In 1913, when Woodrow Wilson was assuming the duties of President of the United States, Joseph Stalin was in exile in Siberia and Lenin in Galicia. When Union and Confederate veterans were meeting to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Henry Ford was about to set up the first modern assembly line, the newly established Union of South Africa promulgated the Natives Land Act. A world preoccupied with the decay of great empires and apprehensive about the onset of world conflict was only dimly aware of this law enacted in a distant corner of a remote continent. The law prescribed the apportionment of territory of the Union into areas of exclusive settlement by whites and blacks.

Cata had moved the children's beds out of the front room; no alarm motivated her, rather calm prudence. The house stood next to a union hall. "Someone might put a bomb," she said. That was in January, 1975, high summer in Argentina, when everyone was preoccupied with bombs. Late one night Susana, Cata's daughter, sprang from her bed. There had been a clap of thunder. "They've bombed Government House!" she exclaimed, still groggy.

Late one night Susana, Cata's daughter, sprang from her bed. There had been a clap of thunder. "They've bombed Government House!" she exclaimed, still groggy.

As I started out that December morning along the riverfront at Benares, the long arch of river, the cremation ghats, and the towering buifdings stretched as far as the eye could see, like a mighty encrusted bow catching the morning sun and embracing the wide, empty sandbank across the river to the east.

Passing a woman squatting in front of her fragile hut of rushes, roasting chapattis on the usual concave brown metal disc over her small fire, I leaped across the trickle of the Asi, which gives Benares the latter half of its Indian name of Varanasi.

In the Soviet Union there are strict laws against prostitution. Nevertheless, if a man is interested in picking up a girl for sexual purposes, he knows where to go find one. Take Canton. Do men know where to find such a girl? I've had no personal experience, but 1 did learn something about this from others in 1971. It happened that I was sent on an errand by the large brigade. I had to get some wire cable, but there was none to be had in Canton, so my job was to procure it through the speculators' organizations.

As a journalist whose job it is to check facts against politicians' promises and public servants' continuing prejudices, I doubt whether modern history is moved much by slogans. Interdependence versus self-reliance, the supposed conflicts of the Chinese Way (egalitarianism, autarchy, underconsumption) versus the Japanese Way (growth, trade, investment)— all give way, I suspect, to changing precepts that bring successes.

My father never left the courtroom. Even though investigation into his crusading Oklahoma law practice—where he had defended blacks, reds, and pinkos-—banned him from the Oregon bar decades ago, he has always stood with one foot before the bench.

No longer having a judge and jury in court, he endeavored to instill in his offspring the intricacies of logic, legalism, and leftism. Of his children he made only one demand: We were to save the world.

The goal is to construct a stable balance of power for the late twentieth century. Critics point out that no balance of power has ever assured justice, or even peace. War and the threat of war have been the central instruments of balance-of-power operations. A system based on a multiplicity of sovereign states is a poor vehicle for managing the crucial problems of our time. I consider those problems to be universalized ideologies in conflict; nuclear weaponry—and perhaps technology in tending to slip out of control; population explosion; maldistribution and looming insufficiency in energy and other natural resources; environmental deterioration; growth of multinational corporate power; the fragility of national and international economies; and on and on.

One way of looking at nations involved in the North-South confrontation is to group them as aid-givers (the industrialized rich nations) and aid-receivers (the poor Third World). Of course it is more complicated than this. Some countries of the Third World group, the Middle East oil states, are extremely rich. These played a special role in heating up the confrontation. Even among the others, not all are equally poor, but the distinction between aid-givers and aidreceivers is generally true. In fact, a great deal of the dialogue between the two groups is about how the North can more effectively assist the South in its desperate struggle to escape poverty.

The world we are obliged to inhabit, it sometimes seems, is being managed by a deity with an exceedingly wry sense of humor. This is the century in Which national governments have taken on the novel and difficult task of actively trying to promote the welfare of ordinary people. It is also the century in which technological forces have been pushing the individual states together and sharply reducing their autonomy. The multinational enterprise epitomizes the conflict. Created in part as a result of the technological forces, responding to the new opportunities those forces have generated, the multinational enterprise is widely seen as threatening the autonomy of the nation-state.