EDITOR's NOTE : Following their nominations, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy were invited by John S. Knight to write an "Editor's Notebook," choosing any subjects they might wish to discuss. Senator Kennedy's article appears today. Vice President Nixon's contribution will be published early in September.

     Many Americans find it hard to accept the fact that we have been losing prestige and influence in the world - and harder to understand why this should be so.
     Ever since World War II, we have been generous in helping not only our friends but our former foes. We have used our strength not to dominate other nations but to safeguard their freedom. We have provided the shield that has protected them from the fate of Eastern Europe.
     Yet the fact remains that our policies do not enjoy popular support among nations whose friendship we took for granted. And this fact - as much as their growing military might - is what makes the Soviet leaders so cocksure that their system will one day dominate the world.
     Hardly a week goes by that we don't read of anti-American demonstrations in some part of the non-Communist world. And it does us no good to pretend that all this unrest is created by a few Communist agitators.
     Instead of inventing excuses we should be looking for the causes.
     There are many reasons why the American image has become tarnished. Our failure to propose any exciting new programs since the Marshall plan is one. Our fumbling leadership - as dramatized at Little Rock and during the U-2 uproar - is another. So was the blight of McCarthyism, when we looked scared and foolish as a nation.
     But I think many of our shortcomings would be overlooked today if people thought we were still aware of our own revolutionary background.
     For the great majority of mankind is in the throes of a worldwide revolution against foreign oppression and chronic poverty. All through Asia, Africa, and Latin America, people are waking up and demanding their human rights.
     The goals they talk about - the goals that inspire them - are national independence, rapid economic development, and neutralism.
     In short, they want to be nobody's wards or pawns. They want to stand on their own feet. They welcome aid and guidance, but they want to make their own decisions.
     These goals are not so different from those of our American Revolution nearly two centuries ago. We wanted to be our own masters; we wanted to develop our own country; and we wanted to be free of foreign entanglements.
     Yet today we are neither guiding nor leading this new revolution in the world. Indeed, we often seem to be opposing it.
     To the young, the bold, and the impatient, we have become careful conservatives who stand for stability and the status quo against anybody who rocks the boat.
     And the reason is that we have been too preoccupied with the danger of overt Communist military aggression to realize that many of the rulers to whom we gave weapons did not have the support of their people.
     We found out - to our surprise - that this was so in places like Venezuela and Iraq and Turkey and South Korea. And we found out - to our dismay - that this was true in Cuba, too.
     And just this month, a rebellion in Laos brought new young men to power who no longer want our military mission around. We may think they are shortsighted, but we had better be prepared for more such surprises so long as our policies are out of tune and out of touch with popular feeling.
     The times in our history when American prestige was highest have always been when our domestic and foreign policies reflected the idealism that kindles all revolutions. At such times we don't have to worry about whether we are making friends abroad or whether people will follow our leadership.
     This was the case under our last three Democratic administrations, when America was a symbol of hope to countless millions. For Wilson's 14 points, Roosevelt's New Deal, and Truman's Marshall plan excited the imagination and stirred the hearts of people all over the world.
     People responded to our leadership because we were being true to our revolutionary heritage and our actions were putting into practice what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said that the American Revolution "is intended for all mankind."
     When Jefferson was President, America was a weak and defenseless confederation standing at the mercy of great world powers, a debtor nation with an agricultural economy. These are elements in our beginnings that ought to make us, of all peoples, sympathetic toward the claims of neutralism and emerging nationalism among the fledgling nations of our time.
     Yet Jefferson proclaimed that our Nation was the strongest on earth, not because of our military might or our productive capacity - for we had neither - but because of our revolutionary ideals and our high moral purpose.
     This is the spirit that we must recapture if we are to recover our lost prestige. For the ideals you hear expressed today by the young men who are rocking the boats are those of our Declaration of Independence.
     But we have not been listening. We have been too concerned with military bases that the missile age is already making obsolete to notice that people cannot be bribed or threatened into choosing sides in the cold war.
     They will choose our side only if we make it clear by our words and actions that we are not opposed to change, that we do not fear unrest any more than we did in 1776, and that we look beyond the arms race to a world made safer for the whole family of man.
     That is why the conduct as well as the content of our foreign policy will be all important during the next few years. And the conduct is something in which all Americans can participate by what they do and say as individuals.
     George Washington sensed this in 1789 when he told the Pennsylvania Legislature: "It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity, but that its influence may be coextensive with the world, and stamp political unhappiness or misery on ages yet unborn."
     What was true in Washington's day is even more true today. We must look at the world as it is, not as we might like it to be. We must look at ourselves as others see us, not as we see ourselves. And we must understand that in this contest for the world, people can be more important than institutions and treaties, and ideas can be more powerful than hydrogen bombs.
     In the campaign that is now underway, I am proud to be the candidate of a party productive of new ideas and sensitive to the needs of people. For the leadership that we require in this fast-changing revolutionary world must understand our friends as well as our foes and must have the heart to inspire us as well as the wisdom to show us the way.
     And it must have the vision, the boldness, the sympathy and that old-fashioned American self-confidence that the world has been missing but still yearns for - and which the commissars will never be able to match.

     EDITOR's NOTE. - Following their nominations, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy were invited by John S. Knight to write an "Editor's Notebook," choosing any subjects they might wish to discuss. Senator Kennedy's contribution was published August 28. Vice President Nixon's article appears today.

     There are many ways to measure a nation's true strength. There are all the usual statistics and percentages - of gross national product, rates of economic growth, and productive capacity. There are the data on military power - forces-in-being, airwings, and fleet units. There are, these days, the number of major breakthroughs in space and missile technology.
     And there is another way besides - less easy to measure or even to define in any precise way, but perhaps the most important of all. It is the image of a nation in the eyes of the peoples of the world. It is what we mean when we speak of "prestige."
     On this score, I am convinced that America's strength is great, indeed.
     When more than a million Indians literally swamped President Eisenhower's motorcade on the streets of New Delhi, the prestige of America was being affirmed. I saw it with my own eyes, on a summer Sunday in Warsaw, with no advance announcement and certainly no official sanction, the spontaneous demonstration of a quarter of a million Poles - and their constant chorus of "Long live America" was an overwhelming testimonial to this prestige of which I speak.
     Even in the Communist-inspired mobs of Caracas and Tokyo, there was the same testimonial in reverse: evidence of the Kremlin's fear that, left to themselves, ordinary people the world over will demonstrate their affection and admiration and respect for America.
     And the object of such testimonials is not just the United States as a nation: it is - even more and surely more important - the principles and ideals which this Nation represents to these ordinary millions. For them, both the American dream and the American reality are the expression of their deepest hopes.
     This is surely the case for those hundreds who, week after week, and at direct risk of their lives, "vote with their feet" for freedom by crossing the borders between the Communist slave empire and the free world.
     I heard this hope and this faith in America expressed, back in December of 1956, by scores of Hungarian patriots, who were refugees from brutal Soviet suppression.
     This image of America is, in every sense, "the land of the free." This image, I am convinced, still prevails throughout the world.
     Added to all the other measures of national strength - the statistics, the hard facts of our economic and military power, the dramatic demonstrations of our scientific genius - the sum ought surely to be a sense of calm national confidence and pride. And yet on every hand there are domestic critics who tell you exactly the opposite: that we ought to be trembling with fear and self-doubt.
     America, they tell us, is soft and degenerate; it is stagnant; it is the object of worldwide contempt; America is second rate and going downhill fast.
     I confess that, beyond questions of pure partisan advantage, I cannot fathom the motivation of these critics. But I do know this: They are wrong. And the facts to prove it are available for all to see.
     What are some of the facts that contribute to America's high prestige in the world?
     There are, first of all, the facts that demonstrate our determination to exercise free world leadership: The billions in aid which are neither gifts nor handouts but rather a sound investment in the stability of free nations which permits them to remain independent of Communist appeals and subversion and the thousands of American lives lost in Korea to defend, directly, the territory of the free world against Communist aggression.
     Then too, there are the facts that underscore our firmness of will: A demonstration that we will not be pushed around by threats or by rocket rattling.
     Cases in point are the sending of U.S. Marines to Lebanon when that free nation was threatened by Communist-run civil war; our determination to maintain a free world bastion in the Formosa Straits, our refusal to surrender Quemoy and Matsu; and our firmness - which continues right down to this day - to retain our own rights in West Berlin and, more important still to guard the independence of this island of freedom literally within the Communist heartland.
     Are these facts to demonstrate weakness and softness, and to earn us contempt in the eyes of the world? Or are they the bedrock on which our prestige is built? I think the answer is clear.
     There are, furthermore, the facts of our military and economic posture. We are, in sober truth, the most powerful nation in the world today. And by policies and programs well planned and in progress we aim to stay that way.
     In overall space and missile technology, we have not only gained ground since 1958 and the first sputnik: We have moved ahead of the Soviet Union. From almost a dead start, fully 7 years after the Soviets had begun an all-out effort, we have shown that free people can outpace even the concentrated efforts of a slave state.
     Dr. Keith Glennan, who has never hesitated to give the Soviet Union generous credit for their achievements, has stated flatly that "in the things that count" the United States has assumed space leadership.
     We have sent 27 intricately instrumented satellites into space - 27 against 7. In 1 single day, we wrote this astonishing record: A 10-story high communications satellite sent into orbit; new manned flight speed and altitude records; the underwater launching of a Polaris missile which, in combination with nuclear submarines, constitutes the most nearly invulnerable weapons system yet developed by man.
     These are facts, not undocumented claims.
     Even our most vocal critics are forced to concede this much: That today our economy is the most productive in the world. And it is only by juggling, statistics that they are able to "prove" that the Soviet Union is gaining on us and will soon overtake us.
     The Soviets say they will increase automobiles and truck production by 50 percent in the next 7 years - but what they do not say is that today their production is 500,000, against an American output of 6 million passenger cars alone.
     They say they are growing at an annual rate, overall, that is twice the U.S. rate - but what they do not say is that starting as they do at but half our total product, at even such a rate they will never be able to close the absolute gap unless we falter.
     These, too, are facts, and if there is a conclusion to be drawn from them, I submit that it must be an affirmation of America's strength.
     More important, of course, they are indications that we intend to build on that strength in the years ahead. Because that is, indeed, what really counts.
     None of what I have been saying is reason for smugness or complacency. Leaders can be overtaken and surpassed. Strengths can be permitted to melt away.
     And in the Communist world, there is no lack of sheer determination, of almost frightening dedication, to capitalize on any least decline in our own will.
     Nor can we count on the inevitable failure of ideas - like communism - that pervert the rational order of truth and integrity. , Even the truth needs its constant and militant defenders. And that is our job. Selling America short is no way to accomplish it.