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King Juan Carlos to the throne. To stem fresh labor and political
unrest, the young king drafted 200,000 more Spanish workers into
military service. Communist opposition in Portugal is still
smoldering and could erupt again any time. The Italian government
is in a crisis. These things and other disturbances in European
Common Market countries could prompt a sensational Vatican movement
leading to the political and military union of ten nations in Europe.
This prophesied event will bring about the emergence of a gigantic
third world power equal to the United States or Russia.
The crisis in Angola involved both the Soviet Union and the
United States and threatened detente. Violence has flared anew
in Northern Ireland, and danger of bombing has been a continuous
threat in London stores, hotels, and public places.
And while danger and violence are everywhere, and the world
only beginning to emerge from worldwide economic troubles, the
British, French, and United States governments are dickering about
faster and more expensive transportation. The question was hanging
in the balance of whether the U.S. will allow the French-English
supersonic Concorde aircraft to use the Dulles International Airport
at Washington, D.C., and the Kennedy Airport at New York.
If the United States allows the Concorde to land and take off
in regular passenger service at these two airports, passengers will
fly between New York and Paris in three hours and twenty minutes.
The jumbo 747 takes eight hours. Flight time between Washington
and London will be three and a half hours, while it takes seven
hours and fifty minutes by the 747.
Through history humans have always striven for more speed in
travel. I am reminded of the time when my mother's twin sister,
an Iowa farmer's wife, overheard her husband drifting off to sleep
while praying. He was saying, "O Lord, give us better roads and
more speed." It was 1924, and he drove a Model-T Ford over Iowa
mud roads at twenty miles per hour. Country roads were not yet
paved.
The first Wright brothers' heavier-than-air flight did not
take place until after my eleventh birthday. I flew from Portland,
Oregon, to New York to attend the first meeting of the U.N. Security
Council in a DC-3 in twenty-four hours. A week later I flew from
New York to Los Angeles on a first flight of a DC-4, leaving New
York after 9 p.m., arriving at the Burbank airport, North Hollywood,
about 5 a.m. What a thrill that was! It had been taking three
days by streamline train! Until very close to my own lifetime
the fastest transportation for human travel was about the speed of
a horse. Fulton didn't invent the steamboat until 1803.
What a world! And here I am, finishing this letter I started
yesterday, in my "office" in my jet aircraft at 43,000 feet (eight
miles) above the Atlantic Ocean at 550 miles per hour air speed.
But what is humanity doing with its modern technology and
"progress"? It was military need that inspired many of the marvels
man has produced--weapons for mass DESTRUCTION and VIOLENCE! I
travel over the world as an ambassador without portfolio for WORLD