A Moral Strategy

Home from Russia this week flew the U.S.'s Ambassador to Moscow, Charles Eustis Bohlen, to help guide State Department tacticians in fashioning policies to match the changing offensives of the Communist world. The details would require careful study, for the cold war has taken a turn that has boosted the stock of neutralists, encouraged U.S.-baiters in the Western Alliance (see FOREIGN NEWS), and set in motion powerful new anticolonial forces. But the job of fashioning counterplans would be hopeless if the U.S. first failed to take stock of its own basic role and mission in the world. Last week Dwight Eisenhower provided just such a stock-taking in an off the cuff speech before the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Advertising Council in Washington.

"The United States," said the President, "cannot live alone--a paragon of prosperity--with all the rest of the world sinking lower and lower in its standards of living. There are many ways in which we can use our influence to make certain that other peoples recognize the virtues of a free, competitive capitalistic system rather than to take the shortcut--the spurious and false road that is offered them by the Communistic ideology . . . And so we must carry not only a material message to the world of what kind of enterprise we have--the kind of system--can do for a people. We must carry those moral values, spiritual values of the worth of man--what he is entitled to as an individual.

"Let us not forget for one instant that we are putting $36 or $37 billions of expenditures every year into arms and armaments, [and] that . . . they will merely defend what we have got. But when you talk about something that promotes a business arrangement--trade--when you can talk about something that proposes a better understanding . . . then you are talking about something constructive, something that yields results over the years to come. Don't make the ignorant, uninformed decision that only in armaments are we going to find the solution of our foreign problems.

"And since we have been favored by the system that our forefathers gave us, by the resources that God gave us, by the good fortune we have of having been born and raised here through the finest educational and health systems in the world, and so on, let us use our brains to make certain we sustain our position by helping everybody else to realize their own aspirations and legitimate ambitions, not necessarily in the exact pattern of this country ... We can preach and show that we believe in the dignity of man, in the independence of nations, the right of people to determine for themselves their own faith. I couldn't conceive of any job in this world being in better hands than that of the American people."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.