I have been out of the mainstream of American life for four years serving in an active, yet very remote, corner of Africa, I have decided however to make virtue of incompetence and —- like Rip van Winkle — present a kaleidoscope of impressions on my rediscovery of a deeply changed America.

When I left this country there had been no Watts, no Newark or Detroit, no fires ten blocks from the White House or machine guns on the Capitol steps. Berkeley was just Berkeley, not a harbinger of turmoil to come. We were about to pass our most important Civil Rights bill and Martin Luther King's impossible dream was perhaps possible after all. Vietnam was becoming more serious, though hardly a national trauma.

It is, of course, trivial to say that the foreign policy of the United States is not only in a political and military crisis — and financial crisis you might add — but also in a moral crisis. This moral crisis has particular significance for the United States. Take, by way of contrast, the moral crises through which Soviet foreign policy has passed since the end of the second world war. Take, for instance, the moral crisis which it faced in consequence of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the moral crisis it is still facing by virtue of its invasion of Czechoslovakia last year. Obviously those crises considerably decreased the prestige and influence of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has emerged from tbose crises as something different from what it was before. For the Soviet Union today can no longer claim to be the fatherland of socialism, the disinterested vanguard of the international proletariat.

It is invigorating to speak of “man come of age” and to proclaim that modern man has marched, with noble maturity, from his sacral and myth-bound past into the secular present. An abundant and exuberant literature has celebrated this grand event. Sacral man, however, is alive and thriving and finds himself in something of the position of Mark Twain who, when he read of his own death in the paper, immediately wrote to the editor: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”