Monday, December 3, 2012

Any Means To Achieve Our Ends

"My son, Dick, had just come home on leave from the Air Force. The rest of the family had gone to bed and he and I were watching TV. I hadn't seen Dick in eleven months. He's a big, raw-boned guy - happy, full of the zest for living, and deeply curious and disturbed about many things. He was just twenty-one. We had just watched Khrushchev on the late news so we turned the TV off and started chatting about the performance we had just seen and world affairs generally. Then Dick said to me, "Dad, when you were a newspaperman you had a lot to do with this communism 'jazz'. What cooks with the commies, anyway? Why do they do the unpredictable things they do?" He went on to explain that at his base in Texas he had been indoctrinated, in a sense, as to what communism was supposed to be. He confessed that he couldn't understand either their basic philosophy or particulary why they acted in such an unaccountable way."

A Help-Your-Self Booklet, 1960


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