January 1988
American Purpose
Issue 1, Volume 2

Publication Date: January 1, 1988
Posted: Friday, January 1, 1988

This issue includes 'Oscar Arias at the Nobel Awards Ceremony'; 'Third Thoughts'; 'The Glasnot Monitor'; 'The Sarajevo Fallacy'; and 'Substance Vs. Character'.


In This Issue :

Oscar Arias at the Nobel Awards Ceremony
The Speech that Might Have Been
Thank you for the honor you have bestowed on me this evening. I accept it in the name of all those brave people of Central America—indeed, in the name of all those throughout the world—who struggle nonviolently for peace, freedom, and justice. In honoring me, you honor them. In honoring them, you acknowledge the great truth, which they have learned: that peace is more than the absence of violent conflict. Peace is a matter of freedom and of institutions of freedom. Peace is a matter of democracy, self-determination, and the pursuit of justice through law and politics rather than through slaughter and oppression. That is the truth upon which we are trying to act in Central America today.  [More]

Third Thoughts
This past October, twenty years after the 1967 "March on the Pentagon" that marked a watershed in the Vietnam-era protest against U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, over a hundred veterans of the radicalisms of the 1960s met in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the National Forum Foundation's "Second Thoughts Project" to ... well, to air their "second thoughts" about the old days.  [More]

The Glasnot Monitor
We begin here a new department that will report on events, arguments, and personages testing the meaning and limits of those changes in Soviet life and policy that are subsumed by our press under the all-purpose moniker of glasnost. AMERICAN PURPOSE is not a journal specializing in Soviet affairs, but, as we have argued time and again this past year, the pluralization (perhaps better, de-Leninization) of the Soviet Union is one precondition to a genuine peace. Thus our interest in the news, good and bad, on the glasnost front.  [More]

The Sarajevo Fallacy
Patrick Glynn, who until recently was special assistant to the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, is the newest James Madison Foundation Senior Fellow. Under grants from the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Mr. Glynn will complete a book entitled Closing Pandora's Box: A Critical History of Arms Control.  [More]

Substance Vs. Character
It is now less than a year until the 1988 election, and we therefore end our self-imposed silence on matters of presidential politicking with a brief reflection on the fates of Gary Hart and Joseph Biden.  [More]