AMERICA
27
poverty and Negro rights must come second to national assertion on the
foreign scene.
There can be scarcely any meeting ground between this perspective
and a way of thinking such as my own, in which the problem of poverty
-at home and in the underdeveloped countries-takes first place, in
which the notion of world leadership is heady nonsense and in which the
idea of holding an American bridgehead in Asia ranks as an affront to
nonwhite peoples everywhere and a dangerous anachronism in the third
quarter of the twentieth century.
To the extent that American intellectuals think as I do, the lack of
understanding between them and the Johnson Administration is perfectly
natural. We and the President are living in two different ideological
worlds.
This radical incompatibility was obscured for a time by the mediating
rhetoric of the Kennedy era. Particularly in the last months of his presi–
dency, when he sketched a new foreign policy in his American Univer–
sity address and when he signed the limited test-ban treaty, Kennedy
seemed to be coming around to the point of view of his peace-minded
critics. But the Kennedy rhetoric never cut deep enough. In what his
biographers have described as his finest hour-the Cuban mis!rile crisis–
he was more concerned about winning a trial of strength with the Soviet
Union than with the military threat the missiles posed to the security of
his country. And his insistence on American primacy in the space race
suggested that he was not above treating this vast expenditure of funds
and scientific effort as an international sporting event.
The continuity of the space program from one administration to an–
other and the fact that so few Americans find anything wrong with it
epitomize the nationalist reflexes that seem to have become second na–
ture among our countrymen. They further explain why it was compara–
tively easy for Johnson to shift over from the cautious approaches toward
peace which he had inherited from his predecessor to a policy of steady
military escalation. Nationalism among small peoples-and especially
among recently humiliated and newly liberated peoples-may well be an
emotional necessity; for a country as rich and as strong as ours it is a
luxury
that the world cannot afford.
I
am
writing this from Paris. From here the United States looks very
big and very threatening. I had occasion the other day to talk with a
French friend just returned from America; his last trip to our country
had been two years ago. Besides his anxiety about the war, what had
now struck him most was the great leap fOIWard-in power, in richel, in
self-confidence---that the United States seemed to have made in the brief
