The ambassador by West Morris L. 1916-

Author:West, Morris L., 1916- [West, Morris L., 1916-]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ambassadors, Americans, Diplomats
Publisher: New York, W. Morrow
Published: 1965-04-11T19:00:00+00:00

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the Viet Cong and ignore China, the millennial giant with an exploding population and, for the first time in history, unified aim. How do we live with her for the next hundred years? How does the rest of Asia live with her? What about the Buddhists? Subversion or no subversion, they exist like Islam and Catholicism and Hinduism. There are no short-term solutions there either. . . . You can inhibit or even abort a revolution, but you cannot stop the evolutionary process that prompts it. . . . From one point of view, you can laugh at all those shave-pates in the pagoda chattering around a cheap mimeo machine. From another, you can call them dangerous enough to beat them over the head and slap them in jail. But they exist! They exist as men, as a society and as a symptom of inevitable change. If we say that we want to modify the change, then I think we have a case ... as good a case as China or Russia or Ho Chi Minh. But if we say, as sometimes we appear to do, that we want to determine the nature of the change and guarantee its finality, then we're out of court and damned to an expensive failure. . . . I'm sorry, sir. I'm tired and off balance. But I am concerned about this. And concerned for you, too."

I was grateful to him and touched with a deep pity for his youth and idealism. But how could I tell him the bitter truth that change was not only the outcome of natural growth, that it was the result of struggle as well—whether the Christians defined it as a battle between good and evil or the Communists called it a Marxian dialectic or the Buddhists displayed it as the Gautama subduing Mara under the palm of his hand. How could I tell him the extent of my own commitment to action and the short-term solutions? . . .

I sent him to bed and sat up late, working over my papers. I was still working when Anne Beldon came in, late, from her party; so we invaded the kitchen and made ourselves coffee and talked of banal things till midnight.

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