What About the Future?

As the reverberations of the summit collapse began to fade last week, the nation could count some net gains from what had at first seemed to many to be if not a disaster, at least a calamity. Khrushchev's ranting belligerence had rallied the Western nations closer together, and at home, even amid election-year recriminations, a heightened sense of national unity was evident.

"What about the future?" asked President Eisenhower in his televised report to the nation. Widespread in the U.S. was a sense of a future, a sense of changes astir. Just beyond the threshold of a new decade, the nation looked ahead to a presidential election. And it seemed unmis- takably clear that the events of the recent past, climaxing in the summit blowup, had brought important changes, that the future would be considerably different from the past, and not necessarily worse.

Gone were the illusions of summitry, and gone with them was what President Eisenhower, after the 1955 summit conference in Geneva, had described as the dangerous and illusory hope that one week of negotiations could eliminate "a gulf as wide and deep as the difference between individual liberty and regimentation." Instead of trying to build peace from the summit down, the U.S. could now set about building it from the base up, by creating bold yet practical programs for helping the backward nations march toward freedom and abundance, by winning the uncommitted nations to commitment, by keeping the U.S.'s own economy sound and its defenses strong.

Facing the tasks of the 19605. the nation has been groping for a definition of its national purpose in its relations with the world. Many have called for such a definition--and there are unquestionably many to be framed, as many as the multiple tasks that face the world. Last week the President of the U.S. provided one definition that would merit thought. "A major American goal," he said, "is a world of open societies" (see box, next page). That meant a world of open frontiers, open skies, free men, free minds, and it was challenge enough for any nation--even for the U.S.

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