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FINDING TIME TO DIE

As the SS America moved down the Hudson River past the glittering skyscrapers Buchman told his party of twenty-four, 'During this Journey we will reach every person on board.' Something like that happened, although he himself seldom left his cabin. The purser put on the film The Crowning Experience twice because of public demand. The captain gave a reception for the party, and the head of the National Maritime Union on board asked them to speak to a special union meeting at ten o'clock one night. The meeting-place was packed, and after the agreed hour of speaking was over the audience called for more. Some were up talking till three in the morning. One burly man from the engine-room commented, 'That was the best union meeting we've ever had. The whole ship is talking about it. Every time I have a row at home I go to sea. A big row means Asia, a small one means the Caribbean. This was a medium-sized row. I decided to write the old woman tomorrow.'

Among Buchman's party was Eudocio Ravines from Peru. He had been the South American delegate to the Comintern, and responsible for bringing about the first popular-front government on the continent. He had been trained by Mao Tse-tung in what he called the 'Yenan Way' of Communist takeover which concentrated on exploiting the moral weaknesses of the bourgeois world.1 Disillusioned with Communism he had then found a wider aim through Moral Re-Armament. When he, his wife and daughter spoke together to the shipboard union meeting, the audience, many from Cuba and Latin America, were thunderstruck. Buchman's cabin steward came to Ravines and said, 'I'm also from Peru. My uncle put you in prison. Tell me what has changed you.' When Buchman offered a tip at the voyage's end, the steward refused it. 'You don't owe me anything,' he said, and added to a bystander, 'That man Frank Buchman is a marvel. Three or four men like him would turn the world upside down.'

Passing through Paris at the time of the abortive Summit Conference of May 1960 Buchman entertained General Speidel, Commander of the Ground Forces of NATO. 'Our weakest point in NATO is the ideological sphere,' the General said. 'We have done almost nothing... Moral Re-Armament has been pioneering what Europe really needs to do to reach out positively to other continents.' He instanced the action of the German miners who had taken their play Hoffnung not only to Britain, France and Italy, but as well to Cyprus, Kerala and Tokyo. 'That is the type of initiative that NATO is incapable of, but it must be done if freedom is to grow in the world,' Speidel said.2

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