60
SARGENT SHRIVER
protection of a Federal court order, with Federal troops alongside and
Federal helicopters hovering overhead, with a Presidential appeal
being broadcast to the American people.
I do not suggest that radicals, new or old, should embrace any
government or any established system. What disappoints me
is
that
leaders of the New Left should view our Establishment as monolithic,
when they see so clearly that the establishments of Communism are
not monolithic. When people say that the Communist world is no
longer a monolith, the New Left agrees. Why cannot it see just as
clearly that today the Federal Government is not a monolith blocking
peaceful change in America or in the world?
It is not just in Civil Rights that the Federal Government has
heen an agent of progress. At the White House Conference on Educa–
tion last spring it became clear that the representatives of the Federal
Government were ahead of the Educational Establishment in their
thinking and proposals. At a similar White House Conference ten
years ago, the reverse was true. But Frank Keppel and others like him
made the Federal Government the ally rather than the enemy of
progress.
Certainly there are areas within the Federal Government today
for those who do not want to be organization men. "We had great
responsibilities," concluded a Peace Corps Volunteer who taught in
Ethiopia, "to our students, to one another, to ourselves, and in meet–
ing these responsibilities, we found a kind of freedom greater than any
we could have imagined."
I am not proposing that the activists of our domestic scene all go
overseas in the Peace Corps, or join the Federal bureaucracy. The
Government and other parts of the Establishment need people ahead
of them. But the New Radicals will not be ahead-they will be left
behind, skirmishing with the wrong enemy in the wrong place-if
they remain preoccupied with protesting, if they continue to confuse
their potential allies with their real enemies, if they continue to ignore
those areas of the world where both the need for and the possibility
of genuine social advance is great.
I do not want the Movement to hecome "responsible" in the
tired sense of the word-no one wants
it
to become "sound"-but in
the more vigorous meaning that Kennedy gave
it:
to respond. Or, in
the slogan that conveys the spirit and hope of the Movement, but
also contains the appropriate warning: "Don't get hung up!"
