A cloud of uncertainty and self-doubt now hovers over most serious discussion of the great public issues of the day. Lines which have long divided liberals from conservatives are breaking down. Noted historians, who once called for strong executive leadership, now express alarm over the Imperial Presidency. Philosophers, who in the 1950's and 1960's had viewed public servants as approximating a collective version of the good Samaritan, complain today of thousands of legislators at all levels passing 150,000 new laws annually and young bureaucrats issuing millions of enabling rules and regulations and applying them with little judgment to complex nationwide problems. The mass media, heralded as the bearers of an educational revolution, nightly bring encapsulated versions of the day's events into everyone's living rooms, generating oftentimes more confusion than light. The trivialization of public life is in part a product of the media's drive for high ratings and in part the result of a major growth industry in the capitals of most major nations, the self-serving practitioner of government leaks. The media, the self-appointed purveyor of government secrets, and the investigative reporter interact and reinforce one another, sometimes, as with Watergate, serving the public interest but often flaking away the cement of public trust.

As a consequence, old hands in Washington look back with a certain nostalgia to that ancient stereotype of the stodgy and self-conscious aide clutching purported secrets to his bosom. A vast outpouring of "show and tell" manuscripts prepared in and out of jail continues to crowd the best-seller list and to spread doubt and distrust; the government memoranda prepared for a handful of responsible colleagues are increasingly treated as were the dispatches from China by foreign service officers during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Public leaders hesitate to trust their confidences to immediate associates. The ultimate victims are decent, hard-working Americans, not strident spokesmen of the far right or far left, who on every hand are bringing under question government's capacity to rule and businessmen's ability honorably to manage the economy. Our wisest thinkers ask: what of mankind's survival in an increasingly insecure and troubled world?