The President's Reorganization Plan for the Defense Department, so much in the news these past few months, brings before us a fundamental issue that every democracy must face anew in times of threat and crisis. The issue—the role that the military shall play in our society and in the making of our national policy—is familiar. What makes it compelling is the siege the Soviet Union has laid to the United States and the Western world and the peculiarly fearsome dangers of war fought with missiles and thermonuclear warheads.

So long as the nations of the world must rely for their security principally on themselves, they will continue to establish armed forces for their protection against outside threats. But every democratic society faces the danger that these forces of arms and of men trained in their use will be used against the society that created them.

In Paris today almost everybody is discovering his attachment to de Gaulle. Some say they have never ceased to trust the General, others claim to have predicted.long ago his return to power. Many have told me—among them Jean-Marie Domenach, editor of the leftist Catholic Esprit— that there still exists a kind of “network of the Resistance” inherited from wartime, now consisting of sentimental attachment of the earlier members to each other and of loyalty to de Gaulle. It was also Domenach who told me of a conversation he had had with the General two years ago. On that occasion de Gaulle expressed his lack of respect for those who paraded, for years, in the'name of his Movement, and called himself the “only true revolutionist” in France, a man deserted and misunderstood by the pseudo-revolutionists who claimed to be bis followers.