Dusty Answer

A h, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!

--George Meredith

Toward the end of President Eisenhower's press conference last week, the American Broadcasting Co.'s Edward P. Morgan asked if the President had considered the "psychological aspect of our struggle with the Russians." Was it not possible that the cumulative weight of Soviet achievements--pushing ahead of the U.S. in numbers of missiles, in the race to the moon, in rate of economic growth, in the number of engineers graduated each year --might bring about a "dangerous state of mind" in which the people of the U.S. might resign themselves to accepting a "posture of second best?"

The President, who is pleased with the state of the union these days but also a little on the defensive because the political cannonading is coming closer to home, gave the question a long, thoughtful, if somewhat rambling answer.

Dictatorships can achieve great efficiency, he admitted, by turning nations into armed camps, but he believed that the free-enterprise system "produces more--not only more happiness, more satisfaction and pride in our people, but also more goods, more wealth." And then he came down hard on .a point that expressed his massive faith in the ultimate victory of freedom and democracy, that "enduring form of government." He believed, he said, that "in the long run men do learn to have this same belief" in individual liberties and rights, and therefore "I believe that there is just as much of the seeds of self-destruction in the Communist system as they claim is in ours ... I think our people ought to have greater faith in their own system."

Morgan: Then, sir, you don't feel that there is a basic danger of defeatism?

Eisenhower: None in my soul; I'll tell you that.

Promised: Challenge. Did the President, in his off-the-cuff answer, mean to say that freedom will inevitably win? Is 20th century American democracy, shining inheritor of Western Christian civilization, invincible if its citizens just continue to practice democracy?

Communists believe that the ultimate victory of their system is inevitable, but the leaders of the U.S.S.R. are nevertheless pushing relentlessly ahead in a mobilized effort to bring victory about. If the Communist belief in inevitable victory is false, the challenge of Soviet achievements in science, technology, education and rate of economic growth is nonetheless real. In the face of that challenge, the U.S. will be in danger if it ever comes to believe that the ultimate victory of freedom does not depend upon the performances of free societies and of free men. "Put your trust in God," said Oliver Cromwell to his soldiers, before crossing a river to do battle, "but mind to keep your powder dry."

Wanted: Purpose. Out of a dozen prominent U.S. intellectuals whom TIME asked to comment on the President's faith in the inherent victory of freedom, only one, the University of Chicago's Professor F. A. Hayek, agreed with him. Said Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty: In the achievement of any particular goal that is already visible, an unfree society will often outperform a free society. But in the long run, intellectual progress depends not so much upon solution of already visible problems as upon "the appearance of new vistas and approaches, on exactly those unforeseeable developments for which freedom provides the opportunity."

All the others took issue with the President. Paul Weiss (Man's Freedom), Yale professor of philosophy, argued that "there is more to the achievement of the good than mere awareness of its desirability. It cannot be achieved without overcoming of obstacles and conquest of evil." Editor Norman Podhoretz of the Jewish magazine Commentary agreed with the President that "in the long run" men will choose freedom--if they are permitted a choice. But by the time men are ready to make the "longrun" choice, "the Communists may already have won the political and military struggle." Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (The Coming of the New Deal) added sharply: "The reason we are falling behind lies in the lack of purpose in our national life. We are promoting private prosperity at the expense of national strength."

Required: Effort. In time, said Sidney Hook (Marx and the Marxists), New York University professor of philosophy, the desire for freedom in Communist countries may become so strong that genuine representative governments will emerge, but that can only come about if in the meantime the U.S. exerts the effort required to cope with Communism's "permanent state of mobilization against the free world." Harvard's Henry A. Kissinger (Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy) thought that freedom would not prevail "if we continue to confuse freedom with passivity and peace with lassitude."

The President got perhaps his best answer from Lionel Trilling (The Liberal Imagination), Columbia professor of English and comparative literature: "Perhaps it is true that in the long run--in the very long run--men learn to value personal liberty above everything else. But that time seems not yet to have come for the people of the disadvantaged nations of the world. Many of them do not have a tradition of personal liberty, and they imagine it far less readily than they imagine national prestige and power, social order and economic efficiency. And indeed the grim fact seems to be that the example of Russia leads many of them to believe that prestige, power, order and efficiency are most easily achieved precisely by sacrificing liberty. It will need an intense and very intelligent effort on the part of the U.S. to convince them that this is not so."

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