ner, not letting slogans shouted for or against one point of view or another replace thoughtful deliberation.

This year we as a nation are in the throes of those rites to which we subject ourselves every four years, in preparation for the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It seems to be our tradition that in carrying out these rites hyperbole becomes the norm of political discourse.

I thus feel it fitting on an occasion such as this to try to take an objective stock of where we as a people stand in the world, and some of our positive accomplishments as a nation, particularly during the past three decades, accomplishments in which political leaders from both parties have shared, and to which both our diplomatic and military establishments have been able to make their contributions. It now often seems fashionable to question our motives and accomplishments in the postwar era. I find this extraordinary.

As to our motives, I will simply note that Winston Churchill, an observer with some experience in these matters, characterized our effort in the early postwar years as the "most unsordid act in history.'

To my mind, our accomplishments speak for themselves:

Our bitterest enemies of three decades ago are now among our closest friends. And surely it is better to have strong friends than strong enemies.

-The dreadful prospect of another world war, this time with weapons of all-encompassing destructive power, seems less likely.

-The American people have prospered to an unprecedented degree during this period, and American science, technology and productivity remain the model for the rest of the world.

- More than 70 free nations have come into being in the remarkable and largely peaceful liquidation of some 400 years of colonial history.

- A new sense of the interdependence of nations has grown in only a few decades from being a bitterly disputed premise to a commonplace statement of the obvious.

resulted in an explosion in trade between nations on a scale unprecedented in history, with immeasurable benefits to the people of the world, notably including our own.

These are not negligible accomplishments. They are, in fact, historic accomplishments. I do not think that we need be apologetic or defensive about them. Rather, I think this country should be proud of them. The fact that we have had some failures— and that we still face serious problems-gives no basis for the denial of our accomplishments.

Although brought about by causes largely beyond our influence or control, I think it important also to note that whereas a decade or so ago it appeared we were going indefinitely to face a hostile and united bloc of over one billion people covering most of the Eurasian land mass, today the unity of that bloc is broken and those on its peripheries seem to be increasingly self-assertive.

Thus while we certainly have no cause for complacency, neither should we let the hyperbole of the moment lead us to despair.

In closing I want to comment on the seeming tendency of some to proceed from the assumption that we can be active at home or abroad, but not both, because we lack the resources, the energy and the talent.

Second is an often implicit assumption that we have broad freedom to choose between domestic and foreign affairs and that our internal problems can be solved in isolation from the rest of the world.

Both of these assumptions are

wrong. I find it impossible to accept the concept that a nation of over 200 million people and over a trilliondollar economy is too poor and exhausted to provide for and manage both its foreign and domestic problems. I reject even more the concept that we have the freedom to choose. I know that I do not need to spell out to this group the degree to which our domestic prosperity and security depend on good management and both our domestic and our foreign affairs. The first question is not what we can afford. It is what does our well-being require. We are not a poor and underdeveloped economy.

If, however, our people believe they are too poor, too inept, or too distracted with domestic problems to Ideal with the world abroad, then this, too, is a reality our foreign policy will reflect.

I would suggest that our problem is not in fact caused by a shortage of either material or psychological resources in our society. It is a problem of will and of confidence.

American society has always demonstrated it will invest in those things which it is convinced are important to it. Peace is important to it.

However, we must recognize that there has been the widespread effort to instill a lack of confidence among our people in the operations and institutions of our Government, both civil and military. It is my hope that this effort has now passed its climax and that we can seek to move back toward that mutual relationship of confidence without which a free government and society cannot for long exist.

This is a task requiring the very best of our leadership, of all our institutions, and of each of us as individuals. To go back to what I was saying about common interests in discussing foreign affairs, it is a task in which every conscientious American has a common interest, and the success of which can only benefit the rest of mankind.

It is institutions such as yours that give me confidence that this effort is being effectively pursued. Again, my sincere thanks for the honor you have bestowed on me and my appreciation for this opportunity to share a few of my own thoughts with you.

Bicentennial
Despatch

JAN K. HERMAN
Bureau of Public Affairs

MAY 1776 Early in the month, John Langdon, an official Colonial agent in New England, learns from returning seamen that the French are assembling a large fleet in the West Indies. They have thus far been very discreet in their dealings with Arthur Lee, the American agent in London. A military buildup at this time seems inconsistent with their present neutral policies. Do they intend to act for or against America?

Before the war American smugglers found the French and Dutch islands ideal bases for their activities. Now they are using the island ports of Port-au-Prince, Cap Français, and other harbors for the transshipment of war supplies to the American mainland. As a result of this increased activity, the British are patrolling just outside the harbors and inlets of the Caribbean islands making the French increasingly more nervous.

The Congress, on May 18, resolves to send an expedition to Martinique both to learn what the French are up to and to procure from them "if possible, a number of muskets, not exceeding ten thousand. . . ." The Americans are unaware that the French show of force is intended to protect her islands from the British and nothing more.

In the last week of May, Dr. Franklin arrives home from the ill-fated Canadian adventure. He is still weak from his recent bout with illness and is again bothered by a painful attack of the gout, a condition that has plagued him for years. In a letter to the commissioners remaining in Montreal, he alludes to the impending arrival in the Colonies of 6,000 Hessian mercenaries. "It is our business to prevent their returning," he says. It is assumed that he means Colonial troops will have to cut them down on the battlefield.

May is the month for intrigue. Beaumarchais' plan, which he outlined in his December 1775 memo to Louis XVI, proposed secretly helping the Americans but ". . .imposing on them as a first condition that they shall never send any prize into our ports, and will do nothing to divulge the help which will instantly be lost to them at the first indiscretion on the part of Congress." The French greatly fear becoming embroiled in a war with Britain but are willing to take minimum risks for maximum gain.

On May 2 Vergennes requests permission from the king to furnish one million livres for the use of

the Colonies. On receiving the king's approval, Vergennes sends the long-awaited go-ahead to Beaumarchais, written in the hand of his 15-yearold son so as not to bring suspicion on himself.

But if secrecy is to be maintained, it certainly is not through the cooperation of Arthur Lee. Lee has been in London now for several months negotiating with Beaumarchais and other contacts for cannon powder and other military supplies. There is some question on the assurances Beaumarchais has given him. Are the Colonies to make nominal payment in American produce-Virginia tobacco-for the French supplies, thus disguising the transaction as a simple commercial deal, or has Beaumarchais insisted that the Colonies eventually make full payment?

On the 23rd, Lee, who has assumed the name Mary Johnston, writes to Beaumarchais, now back in Paris. His true identity and the contents of this and other despatches are known to the British spy he has hired as his secretary.

In the letter Lee prods Beaumarchais (who has assumed the name Hortalez) to hurry the shipment he has promised. ". . .the want of tobacco ought not to hinder your sending out your supplies to the Americans, for tobacco is so weighty an article that it will greatly impede the sailing of the ships, and the essential object is to maintain the war.'

Why do the British tolerate Lee's activities? He is, after all, a conspirator, an accessory to rebellion, and a spy, subject to arrest for treason. But as an unwitting and prolific contributor to British intelligence, Lee is more deserving of their thanks than their enmity. He is about to warn the Committee of Secret Correspondence of the danger in having members of the Congress communicate with certain British officials and merchants. ...the intelligence they give goes directly to the minister," he will write. There is great irony in this advice. Lee has been "corresponding" with the minister for months.

As Lee, the militia diplomat, writes from London, other spies are active elsewhere. Beaumarchais worries about British infiltration of his government. Lord Stormont, the British Ambassador in Paris, already seems far too well informed of what goes on in Louis XVI's council. Stormont, in turn, writes to his chief in London expressing his own fears that French agents have been active in England. "I have good grounds to believe that for some months past, there have been French agents in England, endeavouring to procure sums of money for the Rebels in America. . . . M. de Beaumarchais is, I understand, in this business, but he is not alone. . .

This account is based on the Journals of the Continental Congress.

A Lee of Virginia comments on article

A retired Foreign Service officer, Armistead M. Lee, President of the Society of the Lees of Virginia, has taken exception to an article in the April NEWSLETTER, "Bicentennial Despatch," by Jan K. Herman of the Bureau of Public Affairs.

Mr. Lee wrote, in part, "I was appalled at the treatment of the first American Mission to Paris during the Revolution, in which Silas Deane is made into a hero and Arthur Lee dismissed as 'blundering . . . who employed as clerks at least six British spies.'

"If any single American deserves the most credit for the clandestine military aid given the colonies, first by France, and subsequently by Spain, it was Arthur Lee.

"If Arthur Lee was one of our first career diplomats and intelligence officers, John Adams, who was now assigned to the Paris mission, might be considered the first Foreign Service Inspector, though he is better remembered as our second President. He found the commercial affairs of the mission, which had been Deane's exclusive field, a veritable mess, with no proper accounting. He confirmed Arthur Lee's criticisms on this score. And of Arthur himself, John Adams was to write, years later, in 1819:

"Arthur Lee, a man of whom I cannot think without emotion; a man too early in the service of his country to avoid making a multiplicity of enemies; too honest, upright, faithful and intrepid to be popular; too often obliged by his principles and feelings to oppose Machiavellian intrigues, to avoid the destiny he suffered. This man never had justice done him by his country in his lifetime and I fear he never will have by posterity. His reward cannot be in this world.'

Author Jan Herman comments: "It is important to stress that 'Bicentennial Despatch' is a monthly journal. The account for March and April of 1776 reports the events; it was not meant to be an assessment of heroes or villains.

"Arthur Lee is, to say the least, controversial. He has been judged a true patriot by many historians and certainly meant well. But it cannot be disputed that he was contentious and that his personal ambition often got the best of him. Even his friend John Adams admitted that he had confidence in nobody, believed all men selfish, and no man honest and sincere.'

A glass sculpture representing world peace was presented to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on April 5 in honor of the appointment of former Secretary Dean

Rusk to the Center's Board of Trustees.

The presentation, on behalf of the State of Georgia, was made by Senator Herman Talmadge (D.-Ga.) in the Regents Room of the Smithsoin the Regents Room of the Smithsonian "Castle." Attending the ceremony were Secretary Kissinger, a Trustee of the Center; Chairman of the Board William J. Baroody, Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare David Mathews, Solicitor General Robert Bork and other leaders.

The sculpture-a figure of a winged woman holding an olive branch-was first proposed by Georgia Governor George Busbee, who, in a letter to James Billington, the Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smith

sonian Institution, said:

"On behalf of the people of Georgia, I would like to show our appreciation and recognize his contributions to the cause of world peace by honoring Dean Rusk on the occasion of his appointment to the Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Georgia is intensely proud of one of its most distinguished sons, the Honorable Dean Rusk, a citizen of the world as much as of the State of Georgia."

Mr. Rusk, who served as Secretary of State under President Kennedy and President Johnson from 1960 to 1968, currently is a professor with the School of Law at the University of Georgia.

The sculpture is by Hans Godo Fräbel, a native of Mainz, West Germany, who came to the United States in 1965 and has studied and taught at Georgia Tech, Emory University and Georgia State University.

The following article is excerpted from a paper presented by Dr. Westmaas at a regional workshop on mental health held in Lahore in January.

The workshop was attended by school administrators, counselors, and representatives from American schools and communities in Kabul, Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi, Muree, and New Delhi. Its purpose was to stimulate awareness of mental health needs of students and adults in those communities and to develop plans for dealing with the needs.

I am often asked about the most common problems I encounter as a clinical psychologist working with overseas Americans. My conclusion is that Americans overseas generally have the same problems as Americans at home.

Harry Stack Sullivan, an American psychiatrist who was deeply interested in international affairs, used to talk about the "one genus postulate" which states that "Everyone is much more simply human than otherwise.

Still there are some significant ways in which the mental health of Americans living abroad is placed under stress, just as there are ways in which living abroad has some advantages and positive mental health influences.

What are some of the problem areas needing attention in overseas communities? A list of common problems compiled by high school students in a peer counseling program in Kabul last summer included many of the areas mentioned by Dr. Sidney Werkman in an article in the March 1975 issue of the Foreign Service Journal.

The list of problem areas includes the problem of entry and integration into a new overseas school community, especially when there are welldeveloped subgroups and cliques. A closely related problem frequently mentioned was that of developing a genuine friendship, a person with whom you can share personal feelings and concerns at a deep level. Decisions on matters such as drugs, sex, activities, and conformity to peer group versus parents' values were given as concerns of several students. Students also mentioned loneliness, boredom, and the lack of a variety of extracur

ricular activities in which to participate.

Overseas students do frequently lack a place to meet their friends in privacy and often their activities are much more closely monitored than in the larger American communities. Some writers comment also on the pressure that teenagers feel to be on their best behavior since they, like their parents, represent the American Government.

A common source of problems affecting wives as well as young people is the mixed blessing that servants bring and the lack of opportunity for meaningful work experiences. Young people who have so many things done for them are by the same token deprived of an important developmental task of learning how to work and earn their own money, and this extended dependency is further augmented by lack of access to the family car until they are 18. A supervisor of student employees at a mid-western college recently commented that he could always pick out the missionary kids because they didn't know how to work. The limited exposure of overseas teenagers to the adult world of work has greater implications in terms of career development, as the exposure to a variety of adult occupations is frequently limited. In some communities, the easy availability of drugs and alcohol, coupled with a lack of constructive alternative activities creates prime conditions for drug abuse.

The absence of one's extended family overseas tends to throw a family on its own resources. Often the family creates substitute extended families from among friends in the community. Where this does not occur, family members may be under extreme stress when faced with disappointments and traumas such as are ordinarily shared by relatives and neighbors at home.

peer support group needed to pull away from dependency on one's family.

In place of the extended family in a familiar community and neighborhood, the overseas student and his parents must learn to adapt to a culture which is new and different and which may contain many attitudes and traditions that pose a threat to the values and habits of Americans. The physical mobility and freedom of dress of the American woman, for example, is sharply restricted by attitudes in a Muslim culture where the sight of even a fully-clothed Western woman out shopping may attract a crowd of men, and a teenager running down to the corner store in her shorts is unheard of.

The whole area of cross-cultural relationships between Americans, young people as well as their parents, and host country and third country nationals often presents many difficulties on both sides. While patterns of crosscultural relationships vary with locale, many American overseas teenagers, and perhaps their parents as well, do not acquire a healthy respect for the culture and people with which they deal. There are no easy solutions to these problems but I question whether overseas American schools and communities have done all that can be done to improve interpersonal relations in this area or to exploit the advantages of education in an international setting.

While many of the problem areas of overseas living concern adaptation to the overseas situation, perhaps an even greater area of concern is in the reentry of overseas Americans into the American culture.

The difficulties in making this transition for young people is documented in an article by Bill Cantrell in the Foreign Service Journal of December 1974. Several teenagers have described to me their excruciating periods of adjustment when returning to high school in the States, and I have met other college-age students who decided to return to their families rather than face the frustrating and alienating environment of the American college scene. Though the experiences of these young people are not necessarily typical, even a cursory examination of the situation of a young person who has spent most of his life overseas indicates that he is likely to be

Overseas youngsters who learn to depend too heavily on the stability and support of their nuclear family through the many changes brought about by transiency may find it more difficult to leave the nest and to find meaningful support systems outside the family. The process of emancipation from the home during adolescence may be difficult for some overseas youngsters who are deprived of continuity in the

lacking in skills, experiences, attitudes, and an identity which are necessary for successful adaptation in the American high school or college back home.

While most of the above examples are problem areas in adjustment overseas concerning the needs and problems of young people, there are many sources of stress and frustration for adults as

well. The American overseas wife, for example, is probably required to make more changes in her life style when moving overseas than anyone else in the family. A few American women are fortunate enough to find opportunities to con

tinue their careers in overseas communities. Some wives are now remaining at home while their husbands go abroad a difficult and painful choice at best. The woman whose identity centers around her role as a mother and homemaker finds her activities drastically changed as she moves into a house equipped with servants, but is herself unequipped with skills to manage household employees. She is usually singularly ill-prepared by her American egalitarian value-system and experiences to arrive at an effective and acceptable role of directing the activities of servants who are undeniably of a different social class. Add to this the com

munication problems due to language and culture differences, and the result is an exquisite blend of anger and impotence—not having things done the way one wants them and not being able to do anything about it.

This brief overview of problem areas affecting mental health of Americans overseas is not an attempt to provide an exhaustive list of problem areas. We have not dealt, for example, with the employees' problems in working in a cross-cultural situation, the health hazards in a developing country, or the problems posed for a family when the father travels extensively or works away from the family. Though other problem areas could be mentioned, I do not wish to portray the life of the overseas American as one of unrelieved grimness and stress. On the contrary, there are many positive and rewarding aspects in terms of personal, family, and community mental health in living overseas. Many individuals and families

experience overseas living as stimulating and fulfilling and have developed ing and fulfilling and have developed admirable means of coping with the problems with which they are confronted.

A significant positive aspect of raising children in overseas communities is that there often are many more possibilities for meaningful relationships between adults and young people than is typical in many communities in the States. Frequent and sustained interaction between youngsters and adults is essential in the process of making children human. Segregation by ages in our general American culture and in some

overseas communities is one of the crucial threats to the successful socializacial threats to the successful socialization of the American child.

One of the major advantages of overseas living in the small and mediumsized communities is the potential and the opportunity to constructively influthe opportunity to constructively influence the mental health of the commu

nity through individual and collective action programs. The State Department's Medical Program has in the last few years been offering a Community Action Seminar in the Foreign Service Institute which has stimulated, as well as been stimulated by, constructive efforts in various overseas communities. Dr. Frank Johnson, Special Assistant in Adolescent Psychiatry and Drug Abuse, has actively stimulated and supported local community efforts and has compiled a summary of various overseas community action programs. Edith Bennett and Barbara Algire, Foreign Service wives in Kuala Lumpur, are in the process of producing a book entitled "Community Alternatives Abroad' which will be a sort of work book on how to carry on community action programs dealing with the needs of youth.

In exploring ways to improve mental health in overseas schools and communities, we have the benefit of the experiences of other communities as well as the thinking of many authors about the basis of mental health. Freud stated that the crucial issues for mental health concerned "lieben arbeiten"-to love and to work. Glasser's more recent formulations similarly concern the need for self-respect based on a sense of competency, and the need to experience being loved and loving. Maslow's hierarchy of needs

and

Several overseas communities, for example, have identified a need for constructive after-school activities and a meeting place for teenagers and have developed a Youth Activities Program. Others have felt the need for more individualized and specialized counseling services and have developed a counseling program for teenagers, as well as adults and family members, sometimes in conjunction with and sometimes separate from a Youth Center. Other communities have found their resources in the area of adult cominunity education and recreation programs. Still others have mobilized to provide a program of summer jobs and part-time jobs during the school year.

Many communities have very active women's organizations with varied opportunities for meaningful involvement of a social or service nature. Within the school curriculum there are many possibilities for health education, affective education, value clarification, etc. The total curriculum has an impact either positively or negatively on the mental health of its students and staff. Madeline Hunter at the recent NESA Administrators Conference related that in the UCLA laboratory school they have dispensed with the need for psychologists

on the basis of the fact that their staff has developed the capability of diagnosing and meeting the academic and

human needs of the students in the

classroom. Dr. John Carver, past chairman of the National Council of Mental Health Centers, may have overstated the case when he said that “in several decades the educator might replace the psychiatrist who replaced the clergyman," but he has grasped a powerful idea.

In the ideal school or overseas American community there certainly would not be a need for the functions of a person in my profession. Meantime, we live in a less than ideal world and the demands on the counselors' or