With scarcely a ripple of protest a popular magazine recently carried a cover picture retouched to portray President Ford as a circus clown stepping off the Presidential airplane. The two “best sellers” on the Presidency are scathing indictments of President Nixon's staff and, by inference, of Nixon himself. In The Imperial Presidency Arthur Schlesinger, who sets the pace for many intellectuals, argues that the powers of the office must be curtailed. President Ford found his veto power quite ineffective in the closing days of the 1974 Congress. And the Democratic leadership of the $4th Congress is disussing a legislative program without reference to the President. The Presidency obviously isn't what it used to be.

Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly in September, 1973, Chancellor Willy Brandt said: “Where hunger prevails, there can be no peace in the long run. Where bitter poverty prevails, there can be no justice.” He called upon the Assembly members to adopt a position on the moral aspects of international coexistence. And he said something else, that there is a limit to the expansion of power—“a limit where power becomes transformed into impotence.”

His words had direct relevance to the relationship between the United States and the Third World. In the postwar period, in pursuit of its power aims, the United States concerned itself with ex-colonial countries primarily with the view of “saving” them, as political entities, from a dreaded “Communist conquest.”

It was hardly more than a year ago that his grandiose dreams were scoffed at as the ranting of a petty tyrant and megalomaniac. In the aftermath of the “energy crisis” and quadrupling of oil prices, however, the world is beginning to think twice about Iran's monarch, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, or Shahansha (King of Kings), to give him his formal title.

Though he came to the throne in 1941, the present Shah of Iran did not really hold the reins of power until the overthrow in 1953 of the militant nationalist premier, Mohammed Mossadegh, in a CIA-sponsored coup.

Adolf Hitler and those of his fanatical . henchmen who shared his last days shared also a belief that from their ashes a cult would arise. As early as 1942, when his Russian plans had gone awry. Hitler spoke to his entourage of the satisfactions of dying on “a magnificent funeral pyre.” In his last testament three years later he wrote of his oneness in sacrifice with his soldiers, which would be “the seed of a radiant rebirth of the National-Socialist movement….” Martin Bormann hinted at a Wagnerian myth when he wrote in his last letter to his wife of perishing “in King Attila's hall, like the Nibelungs of old.” Joseph Goebbels, dramatic to the end, de claimed at his last press conference about “the fine color film describing the terrible days we are living through,” which future audiences would see.

It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blacked's unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious 'intention of the translator's preface and notes is to tone down the book's ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.

Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and Blackett's edition was reissued in a new jacket explaining that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross. Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler's aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so agoVith those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn't develop.

The overwhelming vote against Israel by Third World nations in the U.N. has raised some interesting and important questions about die attitude toward Jews in those countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose populations, after all, represent the majority of the human race.

Puzzlement over this issue was expressed by Saul Bellow at the December P.E.N, international writers' conference in Israel. “It is a remarkable thing,” said Bellow, “dial nations which have no knowledge of, or contact with, Jews, no history of anything to do with Jews, should become consistently hostile. Why should the new nations of Africa and Asia turn against us? Can it be put down to the influence of the.'Arabs?”

The United States, as Walt Whitman said, is a “nation of nations,” a nation essentially of immigrants. Their sacrifices, courage, and imagination created factories, farms, mines, and a rich intermingling of cultures.

Our country has two traditions: one that welcomes the stranger who, as Benjamin Franklin noted, is in the forefront of defending democracy; and another that in times of crisis uses the foreign bom as a scapegoat for unsolved social problems. In Jefferson's words, “the friendless alien is the safest subject for a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow.”

The economy of Southeast Asia has been in relatively good shape in spite of the instability of the world monetary system, trade deficits, and the worldwide oil crisis. There are promising factors for economic growth, opportunities for employment, and possibilities of rising income. But Asian development presents short-and long-term problems of a very complicated nature. One of the most serious problems is inflation and its impact on the social and political programs of individual countries. At the same time, there are severe shortages of basic commodities, such as oil and food. My own country, Japan, is among those affected.

In the final years of Portugal's old regime much of the non-Communist opposition came to equate the idea of anti-Communism with cold warriorism. The Soviet Union and the people's democracies tended to be seen as generally progressive forces. The chief enemy of the world's oppressed peoples was American imperialism. The United States, the land of napalm and the CIA, was seen to be the paramount exploiter of the suffering Third World—a view not incompatible with the Old Right's vision of the U.S. as die home of moneygrubbing Calvintst gumchewers.