peace settlement, said President Johnson at Manila.

These being our stated aims, the success of our policy depends in great part upon whether people believe that our objectives are what we say they are. You cannot make an object lesson out of a war if people do not believe that is what you are trying to do; you cannot prove a point if people do not believe that you mean what you say.

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether American purposes are really what American policy makers say they are, it is apparent that much or most of the world believes that they are not. I do not think that very many people, least of all the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, believe that we plan to withdraw from Vietnam as soon as (continued on page 116) A New Order of Priorities (continued from page 112) arrangements for self-determination are made, arrangements that could result in the establishment of a Communist government. I do not think that very many people, least of all the Asians, Africans and Latin Americans for whose benefit the example is supposedly being set, really believe that, with virtually no help from the presumed beneficiaries, America has sacrificed over 21,700 lives and spent 100 billion dollars--thus far--simply to set their minds at rest about America's determination to come to their assistance should they ever be threatened with Communist attack or insurrection. Insofar as they do not believe us, our war policy is a failure, neither setting the intended example nor proving the stated point.

Prejudice is not the only basis of world-wide skepticism about American intentions. The war, after all, is not going well and, even if our sincerity were granted, our success could not be. Far from proving that wars of national liberation cannot succeed, all that we have proved so far is that, even with an army of more than half a million men and expenditures of 30 billion dollars a year, we are unable to suppress this particular war of national liberation. Far from demonstrating America's willingness and ability to save beleaguered governments from Communist insurgencies, all that we are demonstrating in Vietnam is America's willingness and ability to use its B-52s, its napalm and all the other ingenious weapons of "counterinsurgency" to turn a small country into a charnel house. Far from inspiring confidence in and support for the United States, the war has so isolated us that, despite all our alliances and the tens of billions we have spent on foreign aid, we cannot, according to the Administration, get 9 out of 15 votes to put the Vietnam issue on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. Far from demonstrating America's readiness to discharge all of its prodigal commitments around the world, the extravagance and cost of Vietnam are more likely to suggest to the world that the American people will be hesitant, indeed, before permitting their Government to plunge into another such costly adventure.

There are already signs of such a reaction. In the days before the recent war in the Middle East, for example, strong and virtually unanimous sentiment was expressed in the Senate against any unilateral American military involvement in that part of the world. If America ever does withdraw into the neoisolationism of which our policy makers are so fearful, it will not be because of the influence of those of us who advocate selectivity in foreign commitments; it will be in reaction to the heedless interventionism of Vietnam.

Yet another reason why some of our stated purposes are disbelieved is the simple fact of their implausibility and inconsistency. It is implausible to contend that we are defending a valiant democracy when everyone knows that the Saigon generals can inspire neither the loyalty of their people nor the fighting spirit of their sizable army. It is implausible to contend that an act of international aggression has taken place when it is clear that the war began as a civil war within one half of a divided country abetted by the other half and did not become an international war until the United States intervened. It is implausible to argue, as the distinguished Minority Leader, Senator Dirksen, has argued, that, but for the war in Vietnam, the West Coast of the United States would be exposed to attack, when the United States Navy and Air Force are virtually unchallenged over the entire Pacific Ocean.

Finally, it is implausible and inconsistent, on the one hand, to maintain that the United States seeks only to assure self-determination for the South Vietnamese people and will withdraw within six months of a peace settlement and, on the other hand, to assert that our real purpose is to protect a billion Asians from the power of a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons. If the latter is the American purpose, if the real enemy is not the Vietnamese guerrilla army but "Asian communism with its headquarters in Peking," then we are likely to have to remain in Vietnam indefinitely, all the more so because most of the presumed beneficiaries of our intervention, including the three greatest nations among them--India, Japan and Indonesia--show not the slightest inclination to take over even a small part of the military burden.

So implausible and so inconsistent are the statements about one principle or another that is supposed to be being vindicated in Vietnam that one comes to feel that what our policy makers have really been trying to vindicate is their own judgment in having led us into this war in the first place. Even former ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, an Asian expert and a temperate man who, until recently, supported the Administration's policy because he saw little prospect of a negotiated peace, nonetheless expressed in a magazine article fundamental disagreement with the Administration's rationale for the war. "It seems highly probable," wrote Reischauer, "that Ho's Communist-dominated regime, if it had been allowed by us to take over all Vietnam at the end of the war, would have moved to a position with relation to China not unlike that of Tito's Yugoslavia toward the Soviet Union.... Wars sometimes seem justified by their end results, but this justification hardly applies to the Vietnam war. Even the most extravagantly optimistic outcome would still leave far greater losses than gains." It is doubtful, he added, "that even a favorable outcome to the war would do much to deter Communist subversion in other less developed countries. Instead of being discouraged by our ultimate victory in Vietnam, would-be revolutionaries might be encouraged by the obvious pain of the war to the United States and the clear reluctance of the American people to get involved in further wars of this type.... I have no doubt that if those who determined American policy toward Vietnam had foreseen even dimly the costs and futilities of the war, they would have made different choices at several times in the past and thus avoided the present situation, with only trifling costs, if any, to American interests."

Despite the Tet offensive, General Creighton Abrams and other Administration spokesmen continue to make statements about military success. It is, of course, possible that this time they may be right, that Ho Chi Minh will surrender or die or the Viet Cong will collapse or just fade into the jungle. But even in that highly unlikely event, it should not be supposed that the American commitment would be at an end; we would still be the sole military and economic support of a weak Saigon regime, at a cost of perhaps 10 or 15 billion dollars a year. This, of course, would assume--as we cannot safely assume--that the Chinese and the Russians would do nothing to prevent the collapse of the Viet Cong or of North Vietnam. But even if these most optimistic prospects should be realized, grateful for peace though we would be, we would still have little to be proud of and a great deal to regret. We would still have fought an immoral and unnecessary war; we would still have passed up opportunities that, if taken when they arose, would have spared us and spared the Vietnamese the present ordeal, and done so, as Ambassador Reischauer says, "with only trifling costs, if any, to American interests."

For all these reasons, much of the world and an increasing number of our own people are deeply skeptical about the American purpose in Vietnam. Underlying the skepticism is deep disappointment, a feeling that America has betrayed its own past and its own promise--the promise of Roosevelt and the United Nations and of Wilson and the League of Nations, but, most of all, the promise of the American Revolution, of free men building a society that would be an example for the world. Now the world sees that heritage being betrayed; it sees a nation that seemed to represent something new (continued on page 152) A New Order of Priorities (continued from page 116) and hopeful reverting instead to the vanity of past empires, each of which struggled for supremacy, each of which won and held it for a while, each of which finally faded or fell into historical oblivion.

We are, in this respect, a disappointment to the world; but, far more important than that, we are a disappointment to ourselves. It is here at home that the traditional values were formed, here at home that the American promise was born, and it is here at home--in our schools and churches, in our cities and on our farms, in the hearts and minds of our people and their chosen leaders--that the American promise will finally be betrayed or resurrected.

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While young dissenters plead for resurrection of the American promise, their elders continue to subvert it. As if it were something to be very proud of, it was announced not long ago that the war in Vietnam had created a million new jobs in the United States. Our country is becoming conditioned to permanent conflict. More and more, our economy, our Government and our universities are adapting themselves to the requirements of continuing war--total war, limited war and cold war. The struggle against militarism into which we were drawn 27 years ago has become permanent, and for the sake of conducting it, we are making ourselves into a militarized society.

I do not think the military-industrial complex is the conspiratorial invention of a band of "merchants of death." One almost wishes that it were, because conspiracies can be exposed and dealt with. But the components of the new American militarism are too diverse, independent and complex for it to be the product of a centrally directed conspiracy. It is, rather, the inevitable result of the creation of a huge, permanent military establishment, whose needs have given rise to a vast private defense industry tied to the Armed Forces by a natural bond of common interest. As the largest producers of goods and services in the United States, the industries and businesses that fill military orders will in the coming fiscal year pour some 45 billion dollars into over 5000 cities and towns where over 8,000,000 Americans, counting members of the Armed Forces, comprising ten percent of the labor force, will earn their living from defense spending. Together, all these industries and employees, drawing their income from the 76-billion-dollar defense budget, form a giant concentration of socialism in our otherwise free-enterprise economy.

Unplanned though it was, this complex has become a major political force. It is the result rather than the cause of American military involvements around the world; but, composed as it is of a vast number of citizens--not tycoons or merchants of death but ordinary good American citizens--whose livelihood depends on defense production, the military-industrial complex has become an indirect force for the perpetuation of our global military commitments. This is not because anyone favors war but because every one of us has a natural and proper desire to preserve the sources of his livelihood. For the defense worker, this means preserving or obtaining some local factory or installation and obtaining new defense orders; for the politician, it means preserving the good will of his constituents by helping them get what they want. Every time a new program, such as Mr. McNamara's five-billion-dollar "thin" anti-ballistic-missile system, is introduced, a new constituency is created--a constituency that will strive mightily to protect the new program and, in the case of the ABM, turn the thin system into a "thick" one. The constituency-building process is further advanced by the perspicacity of defense officials and contractors in locating installations and plants in the districts of key Members of Congress.

In this natural way, generals, industrialists, businessmen, workers and politicians have joined together in a military-industrial complex--a complex that, for all the inadvertency of its creation and the innocent intentions of its participants, has nonetheless become a powerful new force for the perpetuation of foreign military commitments, for the introduction and expansion of expensive weapons systems and, as a result, for the militarization of large segments of our national life. Most interest groups are counter-balanced by other interest groups, but the defense complex is so much larger than any other that there is no effective counterweight to it except concern as to its impact on the part of some of our citizens and a few of our leaders.

The universities might have formed an effective counterweight to the military-industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy; but many of our leading universities have instead joined the monolith, adding greatly to its power and influence. Disappointing though it is, the adherence of the professors is not greatly surprising. No less than businessmen, workers and politicians, professors enjoy money and influence. Having traditionally been deprived of both, they have welcomed the contracts and consultant-ships offered by the military establishment. The great majority of American professors are still teaching students and engaging in scholarly research; but some of the most famous of our academicians have set such activities aside in order to serve their Government, especially those parts of the Government that are primarily concerned with war.

The bonds between the Government and the universities are no more the result of a conspiracy than are those between Government and business. They are an arrangement of convenience, providing the Government with politically usable knowledge and the universities with badly needed funds. Most of these funds go to large institutions that need them less than some smaller and less well known ones; but they do, on the whole, make a contribution to higher learning, a contribution that, however, is purchased at a high price.

That price is the surrender of independence, the neglect of teaching and the distortion of scholarship. A university that has become accustomed to the inflow of Government-contract funds is likely to emphasize activities that will attract those funds. These, unfortunately, do not include teaching undergraduates and the kind of scholarship that, though it may contribute to the sum of human knowledge and to man's understanding of himself, is not salable to the Defense Department or to the CIA. As Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, expressed it in The Uses of the University:

The real problem is not one of Federal control but of Federal influence. A Federal agency offers a project. A university need not accept but, as a practical matter, it usually does.... Out of this reality have followed many of the consequences of Federal aid for the universities; and they have been substantial. That they are subtle, slowly cumulative and gentlemanly makes them all the more potent.

From what one hears, the process of acquiring Government contracts is not always passive and gentlemanly. "One of the dismal sights in American higher education," writes Robert M. Rosenzweig, associate dean of the Stanford University graduate division, is that of administrators scrambling for contracts for work that does not emerge from the research or teaching interests of their faculty. The result of this unseemly enterprise is bound to be a faculty coerced or seduced into secondary lines of interest, or a frantic effort to secure nonfaculty personnel to meet the contractual obligations. Among the most puzzling aspects of such arrangements is the fact that Government agencies have permitted and even encouraged them. Not only are they harmful to the universities--which is not, of course, the Government's prime concern--but they ensure that the Government will not get what it is presumably buying; namely, the intellectual and technical resources of the academic community. It is simply a bad bargain all the way around.

Commenting on these tendencies, a special report on Government, the universities and international affairs, prepared for the United States Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, points out that "the eagerness of university administrations to undertake stylized, Government-financed projects has caused a decline in self-generated commitments to scholarly pursuits, has produced baneful effects on the academic mission of our universities and has, in addition, brought forward some bitter complaints from the disappointed clients...."

Among the baneful effects of the Government-university contract system, the most damaging and corrupting are the neglect of the university's most important purpose, which is the education of its students, and the taking into the Government camp of scholars, especially those in the social sciences, who ought to be acting as responsible and independent critics of their Government's policies. The corrupting process is a subtle one: No one needs to censor, threaten or give orders to contract scholars; without a word of warning or advice being uttered, it is simply understood that lucrative contracts are awarded not to those who question their Government's policies but to those who provide the Government with the tools and techniques it desires. The effect, in the words of the report to the Advisory Commission on International Education, is "to suggest the possibility to a world--never adverse to prejudice--that academic honesty is no less marketable than a box of detergent on the grocery shelf."

The formation of a military-industrial complex, for all its baneful consequences, is the result of great numbers of people engaging in more or less normal commercial activities. The adherence of the universities, though no more the result of a plan or conspiracy, nonetheless involves something else: the neglect and, if carried far enough, the betrayal of the university's fundamental reason for existence, which is the advancement of man's search for truth and happiness. It is for this purpose, and this purpose alone, that universities receive--and should receive--the community's support in the form of grants, loans and tax exemptions. When the university turns away from its central purpose and makes itself an appendage to the Government, concerning itself with techniques rather than purposes, with expedients rather than ideals, dispensing conventional orthodoxy rather than new ideas, it is not only failing to meet its responsibilities to its students; it is betraying a public trust.

This betrayal is most keenly felt by the students, partly because it is they who are being denied the services of those who ought to be their teachers, they to whom knowledge is being dispensed wholesale in cavernous lecture halls, they who must wait weeks for brief audiences with eminences whose time is taken up by travel and research connected with Government contracts. For all these reasons, the students feel them-selves betrayed, but it is doubtful that any of these is the basic cause of the angry rebellions that have broken out on so many campuses. It seems more likely that the basic cause of the great trouble in our universities is the students' discovery of corruption in the one place, besides perhaps the churches, that might have been supposed to be immune from the corruptions of our age. Having seen their country's traditional values degraded in the effort to attribute moral purpose to an immoral war, having seen their country's leaders caught in inconsistencies that are politely referred to as a "credibility gap," they now see their universities--the last citadels of moral and intellectual integrity--lending themselves to ulterior and expedient ends and betraying their own fundamental purpose, which, in James Bryce's words, is to "reflect the spirit of the times without yielding to it."

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Students are not the only angry people in America nor the only people with cause for anger. There is also the anger of the American poor, black and white, rural and urban. These are the dispossessed children of the affluent society, the 30,000,000 Americans whose hopes were briefly raised by the proclamation of a "war on poverty," only to be sacrificed to the supervening requirements of the war on Asian communism or, more exactly, to the Executive preoccupation and the Congressional parsimony induced by that war.

In our preoccupation with foreign wars and crises, we have scarcely noticed the revolution wrought by undirected change here at home. Since World War Two, our population has grown by more than 59,000,000; a mass migration from country to city has crowded over 70 percent of our population onto scarcely more than one percent of our land; vast numbers of rural Negroes from the South have filled the slums of Northern cities while affluent white families have fled to shapeless new suburbs, leaving the cities physically deteriorating and financially destitute and creating a new and socially destructive form of racial isolation combined with degrading poverty. Poverty, which is a tragedy in a poor country, blights our affluent society with something more than tragedy; being unnecessary, it is deeply immoral as well.

Distinct though it is in cause and character, the Negro rebellion is also part of the broader crisis of American poverty, and it is unlikely that social justice for Negroes can be won except as part of a broad program of education, housing and employment for all of our poor, for all of the great "under class," of whom Negroes comprise no more than one fourth or one third. It is essential that the problem of poverty be dealt with as a whole, not only because the material needs of the white and colored poor are the same--better schools, better homes and better job opportunities--but because alleviating poverty in general is also the best way to alleviate racial hostility. It is not the affluent and educated who primarily account for the "backlash" but the poorer white people, who perceive in the Negro rights movement a threat to their jobs and homes and--probably more important--a threat to their own meager sense of social status.

There is nothing edifying about poverty. It is morally as well as physically degrading. It does not make men brothers. It sets them against one another in competition for jobs and homes and status. It leaves its mark on a man and its mark is not pretty. Poverty constricts and distorts, condemning its victims to an endless, anxious struggle for physical necessities. That struggle, in turn, robs a man of his distinctly human capacities--the capacity to think and create, the capacity to seek and savor the meaning of things, the capacity to feel sympathy and friendliness for his fellow man.

If we are to overcome poverty and its evil by-products, we shall have to deal with them as human rather than as racial or regional problems. For practical as well as moral reasons, we shall have to have compassion for those who are a little above the bottom as well as for those who are at the bottom. We shall have to have some understanding of the white tenant farmer as well as the Negro farm laborer, of the urban white immigrant workingman as well as the Negro slum dweller. It would even benefit us to acquire some understanding--not approval, just understanding--of each other's group and regional prejudices. If the racial crisis of recent years has proved anything, it is that none of us, Northerner or Southerner, has much to be proud of, that our failures have been national failures, that our problems are problems of a whole society, and so as well must be their solutions.

All these problems--of poverty and race, jobs and schools--have come to focus in the great cities, which, physically, mentally and aesthetically, are rapidly becoming unfit for human habitation. As now taking shape, the cities and suburbs are the product of technology run rampant, without effective political direction, without regard to social and long-term economic cost. They have been given their appearance by private developers, builders and entrepreneurs, seeking, as they will, their own short-term profit. Lakes and rivers are polluted and the air is filled with the fumes of the millions of cars that choke the roads. Recreation facilities and places of green and quiet are pitifully inadequate and there is no escape from crowds and noise, both of which are damaging to mental health. At the heart of the problem is the absence of sufficient funds and political authority strong enough to control the anarchy of private interest and to act for the benefit of the community. Despite the efforts of some dedicated mayors and students of urban problems, the tide of deterioration is not being withstood and the cities are sliding deeper into disorganization and demoralization.

The larger cities have grown beyond human scale and organizing capacity. No matter what is done to rehabilitate New York and Chicago, they will never be places of green and quiet and serenity, nor is there much chance that these can even be made tolerably accessible to the millions who spend their lives enclosed in concrete and steel. Ugly and inhuman though they are, the great urban complexes remain, nonetheless, a magnet for Negroes from the South and whites from Appalachia. Crowding the fetid slums and taxing public services, they come in search of jobs and opportunity, only to find that the jobs that are available require skills that they lack and have little prospect of acquiring.

One wonders whether this urban migration is irreversible, whether it may not be possible to create economic opportunities in the small towns and cities, where there are space and land and fresh air, where building costs are moderate and people can still live in some harmony with natural surroundings. The technology of modern agriculture may inevitably continue to reduce farm employment, but we have scarcely begun to consider the possibilities of industrial decentralization--of subsidies, tax incentives and other means--to make it possible for people to earn a living in the still-human environments of small-town America.

A decent life in a small town is not only very much better than slum life in a big city; it is probably cheaper, too. The Secretary of Agriculture has suggested that it would be better to subsidize a rural family with $1000 a year for 20 years than to house them in a cramped urban "dwelling unit" at a cost of $20,000. In New York or Chicago, $2500 a year of welfare money will sustain a family in destitution; in the beautiful Ozark country of Arkansas, it is enough for a decent life.

Aggravating the material ills is the impersonalization of life in a crowded, urban America. Increasingly, we find wherever we go--in shops and banks and the places where we work--that our names and addresses no longer identify us; the IBM machines require numbers: zip codes, account numbers and order numbers. Our relevant identify in a computerized economy is statistical rather than personal. Business machines provide standard information and standard services and there are no people to provide particular information or services for our particular needs. The governing concept, invented, I believe, in the Pentagon, is "cost effectiveness," which refers not to the relationship of cost to human need or satisfaction but to the relationship of cost to the computerized system. Technology has ceased to be an instrument of human ends; it has become an end in itself, unregulated by political or philosophical purpose. The toll that all this takes on the human mind can only be guessed at, but it must surely be enormous, because human needs are different from the needs of the system to which they are being subordinated. Someday the human requirements may be computerized, too, but they have not, thank God, been computerized yet.

The cost of rehabilitating America will be enormous beyond anything we have even been willing to think about. When Mayor Lindsay said that aside from Federal, state and city funds, it would cost an additional 50 billion dollars over ten years to make New York a fit place to live in, his statement was dismissed as fanciful, although 50 billion dollars is less than we spend in two years in Vietnam. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal has ventured the guess that it will cost trillions of dollars to rehabilitate our slums and their inhabitants. "[The] common idea that America is an immensely rich and affluent country," he says, "is very much an exaggeration. American affluence is heavily mortgaged. America carries a tremendous burden of debt to its poor people. That this debt must be paid is not only a wish of the do-gooders. Not paying it implies the risk for the social order and for democracy as we have known it."

Before we can even begin to think of what needs to be done and how to do it, we have got to re-evaluate our national priorities. We have got to weigh the costs and benefits of going to the moon against the costs and benefits of rehabilitating our cities. We have got to weigh the costs and benefits of the supersonic transport, which will propel a few business executives across the Atlantic in two or three hours, against the costs and benefits of slum clearance and school construction, which would create opportunity for millions of our deprived under class. We have got to weigh the benefits and consider the awesome disparity of the 935.4 billion dollars we have spent on military power since World War Two against the 114.9 billion dollars we have spent, out of our regular national budget, on education, health, welfare, housing and community development.

Defining our priorities is more a matter of moral accounting than of cost accounting. The latter may help us determine what we are able to pay for, but it cannot help us decide what we want and what we need and what we are willing to pay for. It cannot help the five sixths of us who are affluent to decide whether we are willing to pay for programs that will create opportunity for the one sixth who are poor; that is a matter of moral accounting. It cannot help us decide whether beating the Russians to the moon is more important to us than purifying our poisoned air and lakes and rivers; that, too, is a matter of moral accounting. Nor can it help us decide whether we want to be the arbiter of the world's conflicts, the proud enforcer of a Pax Americana, even though that must mean the abandonment of the founding fathers' idea of America as an exemplary society and the betrayal of the idea of world peace under world law, which, as embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations, was also an American idea. These, too, are matters of moral accounting.

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Rich and powerful though our country is, it is not rich or powerful enough to shape the course of world history in a constructive or desired direction solely by the impact of its power and policy. Inevitably and demonstrably, our major impact on the world is not in what we do but in what we are. For all their world-wide influence, our aid and our diplomacy are only the shadow of America; the real America--and the real American influence--is something else. It is the way our people live, our tastes and games, our products and preferences, the way we treat one another, the way we govern ourselves, the ideas about man and man's relations with other men that took root and flowered in the American soil.

History testifies to this. A hundred years ago, England was dominant in the world, just as America is today. Now England is no longer dominant; her great fleets have vanished from the seas and only small fragments remain of the mighty British Empire. What survives? The legacy of hatred survives--hatred of the West and its arrogant imperialism, hatred of the condescension and the exploitation, hatred of the betrayal abroad of the democracy that Englishmen practiced at home. And the ideas survive--the ideas of liberty and tolerance and fair play to which Englishmen were giving meaning and reality at home while acting on different principles in the Empire. In retrospect, it seems clear that England's lasting and constructive impact on modern India, for example, springs not from the way she ruled in India but, despite that, from the way she was ruling England at the same time.

Possessed as they are of a genuine philanthropic impulse, many Americans feel that it would be selfish and exclusive, elitist and isolationist, to deny the world the potential benefits of our great wealth and power, restricting ourselves to a largely exemplary role. It is true that our wealth and power can be, and sometimes are, beneficial to foreign nations; but they can also be, and often are, immensely damaging and disruptive. Experience--ours and that of others--strongly suggests that the disruptive impact predominates, that when big nations act upon small nations, they tend to do them more harm than good. This is not necessarily for lack of good intentions; it is, rather, for lack of knowledge. Most men simply do not know what is best for other men; and when they pretend to know or genuinely try to find out, they usually end up taking what they believe to be best for themselves as that which is best for others.

Conceding this regrettable trait of human nature, we practice democracy among ourselves, restricting the freedom of individuals to impose their wills upon other individuals, restricting the state as well and channeling such coercion as is socially necessary through community institutions. We do not restrict the scope of Government because we wish to deny individuals the benefits of its wealth and power; we restrict our Government because we wish to protect individuals from its capacity for tyranny.

If it is wisdom to restrict the power of men over men within our society, is it not wisdom to do the same in our foreign relations? If we cannot count on the benevolence of an all-powerful Government toward its own people, whose needs and characteristics it knows something about and toward whom it is surely well disposed, how can we count on the benevolence of an all-powerful America toward peoples of whom we know very little? Clearly, we cannot; and, until such time as we are willing to offer our help through community institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, I think that, in limiting our commitments to small nations, we are doing more to spare them disruption than we are to deny them benefits.

Wisdom consists as much in knowing what you cannot do as in knowing what you can do. If we knew and were able to acknowledge the limits of our own capacity, we would be likely, more often than we do, to let nature take its course in one place and another, not because it is sure or even likely to take a good course but because, whatever nature's course may be, tampering with it in ignorance will almost surely make it worse.

We used, in the old days, to have this kind of wisdom and we also knew, almost instinctively, that what we made of ourselves and of our own society would probably have a lasting and beneficial impact on the world than anything we might do in our foreign relations. We were content, as they say, to let conduct serve as an unspoken sermon. We knew that it was the freedom and seemingly unlimited opportunity, the energy and marvelous creativity of our diverse population, rather than the romantic nonsense of "manifest destiny," that made the name America a symbol of hope to people all over the world.

We knew these things until events beyond our control carried us irrevocably into the world and its fearful problems. We recognized thereupon, as we had to, that some of our traditional ideas would no longer serve us, that we could no longer, for example, regard our power as something outside of the scales of the world balance of power and that, there fore, we could no longer remain neutral from the major conflicts of the major nations. But, as so often happens when ideas are being revised, we threw out some valid ideas with the obsolete ones. Recognizing that we could not help but be involved in many of the world's crises, we came to suppose that we had to be involved in every crisis that came along; and so we began to lose the understanding of our own limitations. Recognizing that we could not help but maintain an active foreign policy, we came to suppose that whatever we hoped to accomplish in the world would be accomplished by acts of foreign policy, and this--as we thought--being true, that foreign policy must without exception be given precedence over domestic needs; and so we began to lose our historical understanding of the power of the American example.

The loss is manifest in Vietnam. There at last we have embraced the ideas that are so alien to our experience--the idea that our wisdom is as great as our power and the idea that our lasting impact on the world can be determined by the way we fight a war rather than by the way we run our country. These are the principal and most ominous effects of the war--the betrayal of ideas that have served America well and the great moral crisis that that betrayal has set loose among our people and their leaders.

The crisis will not soon be resolved, nor can its outcome be predicted. It may culminate, as I hope it will, in a reassertion of the traditional values, in a renewed awareness of the creative power of the American example. Or it may culminate in our becoming an empire of the traditional kind, ordained to rule for a time over an empty system of power and then to fade or fall, leaving, like its predecessors, a legacy of dust.