Somebody Out There Likes Us

Britain's Peregrine Worsthorne, 36, is a tough-minded Tory journalist with scant regard for preconceived opinions--his own or anybody else's. Last week, fresh back from six weeks in the U.S., Worsthorne reported in London's Daily Telegraph his sharp disagreement with the image, "popular in some quarters, of a nation sick and lethargic after eight years of the Eisenhower Administration."

"I am sure," wrote Worsthorne, "that history will look back on the Eisenhower era as ideal for incubation ... In America today the result of Eisenhower has been to produce a generation of public men who are not only 'raring to go' but have also had time to consider deeply the direction in which they wish to go ... To my mind, the very volume of self-criticism in the U.S., the fact that it is hardly possible to open any American magazine without reading some soul-searing indictment . . . are surely evidence of the very opposite of mental lethargy and material complacency . . . The truth is, America has fewer wrinkles on its face than other societies. Only it spends far more time and money examining them and trying to iron them out.

"It seems to me that the American people are always denied the benefit of the doubt. When they get excited and start calling for the Marines and generally throwing their weight about, they are castigated for being hysterical children. Yet when they remain calm and unruffled, they are castigated for being lethargically senile, too tired and flaccid for world leadership ... I do not wish to suggest, of course, that all is well with the U.S.

What I do want to suggest is that it would be masochistic folly if ... the outside world began to have serious doubts about America's moral and physical potency."

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