Johannesburg, South Africa, is not Birmingham, Alabama, and the practical lessons of the civil rights movement in the United States do not necessarily apply to a society of monolithic racism. So argues the author, who feels that current U.S. policy must take into account some intransigent aspects of South African society. Mr. Ball’s essay is followed on page 51 by a firsthand description of the facts of life under apartheid, from a South African journalist.
In bringing about the recent agreement between Israel and Egypt, the American Secretary of State may have created nothing more than a piece of paper, and worse, “an insuperable impediment” to the achievement of a far-reaching and lasting settlement in the Middle East. So argues a one-time undersecretary of State and ambassador to the United Nations in this critique of Henry Kissinger’s mode of diplomacy.
As one of the closest friends and advisers of the late Adlai Stevenson, George Ball was intimately involved in the Illinoian’s early New Deal days, in his decision to run for the presidency, in his campaigns of 1952 and 1956, in his reluctant try for the nomination that went to John Kennedy in 1960. In this memoir, one of several in the book AS WE KNEW ADLAI to be published this month by Harper & Row, the Undersecretary of State and recently appointed director of the Administration’s new intragovernmental machinery for coordinating foreign affairs tells of the qualities that made Stevenson perhaps the most successful unsuccessful politician in American history.