INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE TRAGIC
We find genuine tragedy . . . only in that destruction which does not prematurely cut short development and success, but which, instead, grows out of success itself.
Breakdown and failure reveal the true nature of things. In failure, life’s reality is not lost; on the contrary, here it makes itself wholly and decisively felt. There is no tragedy without transcendence.
This transformation may go the way of deliverance, where man rises to supreme reality through conquest of the tragic. Otherwise this transformation may go the way of decline into irresponsible aestheticism of the spectator: man distracted, drifting, falling off into nothingness.
KARL JASPERS, TRAGEDY IS NOT ENOUGH.
The tragedy of American diplomacy is aptly symbolized, and defined for analysis and reflection, by the relations between the United States and Cuba from April 21, 1898 through April 21, 1961. The eruption of two wars involving the same two countries in precisely the same week provides a striking sense of classical form and even adds the tinge of eeriness so often associated with tragedy.
After three years of pressure culminating in an ultimatum, the United States declared war against Spain on April 21, 1898. The generally avowed objectives were to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny, to establish and underwrite the independence of the island, and to initiate and sustain its development toward political democracy and economic welfare.
During the subsequent 63 years, the United States exercised continuous, extensive influence in and over all aspects of Cuban affairs. This ongoing intervention produced some positive results. The advantages Cuba enjoyed as an American protectorate rather than a Spanish colony were significant and beneficial. Sugar production was modernized and increased. Some public utilities and other improvements associated with the basic sugar economy were gradually provided. And in the city of Havana, Americans and Cubans developed one of the business and entertainment centers of the Western Hemisphere.
As Cuba planted, harvested, refined, and sold more sugar, it enjoyed slow and sporadic economic development. A modest number of Cubans improved their personal and group economic welfare. Furthermore, some of the forms and mechanisms of representative government were established and legalized, and some of the resulting institutions put out shallow roots into Cuban thought and culture. Reforms were instituted that helped stabilize Cuban politics and contributed to the elementary and routine kind of law and order necessary for moderately efficient economic activity. On rather widely separate occasions, small segments of the Cuban population participated in a consequential way in the process of representative government. And perhaps most important of all, the Cubans were encouraged—and exhorted—to define their future in terms of the kind of democracy and prosperity provided in the United States.
Yet when measured by the Cubans in the course of their daily experiences, or by outsiders concerned to discover and evaluate the results of American control, there was clearly a continuing, even increasing disparity between the actuality and the rhetoric. For the United States dominated the economic life of the island by controlling, directly or indirectly, the sugar industry, and by overtly and covertly preventing any dynamic modification of the island’s one-crop economy. It defined clear and narrow limits on the island’s political system. It tolerated the use of torture and terror, of fraud and farce, by Cuba’s rulers. But it intervened with economic and diplomatic pressure and with force of arms, when Cubans threatened to transgress the economic and political restrictions established by American leaders.
That sad result was not the result of malice, indifference, or ruthless and predatory exploitation. American leaders were not evil men. They did not conceive and excuse some dreadful conspiracy. Nor were they treacherous hypocrites. They believed deeply in the ideals they proclaimed, and they were sincere in arguing that their policies and actions would ultimately create a Cuba that would be responsibly self-governed, economically prosperous, and socially stable and happy. All, of course, in the image of America.
Precisely for those reasons, however, American diplomacy contained the fundamental elements of tragedy. It held within itself, that is to say, several contradictory truths. Those truths, allowed to develop according to their own logic without modification by men who understood that process and acted on their knowledge, would ultimately clash in a devastating upheaval and crisis.
There was first the truth of American power. Measured in relative or absolute terms, the United States has possessed overweening power in relation to Cuba, a power it has exercised vigorously and persistently.
There was secondly the truth that the use of that power failed to create in Cuba or in its relationship with America a reality that enjoyed any persuasive correlation with the ideals avowed as the objectives of the power. American policy makers did not honor their avowed commitment to the principle of self-determination, and they did not modernize and balance the Cuban political economy.
A third truth resulted from that deployment and use of American power. Gradually, but with increasing momentum, Cubans evolved a coalition of groups committed to important changes in their society. In turn, that objective implied significant modifications in Cuba’s relations with the United States. Though this eoalition included reformers and moderate conservatives, it drew most of its verve and drive from non-communist radicals. Their dedication and courage in actively opposing the Batista regime sustained and strengthened the general movement, and ultimately won them recognition as the symbol and positions as the leaders of the campaign for a new and better Cuba.
The convergence and interaction of these three truths produced the Cuban crisis of 1959–1961. Rather than contributing to general and beneficent transformation of Cuban society during the years after 1898, American power and policy produced instead a Cuban and an American crisis that characterized and symbolized the underlying tragedy of all American diplomacy in the twentieth century. In Cuba, the half-century confrontation of the contrasting truths finally erupted in a militant social revolution conceived and designed to establish—in fact and in the present—the kind of Cuban society and development that American diplomacy had promised since 1898.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959–1960 was neither plotted, planned, nor manufactured for export in the Soviet Union. Neither Russian troops nor Russian arms played any role in its success in deposing the Batista regime, or in establishing its authority throughout Cuba. Cuban communists discounted and opposed the revolution until after it had succeeded.
Once triumphant behind the leadership of Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement, the Cuban Revolution was conditioned by two factors: on the one hand, the internal politics of the Cuban revolutionary coalition; on the other, the dynamic effect of American power and policy upon that Cuban struggle. It is possible, though very improbable, that the radical wing of the Cuban coalition would have secured its ultimate control of the revolution even if American policy had been more tolerant, more imaginative, and more helpful. But American policy was none of those things. As a result, so creating the fourth truth and contributing to the tragedy, American policy interacted with the politics of the Cuban coalition in a way that strengthened the radicals. It probably also pushed them much further to the left than they had originally hoped or intended to go.
Two contradictory features characterized the early American response to the revolution. The surface pattern of formal (though noticeably cool and reserved) correctness was interpreted by many observers as a tactical approach to some accommodation to the new circumstances. But beneath that veneer, and clearly discernible from the outset, there was a fundamental antagonism toward the revolution and its commitment to extensive but nondoctrinaire changes in the status quo.
Coming to dominate American thinking and policy within a year, that opposition presented itself in the rhetoric of anticommunism and the cold war. In turn, that ideology served both as justification for a hostile posture and as rallying-cry for strong measures. Undemocratic and arbitrary actions which on a much broader, more vicious level had been accepted and tolerated as routine under the Batista and earlier regimes were suddenly in a truly revolutionary situation advanced as proof that Cuba had become a Soviet puppet. And all Cuban moves toward controlling or nationalizing the powerful and extensive American property holdings in the island evoked similar outcries—and the first thoughts and discussions of retaliation.
In this respect, as in others, the American outlook on Cuba typified a general inability to comprehend and come to terms with two aspects of revolutions per se. Americans gained neither understanding nor perspective, for example, from the knowledge that during the American Revolution their own Founding Fathers arbitrarily confiscated British and colonial property. And they overlooked or discounted almost completely the economic and psychological needs of poor countries. Those requirements could be met only through extensive aid or through measures of nationalization.
Just as a good many early American fortunes, and considerable capital for general development, were obtained through confiscation and other arbitrary measures, so in the twentieth century the new, poor countries were prompted to employ similar devices. And neither the Americans in the 1770s (or the early 1800s), nor the Cubans in the 1960s, felt secure and confident about their respective independence until the economic power of their former overlords had been brought under control. But all such considerations were conveniently evaded through the device of explaining everything as the diabolical work of Cuban communists and the Soviet Union.
When initially advanced, and for many months thereafter, the stereotype of Soviet influence or control was grossly at odds with the facts. Yet persistently and subtly advocated by official American leaders, and crudely merchandized as news or expert opinion by the mass media, it became the accepted picture and explanation of Cuban affairs. American policy based upon and derived from that mistaken view produced two grave and tragic consequences. In Cuba, American rhetoric and policy weakened the moderate elements in the revolutionary coalition and simultaneously strengthened the radicals. They also pushed those radicals further along their own revolutionary path and into an increasingly close relationship with the Soviet Union. In the United States, such Cuban developments intensified the original antagonism, served as convenient if distorted proof for the a priori assertion of Soviet influence, and hardened the resolve to oppose the revolution. A momentum toward violence was thus established and sustained.
The United States first tried economic and political weapons to weaken and subvert the Castro Government. Then, after those measures failed, the United States invaded Cuba by proxy on April 17, 1961, in an effort to overthrow and replace that government by force of arms. The counter-revolutionary forces that waded ashore in the Bay of Pigs were financed, armed, trained, and guided in their operation by private and official American leaders. The action was a blatant violation of the treaty system that the United States had solemnly created to govern international relations in the Western Hemisphere, and a violation of its own neutrality laws. It was likewise a callous negation of avowed American principles by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (who was fond of using the rhetoric of idealism).
Those aspects of the invasion, along with other characteristics of the episode, heightened the aura of terror that was developing around American foreign policy. One of the most unnerving features was the extensive elitism that had become ingrained in the policy-making process. The assault on Cuba was conceived, planned, and implemented by a small group of men in the executive department. They opened no general dialogue with members of the Congress (even in private conversation), and expended great effort and exerted great pressure to avoid any public discussion or debate.
That degree of elitism, which goes far beyond the delegation of power and authority required to execute public policy, began to develop under President William McKinley. The decision to acquire all the Philippines at the end of the war against Spain was made by a small group of insiders; and military intervention in China was initiated by executive order. President Theodore Roosevelt dramatized the continuing concentration of power in the executive department with these arrogant remarks about his intervention to control the Panama canal route: “The vital work . . . was done by me without the aid or advice of anyone . . . and without the knowledge of anyone. I took the Canal Zone.”
President Woodrow Wilson further extended such elitism during World War I: covertly changing policy on loans to the Allies, and intervening with force against the Bolshevik Revolution without Congressional authority. In a similar way, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt maneuvered behind the scenes to aid England and France against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (including the use of American armed forces) at a time when the American public was seriously divided over the question of becoming involved in those conflicts.
The requirements of secrecy during World War II enlarged the power of the men at the top to make decisions without general debate. The practice of informing a few chosen Congressional leaders of a policy just before it was put into operation was developed as a substitute for the kind of dialogue and compromise that characterizes meaningful democracy or representative government. President Harry S Truman used that technique in winning support for his program of global opposition to revolutionary movements at the end of the war. He likewise refined the technique of announcing and defining issues in such a way as to place critics on the defensive as men and women who seemed to be challenging traditional American values and objectives.
Elitism consolidated those gains, and took new ground, during the Korean War crisis of 1950–1952. The decision to intervene was made without public discussion. Women and men in their living rooms, as well as their Congressional representatives, were simply confronted with the information that Americans were engaged in combat against communists. The provisions of the Constitution were evaded by calling the war a police action, and, for the more sophisticated, by arguing that the Congressional commitment to the United Nations included an obligation to resort to force.
During those years, moreover, the Central Intelligence Agency enlarged its power and freedom to undertake various self-selected interventionist projects around the world. It deposed premiers, installed counter-revolutionary governments (and aided other such movements), and in all probability assassinated various men and women it considered dangerous or troublesome. The invasion of Cuba, in which the CIA played a major role, was but another—if a major—stride down the road away from responsive and responsible self-government in the United States.
That in itself generates terror. The kind of terror that Karl Jaspers implies when he speaks of the destruction which grows out of success, and of the possibility that tragedy can lead to decline rather than transcendence. Such terror became ever more omnipresent during the subsequent missile confrontation with the Soviet Union (which also involved Cuba) and the grossly unjustified intervention in Santo Domingo. Then came the deceitful and manipulative climax of the intervention in the Vietnamese revolutionary civil war.
That ultimate manifestation of the tragedy and the terror of American foreign policy began with encouragement to Ho Chi Minh as a way of defeating Imperial Japan. Then the emphasis shifted to helping France maintain its position in Indochina in order to be sure of French support against the Soviet Union in Europe. And to securing access to the raw materials—and the potential customers—of Asia. Those commitments were deepened when the Chinese Communists won power. Grants of money to France led to talk about nuclear weapons and then, when the French were defeated, to discussions about how to contain the Vietnamese who would very probably use a free election to self-determine themselves out of the orbit of western capitalism.
The answer to that problem was for the elite to abandon elections. That done, the CIA agents became the new ward heelers. Then, terror of terrors, the acceptance of the philosophy that power and freedom erupt from the muzzle of a gun. And so a few experts became 15,000 advisors under fire in the field; and those mushroomed into more than half a million men, a bombing campaign that surpassed the air assault on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, a chemical attack that destroyed children as well as vegetation and animals, and an appalling barbarism among young Americans. All in the name of assistance, reform, and self-determination.
Thus, even by itself, the elitism generated terror about what was done as well as about how the decisions were made. Such dismay was deepened by the elite’s self-isolation from the nature of reality, by its loss of the power of critical thought, by its exaggerated confidence in American economic strength and military might, by its own arrogance and self-righteousness, and by its messianic distortion of a sincere humanitarian desire to help other peoples. Even the American public came more and more to be considered as simply another factor to be manipulated and controlled in the effort to establish and maintain the American Way as the global status quo.
Yet, in truth, the attitudes and the outlook of the public also contributed to the sense of terror about American foreign relations. For, beginning with the depression of the 1870s, an increasing number of farmers and urban businessmen, and even workers, came to favor and support American overseas expansion. Others acquiesced in the imperial policy as it was developed and acted upon. Many such citizens thought this expansion would improve their own economic condition, or strengthen the national economy. Another group wanted to strike a blow for freedom, either by blocking the expansion of European powers or by extending America’s activity as a world reformer. Or both. And still others, caught up in the nationalistic or patriotic support for the government that is common in all societies, or perhaps sublimating their frustrations about life in America, provided additional support for the active expansionists. By the 1890s, therefore, most Americans generally favored an expansionist policy, though they might disagree about specific actions.
Beginning with the rise of Jacksonian Democracy during the 1820s, moreover, Americans steadily deepened their commitment to the idea that democracy was inextricably connected with individualism, private property, and a capitalist marketplace economy. Even the great majority of critics sought to reform existing society precisely in order to realize that conception of the good system. The small minority that wanted to change central features of the capitalist political economy, or replace it with a new order, was viewed as an odd bag of quixotic idealists, ignorant dreamers, or dangerous radicals—or all three. And foreigners who had created and preferred a different way of life were considered inferior or backward—proper subjects for education and reform in the American Way.
Those two characteristics of public involvement in foreign policy were firmly established by the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The general support for American expansion created, ironically, the power base for the increasing elitism among the policy-makers. And the antagonism toward other approaches to organizing society, and toward other value systems, provided fundamental backing for an anti-revolutionary policy.
Whatever the periodic outbursts of opposition to the basic strategy of expansion and intervention, or even to specific manifestations of that outlook, the policy-making elite felt steadily more confident of being able to generate or manipulate effective support or acquiescence among the general public. By the 1950s, indeed, the ultimate touch of terror had appeared. Not only could the elite answer critics by explaining that it could not change course because of popular support for existing policy, but even the reformers within the elite believed and acted upon that reading of political reality. The political system was thus immobilized as a process of peaceful change.
Seen in historical perspective, therefore, what we are accustomed to call the Cold War—meaning the confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, between 1943 and 1971—is reality only the most recent phase of a more general conflict between the established system of western capitalism and its internal and external opponents. That broader view not only makes it possible to understand more clearly why American foreign policy has been criticized by conservatives as well as radicals but also provides a fuller grasp of the long struggle by China (and other nations) against being reconstructed as a part of the western capitalist system. It should also deepen our determination to break free of the assumptions, beliefs, and habits that have carried us so close to the abyss of thermonuclear war.
It is not enough to be more prudent, more flexible, and more efficient. We have now to cut to the bone and scrape the marrow of our traditional outlook. Nothing is more painful or more demanding in human affairs. But we can take heart from the knowledge that such action is the source of individual self-realization and true national greatness.
Only a few Americans in positions of influence or leadership demonstrated that kind of bedrock courage prior to 1965. It was customary for such spokesmen, even when they recognized and described the difficulties, to call merely for more vigor and efficiency in the prosecution of traditional programs and policies. But Walter Lippmann repeatedly and patiently explained some of the root causes of the crisis in American diplomacy, and went on to suggest cogent if often unpopular alternatives. And a few other commentators such as James Reston wrote in a similar vein.
Another striking example was provided by foreign service officer George Frost Kennan. At the end of World War II, Kennan played a key role in developing the containment policy toward the Soviet Union and other radical movements. That policy was predicated upon the assumption that, because of its great relative economic advantage and its absolute monopoly of atomic weapons, the United States was powerful enough to force the Soviet Union to change fundamentally its entire system. But within a decade, Kennan so modified that unrealistic estimate as to call repeatedly and with some eloquence for an end to the rigidity and single-track diplomacy that he had done so much to initiate.
Senator J. William Fulbright has been even more impressive. Beginning in the late 1950s, he initiated a keen and sophisticated critical evaluation of American diplomacy from his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His talent for asking searching questions and his ability to work through to relevant answers earned him a reputation as one of the nation’s most perceptive critics of foreign policy.*
In his vigorous and unqualified condemnation of the Cuban invasion at a top-level meeting held before the initial landing, for example, Fulbright revealed himself as a man of magnificent personal and political courage and as a man who grasped the full dimensions of the tragedy of American diplomacy. He flatly asserted that the proposed attack was morally, legally, and practically a grave mistake: certain to cause incalculable negative consequences whether or not it succeeded in its immediate objective of initiating the overthrow of the Castro Government. Fulbright also questioned the judgment of the proponents of the invasion in arguing that Castro’s Cuba posed a serious threat either to the military security or to the vital national interests of the United States. But even if that argument were granted, Fulbright insisted that the means would subvert the ends of American diplomacy. And that was his key insight into the general as well as the immediate crisis.
Fulbright’s powerful performance at the meeting on Cuba can be more fully understood against the background of his earlier analysis of the difficulties underlying American foreign policy. Writing late in 1958, he advanced his central points with unusual clarity and candor. “If there is a single factor which more than any other explains the predicament in which we now find ourselves, it is our readiness to use the spectre of Soviet Communism as a cloak for the failure of our own leadership.” Quite aware of Russia’s challenge to American leadership, and in no way disposed to discount or evade that issue, Fulbright nevertheless insisted that it was crucial “to ask ourselves some very searching questions.” “We must stop thinking about these problems in terms of a stereotyped view of the world,” he concluded. “We must abandon the clichés and reconsider all our assumptions.”
He then acted to break open the clichés employed by the elite. The drastic escalation of the intervention in Vietnam undertaken by President Lyndon Baines Johnson through the winter of 1964–1965 generated a wrenching awareness of the tragedy and the terror of American foreign policy among a small group of students, professors, and concerned citizens. They struggled, through the tactics of teach-ins and nonviolent demonstrations, to dramatize the issues, to arouse the public, and to force the policy-making elite to open a consequential dialogue with the citizenry. Their efforts did arouse many students, but most others were slow to break free of the chains of tradition. The critics did not muster the power to force a strategic confrontation with the elite.
Then Fulbright used his position as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to launch a nationally televised inquiry into the war. The maneuver was skillfully conceived and beautifully executed: he pushed the issue into the daily experience and consciousness of the body politic and revitalized the essential process of serious, sustained dialogue. He forced the policy-making elite on the defensive (though their power was sufficient to mount an effective rear-guard action), he transferred his respectability to the larger body of critics (despite the periodic outbursts of violence that scared many citizens), and he gave other politicians reason to believe that their consciences might win votes (though that kind of confidence in the essence of democracy took a bit longer to materialize). It was a notable achievement.
Fulbright did not go on, however, to “reconsider all our assumptions.” That involves, of necessity, a re-examination of the history of twentieth-century American foreign relations (and the relationship between foreign policy and the domestic economy). In proceeding according to that intellectual strategy we first confront directly what happened. We learn the ideas and the actions of the men who made or influenced policy, and the consequences of those events at home and abroad. Second, at the end of such a review of the past, we return to the present better informed. Finally, that increased knowledge and understanding may help us to muster the nerve to act in ways that can transform the tragedy into a new beginning.
For history is a way of learning, of getting closer to the truth. It is only by abandoning the clichés that we can even define the tragedy. When we have done that, we will no longer be merely acquiescing in the deadly inertia of the past. We will have taken the first and vital step in making history. Such a re-examination of history must be based upon a searching review of the way America has defined its own problems and objectives, and its relationship with the rest of the world. The reason for this is simple: realism goes nowhere unless it starts at home. Combined with a fresh look at Soviet behavior, such an understanding of American policy should help in the effort to outline new programs and policies designed to bring America’s ideals and practical objectives closer to realization.
In the realm of ideas and ideals, American policy is guided by three conceptions. One is the warm, generous, humanitarian impulse to help other people solve their problems. A second is the principle of self-determination applied at the international level, which asserts the right of every society to establish its own goals or objectives, and to realize them internally through the means it decides are appropriate. These two ideas can be reconciled; indeed, they complement each other to an extensive degree. But the third idea entertained by many Americans is one which insists that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States.
This feeling is not peculiar to Americans, for all other peoples reveal some degree of the same attitude toward the rest of the world. But the full scope and intensity of the American version is clearly revealed in the blunt remark of former Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson. He phrased it this way in explaining and defending the American program of foreign aid as it was being evolved shortly after the end of World War II: “We are willing to help people who believe the way we do, to continue to live the way they want to live.”
This insistence that other people ought to copy America contradicts the humanitarian urge to help them and the idea that they have the right to make such key decisions for themselves. In some cases, the American way of doing things simply does not work for other people. In another instance it may be satisfactory, but the other society may prefer to do it in a different way that produces equally good results—perhaps even better ones. But even if the American way were the only effective approach, the act of forcing it upon the other society—and economic and political pressure are forms of force—violates the idea of self-determination. It also angers the other society and makes it even less apt to accept the American suggestion on its own merits. Hence it is neither very effective nor very idealistic to try to help other people by insisting from the outset that they follow closely the lead and the example of the United States on all central and vital matters.
The same kind of difficulty arises in connection with the economic side of American foreign policy. The United States needs raw materials and other goods and services from foreign countries, just as it needs to sell some of its own goods and services to them. It might be able literally to isolate itself and survive, but that is not the issue. Not even the. isolationists of the late 1920s and early 1930s advocated that kind of foreign policy. The vital question concerns instead the way in which America obtains what it needs and exports what it wants to sell.
Most Americans consider that trade supplies the answer to this problem. But trade is defined as the exchange of goods and services between producers dealing with each other in as open a market as it is possible to create, and doing this without one of them being so beholden to the other that he cannot bargain in a meaningful and effective way. Trade is not defined by the transfer of goods and services under conditions established and controlled largely by one of the parties.
Here is a primary source of America’s troubles in its economic relations with the rest of the world. For in expanding its own economic system throughout much of the world, America has made it very difficult for other nations to retain their economic independence. This is particularly true in connection with raw materials. Saudi Arabia, for example, is not an independent oil producer. Its oil fields are an integrated and controlled part of the American oil industry. But a very similar, if often less dramatic, kind of relationship also develops in manufacturing industries. This is the case in countries where established economic systems are outmoded or lethargic, as well as in the new, poor nations that are just beginning to industrialize. American corporations exercise extensive authority, and even commanding power, in the political economy of such nations.
Unfortunately, there is an even more troublesome element involved in the economic aspect of American foreign policy. That is the firm conviction, even dogmatic belief, that America’s domestic well-being depends upon such sustained, ever-increasing overseas economic expansion. Here is a convergence of economic practice with intellectual analysis and emotional involvement that creates a very powerful and dangerous propensity to define the essentials of American welfare in terms of activities outside the United States.
It is dangerous for two reasons. First, it leads to an indifference toward, or a neglect of, internal developments which are nevertheless of primary importance. And second, this strong tendency to externalize the sources or causes of good things leads naturally enough to an even greater inclination to explain the lack of the good life by blaming it on foreign individuals, groups, and nations. This kind of externalizing evil serves not only to antagonize the outsiders, but further intensifies the American determination to make them over in the proper manner or simply push them out of the way.
The over-all result of these considerations is that America’s humanitarian urge to assist other peoples is undercut—even subverted—by the way it goes about helping them. Other societies come to feel that American policy causes them to lose their economic, political, and even psychological independence. The people in such countries come to feel that they are being harmed rather than helped. That inclines them to resort to political and economic retaliation, which only intensifies and further complicates a problem that is very complex at the outset. Thus the importance of trying to understand how the contradictions in American policy have developed. If that aspect of the problem can be resolved, perhaps then it will be possible to evolve a program for helping other people that is closer to American ideals and also more effective in practice.
But it is wise to avoid deluding ourselves even before we begin. “History writing,” as Sir Lewis Namier has observed, “is not a visit of condolence.” History is a mirror in which, if we are honest enough, we can see ourselves as we are as well as the way we would like to be. The misuse of history is the misuse of the mirror: if one uses it to see not only the good in the image, but to see the image as all good. As Oliver Cromwell spoke to England, so history speaks to all men: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider that ye may be mistaken.” The courage to accept that challenge is the precondition of winning even a chance to transform the tragedy into a new opportunity for great achievement.
* Fulbright is perhaps the best example of the enlightened conservative as critic of American foreign policy. My respect for his position does not imply agreement with him on ail foreign or domestic issues.