Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Leadership
& Decision-Making:
Ronald
Reagan:
A
Time for Choosing
On the evening of 27 October 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered a nation-wide paid
political telecast on behalf of the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. His
presentation was so forceful and engaging that Reagan, hitherto little considered a
political figure, became overnight a political force in the Republican party. Although
Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in an landslide and Richard Nixon captured the nomination
-- and the presidency -- in 1968, Reagan's reputation was firmly established and he
recovered the fortunes of the Republican party with his victory in the presidential
election of 1980.
Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The
sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't
been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own
ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I
recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us
cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of
this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used
"We've never had it so good."
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this
prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in
history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today,
37 cents of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our
government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in. We
haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We have raised our debt limit
three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times
bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations in the world. We have $15 billion in
gold in our treasury--we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are $27.3 billion, and
we have just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total
value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder
who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in
South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained
indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There
can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of
us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long
climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in doing
so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment
that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think
it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the
Founding Fathers.
Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking
to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his
story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we
are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are! I had someplace to
escape to." In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here,
there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that
government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to
sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of
man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our
capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess
that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better
than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly that we have to
choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as
a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in
individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism,
and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our
freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like
the "Great Society," or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must
accept a "greater government activity in the affairs of the people." But they
have been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves--and all of the things
that I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For
example, they have voices that say "the cold war will end through acceptance of a not
undemocratic socialism." Another voice says that the profit motive has become
outmoded, it must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state; or our traditional
system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th
century. Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is
outmoded. He referred to the president as our moral teacher and our leader, and he said he
is hobbled in his task by the restrictions in power imposed on him by this antiquated
document. He must be freed so that he can do for us what he knows is best. And Senator
Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting
the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government."
Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the
free man and woman of this country--as "the masses." This is a term we haven't
applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized
government"--this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They
knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without
controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force
and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside
of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the
private sector of the economy.
Now, we have no better example of this than the
government's involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost
of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for
85% of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known
a 21% increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth
of farming is regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years
we have spent $43 in feed grain program for every bushel of corn we don't grow.
Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry
Goldwater as President would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little
better, because he will find out that we have had a decline of 5 million in the farm
population under these government programs. He will also find that the Democratic
administration has sought to get from Congress an extension of the farm program to include
that three-fourths that is now free. He will find that they have also asked for the right
to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The
Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and
resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that
would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.
At the same time, there has been an increase in the
Department of Agriculture employees. There is now one for every 30 farms in the United
States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria
disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.
Every responsible farmer and farm organization has
repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but who are farmers to know what
is best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed
it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.
Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal
the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights are so diluted that public
interest is almost anything that a few government planners decide it should be. In a
program that takes for the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in
Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must
be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of
the land." The President tells us he is now going to start building public housing
units in the thousands where heretofore we have only built them in the hundreds. But FHA
and the Veterans Administration tell us that they have 120,000 housing units they've taken
back through mortgage foreclosures. For three decades, we have sought to solve the
problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the
more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency. They have just
declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil
wells, and the 14,000 people there have over $30 million on deposit in personal savings in
their banks. When the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed.
We have so many people who can't see a fat man
standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way
by taking advantage of the thin one. So they are going to solve all the problems of human
misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and
welfare had the answer and they've had almost 30 years of it, shouldn't we expect
government to almost read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us
about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the
need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows
greater, the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people
went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But
now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the
basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the
dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little
arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9
million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added
to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is
running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some
overhead.
So now we declare "war on poverty," or
"you, too, can be a Bobby Baker!" Now, do they honestly expect us to believe
that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending...one more program to the
30-odd we have--and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates
existing programs--do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic?
Well, in all fairness I should explain that there is one part of the new program that
isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout
problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps, and we
are going to put our young people in camps, but again we do some arithmetic, and we find
that we are going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person that we
help $4,700 a year! We can send them to Harvard for $2,700! Don't get me wrong. I'm not
suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek
to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young
woman who had come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her
seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning $250 a
month. She wanted a divorce so that she could get an $80 raise. She is eligible for $330 a
month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her
neighborhood who had already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the
do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are
always "against" things, never "for" anything. Well, the trouble with
our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't
so. We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of
old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the
problem.
But we are against those entrusted with this
program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge
that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those who depend
on them for livelihood. They have called it insurance to us in a hundred million pieces of
literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified that it was
a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people.
And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and
the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial
head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of
this moment is $298 billion in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry
because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people
whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble! And they are doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average
salary...his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance
policy that would guarantee $220 a month at age 65. The government promises $127. He could
live it up until he is 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social
Security. Now, are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a
sound basis so that people who do require those payments will find that they can get them
when they are due...that the cupboard isn't bare? Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
At the same time, can't we introduce voluntary
features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon
presentation of evidence that he had made provisions for the non-earning years? Should we
allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her
deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be
under these programs, which we cannot do? I think we are for telling our senior citizens
that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But
I think we are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory
government program, especially when we have such examples, as announced last week, when
France admitted that their Medicare program was now bankrupt. They've come to the end of
the road.
In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible
when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate planned inflation
so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth,
and not 45 cents' worth?
I think we are for an international organization,
where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we are against subordinating
American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today
you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among the nations
that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I think we are against the
hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we
engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people
enslaved in Soviet colonies in the satellite nation.
I think we are for aiding our allies by sharing of
our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we
are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not
socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107. We
spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a $2 million yacht for Haile Selassie. We
bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenyan government officials. We
bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six
years, 52 nations have bought $7 billion worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving
foreign aid from this country.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in
size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau
is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth. Federal employees
number 2.5 million, and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work
force is employed by the government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of
regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize
that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a
fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury, and they can seize and sell his
property in auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James
Wier overplanted his rice allotment. The government obtained a $17,000 judgment, and a
U.S. marshal sold his 950-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a
warning to others to make the system work. Last February 19 at the University of
Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-time candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket,
said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in
the United States." I think that's exactly what he will do.
As a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas
isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present
administration. Back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came
before the American people and charged that the leadership of his party was taking the
part of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin,
and Stalin. And he walked away from his party, and he never returned to the day he died,
because to this day, the leadership of that party has been taking that party, that
honorable party, down the road in the image of the labor socialist party of England. Now
it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose
socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your
business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that
business or property? Such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge
to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale
of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are
now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile,
so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. Our Democratic opponents seem
unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a
contest between two men...that we are to choose just between two personalities.
Well, what of this man that they would destroy? And
in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold
dear. Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well, I have been
privileged to know him "when." I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying
for high office, and I can tell you personally I have never known a man in my life I
believe so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.
This is a man who in his own business, before he
entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it.
He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the
profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his
employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work. He
provided nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was
ravaged by floods from the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and
supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week
before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to
get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas, and he said that there were a lot of servicemen
there and no seats available on the planes. Then a voice came over the loudspeaker and
said, "Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway
such-and-such," and they went down there, and there was this fellow named Barry
Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in the weeks before Christmas, all day long, he
would load up the plane, fly to Arizona, fly them to their homes, then fly back over to
get another load.
During the hectic split-second timing of a
campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of
cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, "There
aren't many left who care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care." This is
a man who said to his 19-year-old son, "There is no foundation like the rock of
honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life upon that rock, with the
cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start." This is not a
man who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. And that is the issue of this
campaign that makes all of the other problems I have discussed academic, unless we realize
that we are in a war that must be won.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup
kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace
without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only
avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to
love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers
to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer--not an easy answer--but
simple.
If you and I have the courage to tell our elected
officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is
morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by
committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron
Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing
to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation
which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one."
Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war,
but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next
second--surrender.
Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow
other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in
appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that
their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and
war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and
retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then? When
Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them
that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes
to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will
have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because
from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or
"better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live
on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those
voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so
dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing
in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should
Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should
Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down
their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history
were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis
didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after
all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies,
"There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not
advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through
strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by
material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are
spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and
space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will
preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence
them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
We will keep in mind and remember that Barry
Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity
and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
Thank you very much.
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