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But beyond provocative half-truths and hyperbole. Reporter Barzini's picture includes much sympathetic understanding and many brilliant flashes of intuition. He looks past the city skylines at the American heartland, at the prosperous farms and small towns which are the "living tissue" of U.S. strength. He has a lyrical feeling for the American countryside, "the only one in which one forgets the existence of man that is always at your elbow in Europe . . . Woods as old as the world, woods such as only children can imagine . . ." But he also understands the America of intricate machines, and he knows that an assembly line is not without heart.
Billions of Facts. Reporter Barzini is at his most interesting when he criticizes U.S. foreign policy. Barzini's thesis is that the U.S. is both too empirical and not practical enough, too idealistic and too unprincipled.
American faith in trial & error Barzini believes to be a heritage from the iSth century, and in his mind its most notable present-day symbol is Charles Kettering, "the last great living American inventor" (who, among other things, developed the automobile self-starter in the face of theoretical calculations that such a gadget was impossible). One of Kettering's favorite sayings is "Let the job be your boss." This may work in technology, Barzini suggests, but it can be disastrous in other human endeavor. "Dean Acheson," writes Barzini, "was the Charles F. Kettering of international affairs, the man . . . who reluctantly and experimentally had to invent American policy to avoid disasters . . . 'We must decide nothing in advance,' he once said. 'There are no final solutions for all problems. All decisions must come from an analysis of facts' . . . That problems could be solved day by day with decisions based on carefully gathered data, and that there was no such thing as a valid general principle . . . were the hopes he most frequently expressed."
Achesonian empiricism, says Reporter Barzini, was reflected by the whole State Department, "undoubtedly the most impressive depository of information the world has ever seen. In its immense files, billions of facts sleep . . . irrelevant for any purpose other than the leisurely preparation of almanacs. From all this one rarely gets a general idea . . ." Empiricism, warns Barzini, "means leaving the initiative to the outside world."