Books: Speak Low

Hardly ever before in peacetime has U.S. public interest in foreign policy run so broad and so deep. The fall publishing season has brought a batch of foreign-policy books, including four by authors with topnotch reputations: George F. Kennan, onetime (1947-50) director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff; Charles Burton Marshall, a top State Department planner under Dean Acheson; F.S.C. Northrop, Sterling professor of philosophy and law at Yale, noted for such provocative books as The Taming of the Nations, The Meeting of East and West; and Adlai Stevenson, titular head of the Democratic Party. The four volumes are being heavily advertised, have been widely reviewed and have caused quite a bit of chatter. They are indeed newsworthy, not because they are good, but because—for all the work that has gone into them—they are so bad.

Their common denominator could be expressed thus: in international relations, the U.S. should speak ever so softly and never appear to be carrying much more than a twig.

A CALL TO GREATNESS, by Adlai Stevenson (Harper; $2.25), will sound to many more like a call to weakness. Stevenson is seriously disturbed over the possibility that the U.S. will appear to be too arrogant in world affairs. He is troubled by "pronouncements of rigid policy by American leaders" and by "the growing emphasis on the military aspect of anti-Communist defense." Any unilateral action by the U.S., he fears, "will tend to confirm the Communist charge that our purpose is not disinterested cooperation but self-interested domination." As the U.S. stands before the world it must be humble. "We are never going to solve many of the hard problems of the world, but will simply have to learn to live with them for years and maybe for centuries."

REALITIES OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, by George F. Kennan (Princeton; $2.75), disagrees with Stevenson on the question of humility: "There is no use blinking the fact that we are a great nation." But Kennan, too, is worried that the U.S. may become too agitated, may attempt to force its standard of morality on the rest of the world, may abuse its power and responsibility. His recommendation: "If we all sit quietly in our little boat and address ourselves to the process of navigation, I doubt that it will tip over."

THE LIMITS OF FOREIGN POLICY, by Charles Burton Marshall (Holt; $3), maintains that there cannot be much initiative in foreign policy: it is "necessarily in large part a response to situations . . . beyond our Government's control." Americans, says Marshall, are too fascinated with Davy Crockett's formula, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead." For the purposes of world politics, he writes, the best that can be expected is some such paraphrase as: "Be as sure as you reasonably can of the rightness of your premises. Take care as best you can to see that the conclusions which you draw from them are tolerably right. . . . After you have done your best to meet these obligations, go ahead as far as the circumstances taken as a whole warrant, getting others to go along as far as you can."