Draft Chapter I -- Overall Report

October 29, 1957.

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above the North Pole, the whole pattern of life of huge areas of the earth
may be transformed. To permit any one nation to control the climatic en-
vironment of others would be unthinkable.

A view of world problems in this largest focus is not merely an inter-
esting exercise of the imagination. It is the necessary precondition to
understanding what our own contribution can be. It makes crystal clear the
limited -- albeit essential -- assistance which dollars or machines can
give to a crisis whose characteristic is a groping for new orientations. It is
not wealth but values which will win the adherence of the old world and the
new; not military or economic command but moral and intellectual leadership
which will inspire their trust.

Thus internationally as well as domestically our problems -- and as
before, our opportunities -- are not such as to be mastered by strength of
effort alone. They too call for imagination and vision. The impatient as-
pirations of the newly independent states demands the guiding example of
our own democratic self-discipline quite as much as our material assistance.
The temper of our European friends must be turned away from fruitless bitter-
ness, and toward a new renaissance of effort by the stimulus of sympathetic
ideals as well as by concrete help. The explosive rate of technological
change must be guided by a morality as tough and durable as science itself.
And finally, the communist threat must come to us not merely as a test of
power but as a challenge to make us more deeply aware of the principles by
which we should live.

October 29, 1957.

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IV

These are some of the vistas of America at mid-century. They are very great, even to a people used to bigness. The scale of experience which has shaped our traditional notions of policy is rendered obsolete by the enormous contingencies of the unfolding future. The radical nature of the changes before us, and the incredible rapidity with which we have been catalyzed into the center of world affairs present our nation with a situation unique in our history; we find ourselves today in a new world, wherein concepts formed in the more tranquil past are proving inadequate guides. There is a discontinuity in our historical experience which makes it imperative to look closely at our national values and national purposes and ask how they can be given a new and cogent affirmation.

For a value system is crucial to the survival of any society or nation. Society cannot carry its tolerance of other value systems to the point of acquiescing in its own destruction. It cannot treat its survival as negotiable. Its values will determine the sacrifices it is prepared to make to insure its survival. In any conflict, spiritual or physical, the side with the stronger faith has a decided advantage. It is willing to make greater sacrifices because its purposes will be stronger.

Beyond the elementary needs for survival lie the positive goals of a society, both domestic and international. The distinction between societies is to be found in the positive part of their actions, in their view

October 29, 1957

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of the nature of man and his place in the universe. If we did not have
such values we would not greatly care what happened as long as our im-
mediate security were assured.

The actions of a society can thus be placed into two categories. Certain measures are dictated by the requirements of survival; others are produced by the desire to create a world harmonious with a society's aspirations and values. The first category of actions is imposed by the environment; it is defensive. The second class of actions is an attempt to shape the environment; it is constructive. Without a well-defined value system, or even if the existing one is not clearly understood, any nation is liable to drift aimlessly in the stream of history. Its actions will prove haphazard. Its policies will evolve from impromptu reactions to crisis situations. It will become, inevitably, a prisoner of events.

Unfortunately this has been America's approach to its problems
for most of this century. Time and again the U.S. has mustered its im-
mense, latent energies only at the eleventh hour, when confronted with
an obvious, immediate, deadly danger. We entered World War I only
after German submarines had sunk American ships, invaded American
waters and threatened to dominate the Atlantic Ocean. We entered World
War II only after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and threatened to dominate
the Pacific Ocean. The new economic and social concepts that emerged

October 29, 1957

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in the 1930s were the products of an economic crisis that threatened the foundations of American society -- and that no one had believed could occur. In each such emergency, the U.S. only belatedly mobilized its resources, creative skills and innate idealism to combat concrete and inescapable dangers. In none of these emergencies did the nation perceive its peril in advance or act soon enough to forestall the ultimate violent storm.

The explanation for our behavior lies deep in the American heritage. For the U.S. has been, at least since the passing of the philosopher-statesmen who directed its first formative decades, a nation inclined to operational rather than abstract or conceptual thinking, to action rather than reflection, to facts rather than theory. By and large Americans today like to regard themselves as a practical people. We feign to be scornful of prophets, idealists and philosophers. We are more interested in the result than in the theory which produced it. We tend to forget that great results are unattainable without great concepts. This nation was populated and established by men of ideas -- by apostles of political and religious freedom like Roger Williams, by many-sided statesmen like Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Most of our great charitable and public welfare institutions, the churches, the endowed foundations, the universities and medical schools, the hospitals and the whole complex of public education, are

October 29, 1957

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the creations of men in whom vision was the essential prerequisite of
action. No social problem has ever been solved, no social advance has
ever been achieved, except through the force of concepts formulated by
men of vision, dedication and reason. One need only contemplate the in-
fluence of John Dewey on American education, the influence of Albert
Einstein on science, technology and modern warfare and the influence of
Sigmund Freud on the field of social morals and mental health, to discern
the incalculable effect which conceptual thinking exerts -- though often
belatedly -- on the behavior of mankind.

More than a century ago, the French observer, de Tocqueville,
discerned the pragmatic predilection of our society. Commenting on the
American approach to the unfolding vistas of science, he wrote: "In
America the purely practical art of science is admirably understood . . .
On this head the Americans always display a clear, free, original and
inventive power of mind. But hardly anyone in the United States devotes
himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human know-
ledge." It was not only with regard to science that de Tocqueville was
prescient. This same impatience with concepts and theory, with underlying
rationales and ultimate questions, has also marked the conduct of our do-
mestic and external affairs. America has met each recurring crisis on the
basis of a last-minute decision shaped more by immediate circumstances
than by a lasting standard of values.

October 29, 1957

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Over and above our antipathy to abstract thinking, we have also
cultivated an historical image of ourselves which has served to impede
the formulation of any basic definition of the abiding national interest. The
image has been shaped in part by our Puritan inheritance -- by the ethical
conviction that power is essentially evil, inevitably corrupts and may be
mobilized only temporarily for transient crises. Another distortion in our
perspective has been created by our view of geography which asserts that
the oceans are barriers rather than highways, that economic areas are
necessarily defined by national boundaries, and that we can exist safely
in isolation on our continental island without concern for contingencies
beyond our shores. A third factor has been our recurring peacetime re-
jection of our military tradition. Though victorious in every war we have
fought, each has been regarded as an unhappy, temporary episode induced
by unfortunate circumstances unlikely to arise again. We have approached
our great wars of the twentieth century somewhat in the light of technologi-
cal exercises in production or logistics, quite divorced from the continuum
of international politics or the problems of diplomacy which can be met by
other methods in times of peace.

In essence, we have adhered tenaciously to concepts of history en-
gendered in the more stable past and attempted to solve twentieth century
problems with a kit of tools manufactured in the nineteenth century. Today,
the nature of our situation is such that the U.S. can no longer afford to

October 29, 1957

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conduct its affairs on the basis of nineteenth century images. Power is
inescapably ours; and the only meaningful debate is how to use it, not
how to abdicate from the responsibilities it imposes. The world is very
small, and there are no longer any Chinese walls behind which we may
seek security. War -- or the threat of war -- is endemic to our times;
and we only magnify its chances of outbreak by pretending that this is
not so. We cannot afford in a world in transition, wracked by revolutionary
upheavals in social and political thought and overhung by the brooding
menace of nuclear destruction, to continue to meet one crisis after the
other by reliance on industrial strength, wealth, technology and inspired
improvisation.

Action alone is not enough to meet the challenges to America to-
day. To act with assurance in the face of vast changes, both domestic
and international, to meet the ideological competition that divides men,
we require above all a sense of values. And it is here that our generation
will be put to the test. Although we have at our disposal an immense ca-
pacity for gathering facts we have sometimes seemed bewildered by the
very mass of available data. Although we have great energy and strength
we have moved from crisis to crisis without a clearly discernible sense
of direction. Without such direction all our tremendous economic and
technical power may prove self-destructive.

October 29, 1957.

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This is not to say that we are bankrupt of values. On the contrary,
the values which are unconsciously ours, which are unnoticeably but tightly
woven into the very fabric of our national existence, are our greatest strength.
The need of the moment is not to devise new values, or to invent new stand-
ards. It is to become more aware, more self-conscious, of existing values
-- not necessarily to approve what they are, but to know who we are.

For it is possible -- at least we would like to think it possible --
that the American tradition may contribute direction and hope to the aspira-
tions of a diversified world. We ourselves are diversified. Indeed a unique
characteristic of American society is its pluralism and diversity. The genius
of America is essentially its ability to synthesize the objectives of a multi-
farious people and to reconcile and combine into a community of outlook,
principles and ideals, a diversity of individual beliefs.

The world has become an international community of which we are in-
extricably an important part. Our task, like that of each nation which remains
free to shape its destiny, must be to find the strength and purpose to contri-
bute to the unfinished moral business of our time: the bringing of peace to a
divided and belligerent family of nations, justice to a world of injustice and
inequality, security to a world threatened by communist enslavement, freedom
to a world of multiple oppression, welfare to a world of misery. It is by the
earnestness, the intelligence, and the integrity which we bring to this task
that history will judge the kind of people we are.