The Second American Century

By HENRY GRUNWALD The writer, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, was editor in chief of Time Inc. from 1979 to 1987.

Look around America. Begin with New York City. Observe the filth and decay, the turbulence and misery evoking a Third World capital, the homeless sleeping in the streets, the haze of drugs, the racial hate, the crime, the fear. Look at other large American cities, most of which have some of New York in them. And then recall the phrase the American Century.

Turn it over in your mind. Consider the sense of American wealth and power, almost of omnipotence, that it implied. The effect is ironic, even heartbreaking.

Is this still a country that can lead? A country that can give others its ideals of freedom and justice, its formula for creating wealth, its generosity? Was the American Century always an illusion? And, if it was real, is it over?

It is nearly 50 years since Henry Luce published his essay "The American Century" in LIFE. It was a passionate argument for intervention in World War II and a summons to global leadership, an appeal for America to do its duty toward itself and toward mankind. The 20th century, wrote Luce, must be, "to a significant degree, an American Century."

Since the publication of that essay -- or editorial or sermon -- the phrase has echoed down the decades. It was often questioned, ridiculed, attacked. When the Soviet Union emerged as a nuclear power, when communism spread across the map, when the U.S. was ignominiously defeated in Vietnam, many people decided that it could not really be the American Century, after all. But it was. The remaining decade is not likely to change that.

In technology, the U.S. led most major developments, from the jet plane to the computer. It pioneered the move from the industrial to the information society. It did a lion's share of theoretical work in the sciences. For better or worse, it built -- and used -- the atom bomb, forever changing the calculus of war and peace. It took man to the moon. It played the major role in proving capitalism, widely seen as doomed in the century's first half, to be a vital and successful system. Above all, it decisively helped defeat the two great totalitarian enemies of freedom -- Nazism and communism.

Communism might have collapsed of its own fatal flaws anyway. We will obviously never know for sure. But the process was vitally influenced by the U.S.-led revival of Europe and Japan after World War II, by U.S. containment efforts that made the cost of Soviet adventurism prohibitive, by the solidity of NATO, by the drive for human rights and by the example of U.S. -- and Western -- economic success. Even Soviet officials acknowledge the effect of American pressure, including the arms buildup.

So the question is not whether this was the American Century but: Will the next century again be American?

To many, the mere question seems fantastic. There are widespread announcements of the End of the American Century, the title of a thoughtful recent book. It is one of many. Declinism has become a growth industry, for familiar reasons: the relative erosion of American economic power, the rise of Japan and the European Community as serious trade rivals, the transformation of the U.S. into a debtor nation, the disastrous shortcomings of American education, the seeming sclerosis and corruption of the U.S. political system -- and on and on.

All this is accompanied by a new isolationism, the notion that with the collapse of communism, there is not much left for America to do in the world, that the U.S. should circle the wagons. There is also economic isolationism, otherwise known as protectionism. And there is the isolationism of despair: the conviction that in winning the cold war, we spent so much of our treasure that we no longer have the means to exert much influence abroad -- that the U.S. is increasingly "irrelevant."

But that was a false view, even before events in the Persian Gulf suddenly made America very relevant indeed. The situation is not as simple as the declinists claim, our fate surely not that bleak. The 21st could and should be -- "to a significant degree" -- a Second American Century.

It is useful to look at that proposition from the perspective, however distant, of Luce's essay, which was an attack on the isolationism of his day.

It began with a slap. "We Americans are unhappy," wrote Luce. "We are nervous -- or gloomy -- or apathetic," as well as confused about the world. "And yet we also know that the sickness of the world is also our sickness. We, too, have miserably failed to solve the problems of our epoch. And nowhere in the world have men's failures been so little excusable as in the United States of America."

Published nine months before Pearl Harbor, Luce's essay conceded that fighting in World War II was not really necessary as a matter of defending "our homeland." The U.S. could be made impregnable and might live, "discreetly and dangerously," like "an infinitely mightier Switzerland."

So what would we be fighting for -- "Dear old Danzig or dear old Dong Dang?" Or "Shall we use some big words like 'democracy' and 'freedom' and 'justice'?" Yes, Luce replied, of course. This does not mean that it is our task "to police the whole world nor to impose democratic institutions on all mankind including the Dalai Lama and the good shepherds of Tibet." But America must primarily blame herself if "the world environment in which she lives" is "unfavorable to the growth of American life." And our only chance to make our democracy work is as part "of a vital international economy" and "an international moral order."

To a large extent, Luce pointed out, it already was the American Century, because of the influence of American culture and products. But more was required: the spread of free enterprise, because it could not prevail in America "if it prevails nowhere else," and of freedom, because "without Freedom, there can be no abundant life, but with Freedom, there can be."

So the U.S. must now be "the Good Samaritan of the entire world," helping feed "all the people of the world who . . . are hungry and destitute." But such efforts will fail unless animated by American ideals -- love of freedom, equality of opportunity, self-reliance but also cooperation, together with "all the great principles of Western civilization" -- justice, truth, charity. "It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread . . . and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the psalmist called a little lower than the angels." Other nations can "survive," but America can endure only if its veins are filled with "the blood of purpose and enterprise and high resolve."

Most interventionists cheered Luce's appeal. But even some of them were disturbed by the missionary's son's missionary zeal. The Nation called Luce's program magnanimous but also smug and self-righteous. The Literary Magazine at his alma mater, Yale, called it "jingoistic jargon." Luce's favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, later wrote that the very title implied an "egoistic corruption."

Luce, distressed and puzzled, once said he regretted using the phrase American Century. He need not have. Sure, the title and the piece itself had arrogant overtones, a belief in a divinely ordained American mission. Yet there was also chastisement for American faults and some prudent qualifications.

Today what seems more striking than the almost quaint idealism and the bombastic style (forgive me, Harry) is the degree to which, shorn of rhetoric, the essay proved to be a realistic program, anticipating the Marshall Plan, Truman's Point Four call for American technical assistance abroad, the Kennedy Peace Corps, Food for Peace. America as a powerhouse of democratic ideals, as the champion of freedom and the source of material sustenance and technical expertise -- all animated U.S. foreign policy the past half-century.

What, if anything, of this vision remains valid? No matter how American wealth and power may have changed, Luce's assumptions still apply with remarkable force.

The world has indeed become "indivisible," interdependent. More than ever we -- and others -- need a "vital international economy" with open trade. Democracy, once regarded by many as hopelessly inefficient compared with the planned and regimented dictatorships, has proved itself indispensable to productive economies. We have learned much more about the connection between the abundant life and freedom. We have also learned that communism is really a new form of feudalism, a fixed society. Such a society cannot create abundance.

With the Soviet decline and the emergence of a prosperous and uniting Europe, the U.S. contribution to the Continent's defense and political stability, while still important, will diminish. That is as it should be. The fact that the U.S. is standing aside as the Germans give economic aid to the Soviets (and the Japanese to China) may be read as a sign of reduced American means and influence. But it is also an overdue form of burden sharing that the U.S. has long urged and that must increasingly be carried beyond the present NATO area.

While the threat of an attack on Western Europe and of global war is much reduced, the next century will bring other dangers.

The most important form of power will be economic, not military. That is already a truism -- but not true everywhere. Indeed the world can be divided into those who live in the era of economics and those who cling to noneconomic, atavistic forces: religion, national or tribal passions, militarism.

The distinction is not precise or absolute. But, as the leading example, the European Community is founded on economic principles. A succession of terrible wars has sharply reduced the nationalist-tribal and militarist instincts in Western Europe. The Community is trying to build a supranational order based on economic cooperation and competition, on material self-interest, ultimately on reason. Japan is also pouring most of its once militaristic energies into economic channels.

The future of the Soviet Union could bring disintegration or right-wing reaction, or both -- prospects all the scarier because the Soviets still possess vast nuclear stockpiles. Moreover, a successful transition to a market economy will take a miracle. But one can hope the U.S.S.R., or what remains of it, will also pursue economic development rather than expansion and aggression.

While Clausewitz called war a continuation of politics by other means, $ economics may become a continuation of war by other means. There may be virulent trade wars among the economic Big Three -- Europe, Japan and America (whose sphere should eventually include Canada and Mexico in an American Economic Community).

The global marketplace, however, has become so interconnected that trade wars don't make much more sense than real wars. Issues that once were strictly internal -- Japan's retail distribution system, European price supports for farmers, the U.S. budget deficit -- have become legitimate subjects of international negotiation. This suggests that the emerging world economy will dictate a new and more limited concept of sovereignty.

Even so, real or imagined unfairness in trade will persist, as will visceral fears of one's country being overtaken and bought up by foreigners. Fighting protectionism, the creed of economic know-nothings, in the U.S. and elsewhere, may be the greatest challenge to American leadership, and also its greatest opportunity. A special advantage is that the U.S., both an Atlantic and a Pacific power, has closer ties to Europe and Japan than they have to each other.

Beyond these three economic force fields, national, tribal and religious conflicts threaten to turn many parts of the world into larger Lebanons -- conflicts like the ones pitting Arabs against Israelis, Islamic factions against one another, Islamic fundamentalism against the West, Indians against Pakistanis, among others.

The current Middle East crisis, with Iraq ranged against moderate Arab states and the West, is sometimes described as an economic conflict: poor Arabs vs. rich, the "Arab world" (a fictitious concept) vs. the oil-greedy industrialized world. But that is at best a partial truth. Such economic issues are really elements of those other, overarching battles of nationalism and tribalism, conflicting faiths and competing power.

Why should the U.S. care? In the instance of Iraq, because of oil and Israel. But there are more general reasons. Some years ago, a French novel imagined desperate hordes of the Third World poor advancing on the West. One need not take that prophecy literally to worry about terrorism and other forms of contagion from regional conflicts and from "the wretched of the earth." We should be able to reduce our military commitments in the Third World, but we cannot escape them altogether. It is in our interest to help construct some degree of world order, especially as several Third World countries have nuclear weapons capability. That is also why the U.S. must continue pushing for nonproliferation. And that also strengthens the case for continued development of nuclear defense.

Despite the present intractability of atavistic conflicts, they may ultimately be mitigated by the transforming promise of economic progress, of a better life, as happened in Europe. That will not be brought about by radical policies (in the case of the Middle East throwing out the oil monarchs or fighting Israel or the West), the sort of policies that have failed everywhere, but only through a process of economic growth and integration.

But that process will continue to be at odds with nationalism, an imprecise term that covers both the self-assertion of various ethnic groups within states and the patriotic claims of the nation-states themselves.

Because the former are increasingly in conflict with the latter, many nation-states are becoming obsolete; the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, India and others demonstrate that their artificial Nationality does not satisfy their nationalities. Nation-states are apt to be too small and ineffective to cope with the global economy and yet too large and insensitive to cope satisfactorily with local problems.

Ideally, the world needs a new view of sovereignty and new structures that would give peoples a sense of autonomy and identity, but within larger regional and rational economic groupings. The U.S., which gave a huge push to the formation of the European Community, can help develop such structures.

Many impoverished, debt-ridden Third World countries are only just beginning to make their way along the only path forward -- the free market, painful and politically explosive though that is. Again, why should the U.S. care? Even though Marxist revolutionaries and guerrillas still carry on their archaic battles in many places, the danger of such countries' "going communist" is sharply diminished. But the developed world needs Third World countries as markets. Also, economic turmoil would put heavy pressures on the U.S. and other Western nations, not least through growing streams of emigrants.

The U.S. cannot engineer, let alone finance, the success of the free market everywhere. Nor can it be the Good Samaritan to the whole world, although well-targeted foreign aid should continue. But the U.S. must help by seeking an open trading system in which underdeveloped countries can sell their products. Above all, the U.S. must push for economic and political reforms, offering advice and entrepreneurial guidance; one can imagine the Peace Corps being followed by a Development Corps.

This will have to go hand in hand with the building of democracy. Skeptics argue that it cannot be exported, but surely the U.S. has influenced the drive toward democracy and the development of free institutions in a great many nations. We must continue and expand that activity.

But can we afford all this when our Cabinet members are traveling the world, hat in hand, soliciting contributions to our gulf operation? When we are fighting desperate budget battles and haggling over Social Security and health care, Head Start and parental leave?

In recent years foreign assistance has equaled less than 5% of our defense outlays. It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable -- that the richest and most productive country in the world, which we still are, cannot find the relatively modest means to exert international leadership while simultaneously improving its own society.

It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable -- that at the moment when much of the world seeks to follow American political and economic ideals, the country should consider itself too broke to live up to these ideals, at home or abroad.

It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable -- that a people responsible for unprecedented achievements in this century should accept mediocrity and slow decline in the next.

But must America lead? Why not try for the good life without world responsibility? Why not, in Luce's words, settle for being a more powerful Switzerland? Partly because Switzerland has always been only Switzerland, while America, after playing its global and historic role, would suffer a permanent sense of loss and dislocation. But more important, the world has become too interdependent for the U.S. to create a prosperous, isolated enclave.

While America's power to influence the world environment has declined, it has not disappeared by any means. But to wield such influence, the first task for the U.S. is to renew and rebuild itself, to restore its economic growth and productive capacity and replenish its wealth.

The Second American Century must begin at home.

It must begin in the schools and factories, on the mean streets and the crumbling highways.

It must begin in people's minds. Nearly half of all Americans polled believe we are in decline, overtaken by the Japanese and others. That could be a healthy stimulus to greater effort. But the Second American Century requires a more accurate sense of reality -- neither the heedless optimism that once held everything to be possible for America, almost as a law of nature, nor the new, creeping pessimism that considers America's downfall inevitable.

Of course, all world powers sooner or later decline, but the timing is not foreordained.

The Second American Century must begin with the realization that America's problems are not primarily imposed from outside, not by the wicked Japanese or the Colombian drug lords, but by us.

It must begin with a recognition that the American concept and practice of freedom have been distorted. To the founders it was self-evident that freedom required obligations; in the past half-century the notion of a citizen's obligations virtually disappeared from public discourse, while "duty" came to be almost a code word for fascism. About the only thing that is talked about, demanded, praised is citizen's rights (some of them pretty exotic). The Second American Century must involve a new balance of rights and obligations.

We still have tremendous resources. Our share of the global product is about what it always was, except in the unnatural years following World War II when much of the world was prostrate. And our GNP is almost twice that of any other country.

But other measurements are far more discouraging: our trade and budget deficits; the decline in our productivity; our personal savings rate, now a third of Japan's. Perhaps worst of all, not even three-quarters of our students finish high school (compared with 95% in Japan), and most of those who do are miserably educated. Statistics aside, everywhere there are signs of inefficiency, from the space program to the military to everyday services.

None of this is irreversible.

The reform of our economy must begin, alas, with taxes. The fact that America bears a smaller tax burden than other developed countries is not conclusive: perhaps the others are doing it wrong. Still, as a nation we are reluctant to pay for what we -- the sum of all our various constituencies and interest groups -- want. At the same time, we don't get adequate value for the taxes we do pay. So tax increases must be balanced by severe cuts in expenditures, especially entitlements for the better off, plus farm and other subsidies. But a mere split-the-difference deal on taxes will not be enough. We need to address the nature and structure of our government.

Industry has begun to recognize that the age of assembly-line mass production is over and that what has been called the second industrial revolution, based on the computer, involves smaller, flexible units with far fewer layers of middle management. Government, by contrast, is stuck in the political equivalent of the assembly-line, mass-production era -- insensitive, inflexible, overregulated and overstaffed, partly because Congress keeps mandating innumerable and conflicting functions. Even though it may seem impossible, we must have a long-range effort to reorganize our government machinery.

Not that the private sector is necessarily a model. In many ways American business has let America down. It has often been too bureaucratic, too complacent and unimaginative, too ready to ask for government help, too provincial and isolated from world markets. There are signs of revitalization: industrial productivity is rising slightly; the quality of many products is improving. But we have a long way to go. Moreover, the government will have to invest in America's crumbling infrastructure. This has been done in the past, without damaging our free market.

Ultimately, we must look anew at the interaction between public and private sectors. Coping with our social problems is more complex than the usual formula of more vs. less government intervention.

Conventional government intervention has largely failed, notably in the chaotic and counterproductive welfare system, which is at once too lax and too rigid. We have been more successful than is often realized in ending or alleviating certain kinds of poverty. The underclass, with its devastated family life, its single mothers and routine teenage pregnancies (among black teenagers, nearly 90% of babies are born out of wedlock), is a nightmare reproach to America. But it is also a relatively isolated phenomenon -- far more so than the poverty that festered behind the proud facades of Victorian England, for example. It requires separate, special treatment.

Private initiative must carry a larger share of responsibility, but in combination with more intelligent, imaginative and flexible government policies that tie social services to incentives for self-help. These may range from vouchers to enterprise zones to tenant ownership of housing projects. The principle of combining social responsibility with individual initiative, compassion with reward for effort, suggests that the U.S. must partially reinvent capitalism -- and do a more imaginative job of it than the heavily welfare-statist economies of Europe that are increasingly retreating from socialism.

It has become a cliche that to restore our global competitiveness, we need to reform our educational system. That will take a lot more than money. The educational bureaucracy must be curbed -- education is too important to be left to the educators. Nor can it be left to zealous amateurs more interested in "community rights" or minority cultural traditions than in effective education. We must also loosen the still strangling grasp of "progressive education." Curriculums must be purged of mindless courses. Teachers must be given more independence but also held to higher standards. Families must give early support to their children's education.

And we must stop the practice of simply taking pupils who can't or won't learn and running them through the system toward a meaningless diploma. Everybody has a right to education, but that right must be earned with effort and discipline. An alternative to the present chaos is to establish more and better trade schools and on-the-job training programs, as well as national civilian service.

Each step would involve many real or imagined sacrifices for particular groups; each one would be bitterly fought. Normally, any change remotely as drastic happens only through war or domestic catastrophe. So, is it simply utopian to hope for an American revival?

No -- thanks to three factors:

1) Among America's greatest strengths is its capacity for renewal; it has shed its skin again and again to re-emerge with new life. It rebuilt itself after the Civil War and Reconstruction; it reformed itself after the cruelties of the 19th century industrial surge and the excesses of the robber barons; it picked itself up after the Great Depression; it made tremendous strides in race relations through the civil rights movement; it achieved at least partial healing after the bitter national split over Vietnam and the counterculture's nihilism.

America assimilates radical changes that in most other countries could cause revolution. In America revolution is permanent but piecemeal.

2) The U.S. has the tremendous asset of flexibility. An American expatriate journalist recently wondered how this country can survive without a ruling $ class. Yet again and again, ruling classes have decayed and left their countries in ruin. It is to America's advantage that it has no permanent ruling class and that its elites are constantly open to new blood.

America as a whole is far more open to newcomers than any other country in the world. Immigration has always been a source of boundless fresh energy and enthusiasm, as millions discovered America anew and in a sense rebuilt it in every generation.

Obviously, immigration creates problems as well. There are conflicts among various immigrant groups. U.S. immigration policy is not emphasizing the influx of the skilled and educated, thus calling into question what has been dubbed the brain gain. Some immigrant groups, especially Hispanics, seem to resist learning English, which in some states has already created a bilingual culture. That raises a deeply worrisome prospect. Is a healthy pluralism giving way to a corrosive separatism, the ideal of tolerance to reverse racism?

Minorities must and will recognize such trends as self-destructive. By and large, the melting pot still works. In the 21st century America will have a new ethnic profile. The prospect of a Hispanic or Asian -- and surely a black -- President is quite plausible. And it is a cheering prospect, provided only that he or she speaks to the nation in English and governs in the tradition of the founders. That tradition has evolved but remains the binding force and genius of America -- an ability to combine self-interest with compromise.

3) America possesses a special instrument of change and reform -- what might be called the civic crusade. These grass-roots movements about particular issues have repeatedly forced the more rigid political system to follow: in the fight against racial discrimination, the movement for women's equality, the drive for fair treatment of homosexuals, the environmental movement, the campaign against smoking and many others. Not everybody is comfortable with all these crusades and the rights they champion. But they represent an extraordinary American capacity to change perceptions and habits.

If it is possible through organized popular pressure to make the environment and nature a major political issue, it should be possible to do the same for education. If it is possible to make smoking despised, it should be possible for drug use. And it should be possible to refocus some civic crusades. The antitax movement was an important political force, but it was too blunt and undifferentiated. To reduce the excesses of government bureaucracy, it is not enough to curb its spending powers. It is far more important (and more difficult) to monitor performance and press for efficiency.

Yes, of course, leadership is needed. But there are times when followers must lead until the leaders follow.

The civic crusades also carry danger. There are so many on behalf of so many causes, including relatively trivial ones, that their energy can become scattered. They threaten to be no longer civic but merely uncivil, dismissive of the rights of others.

But that is not wholly new. The notion that in the past the U.S. was somehow a united community is a nostalgic illusion. The founders warned of the dangers of "faction." Even on the frontier, the pioneers fought not just the Indians but one another. Interests fought other interests. Regions fought other regions. Industrialization brought bloodletting between bosses and labor. But despite battles that in other countries would have wrecked social and political systems, the U.S. usually managed to find some accommodation that satisfied nobody but, in the end, proved workable.

In an interdependent world with conflicting national and ethnic claims, with people on the move as never before, America's social flexibility and its experience with blending many ethnic groups is an important advantage. It is a quality notably lacking in some of the other possible claimants to leadership in the next century.

A united Europe, driven by a united Germany, could become the world's leading power. Heir to a unique civilization and used to rule, the European Community has a highly educated, skilled population and a GNP larger than America's.

But for all their prosperity and, in most cases, munificent welfare arrangements, European countries show few signs of overcoming their traditional social rigidity; one's class, one's prospects in life remain remarkably fixed. European countries are also strongly xenophobic, especially hostile toward immigrants, which could become a major problem for the European Community. Nor is it yet clear whether the Community will continue to be inward-looking or seek a greater global role. It is also far from certain to what extent a Europe guided by the Brussels bureaucracy will be dedicated to vigorous free enterprise and whether it will achieve true political union.

In economic terms, Japan could also be the world leader. But its economy, for all its stunning success, has serious flaws. Much of it is based on absurdly inflated real estate values, lavish subsidies to farmers and artificially low domestic consumption (which is beginning to change slowly).

Japan is even more inflexible socially and politically than Europe. It has largely failed to include women as full members in its economy or society. It is also profoundly xenophobic. Japan has started to play a role in international organizations (its foreign aid is ahead of ours), and it has the third highest defense budget, after the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. But even if it maintains its economic edge, and develops the will to provide political leadership, the rest of the world may have difficulty accepting it in the foreseeable future.

Thus the U.S. should retain its leading role -- but not by the same wide margin. The U.S. effort in the gulf and the international support it rallied show that there are still tasks that only the U.S. is able and willing to undertake. It also shows that the U.S. cannot and should not undertake them alone. In the emerging, decentralized world, no single power will play the kind of predominant part that was possible in the 19th and 20th centuries. It will be an era of diffused power. In his book Bound to Lead, political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. speaks of "soft" or "co-optive" power, that is, indirect means of influence: winning others over through one's ideas or acting in concert with allies and through international organizations.

In the early years of the Republic, it was widely believed the best, if not the only, way for America to influence the rest of the world was by the power of its example. That "light unto the nations" view was later ridiculed, but it has regained the force of simple truth. The example of a tremendously successful American economy and free institutions contributed strongly to the downfall of communism and to the movement toward market economies and democracy all over the world.

So a Second American Century will require the U.S. to retain and greatly improve its role as an example.

Look around America. Observe, even in New York City, alongside the decay and decline, the irrepressible drive, the jackhammer energy, the ambition as high as the builders' cranes, the opportunities as exciting as the turbulent street scenes.

Observe the vast plains, still the source of the kind of strength that only space can give. The Main Streets, often puzzled and outraged by change, but -- so far -- willing to bend to it, without breaking. The campuses, dotted with ugly racist conflict but still great generators of knowledge and ideas. The countless individual entrepreneurs and the omnipresent civic groups, committees, associations.

This whole strange country that can endlessly fool itself and be fooled and yet retain a saving common sense; this materialistic, money-driven country that is constantly caught up in moral, sometimes naively moralistic struggles; this smug country that is relentlessly self-critical; this freest of all countries in the world, living both the dangers and the triumphs of freedom.

Observe all this and then recall the phrase American Decline. Consider the sense of failure and loss that it implies. The effect is disorienting and provocative. Is this really a country that must inevitably slide downward?

The key word is inevitably. Nothing in history is inevitable. There can and will be a Second American Century if Americans want it, if they are again stirred by the "blood of purpose and enterprise and high resolve," if every individual American is committed to extra effort and dedication, extra thought and tolerance.

As Luce wrote 50 years ago, nowhere in the world is failure so little excusable as in the United States of America.