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A. I think his speeches reflect a thoughtful man, who really realizes that the ideological oversimplifications of the past several decades are irrelevant. The hours I spent with some of his people increased my feeling that they are intelligently, thoughtfully, and in some ways boldly responding to the short- term problems that they are confronting and which they have the intellectual acumen to identify and not to evade. But I am less certain now that they have any comprehensive, long-range vision.
Q. How about the Bush Administration? Does it have a comprehensive, long-range vision?
A. Well, in the late 1940s President Truman had around him a cluster of creative people who asked themselves how the West should respond to the collapse of Germany. Now is the time to ask ourselves, creatively and historically, how do we respond to the apparent collapse of the Soviet Union? We can either deliberately shape a new world or simply let the old disintegrate -- with some of the wreckage potentially even endangering us.