¶ Initiative
Index Entry
Initiative:
"I was invited by the government of Cuba to come to the world design congress there as their guest of honor just after Kennedy had come in. I’d gotten to know McGeorge Bundy at Harvard where he’d asked me to take over the Charles Elliot Norton lectureship. So I went to him and said I’ve got a world initiative here and I want to take it to Cuba.
"And I told him it was my understanding of the philosophical basis of democracy that when the individual takes the initiative the government is supposed to back him, in distinction to the socialist way, where the government takes the initiative and the individual has to follow. And I told him I expected the government to back me and to do so publicly and in a very big way. Bundy was very perplexed and asked me not to do it, and the reason was that the Republicans were planning to use Cuba in the next election…
“And we were told by those who attended that the world architects were very impressed by Castro because he’d said that architects worked transcendentally to world politics.”
