balls that would make salvation a universal religion. It pokes some fun at Harry Truman, as if Americans who expected Nixon, JFK, and LBJ to make Vietnam a land that Americans could die for had not really tried Christianity, but the president has the right to think the Beatitudes are the perfect description of the reversals of meaning popping into the head of a figure in flight with its mind fixed on its own salvation. At this late date in December, 2011, I hardly expect people to remember a craving to put everything in your Harry Truman and smoke it, but books can take us back to the hell that makes it worth quoting a footnote on page 168: President Truman, for example, once told a delegation of churchmen that the foreign policy of the United States is based on the Sermon on the Mount. He was no doubt quite sincere, quite unaware of any inconsistency between this announcement and the contemporary Truman doctrine. And though Americans are notorious for such self-righteousness or innocent hypocrisy, it has always been characteristic of the Christian civilization of the West and a major offense to the exploited peoples of the East. Vietnam was a question which was not a sure thing for Americans, but the salvation of America as a global superpower has a lot in common with Jesus, which The Uses of the Past describes as being "as unconcerned about economic opportunity and political freedom as he was about the cultivation of