The right of the Executive to withhold from its citizens a large part of the raw information it possesses is only one aspect of a complicated situation, and when public officials place an undue emphasis on such withholding they do so at their ultimate peril. There is also the Executive's obligation of keeping Americans informed of its general purposes in the area of foreign policy, and this responsibility arises from the requirements of practical politics as well as from democratic principles. This responsibility operates on two different levels, although, in practice they can hardly be neatly delineated. The government should present its general view of the world, the alternatives open to it in the field of foreign and military affairs, the arguments for and against these alternatives, and an estimate of the burdens that are likely to be involved. It need not, and probably in many cases should not, go into great detail on these matters, although it should provide considerably more detailed information to Congress than it does when addressing the American people directly.

We can count on injustice in human affairs; on the presence of privilege, exploitation and violence. Violence, which in its ability to turn a human being into a thing, a corpse, offers the final unalterable injustice.

But we can count, too, on men and on social movements to challenge, and by challenging to limit, this grim reality. In one time a revived religious or political tradition, in another a movement of the oppressed, but in every time, men affirming dignity and brotherhood and the superiority of the human person over all the political, economic and social mechanisms which oppress him.

Several recent books have been looked upon at the United Nations with varying degrees of interest and enthusiasm. Since the U.N. is in the U.S., and since its life is dependent upon the U.S. Government, it is natural that any utterances by prominent U.S. officials about the role of the U.N. in American foreign policy are read with fascination, trepidation and at times bewilderment. And indeed George W. Ball's The Discipline of Power was read at the U.N. with morbid fascination, bewilderment and despair. Unlike all previous heads of a U.S. delegation to the U.N., Ambassador Ball was the first who had not been a public figure, and he had no U.S. constituency.