Myth, Man, and Statesman
Etzold, Thomas H.
is a liberal. She not only reads the Nation magazine cover to cover but believes what she reads. Being a liberal she is, of course, for almost everything--even for me, whom she regards as a nice...
...In )ne variety of internationalism Americans sought peace and security through interaational organization...
...Not only the weather but the political climate as well is all wrong...
...And then they came in waves...
...Streakers will reply (the Government claimed 1,500...
...A few observations...
...They were the practical enunciation of a loss of faith in international organization for peacekeeping...
...It was better to build fallout shelters and promote civil defense, even in the knowledge that such measures could hardly avail most of the nation's population, far better than to sit in frustrated paralysis for the tions...
...Because this latter variety of inter~ationalism superseded the first variety and became the fundamental element of .~znerican ColdWar policies under Dulles, it .s especially important to explicate...
...Yes, yes, yes...
...Americans would, it seemed, have ~o rely on themselves...
...ever had the United States been so inse;ure, never so bare of protection from ter_9 ible destruction...
...mal relations with mainland China...
...His prestige and power within the Eisenhower Administration reached truly mythic proportions, and the force of his rhetoric carried him to the front of national and international attention time and again schooled in the rhetorical traditions of isolationism...
...You is closer to the latter's...
...Perhaps the greatest weakness in Hoopes' account is reflected in the sparse bibliography...
...It was also a manifestaBy its postwar experience, the United States had become inclined to denigrate international organization and to favor self-reliance, a proposition that certainly led to behavior and style that have mistakenly been described as the "arrogance of power...
...Every reader needs to have Dulles' era placed in a larger context, not just as to consequence or subsequence, but as to antecedents...
...NATO could augment American ~ecurity only in one part of the world, and as it happened, not even in the part of the ~r where armed conflict was most imninent...
...Simultaneously, the United Nations proved inade]uate, if not incompetent, to deal with the ~ntroversial and terrifying problems sur:ounding the atomic energy issue...
...The campus police estimated slightly morous...
...Hoopes does not seem to know as much as he should about preDulles and extra-American developments in such cases as the emergence of the Diem regime in Vietnam or the development of Sin0-American relations in the early years of the People's Republic, nor does he take into account at all the constraints on Dulles' freedom of action...
...Example: ~in what may have possible--though it should not be--to read this book and grill know far too little of what was happening to the foreign relations of the United States, producing the apprehensions and actuating the behavior which Hoopes describes...
...There was, of course, scarcely an interval before war erupted in Korea, an event ~r brought still further evolution in American postwar security policy...
...I know, some gentlemen streakers have managed to carry the weight of lady streakers, but that is not the same thing...
...It was evidence of Dulles' intellectual habit of simplifying problems, of penetrating to the heart of issues and defining alternatives clearly even at the risk of fully accepted as policy even in mid-1974, oversimplification...
...It was profoundly unsettling when that organization demon~trated almost immediately that it was far irom capable of ensuring American security in the postwar world...
...Because Dulles missed potential turning points towards better relations with American competitors and enemies, because the force of Dulles' rhetoric and the shape of his strategic policies lived beyond his time, and because some long-term problems surfaced during his secretaryship but found no resolution, Hoopes regards the legacy of John Foster Dulles, especially in lems in a difficult decade, it is not an adequate method...
...Further, it ~eemed clear in 19~ 1945 that the League _9 ad failed not because it had been a bad Ldea, but because Americans had shirked ~heir responsibility for world order and a~istakenly had attempted to provide for ~heir own security irrespective of what happened to the other great powers...
...The critical insecurity of the mid-fifties was too frustrating to tolerate, but it was for a time beyond his power to alter in conclusive strategic terms...
...Finally, n the public forum provided by the United ~ations, the intransigence and cynical ~ostility of Soviet leaders seemed to be ~onfirmed beyond doubt...
...That lesson was prominent in the time ~r Dulles became secretary of state, and Lt created subtle but extremely important differences in the ways in which Dulles ~ontinued the policies of the Truman Ada~inistration, It is true, as Hoopes and ~any others note, that Dulles and Eisen~ower carried on with containment...
...Being a liberal she is, of course, for almost everything--even for me, whom she regards as a nice young man corrupted by bad reading material...
...Two primary factors" had combined to produce the notable and '~free" security which the United States enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century...
...Dulles thought it an error to believe that the foreign policy of any state was "due to the personal views and idiosyncracies of some . . . politician who may have temporarily secured an ascendance over his fellows...
...Guhin and Hoopes, both with extensive research into the manuscript and oral-history collections of Dtflles and his associates, have arrived at significantly different appreciations of Dulles as a man, a ' diplomat, and a secretary of state...
...It is unfortunate that Guhin never quite explains why he thinks Dulles a statesman, and that his book remains more expository than conclusive in analysis...
...Thomas H. Etzold B ok R iew Myself When Young ARTHUR KROCK, AN older American for freedom, retired some years ago at the age of seventy-eight as the Washington "In the Nation" columnist of the New York Times, but, bidding his sometimes faltering heart to take it easy, he still goes downtown to his old office for part of each day...
...in the other they ~et newly accepted "responsibilities" for world order and progress by expanding the _9 ealm of national interest and of national action...
...The Washington news was soon flowing in such volume that the Times, in spite of itself, took on all the trappings of a national newspaper...
...And perhaps postwar losses of security had introduced a modest paranoia into American approaches to foreign relations...
...I was wrong...
...He used to drop in at the small offices of the Times Sunday Book Review to tell of the delights of working in Manhattan, where mingling with prize fighters--Harry Greb, Gene the old World~ chief of the editorial page, and sent Arthur off to Washington to head a bureau which, with the sudden ladling out of all that New Deal alphabet soup, had taken a light-year leap in importance...
...Guhin minimized the effects of Dulles' family life and religious training and beliefs, and continues Louis Gerson's earlier attempts to "demythologize" Dulles.* Contrary to the stereotypes of Dulles and of American diplomatic defects, Dulles in Guhin's view was antilegalistic, eminently realistic in ununder which Dulles had to conduct his businessmthe constraints of public and even more of congressional opinion which constantly foreclosed alternatives in such matters as the normalization of relations with mainland China...
...It was no easy task to bring the American people to such unity of conviction and purpose or even to convince them of urgency and perhaps of a need for sacrifice and dedication in the national interest...
...About 90--100 were females...
...Nor has the world gone to hell because of American policies in the Cold War...
...Lost faith turned to a kind of existentialism---to a concern for the challenges and needs of the moment--when Soviet expansion continued in the latter forties in Czechoslovakia...
...He missed a series of opportunities from 1954 to 1957 which might have led to norfleet, interposed between the United States Dulles skipped the last several questions and the scheming monarchies of old on the bar exam in Rochester in order to Europe...
...In rolling phrases Hoopes denounces Dulles for constructing American alliance systems ringing the Soviet Union and China, deploying a million American servicemen overseas in a "vast formation of unprecedented imperial power," a system that Vietnam and the Middle East, as perni- could be justified only by the construction cious...
...I have long marvelled at Arthur Krock Tunney--was much to be preferred to his former career of hobnobbing over bourbon with politicians...
...There is much wisdom in one of Dulles' own observations on diplomacy...
...Thus it was not moralism but appreciation for the psychic element of struggle that brought Dulles to employ a rhetoric of confrontation...
...The ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in the questions have manifestly troubled evaluations of John Foster Dulles and his influence on American foreign policy in the years since 1952...
...But, like the poor, they are always with us anyway, Ultimate Streak or no...
...Within the space ~f two years, the United Nations had shown Ltself unable to deal with major elements ~f developing American security needs...
...That is an important point...
...Hoopes becomes the victim of his own literary skill in some passages where he is drawn into overly shallow judgment--~analogy by the rush of a phrase...
...Guhin has tried to analyze Dulles' policies, ideas, and in political science jargon his operational codes, rather than to judge Dulles in either political or mordl terms...
...The predominance of hindsight in Hoopes' book, concerned as it is with the route to Vietnam, is its most serious flaw as history...
...In the first flush of victory and leadership at war's end, Americans looked optimistically to the infant United Nations as a ,marantor of peace...
...Arthur, always a combination of indulgent affection and acidulous objectivity, e ~ t s very little of politicians, which is a sensible American attitude...
...His calculation, which proved correct, was that he had already written enough to pass...
...Streaking, I then realized, may be a l o t of things, including infantile regression...
...There were streakers masked and unmasked, streakers on bicycles and motorcycles, couples ("odd" and "straight"), even a blond girl on a white horse...
...One cannot be a streaker and at the same time carry the weight of the world on his shoulders...
...Dulles was not the devil, and the United States has not gone to hell because of what Dulles did or failed to do...
...Americans who favored the League of Nations hoped, and probably believed, that the threat of communal force in Article X would suffice to deter aggressors, and that consequently it would never have to be carried to the point of major conflict...
...The "new look," "massive retaliation," promises of "liberation" and "rollback," the "domino theory," "more bang for the buck," and more---the catch phrases of Dulles' oratory became the clichds of his era, building blocks out of which myth was constructed and the real Dulles, as well as the nature as he addressed the issues and problems of of American foreign policy, concealed from American foreign relations in a time of view as by a wall...
...But it was not arrogance or bluster or brash brinkmanship that contributed this character to Dulles' diplomacy...
...To what extent the molder of them...
...Unhappily, the diminution of American security accelerated rather than halted...
...Dulles exaggerated the communist menace deliberately to frighten the American people into a frenzied and rigid Cold War posture...
...It is In one very important sense, American flirtations with Wilsonian, and later Rooseveltian, internationalism were attempts to restore primary responsibility for American security to the community of powers...
...In the era of Vietnam, when it has become easy to embrace the idea that the United States has succumbed to the ~arrogance of power," important aspects of that historic development have been overlooked...
...Amid overwhelming evidence that American security was diminishing and that the United Nations was powerless to halt the trend, Americans devised an alternative organization, one with less pretension to serving the needs of universal peace, but with more point for the American circumstance...
...Perhaps more important, ~t demonstrated that even a NATO was :nadequate to provide for American needs Ln a world of incredible instability and ~ostility...
...It is tempting, perhaps, to substitute immersion in the Dulles papers and in the oral-history interviews for sufficiently wide reading of secondary material, but when so much has modest power in support, which meant that European states could safely relegate the United States to the periphery of interest or concern...
...By which she meant the presidential campaign of Ted Kennedy, war, racism, poverty, the lettuce boycott...
...The foremost diplomatic problem for the United States in the twentieth century became the acquisition of reasonable security in an age when British power had diminished, when concurrently American power and interests had grown large enough to invite competition and conflict in relations with other powers...
...So did 15,000 other spectators (police estimate...
...At the same time, the worst qualities of the book appear, for in his portrait of Dulles his almost vindictive hatred of the man is clear...
...The crowd surged forward, allowing streakers to go through two-by-two, like Noah's Ark, I thought...
...The sociologists and psychologists will banalize the phenomenon, trying to breathe the stale vapors of High Seriousness into it Ca protest against a conformist society"), Madison Avenue will Commercialize it (Streaker Ski-Masks from Pucci), athletic departments may institutionalize it ("Join the Streaking Squad...
...Thecourse of events in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin crisis a year later moved the United States a significant step further from its earlier optimistic confidence in international organization for peacekeeping...
...I first knew him in New York City at the end of the twenties when he jumped from a doomed New York World to write editorials for the T/rues...
...The first streakers appeared, running hard, not realizing perhaps that they had'a half-mile to go...
...The North Atlantic l~reaty Organization was a regional miliLary alliance, a mutual defense pact designed to provide the United States and its friends on the fringes of Soviet Russia and Sovietized Central Europe with the security they sought but could not find in the United Nations...
...She said that while she approved of streaking, she hoped the phenomenon would not divert the students from the serious issues...
...Campuses where people worry about the serious issues, where the dominant expression is a frown, where students actually wear "Impeach Nixon" but' tons, will recognize "streaking" for what it is: a harmless activity that uses up excess time and energy...
...It was important that Dulles identified defense and security problems as paramount...
...The second factor was the narrow catch an afternoon train back to Auburn _9 definition of American interest, with only for a dinner date with Janet...
...Someone once said of Dulles that he was a bull who carried his own china shop around with him...
...Dulles' personality did affect American policy in the Eisenhower years, but not so fundamentally...
...I doubt if streaking will prove as popular in the North as it has in the South...
...Dulles became secretary of state at the climax of a long process during which America had moved to the forefront of international society...
...To complain because the previous generation did not resolve the problems we must face in our time is, after all, only to testify to the passing of one generation and the immaturity of another...
...Similar expectation and optimism surrounded the creation of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War, though it was a more complex time in American policy because there were contradictory strains of internationalism which would exert great influence on the development of American policy in the first decade after World War II...
...Moreover, I detect very little outrage on the part of the supposedly uptight older generation...
...But it is also, praise the 1970s, a protest against the Serious Issues of Our Time...
...What was to be done?--*The Alternative May 1974 19 Hoopes and Guhin both fail to convey a sense of that unstable and frightening era in American foreign relations, and it is an enormous failure...
...Arthur Krock despised Washington at the time, and it was no secret that he would have preferred to remain in the home office of his newspaper for the rest of his working life...
...There were in SEATO and ~ENTO no mutual pledges, no clauses in ~r member states promised their aid and support to the United States in its ~otential need...
...In sum, as Guhin proclaims in his title, Dulles was a statesman...
...Even to his contemporaries, Dulles John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times by Michael A. Guhin Columbia University $12.95 The Devil and John Foster Dulles by Townsend Hoopes Atlantic Little Brown $15.00 seemed almost larger thanlife, one of those rare people who may have so imprinted his times as to have influenced a succeeding era...
...Moreover, with hundreds of naked bodies in full flight around one there is a momentary moral reconstruction...
...of a powerful anticommunist rationale in which Americans grew accustomed to elevating "every issue of foreign policy to the level of deadly clash between opposed moral absolutes...
...In the first variety of internationalism, the classic formula, Americans sought peace through international organization...
...In ~uick succession, only shortly after the [ormation of NATO, the United States lost its atomic monopoly and then "lost" China, Lhe first loss undeniably the result of espionage and subversion, and the second unmmfortably tinged, as Americans saw it for a time, with incompetence and perhaps ~reason: In five short years Americans had slid from the pinnacle of national and in [act international power to a deep insecurity unparalleled in their national history...
...American foreign relations have been characterized far more by a diplomacy of insecurity than a diplomacy of arrogance, at least in relations with the major powers of Europe and the Orient...
...Finally, Sir Toby turns on Malvolio, steward of the house, and asks: "Cause thou art virtuous dost thou think there will be no more cakes and ale...
...It is small wonder that they were willing to listen to anyone--even to a McCarthy-who claimed to have an explanaLion and a solution for the security problem...
...One can leer at the girls in Playboy or the boys in Playgirl, each to his own, but not at a coed flying by...
...But to blame Dulles for the fundamental principles, policies, and problems of the Cold War since 1952 perilously approaches promulgati0n of a "devil theory" as foolish and simplistic as that ascribed to Dulles in his combat with world communism...
...At the very moment when ~,znericans were assimilating the unwel;ome knowledge that they would have to 'go it alone," they faced world-exciting, nind-boggling demonstrations of the enehies' power and strategic superiority...
...Likewise significant, Dulles preferred action over inaction, and there is no doubt that he moved at times without sufficient reflection, plantion of his conviction that the American diplomatic situation could hardly be worse, except perhaps in a time of general war...
...Eat your hearts out New Hampshire...
...When it came to a big reshuffle in the Depression decade, however, the Times high command for his ability to live in Washington (work- made Charles Merz, Krock's colleague on ing for the Haldeman papers of Louisville, Kentucky, from 1910 to 1915 and for the New York Times from 1932 to 1966) without ever showing a single symptom of Potomac fever...
...In this limited task, he has accomplished much...
...Malvolio is continually reproving the wastrels, Sirs Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch, for their frivolity...
...In ~EATO and CENTO, the United States acknowledged that in some circumstances ]efense of member states could become its noral duty or practical interest, but that ~here was little the member states could ~ontribute to American needs...
...Streaking is a fad that will prove as ephemeral as any other...
...Former University of Georgia Dean of Men, William Tate, a strong Southern traditionalist (he once said he got nervous every time he saw a Yankee light a match in Atlanta) provided a historical basis for streaking...
...The ~oviets violated the Yalta agreement and ~onsolidated their expansion into Eastern Europe, apparently immune to the influence of the world organization...
...But none of them will ever be able to kill the splendor of multitudes of people finding joy in running naked through the grass and thumbing their nose at the serious issues...
...E:] Myth, Man, an d Statesman IN THEIR RECENT books on John F o s t e r Dulles, Michael Guhin and Townsend Hoopes have illustrated once again the perennial hardihood of a great puzzle for historians and especially for biographers: to what extent is an individual representative of his times...
...To be sure, the United States in Dulles' time was striving to be a great power rather than a great society...
...And Arthur Krock, with his inside track to such knowledgeable friends as old Joe Kennedy, began getting 20 The Alternative May 1974...
...It was by no means a matter of being kicked upstairs...
...For all his past prominence, John Foster Dulles is no easy man to rediscover, a fact which reflects in substantial part the confusion in arguments over recent American foreign relations as it does the undeniable importance of a writer's own prescriptive convictions about recent policy...
...A few dozen people went streaking around for an hour or so before the mass gathering in one of the dormitory quadrangles...
...Hoopes concludes that such an achievement testified more than adequately to Dulles' lack of foresight and to a lack of will to construct more durable, less morally and practically precarious institutions, a conclusion that is long on hindsight, but short on insight...
...The absence of such a context leaves the authors unable to explain important aspects of Dulles' motivaning, or coordination...
...That Dulles did profoundly influence the tenor and course of American policy is agreed, but whether that influence was for good or for ill, whether Dulles determined policy in his time and fixed it for his successors or merely participated in and contributed to its development is hotly disputed...
...For adequate treatment of Dulles' early and formative years, and especially for a full, almost living word portrait of the personality and character of John Foster Dulles, one must turn to Hoopes...
...Dulles been written on a world's diplomatic probmismanaged relations with American allies, alienated friends with supercilious arrogance and gratuitous lectures, and convinced communist powers that they and the United States were locked in a death struggle...
...was surely influenced by the development of massive insecurity and the conviction that things were getting worse...
...Or, vals and free-lancers, perhaps 10 percent of the student body (l~ies...
...Alas, I fear not...
...Counting late arri- have nothing to lose but your Farahs...
...Guhin begins his study challenge still unfamiliar to Americans with a chapter entitled "In Search of John The Alternative May 1974 17 Foster Dulles...
...Hoopes judges Dulles' professionalism in diplomacy as merely a tactical skill, for Dulles had no long view of policy which would qualify him as a statesman...
...As I said earlier, Georgia is a conservative campus...
...Though not formally at war, the United States had been sustaining huge losses, and the prevention of further erosions of American security required Americans to be vigilant, energetic in endeavor, unified in spirit...
...The opponents of streaking--a strange assortment of fuddy-duddies and liberalswith-a-cause--are really descendants of the puritan Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night...
...An especially important point of Guhin's analysis is his emphasis on the limitations *Louis L. Gerson, John Foster Dulles, Cooper Square, New York, 1967...
...The first one he saw at Georgia was in 1921, a hapless fraternity pledge fulfilling a command from the '%rothers...
...Hair today, gone tomorrow...
...If :he international organization could not ~eep peace and order, the United States ~ould have to do it...
...After twenty years many of his phrases retain the power to summon images of conflict and consensus, the fantasies and realities of the middle and most intense era of Cold War...
...Yes, there were some professional exhibitionists and perverts...
...streaked at Georgia that night...
...Indeed, in the strategic terms of the middle fifties, the United States was attempting to maintain its position as the greatest power, for only in that position did the prospect of tolerable relative security lie...
...I expected that all the publicity, coupled with the insistencies of the moment, abetted by great quantities of beer, would produce perhaps 100 streakers...
...Guhin's book successfully conveys both understandin~g and respect for Dulles' principles of life and axiorfis of politics...
...He respects the Scotty Restons and the Turner Catledges who grew up under his tutelage in the Washington Bureau for their reportorical capacities, but obviously thinks they never quite understood the genius of the traditional American republic, which once took it as Growing Up in the 1890s by Arthur Krock Little, Brown $6.95 gospel that the people should support the government, not vice versa...
...True, Dulles and Eisenhower left precedents and problems to their successors...
...The United Nations like the League before it was primarily to be a peace-keeping organization, not a humanitarian or liberalizing agency...
...The hope of the present generation rests on strategic principles and diplomatic styles other than those of the Dulles years, which i s n o t necessarily an indictment of Dulles...
...By 1947 Americans saw little choice...
...he said his generation hadn't indulged in the activity because they "didn't have as much to offer...
...The Korean War confirmed the worst American ~uspicions about commumst intentions and ~referred tactics...
...Which characteristic, that of representative or molder, makes him more important to the historian...
...The second variety of American internationalism after the Second World War reLated inversely to the first, although the ;wo varieties have often been confused...
...If Dulles could help it, there would be no American confused or in doubt as to who were enemies of the United States, as to what tho~ enemies intended, and as to the serious threat such enemies posed in an era of dramatized insecurity...
...Here the best qualities of Hoopes' book are on displaymthe fine prose style, lively wit, and the informed manner that perhaps comes only from having been on the inside for a number of years (Hoopes is a former State Department officer...
...And then, mirabile dictu, one of the tightly packed crowd of watchers turned around and pointed out that an equally large number of streakers was bypassing the main body of spectators and running behind the crowd...
...The later pacts recognized at least implicitly the new American real~ation that defense of interests and the ~aintenance of security depended on no ~ther state or combination of states...
...Newly found power, a new role in international relations, from the earliest part of the century brought with it not only novel privileges and responsibilities, but unprecedented risks...
...But ~he alliance systems built by Dulles--~EATO and CENTO--were not analogues ~o NATO...
...I went to the March 7 streak...
...the cheering started (it didn't stop until 3:00 A.M...
...It is also, in the mass form, a surprisingly asexual event...
...The first, as everyone knows, was the British derstanding the nature and uses of power, been his first application of brinkmanship, only moderately religious and a liberal at that, little influenced by moralism in his practice of international relations, and underneath the generalities of his public statements a shrewd and thoroughly professional diplomat...
...The Greek-Turkish aid ~ill, the Truman Doctrine, and the Mar~hall Plan were much more than statements of American hostility to the Soviet Union and international communism...
...Hundreds of naked people were going by...
...my own guess bareassed to the harassed), "Join us...
...But it is difficult to argue that any or all of these elements of American policy and style were attributable to John Foster Dulles...
...With mother generation of spies and an incredible surge of development the Soviets first ~xploded a hydrogen device and then lofted t Sputnik...
...They would have to ?rovide for their own security...
...At precisely 11:00 P.M...
...Even Lester Maddox, who was "streaked, when he came to speak at Georgia found it hualternatively, "On streak...
...In contrast, Hoopes considers Dulles intensely moralistic, rigid in mind and precept, cynical rather than realistic, and completely bound up in lawyer-like modes of thought, expression, style, and personality...
...The strategy of deterrence via equivalent power was at least two decades in the future, and has not been Dulles was realist enough or, one might insist, cynic enough to place more confidence in the exercise of power and the use of threats than in the arts of persuasion...
...His business: writing nostalgically of a time in the United States that knew not the philosophy of those who succeeded him in the Times Washington Bureau...
...Streakers poured by for perhaps fifteen minutes, greeted by a roar from the spectators (many of whom stripped and joined in) that was almost gladitoriaI...
...Dulles' own characteristics present a further obstacle to analysis because of the superficial consonance between Dulles' background, connections, and training and the stereotype of mediocre American diplomatic officials, A lawyer, a lay churchman of prominence, a WASP, an ~'old boy" by virtue of family, education, and professional associations, Dulles apparently fit ideally into the mold of moralistic, legalistic, strong-headed but narrowminded American diplomats, except that he was probably more intelligent and more influential than most such American diplomats...
...Join us...
...Neither is it adequate to explain the institutionalization of the Cold War in the _9 niddle fifties as a function of Dulles' personality, of his limitations in vision, or of his peculiar conviction that monolithic world communism was the Antichrist...
...As long as the United States moderated its definitions of national interest and behaved with restraint, it faced few risks in foreign relations...
...They will see that it distracts one's attention from, say, the Farah over 1,000 streakers, although the Student Pants Company...
...Soon after Dulles came to office, while &mericans were still struggling to find ~plendor in loneliness, pride in self-relirace, two more events shattered whatever .'omposure and confidence remained...
...As Hoopes emphasizes and Guhin acknowledges, Dulles was ready to exaggerate and stereotype the enemy--to distill complex cross currents of conflicting national interests and ideologies into clear-cut challenges and choices--if such tactics would awaken Americans to the risks and duties of American foreign relations in the mid-fifties...
...With the turn of the century, of course, not just one but both of the major factors underlying American security altered...
...It may be that those who remain fully clothed are the ones who feel slightly embarrassed...
...Dulles, like other Americans, per- several years it would take the United haps more than many other Americans, Stages to close that first "missile gap...
...Americans in 1945 favored a United Nations because they thought they had learned during the last stages of a second 18 The Alternative May 1974 ~orld war that they could not stay secure and at peace on their own...
...So did 50,000 beer cans (my estimate after surveying the scene the next morning...
...It would be an indictment of us if we had not progressed beyond the plans and understandings of the previous generation, for Dulles anticipated a different future than we do, just as he lived through a different past and confronted a different present...
...Ale, as all streakers know, is a marvelous lubricant for this nonlubricious form of nudity...
Vol. 7 • May 1974 • No. 8
