The empty office of the Vice Presidency was once only an unimportant appendage to the American body politic; a pretext for mild witticisms. Once every twenty years or so its occupant would suddenly rise to the Presidency upon the death of the elected incumbent. But since those spectacular events occurred so infrequently and with such varied consequences for the nation's political affairs, no steady attention ever focused on the office itself. Except for their previous service in the Vice Presidency, what did Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur have in common? Or Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge? It seemed impossible to derive from their experiences any settled conclusions about the Vice Presidency either as a preparation for the Presidency or as a way of providing a standby President.

The roots of patriotism are in childhood. At least in Western languages this is expressed in the terms that most commonly evoke patriotic sentiments—fatherland, motherland, homeland, native country. Patriotism most basically refers to places, people and things with which one is at home, and there are few later experiences that can match the sense of at-homeness experienced by the child. The world then is still a very new place, and most of it is very strange, much of it terrifying. The familiar, the secure zones of the world have, for this reason, a particular sweetness about them.

The now famous “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, written before his exile, is undoubtedly a remarkable, even historic, document. It deserves to be read along with, say, Dostoevski's “Address on the Unveiling of the Pushkin Monument” as a witness to the human spirit and to Russia. One Soviet leader, upon the occasion of Solzhenitsyn's celebrated expulsion, remarked to the effect that now he will be out of our hair and you Westerners will soon find him a bore, a nuisance and a neurotic, just as we did. The remark was not entirely unperceptive. It recognized that much of the novelists news value was based precisely upon his being inside of the Soviet Union. Once out, he might soon have as little impact on public opinion as did Kerensky during his declining and obscure years in America.

My first visit to England was in 1921, when the Macdonald Labor government had its first but brief reign by sufferance of the Liberals. I married an English girl in 1931, and my wife and I subsequently spent every other summer in Britain until 1939. I met the late Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of York, in a preparatory meeting for the Oxford Conference on “Church, Community and State” in 1938. My contacts with Britain were chiefly on the Left in both Church and State. Dr. Temple was a member of the Labor Party and, with Professor R. H. Tawney, one of the founders of the Workers Education Association. Temple was certainly partly responsible for the general diffusion of “labor” opinion through the middle classes of Britain and beyond the limits of the industrial classes to which socialism was confined on the Continent. This diffusion laid the foundation for the victory of Labor after the War, in spite of Churchill's great eminence as the architect of British victory. The slogan “Fair shares for all” represented the conscience of the whole war-impoverished nation.

The role of higher education is crucial in a world that seems torn apart by cultural, economic, political and social differences, and yet is, at the same time, ever more closely drawn together by technology, travel, social and economic needs. Higher education offers no panacea for the disunity of this complex and confusing world. It should, however, contribute to a kind of understanding that spans the differences among the people of the world, or at least those within one country. In this connection liberal arts education is today in jeopardy, unsure of its competence to serve the ideal of humanitas that at one time was conceded to be both the stable ground and the ever elusive goal of higher education.

It was a warm, humid Bengal evening when a small party of resident foreigners gathered in the Dacca home of an American diplomat. Two journalists, two American diplomats, a French diplomat and the director of a private relief organization in Bangladesh spent five hours talking about the country's bleak economic and political future. The discussion was heated, and the conclusions drawn in the early morning hours ought to evoke nightmares worthy of the cheapest horror film. The evening's host, a diplomat seasoned in the conflicts of Southeast Asia, reluctantly admitted that Bangladesh's rapid decline into absolute economic chaos might be averted only by a dedicated and ruthless party of Maoists. In any case, after more than two years of independence and $2 billion of international aid, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Bangladesh has nothing to expect from the West.

It is generally accepted today that Japan —simultaneously the most economically powerful and militarily weak nation in Asia—is looking for a role in the world community that is independent rather than subservient, cooperative rather than disruptive, influential and contributive rather than domineering and exploitative. Thus Japan is an anomaly in a system of world politics where the prime determinant of role and influence throughout the modern age has been military power and the will to use it. However, having once demonstrated its ability and will to challenge the United States and Great Britain in East Asia, Japan could again become a major military power if that seemed necessary to achieve and maintain the influence it seeks in the international community.

Military planners, security-minded intellectuals and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger himself have been reexamining current nuclear strategy in light of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. As always, caution and skepticism are advisable in appraising new proposals for military strategy and even for arms control, since such proposals often encourage the arms race to continue unabated in new, more volatile areas.

Because of Schlesinger's public / announced intention to modify American nuclear policy, one strategic proposal receiving attention is Bruce Russett's suggestion, published two years ago in Worldview (“Short of Nuclear Madness,” April, 1972), and in his contribution to The Military-Industrial Complex: A Reassessment, edited by Sam C. Sarkesian and Charles Moskos, that the United States should replace a countercity nuclear strategy with a counter-combatant strategy.