Perils and Promise

By Hugh Sidey

When the White House speechwriters crafted Ronald Rea gan's Christmas message, they tried desperately to get away from Charles Dickens' hoary label for any era: "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." But they failed, drawn again to that time-worn language to describe the maddening contradictions of the world today. And indeed, Dickens' words may be especially apt for 1982, a year with no poetry in its sound, no numerical magic. It is a year that a number of scholars and statesmen are already predicting will be momentous for the industrial democracies of the West, a time combining peril and

opportunity. The perils are obvious. The free world's alliances are weakened and some of its economies faltering; the adversaries are more threatening and the have-nots more demanding. Military power and its illicit offspring, terrorism, threaten to break all restraints. Firm decisions elude American strategists on nuclear security. Recession continues and worries deepen over the impact of budget and tax cuts. Decline in the auto, steel and building industries spills over to small business, farming and credit

institutions. The accumulated stress spells fear. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, pulled his trench coat around him in Washington the other morning and said, "The foreign policy crisis that I predicted for late winter is starting to develop by early winter." He cited four areas--Poland, the Middle East, Central America and China--that have reached critical mass against a dispiriting background of European neutralism, Third World alienation, frustrations about nuclear arms

and indecision within the President's council about what we should do. Brzezinski's counterpart from the Nixon-Ford years, Henry Kissinger, sees the next months as one of the most critical junctures in postwar American history, ranking with the 1956 Suez and Hungarian crises and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. "It is almost exactly a generation since the great creative acts of the immediate postwar years were put in place," says Kissinger, referring to such landmarks as the Marshall Plan and the formation of the Atlantic Alliance. The key tests today, in Kissinger's view, are for the nation to deepen values and transcend materialism at home, and to meld firmness and

conciliation abroad in wise portions. Failing that, he says, "we can become irrelevant in just a few months' time." Public television's Scholar-Author Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise

Institute, declares: "Poland is one of those great events that happen once in a generation to unmask the truth." Like former CIA Director and Ambassador to Iran Richard Helms, Wattenberg sees much of the world struggle transformed into a propaganda war of unprecedented scope, in which perceptions of strength and weakness--conveyed in words and spirit--are critical elements. Both Helms and Wattenberg would have the President muster academics, peace marchers, public relations experts, labor groups, corporations and churches in a worldwide educational effort to show that the Communist system is a brutal failure.

"Turn the bully pulpit into a bully spotlight," says Wattenberg., who, with Kissinger, believes that the U.S. is at the end of an era. "I've thought about it a great deal," Wattenberg says. "Perhaps a new era is defined best when people begin to agree on certain things." There is growing agreement in the world, he suggests, that the Soviet system cannot meet human needs, and increasing awareness in the U.S. that excessive reliance on Government, which began with F.D.R., must be altered.

Democratic Senator Jennings Randolph, 79, of West Virginia, the only man in Congress who sat on the Inaugural stand behind F.D.R. as he took the oath of office in 1933, fears that those "dark days" are in some ways being repeated by "these serious times." But now, America's reserves of wealth and power are exhausted. We are "stretched too thin." Randolph is deeply troubled, too, by the political atmosphere. In 1933 the Congress was ready to do almost anything to help the President. Now there is far more of an adversary relationship between the White House and the Hill.

George Ball, who has served in Government on and off for nearly 40 years, speculates that unease in Europe over American leadership "is greater than any time I recall since the end of World War II." James Schlesinger, who has been boss of both the Pentagon and the CIA, tends to agree: "We are moving into a period in which the structure of international politics of the postwar era is threatening to dissolve. We are losing our power of protection--and attraction." His sense of history is that the United States may be in an era of weak Presidents, not unlike those years preceding the Civil War.

Says Clark Clifford, the lawyer who served in four Democratic Administrations: "In 1982 the world is in a curiously and acutely precarious position." Clifford, who celebrated his 75th birthday on Christmas, sees the past three decades as a time in which remarkable leaders pushed their way to the top at just the right times--Truman, Churchill, De Gaulle, Eisenhower, Macmillan, Kennedy, Johnson, Sadat. But now he wonders "whether the world has the leadership to get through the very difficult times we face."

Josiah Bunting, 42, president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, also worries about men at the top. "Heads of government in these times are selected for qualities that often have nothing to do with what is needed to manage the problems they face," claims Bunting. There is no William Pitt on the scene, who, with vision and conviction, could say in 1805: "England has saved herself by her exertion, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example."

Reflecting on the crisis ahead, many of these men detect echoes from Europe of the 1930s. Demographer Richard Scammon, a student at Oxford back then, today hears some of the same neutralist refrains that he heard when Hitler marched into the Rhineland and later took over Austria. When the U.S. had its huge margin of power, nuclear weapons were not a big issue. Now, with the Soviets in the lead, there is this unreasoning compulsion to seek peace by denying the evil intent of the true aggressor and blaming everything on the U.S.

In the "more dangerous world" foreseen by Richard Beal, who probes the future for the White House, old regional antagonisms like that between India and Pakistan have been heightened by the addition of modern weapons. North Africa, Seal's futurists have concluded, is checkered with good leaders and bad, a combustible compound. By White House projections, at least six tough months for the economy lie ahead, and there has been nothing to shake Reagan's conviction that economic troubles add to the uncertainty of foreign affairs.

Yet, in the midst of all this heavy concern, there beats a curious optimism. Republican Congressman Barber Conable of New York sees America headed the right way in the long run. "We love to live from crisis to crisis," he says. "If we don't have a crisis, we find one. The job is to keep hope alive and accept the idea that we cannot solve everything, that we cannot still all the voices of hostility." Former World Bank President Robert McNamara glimpses the peril, but sees more clearly the promise. "We exaggerate our weaknesses and our enemies' strengths," he says. "We are rich, intellectually and technologically. I feel very secure in predicting that we are headed toward superiority in the next ten or 20 years. So many of our problems, like unemployment, are temporary conditions that we can change--if we want to."

That theme, which cautions Americans to understand that the struggles for freedom and dignity never end, is sounded with particular appeal by Historian Daniel Boorstin, the wry and erudite head of the Library of Congress. Says Boorstin: "Man is a problem inventor, not a problem solver. Man's humanity is measured by his ability to invent problems not authorized by government or approved by professors." That very openness of life is a process: dilemma replaces problem, and somehow drags civilization along, but never furnishes the satisfaction of ultimate solutions.

Boorstin claims to be "a longtime optimist." So is Canon Charles Martin of Washington's National Cathedral, even though he has "never seen as much concern, fear and anxiety among religious people." But Canon Martin is now deep in planning the 75th anniversary of the cathedral with a yearlong program of lectures and discussions on the theme of reconciliation between the races, between people and their environment, between nations. New energies are being unleashed, finding voice. Last week, in a graceful and powerful appeal to friends, he summed up the importance of the challenge: "It will determine whether our children live or our civilization survives."

--By Hugh Sidey

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