Suchergebnisse

A full understanding of political realism is needed, Kenneth Thompson writes in the preface of his recent study, "if American statesmen and scholars are to advance public understanding and awareness of the realities of international life and close the gap between what leaders feel and do and what the people imagine they do. Therefore the central aim I have had in mind is a careful explication, first, of the origins of political realism as an approach to American foreign policy, and, secondly, of its implications for the major unsolved problems of America's relations with the rest of the world" (p. vii).

'Blackness is not absence, but refusal' said Aimé Césaire. The only trouble with refusal as a literary posture is that it is inclined to produce writing which is concerned with public gesture rather than with private and particular observation. Until recently, the great bulk of French writing by Africans could be fairly labelled as romantic, rhetorical, and directed at general rather than individual situations. That is to say, there was a preference for romantically revolutionary statements about 'the situation of the negro', rather than exploratory statements about the situation of the individual writer at a particular moment in space and time.

Acheson served in the Department of State under both Roosevelt and Truman, and the contrasts were striking as each President approached foreign affairs in strikingly different ways. FDR was keenly sensitive to the difficulties that foreign affairs can create in partisan politics. Having served in the Wilson administration, he was aware of the obstacles a president can face in achieving his foreign policy goals because of congressional opposition, an experience he meditated upon and took to heart. In appointing Cordell Hull as his Secretary of State, Roosevelt tried to neutralize and conciliate possible opposition in Congress. He was careful throughout his term of office to handle the Senate with tact and political prudence.