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ROBERT LOWELL
ly foolish presidents would have widely differing effects on our lives, the
difference between life and death. Yet a great president somehow honors
his country, even if what he effects is debatable. I suppose Lincoln was
our most noble and likable president. The country is somehow finer for
having had him, yet much that he accomplished was terrifying and might
have been avoided by the run-of-the-mill Douglas. I wish Stevenson had
been elected. Maybe he would have done nothing (I don't believe this)
but at least he would have registered what he was doing. I can't imagine
him not losing a night's sleep over Hiroshima, even if he did drop the
bomb. I think he might not have.
2. Inflation is over my head, but I think we can never again forget
poverty. Man throughout time has been very lighthearted about poverty
in a way that we can never, with decency, be again.
3. I don't know what the split between the President and the intel–
lectuals
means.
Something very horrifying about our country has been
brought home to us. I don't know how profound this is, or how much it
is a passing twinge of remorse, how much is due to Johnson and how
much was almost inevitable with almost any president. We've swallowed
worse things than Vietnam, yet it's hopeful that we are now appalled.
We may be going through a deep change of heart as to what can be
allowed to nation-states, or maybe our present mood is only a sort of tem–
porary, superficial and hangover "profundity."
4. As far as honor goes, I think white America is committed to grant–
ing equality to the Negro. How much equality actually will be granted
is another darker and unanswerable question.
5. I think our foreign policies are quite likely leading us to the third
and worst world war, not right away probably, but over a stretch of time,
within twenty or thirty years. When we have said the worst we can about
our American foreign policy, and I think as citizens we must say this,
still it must be admitted that the future depends on other countries be–
sides ourselves. Who can be happy, when he looks at the great contenders?
6. I have mostly answered this question. I have a gloomy premonition
though that we will soon look back on this troubled moment as a golden
time of freedom and licence to act and speculate. One feels the steely
sinews of the tiger, an ascetic, "moral" and authoritarian reign of piety
and iron.
7. Doom or promise must be found in youth. I think perhaps the
young hope for things that neither we nor any previous generation dared
hope for. But how much like us, and what a slender reed, they often
seem!
