The tremors of change and challenge are felt at many levels. The CIA is undergoing major convulsions as old hands deny the acceptability of new concepts of purpose and management. Two or three senior officers are resigning, and apart from the loss of their services to their country, we need to celebrate that option: the glorious option of resigning. Nobody resigned from service to Stalin or Hitler. There is simultaneously the tradition of staying in to stand by the leader. Colin Powell did that, and leaves now after a reasonable period of identifying with a leader qua leader, which is different from the leader whose policies he always endorsed.
At a third level we have the phenomenon of U.S. soldiers who are being reprimanded and fined, and, the news tells us, here and there to face court-martial, for failure to carry out orders in military circumstances. Such are the seeds of revolt. This is not going to happen to the American enterprise. The United States is too experienced and too proud to move toward anarchy, which always produces the autocrat or the despot.
So great ventures, democratic in composition, are struggling for historical affirmation. They are animated, ultimately, by the transcendent human ambition, which is to live as free as possible in a world in which so many claims are made on us.