256
DAVID RIESMAN
Catholics and other newer Americans who thus establish their superiority
to earlier, better educated but "decadent" families.
Seven years ago it appeared to us that a holding game against the
Communists was frustrating but endurable. Since then, Soviet Com,.
munism has broken away from Stalin's paranoia, caution, and brutality
and seems at once more flexible and more difficult to understand; it is
also much better armed, militarily
if
not ideologically. At the same time,
as I have sought to emphasize, President Kennedy has broken out from
the limits imposed on American policy by the provincial, relaxed, but at
the same time restricting morality of his predecessor. Kennedy has ex–
ceptional gifts of virtuosity, drive, charm and impatience ; and he and
his advisors have a grasp of the world far more differentiated and
supple than the narrow moralism of John Foster Dulles. In addition,
the new Administration is deeply committed to civil rights, as both a
domestic and foreign policy imperative, and it is naturally oriented
toward civil liberties as a necessity for a civilized and sophisticated
world power. President Kennedy is anything but a demagogue, as his
debates with Nixon showed, nor is he an indignant ideologue. Never–
theless, his rhetoric of activism speaks to the mood of many in the
discontented classes; and since he has in some measure freed himself
from his predecessor's budgetary and other controls, the anti-Com–
munism of the radical Right can always appear to be an extension of
the Administration's doctrine to its logical conclusion-a conclusion from
which, as the Right would say, the Administration itself draws back only
from softness, inconsistency, treason or incompetence.
This constellation may be one factor that helps impell the Ad–
ministration toward limited and paramilitary measures, whether· in
Cuba Or in South Vietnam, which antagonize much of the rest of
the world, especially the non-white formerly colonial world.* And this
antagonism then seems to Americans at once as utterly bewildering
and grossly ungrateful, polarizing us still further from the rest of the
world and thus feeding discontent simultaneously at home and abroad.
Indeed it may well be that this Administration, far more cosmopolitan
and world-minded than the country at large, may serve to isolate us
*
I recognize that there are reasons quite apart from domestic politics for each
of these actions. Thus we are pressured to act in South Vietnam on the one
aide by Communist guerilla tactics and on the other, by fear for all our Asian
allies with whom we are linked in military pacts. And we are pressed to act in
Cuba by shaky Central and South American states. But I am emphasizing above
the domestic pressures that are one factor in the decision to select among avail–
llhle peripheral targets at the outposts of Communist empire.
