Supernation at Peace and War

“We Americans are unhappy. We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous — or gloomy — or apathetic.”

More than a quarter century has passed since Henry R. Luce began With those words his long-controversial manifesto proclaiming the twentieth to be The American Century. America has become the superpower almost totally involved in the whole world’s business, and yet in the spring of 1968. not a word of Luce’s morose introduction to The American Century deserves to be changed.

In this third decade of the nuclear age. we are physically the world’s greatest power; psychologically we are still somewhere in transit between our abandoned innocence and what a historian might call mission and a politician would label consensus. Even more perplexing and important than the question. What really are we doing in Vietnam?, is the question, What is Vietnain, and all it symbolizes, doing to America? No day goes by without its surfeit of suggested answers to the first. It is the second Which has come to preoccupy the editors of this magazine, and has caused us to feature in the March issue one superb journalist’s search for the answers.

The author, born in Indiana and educated at Columbia, is Dan Wakefield, one of America’s great reporters. Through most of 1967 he has traveled the United States, haunts both familiar and strange: hippies’ pads and the drawing rooms of Georgetown savants, executive suites and high government offices, military bases, high school assembly halls, and the exile-places of draft-dodgers. He has observed from the back seat of a Detroit prowl car, the waiting rooms of countless airports, the inner offices of black power conspirators, the private cabin of the Vice President s jet. His notebooks contain the thoughts and words of hundreds of Americans, ranging from a middle-aged digger called Plastic Man to a beleaguered Secretary of State. From his months of reporting and his years of experience as an observer and interpreter of America, Dan Wakefield has composed a rare and valuable document, a profile of the United States in a year of turbulence and decision.

The Atlantic is proud to present

SUPERNATION AT PEACE AND WAR

Being Certain Observations, Depositions, Testimonies, and Graffiti Gathered on a One-Man Fact-and-Fantasy-Finding Tour of the Most Powerful Nation in the World.