The belated dismissal of murder charges against the eight Special Forces personnel in Vietnam throws into glaring relief what has been the least noticed aspect of an utterly regrettable war — the general incompetence of those charged with achieving that fata morgana, victory, or even a tolerable peace.

The scandal itself will, no doubt, have been all but forgotten by the time these words appear, though leaving, to be sure, a residue of heightened mistrust of an Administration which could not foresee the public consequences of its actions, misjudged its own courage, and was guilty, moreover, of intolerable hypocrisy. Not to understand that the very climate of Vietnam, the violence, the suspicion, the tangled intrigues joining Americans to South Vietnamese, produced the casual murder of a double agent is to understand nothing at all of the consequences of the American intervention in this luckless corner of the world.

Since the second world war, tension has existed in this country between two schools of “internationalists.” One camp has concentrated on the necessity of building and maintaining “positions of strength” in order to deter and tu negotiate with the Soviet Union and Communist China. The second school has stressed the need for “constructive” policies such as foreign aid and liberalized trade in order to foster economic and social progress in the industrialized nations and to promote development in the Third World. Generally speaking, presidents from Truman through Nixon have combined the two approaches, although at various times more attention has been given to one or the other. Most students of American foreign policy would probably agree that power generally has been given priority over development politics since the Korean War.

“There are two kinds of truth,” the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, used to tell his students, “small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.”

I suggest it might be helpful to view Christianity and communism as two great truths, in Bohr's sense. The issue between them is not so much one of truth and falsehood as the more comprehensive opposition of the kind exhibited by different philosophies of life, each making claim to man's total allegiance. This opposition ought in fact to be a form of creative collaboration, for the truth never'competes with itself, only with error.

Confusion and a deep division within the American public over die value of an anti-ballistic missile (A.B.M.) defense system was reflected in the midsummer vote in the Senate to authorize about $900 million for expenditure in fiscal year 1970 for President Nixon's Safeguard A.B.M. system.

During the debate that preceded the Senate vote, public and religious presses carried many articles that presented forceful arguments against the Safeguard program. These seem to boil down to two principal issues of moral concern: it is alleged, first, that the Safeguard A.B.M. would introduce a destabilizing element into the strategic nuclear balance just at the time we are attempting to enter negotiations with the Soviet. Union for limitation on strategic armaments; second, that deployment of the Safeguard system would be wasteful of national resources needed for pressing domestic problems.