Nature of power

THE following chapters should be regarded as the published proceedings of a private inquiry. For a number of years it has been my professional duty, for

which I was paid, to think hard about the problems of our American foreign policy. The present private inquiry, although it has antecedents, really began in the fall of 1951 when it was my fortune to be assigned by the Department of State to the National War College. My fellow students for ten months were experienced and even hard-bitten senior officers of the three military services, of the Foreign Service, and of the De partment. We all had set notions at the beginning about what was right and what was wrong in our foreign and military policy. We listened to the variety of opinions put forward by a succession of distinguished Government officials and out siders who came to lecture and who could talk freely in the assurance that confidence would be kept. Then we argued end lessly, in the same circumstances of free inquiry. No one was allowed to take anything for granted, and if anyone said the sun rose only once a day he had to prove it.