Nieeolo T ueei
THE FALLACY OF CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
The following episode may be entitled: End of a Friendship.
Here it is:
There were in Washington during the recent war two friends
who worked together in the government; one of them in the State
Department as a career diplomat, the other in a newly organized war
agency, one of those many bureaucratic eggs laid by the wide-winged
O.E.M. chicken: the Office of Emergency Management.
Both these friends had ideals, both believed in the "war to end
dictatorship," both thought that someone should remind the higher–
ups from time to time not to lose sight of their responsibilities toward
the people in whose name the war was being fought.
To both the vagueness of the Atlantic Charter had appeared as a
great peril; they had both foreseen that Article One (no territorial
aggrandizements) was slated to become Breach One right after the
war; that Article Two (free access to raw materials to anyone who
could pay for them) was like announcing the reopening of the shop
after alterations; they had both referred to the entire document as
the Atlantic Chatter, for which nickname each credited the other.
But that
is
not all. They had both constantly refused to adopt the
then current practice of dividing the world into Peaceloving and
Aggressor Nations; they had criticized the secrecy of Teheran, Yalta,
Casablanca and later Potsdam, although both of them had been
warned by their superiors in office not to "split the Allies," as one
said at that time to stop Government critics.
In
other words, there
could not be a more complete understanding between two young men
working together.
At a certain moment they had parted ways; one of them feeling
an inborn urge to write, had decided to write and never again to be
