Challenge to a Generation:

...Before this invasion occurred, we had comfortably assumed that Soviet military power, although great, was not likely to be used in outright aggression...

...As a result, our military forces had been reduced well below the danger point...

...Global economic problems, like modern military problems, are infinitely complex...

...We are confronted with a whole new world and entirely new sets of relationships within that world—from medical science to space law, from labor-management relations to the critically complicated challenge of disarmament...

...but even more perhaps on our deep convictions with regard to human freedom and our moral commitment to the rights of the individual, and on our capacity and willingness to think and act in the great democratic tradition...

...The common lot of the 1 billion people who live under Communist rule consists of hard physical work in return for the bare essentials of life, uncritically believing what the newspapers say, avoiding controversy, sticking resolutely to safe thoughts and simple comments, concentrating on the safe and the unspectacular, never probing, arguing, writing, speaking...

...As members of a free society, we must strive not only for survival but to maintain the right of future generations to continue to live in open societies...

...But whatever we do, let us not become so preoccupied with the forces and counterforces within China and Russia that we neglect to do the great and good things we are able to do among the majority of mankind for whom Communism is still an unappealing and foreign ideology...

...Suddenly we found ourselves face to face with the hard, aggressive military aspect of world Communism...

...Thus we became increasingly conscious of the burgeoning Soviet economy, its rapid growth rate and its concentration on heavy industry...

...What is equally important, we will once more have standards for self-judgment...

...At best, much of it depends on influences and events beyond our control...

...Only by learning to make use of the freedom that our open society provides to do the things others cannot do because of their closed one...

...As a practical matter, therefore, the ordinary citizen felt little direct responsibility...

...If we re-anchor ourselves to the great ideas of all time, we will have more than enough of the moral strength we need to make judgments, to set our course and to persevere...

...Essential to this process is a clear understanding of the revolutionary changes which are taking place in the world beyond our own shores, and a vigorous communication of this understanding to our children...

...Moreover, freedom itself cannot be indefinitely confined by national borders and cold war battle lines...

...The point about a free society is that it is an open society, not a vacant one...

...This re-examination in regard to America's relation with the world strikes me as particularly hopeful...

...Only by living by significantly different values and for significantly different goals...

...We must accentuate the use of that marginal element in our lives which really is different from theirs—that goes beyond the essentials of eating, sleeping and keeping alive, to the individual, distinguishing element that enables us to be different...

...Bowles, who resigned his seal in Congress to support President Kennedy in his bid for election, is a former Governor of Connecticut (194551) and also was Ambassador to India (1951-53...

...The first essential step is to understand the forces with which we must contend, and throughout America a major re-examination is already under way in earnest...

...In our hurry to redress this error, we rushed to the other extreme: Constructive, creative programs such as the Marshall Plan and Point Four were downgraded...

...We are beginning to understand that the contest goes beyond both guns and butter to the fundamental question of the meaning, promise and relevance of our free democratic society...

...Admittedly, the present challenge involves far more than jobs, pay increases and material comforts...

...It is open for inventiveness in statecraft as well as in science, for controversy in public as well as in private, for competition in ideas as well as in goods, for incentive for leadership as well as for leisure...

...As Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened to "bury" us economically rather than militarily, we began to look beyond the very real Soviet military threat to the economic aspects of the world conflict...

...My own generation faced a similar although more limited challenge in the early '30s when the sudden collapse of our economy shocked us out of our easy assumption that money, at least for the fortunate few, grew on trees...

...People do manage to exist in closed societies...

...On the contrary, our tasks will be grueling, difficult and at times thankless ones...

...All religions are committed to that proposition...

...What indeed could he do except pay his taxes cheerfully and hope that our military authorities really knew their jobs...

...While this broader view of the world challenge was a long step toward reality, it still left the individual American in the role of an anxious, but not yet directly involved, bystander...

...I do not suggest that the path ahead is easy...

...In my lifetime, this world has been put on the defensive by the impact of two world wars and the revolutionary forces which have accompanied and followed them...

...We must concentrate as free individuals in making use of our margin for living free lives, the margin which the threat of fear, eavesdropping, secret police and regimentation stifles in the closed society...

...As members of an open, free society, how can we successfully compete with a closed, totalitarian society of this kind...

...Those who believe truly and deeply in the worth of the individual and the power of the ideal of freedom cannot accept as inevitable the denial of freedom for any portion of the human race...

...Now, for the first time in our history, our destiny is tied to that of hundreds of millions of other human beings whose objectives, hopes and fears appear different from our own, but who, like ourselves, are contending with new forces of massive strength and uncertain direction...

...Obviously, our free society faces some formidable disadvantages when it is called upon to share the world with closed totalitarian societies, particularly so when those closed societies have announced their determination to demolish it...

...We have no need to discover or invent new principles or ideologies to live by...

...We are beginning to suspect that the future may not necessarily belong to the nations which can produce or set off the most rockets or even make the most bathtubs...

...Our response was bold, pragmatic and creative...

...Long before the Soviet Union and Communist China, hundreds of millions of people had lived their full span of years in closed societies...

...Consequently, our attention is shifting from the question of how our society can survive to what we Americans have to offer...

...In many areas, old methods and old attitudes must give way to the new...

...Views and assumptions which a previous generation of Americans have taken for granted are being jolted abruptly, and the jolts will continue to come...

...All of the major civilizations of the non-Communist world have been built on the proposition that man is more than a chemical accident...

...In the minds of many, if not most, Americans they seem to belong to the great corporations, the great labor unions, and to the distant Federal Government...

...Yet we have all we need for the task before us, and I am confident that the rewards of living in the days ahead will be measured by the sense of achievement, patriotism and personal accomplishment that will go to those Americans who involve themselves in participating in the long-term effort of moving our national policies into constructive, active, positive channels...

...Whether or not free societies such as ours continue to exist and prosper in tomorrow's world will depend not only on defenses and the vitality of our economy...

...But our free and open society is the only kind of society that gives meaning and purpose to life, and if we are to keep it, we must see that our individual, family, college and professional lives are freer, more constructive and more active than the lives we might lead if we lived in a closed totalitarian society...

...Is it possible that behind the ruthless, totalitarian leadership of Communist China, humanistic sparks may still be smouldering and that out of the ashes may again arise the creative genius which made possible the long miracle of Chinese civilization...

...But our capacity to achieve a meaningful existence rests squarely on our ability to generate sufficient power to assert ourselves constructively and responsibly as individuals...

...Yet I believe there is every reason for measured confidence in our capacity to meet this new challenge with honor and success...

...Unless I am sadly mistaken, we are now rapidly developing a broader, more sophisticated and more personal view...

...The conflict between the closed Communist societies and our own open one is far more than a conflict between rival defense establishments, rival economies, rival espionage systems, or rival summit negotiators...

...Today, two-thirds of the people on this earth are in the throes of the greatest revolution of all time: Men and women once doomed to endless poverty, misery and disease are reaching out for more dignity and expanding economic opportunities...

...A little over 10 years ago the North Korean Army, armed and directed by the Kremlin, struck without warning across the Southern border...

...This is the exciting promising kind of world into which my generation was born—a world where, on three continents, Gandhi, Wilson and Sun Yat-sen represented triumphant moving forces of wider freedom and more significant life...

...Ultimately, we found the means of releasing again the limitless capacity of the American people and their economic system for new records of material accomplishment and individual opportunity...

...And so, while accepting in a general way the dangers which confront us in world affairs, we were inclined to view them as beyond our power to influence or even fully to understand...

...The vastly oversimplified views of the world struggle which most of us accepted without serious question a decade ago are now giving way to a much more sophisticated and realistic consideration of what we are up against...

...We know that man is surrounded by belief and lives for a purpose...

...With Stalin's death in 1953 we gradually moved toward broader interpretation of the world contest...

...Let us review briefly the stages of American thinking about world affairs which succeeded one another in the 1950s...

...Indeed, we have only to reach back to the values of the past and merge them with the opportunities of the future...

...This article is adapted from a commencement address which Bowles recently delivered at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor...

...Foreign policy became centered on military force and military alliances...

...We will realize that the promise of America cannot be fulfilled through a half-hearted fulfillment of our national commitment to human rights and individual dignity for all...

...In the most effective possible way we must learn how to combine a willingness to be venturesome with a sense of responsibility, of history, tradition and moral values...

...The challenge of world Communism had suddenly emerged as largely a military challenge...

...We are now challenged to understand the nature of this revolutionary world, to recapture the power and purpose of our own great democratic revolution, to explore the destructive, negative forces at work in Communist societies, and to put ourselves in touch with the aspirations of the people in between—the men and women and children of Asia, Africa and Latin America who are looking for America to recapture the vision of Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt...

...The task of working the world out of its cold war impasse may, of course, prove to be beyond human capacity...

...Since matters of military policy, in the public mind, are largely the concern of the experts, generals, admirals and heads of government, this helped create an almost fatalistic national mood...

...Can the Kremlin open the laboratories of the Soviet Union to the inquiring young minds necessary for scientific achievement while still denying the right to think about, and absorb, the great truths of human history...

...Chester Bowles, now an Under Secretary of State, has long been a contributor to The New Leader...

...We will see more clearly than we have in the past that our national economic growth will not be maintained by half-empty factories and uneven employment...

...We will understand that in the context of the challenge of the 20th century, we have not been put here on earth merely to build better bathtubs than the Russians...

...During the recent months I have seen it and felt it not only on college campuses, but in crossroads and byways around the nation, in buses and in supermarkets, in grocery stores, in the State Department and on Capitol Hill...

...In such a society the risks are very great, for no one knows when the police will knock at the door at night, or when the leadership will decide to snuff out a few more lives in a sudden burst of terror...

...Without neglecting the essential military mechanics of survival, the pertinent question is not simply how but why...

...In its broadest and most realistic sense, we are coming to see that the struggle is between two widely varying interpretations of the meaning of life: one which believes in the inherent dignity of the human individual, the other which believes that man was born to serve the state...

...It is a conflict that touches directly the lives, the energy, the sense of purpose and the faith of each one of us...