Foreword An Inquiry into the Human Prospect was written between July 1972 and August1973, a period scarcely ten years away that now seemslight-years distant. Perhaps it can best be described asa time when a great national illusion was graduallydestroyed--the illusion that an invisible shield sur-rounded the United States, like those force fields inscience fiction. This shield, we believed, held at baythe brutalities and irrationalities that seemed to be partof the life of other nations, but not our own. It be-stowed on American life an invulnerability against theravages that history worked elsewhere in the world. Itproduced in us the mixture of innocence and assur-ance with which the best Americans faced the future,as well as the noisy arrogance with which the worstdid. During the period when this book was conceived,that shield gradually disappeared--or rather, our be-lief in it evaporated. From our terrible experiences athome as well as abroad, from a smugness and mendac-ity in high government as demoralizing in their ownway as the atrocities in Vietnam, came the slow reali-zation that there was nothing outrageous or brutal in 7