I am setting this down on February 26th as the reverberations of our trip seem to be subsiding. I want also to pay a certain ironic tribute to the visit and presence of a State Department official who arrived here this afternoon and treated me to an hour and a half of small talk and double talk. He is so young, and so completely cut to the bureaucratic cloth, that I found him excelling beyond praise in the old game of which Socrates spoke. That is to say, he is skilled at making the worse cause appear the better.

These past years have rung with growing clashes of arms and men. Surely we can observe with more than literary justice that our generation is filled with wars and rumors of war, with violence, strife and hatred. Even though psychologically and spiritually we pass from Nigeria to Palestine to Vietnam to China, and even to Detroit, we are uneasily aware that the scope of unrest today is both world-wide and of universal significance. No one can long remain objective and calm in the face of our news media which make the whole planet so visible before us. We are often tempted to wish that Asian news still had to be sent to San Francisco via a slow-moving clipper ship rather than via instantaneous radio and television.