Candle in the Darkness

Isn't it a fact that the U.S. is wholly owned by cynical Wall Street speculators? That U.S. foreign policy is dictated by the Rockefellers? That the country is a police state run by J. Edgar Hoover? That hundreds of Negroes were lynched last year in Little Rock, and the U.S. Air Force aims to drop an H-bomb on Havana?

Such a weirdly distorted picture of the U.S. is one that countless Asian, African and Latin American students are prone to accept--seemingly as a consequence of their education, for the common people of the same regions often candidly admire everything American. Last week at his press conference, President Kennedy addressed himself to the irony of widespread student hostility to the U.S., which Attorney General Robert Kennedy confronted on his trip to the Far East.

''You would feel,'' said the President, "that the students who are intellectually curious would be attracted by a free society that gives that intellectual curiosity a chance to develop." Instead, they have not "caught up with the tremendous changes which have taken place in the U.S. in the last 50 years, or with the fallacies in the Marxist system which have become obvious in the last 20 years.''

The U.S. problem is to "emphasize those facets of American life which should be most attractive." The University of California, the President pointed out, has more Nobel prizewinners than the Soviet Union. "They find in this country . . . a climate which permits them to function most effectively. And all of the cultural efforts here, all of the intellectual efforts, all our great schools and universities, these are the part of the story we ought to tell."

As Robert Kennedy found, the telling is tough. But, said the President, "it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness."

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