Spirit of Prometheus

The guide line of U.S. policy, as the Western world's foreign ministers prepared last week for a May 11 conference that would presumably lead to the summit, was firmness against Soviet aggression in Germany or anywhere else. But the guide line of U.S. aims and ambitions, as measured by the human spirit since man saw Prometheus steal fire from the gods, was perhaps better characterized by 1) a mellow old man who had spent his life seeking new frontiers of truth and order, and 2) seven young men on the threshold of high adventure.

The old man was New York's Judge Learned Hand, 87, completing his soth year on the federal bench. Traveling to Manhattan for the warm occasion were Chief Justice Earl Warren, U.S. Attorney General William Rogers, and a host of the nation's leading lawyers. Attorney General Rogers read a letter to Hand from the President of the U.S.: "You have stood for that excellence and temperament essential to the achievement of equal justice under law." Learned Hand found his reply in a Shakespearean sonnet to Time: "This I do vow, and this shall ever be;/I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee."

The seven young men, introduced in Washington, were candidates for the mark of becoming the first human to travel in space. Despite the rub-a-dub-dub of press-agentry, they emerged as ordinary, hardworking, courageous airmen who were willing to chance death in the hope of finding the future that lies in some far sky.

In both Learned Hand and the Mercury Astronauts was the Promethean spirit that motivated the free world as it followed its imagination and aspirations beyond the cold war to faraway goals.