Committee Without Goals

Only the Eisenhower Administration, it seems not too frivolous to assert, could ever have gathered together a group of extremely distinguished men and given them the name "The President's Committee on National Goals." And, perhaps, only this administration could have conceived and executed the entire project with an air of such solemn and measured gravity.

The committee evidently surprised the New York Times with the vagueness and vacuity of its report. After all, the Times protested, a committee that will not publish what a large number of its members suggested--a recommendation that the Connally Amendment be repealed--is not likely to broadcast anything else of much specific value. Indeed, the committee has produced nearly nothing; its report reads like the speech of a small-town politician who knows very little about the workings of the large affairs of greater men, but who feels obliged to make a few grand-sounding (but actually not very eloquent) remarks about them. He tells his constituency that he is for free speech, integration, education, and all that sort of thing; but if he is pressed, he begins to stutter.

The Times is easily astonished. It is difficult to guess what they expected beyond the easy, frothy flow of cliches that must always accompany such projects. If businessmen, professional men, and scholars do not have some well-defined purpose to fulfill (as do, say, the members of the American Assembly in their conferences at Arden House), they are useless as an aggregate of truth-seekers. The committee that Henry Wriston has chaired for the last year had no such purpose; it was a committee on goals that had the distasteful task of operating completely without them.