The last days of the old year underlined the painful truth once again — America is the blind giant, its three astronauts circling tlie moon in a dizzying display of technologic expertise, while on earth its diplomats and statesmen played out the bizarre farce attending the release of the Pueblo crewmen from North Korean captivity and simultaneously lapsed into an exchange of invective with the Saigon junta we once hailed as a vehicle for the constitutional salvation of South Vietnam.

The Apollo 8 journey was, of course, wholly admirable—a stunning reversal of America's space fortunes in little more than a decade. What money, organization, application, and no doubt a vast engineering talent can do, the United States has done in space.

I am aware that a short visit to any country allows for only the most superficial kinds of observations. For a Western visitor, conclusions about the Soviet Union, after short visits to the major cities of western Russia, must be highly tentative, since little in our cultural, ideological and political experiences prepares us for an objective assessment of the Soviet Union. But even if personal objectivity were possible, adequate data is impossible to acquire. I found that the constant efforts of Intourist and others to provide an “official” view, an “official” explanation, an “official” insight into the Soviet people, their motivations and desires, compounded the difficulties. The visitor sees and hears what “they” want you to; exceptions to this, the most fruitful part of my trip, were hard to come by.

James Reston wrote recently, “It is a time of strong passions and weak reason.” While one can hardly say anything but touché, could not the same be said of the whole Age of Conflict since 1914? The Time of Troubles which began with the outbreak of what was known before 1939 as the Great War has been characterized by many conflicts and crises, triumphs and tragedies. Vietnam, Nigeria, the Middle East, racial strife in America and elsewhere around the globe all are part of the pattern of this painful epoch of transition. Instead of putting these and other leading issues of the day in historical perspective, all too many leaders in this country have outdone the under-thirty set in irrationality.

Leo Tolstoy once remarked that “certain questions are put to mankind, not that men should answer them, but that they should go on trying.” The highly complex Middle East situation in which we must deal with the rights of Jews and Arabs against the background of a power struggle between a Russia and an America with nuclear weapons often seems to be one of those questions. I do not here propose to offer any final answer. But I will try to state clearly what I conceive to be some misconceptions blockinga possible solution.