Although several years have passed since the end of America's involvement in Vietnam, this war remains a highly controversial subject about which great reservoirs of heated emotion are easily let loose. No consensus has been reached concerning the lessons American foreign policy should have learned from this experience, and perhaps more important, how such situations should be approached in the future. Indeed, the dialogue on Vietnam that has taken place among political leaders, scholars, and the public at large has scarcely touched upon this issue at all, but has instead focused upon the question of which segment of American society's actions were justified at the time and which were not. Most recently, the study by Peter Braestrup, entitled Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, has drawn the conclusion that the American military actually won the Tet offensive, but the media unjustifiably portrayed it as a defeat. Others, such as Robert Gallucci in his book Neither Peace Nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Viet-Nam, have described how the Pentagon continually claimed that the war was being won in Vietnam when actually it was being lost. In short, the dialogue on Vietnam that has taken place since the war has been primarily a restatement by various people of the same views they held during the war.

The hesitancy of French Catholic intellectuals to engage in public quarrels, and speak ill of their dead, has led to the forgetting of arguments and divergences of great importance to the background of Vatican II. It has been widely assumed that France's two most influential Christian intellectuals of the mid-century, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, worked hand in glove to promote what one historian has called a common “French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World.”* In fact, however, letters and diaries only known after the two principals were dead, have revealed deep differences between the two men at a decisive point in the evolution of modern French intellectual life. Maritain's reservations about the left-wing Catholicism and ecumenism of his younger friends remain quite relevant in our own day. In fact Maritain had, and kept, serious reservations about the new kind of Catholicism which Mounier and his new review Esprit articulated in the early nineteen-thirties but kept them private largely because of the secret danger of a known ecclesiastical condemnation for Esprit.

Over the years, historians have engaged in various disputes concerning the origins, nature, and results of the progressive movement that dominated the political imagination of Americans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. No one set of categories has dominated those disputes, but much of the controversy has focused on a fundamental tension in progressive thought: the conflict between a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington said: “'Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government. Who that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” With these words in mind, I sought to examine West German institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge, specifically the schools. I tried to find out whether those institutions promote, or even speak of, virtue or morality, and whether they aim at the development of enlightened public opinion. I defined enlightened public opinion as those opinions which support free, popular government. Enlightened human beings are those “who recognize other human beings for what they are, namely, persons with rights which they must respect, in order to have their own rights recognized and respected.”

Few documents have so influenced the course of history as has the American Declaration of Independence, now more than two centuries old. The Founding Fathers seem to have realized, with their usual clairvoyance, that no diplomacy can succeed without representing some intrinsic values, and the great Declaration established a moral basis for American international relations by announcing principles of universal validity. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out, “Our Declaration of Independence meant liberty not alone for the people of this country but hope for all the world for all future time. It means in due course the weight should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.” In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence no other human experience in the last two centuries has been so attractive to liberty-seeking people as the American experiment — called, not without warrant, “the permanent revolution.” In the early years of the Republic, Thomas Paine stated with prophetic vision:

So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe, to reform the political condition of man. Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.