It was the time for reading Washington's Farewell Address. In each House of Congress and in many a schoolhouse across the land, audiences dozed. Only the wakeful few noted that the nation's present dilemma was accurately outlined in his phrases.
Washington had said: We must take "care always to keep ourselves, by suitable establishments, on a respectably defensive posture. . . ."
Who could say, in the second year of the atomic age, what "establishments" were suitable? The War Department said a suitable Army must have a million men (including an Air Force), to...