Rules of Order

New York's Chancellor Robert Livingston, representing the law that preceded, underpinned and nourished the Constitution, administered the oath to the big, embarrassed man in the brown suit with eagles on its metal buttons. Then George Washington, painfully striving to strike exactly the right pitch on history's tuning fork, delivered on April 30, 1789 the first address by a President of the United States to the Congress. "The propitious smiles of Heaven," he said, "can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained . . . the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people."

A generation now aging dismissed this as bombast. A generation now living knows it so familiarly as sober truth that the excitement and suspense posed by Washington is lost. This week, as another President sends his annual address to a Congress of the U.S., will his words carry this sense of American responsibility for freedom attained through regard for "the eternal rules of order"?

Not unless there is a change of tone in the great conversation between the American people and their leaders, a conversation overheard (as George Washington knew it would be) by all the world. Willingly, the people have done all that was asked of them by the leaders. Ably, Dwight Eisenhower and his Secretary of State have applied American principles to scores of crises around the globe. But each crisis has been met within the limits of its own circumstances. The leaders have not ade quately connected the crises one to another with the sweep of America's suspenseful destiny.

For common denominator, present U.S. policy depends on the clownish heirs of a corrupt and disorderly daydream. If the U.S. makes sense to the world in January 1956, it can thank not Robert Livingston and George Washington but Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. It reacts, through John Foster Dulles, brilliantly. But does it act? Does it present to the world an idea of order?

As President Eisenhower prepares this week's State of the Union Message, the time is overripe for a new translation of the American theme--freedom through order. Does it make contemporary sense that Europe continues as a fractured continent, no part of which is able to sustain industrial mass production or even to defend itself? Does it make sense that Arabs and Israelis continue to defy the law by prolonging a quarrel that neither can win? Does it make sense that Asia, wishing only for national freedom and economic progress, is allowed to drift toward slavery and reaction?

George Washington's "eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained," are not clauses in the constitution of Utopia. They have another name: common sense. The U.S. has the duty and the power to pursue common sense in the world. It would have that duty and power even if Communism had never existed. It will be blamed if it proclaims its mission, but it will be blamed more--and far more justly--if it does not carry out its mission.

Now, in spite of all American gains in crisis after crisis, the idea of a U.S. goal for the world languishes. Neither foreign governments nor the nation's own representatives abroad nor its people at home hear a clear statement of the U.S. responsibility and purpose. As 1956 begins, it is time to recall the issue posed on April 30, 1789.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.