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The original documents are located in Box D23, folder "Mock Political Convention,
University of Missouri, February 23, 1968" of the Ford Congressional Papers: Press
Secretary and Speech File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
Copyright Notice
The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of
photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. The Council donated to the United
States of America his copyrights in all of his unpublished writings in National Archives collections.
Works prepared by U.S. Government employees as part of their official duties are in the public
domain. The copyrights to materials written by other individuals or organizations are presumed to
remain with them. If you think any of the information displayed in the PDF is subject to a valid
copyright claim, please contact the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
Distribution 20 mailing capies a.m.of to Mr. Feb Ford 24, 1968
moffice Copy
CONGRESSMAN
NEWS
GERALD R. FORD
HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADER
RELEASE
--FOR RELEASE AT 6:30 p.m. FRIDAY--
February 23, 1968
An Address by Rep. Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., before a Mock Political Convention at
the University of Missouri, Friday evening, Feb. 23, 1968.
Mr. Chairman, Fellow Republicans and Fellow Americans: As we meet here
tonight in convention, America and, indeed, the world resound with alarms.
We are met at a time of grave crisis--a crisis not only for the American
people but for the entire Free World. While our Free World partners see some of
the pieces of this crisis only as in a glass, darkly, we here in America are con-
fronted with the full stark tragedy of it.
This will not be a traditional political convention keynote speech. I have
no intention of promising the American people that the Republican Party if returned
to the White House will solve every problem overnight, increase every benefit,
expand all existing federal programs and start a whole flock of new ones...in
short, give everybody everything he wants, with the devil taking the National
Debt. Let's leave that onus of fiscal irresponsibility to the other major
political party--they deserve it.
Of course, they have been pursuing that course for the last seven years and
they haven't accomplished much except to run up prices, run up interest rates,
run up the National Debt and the interest on it to staggering proportions, nearly
run us out of gold and run the dollar into the ground. Small wonder we recently
witnessed a run on U.S. gold stocks by foreign creditors. No stardust in their
eyes. They haven't swallowed the Administration's Big Lie--the fiction about
84 months of uninterrupted prosperity. And they are fearfully aware of how the
United States is being bled of its men and its treasure in that bottomless pit
known as Vietnam under the Administration's misguided and misdirected policies.
Tonight I want to talk with you about the health and welfare of our Nation.
Not in the limited sense of school lunches or prenatal care for indigent mothers.
But the health and welfare of all the American people--of every one of us who as
individuals make up the great living community which is the United States of
America.
Where are we tending, and what do we want?
We face many problems--problems that threaten to tear us apart as a people, FORD
problems that demean us in the eyes of the world, problems that threaten us with
LIBRARY
collapse as a Nation.
(more)
Digitized from Box D23 of the Ford Congressional Papers: Press Secretary and Speech File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
-2-
I believe what Americans want to know as we meet here tonight is this:
Which party is best equipped to restore this country to blessed peace and which
party can best promote genuine prosperity, a soundly growing economy with
relative price stability.
Which party best understands the forces at work in America and the world
today--those forces which promise a brighter tomorrow and those other forces
which threaten our very existence?
Which party best recognizes the uses of power and how best to employ it in
the interests of world peace?
Which party does a better job of preserving the value of the dollar so that
a man need not lead a precarious credit-card existence during his working years
and throw himself on the mercy of the government in his old age?
Which party does a better job of watching over tax dollars and seeing to it
that Americans get a fair return for what they "invest" in their government?
Which party offers the American people the kind of moral leadership so
necessary to teach respect for law and order and to preserve this republic as a
government ordained of laws and not merely of men?
Both major parties want what is best for America. We share many of the
same objectives. Where we differ is not on goals and ends but on the means to
those ends.
The other party would have Americans believe that the Republican Party is
the enemy of the people. That is so ridiculous as to be laughable. It ould be
laughable if the opposition did not repeatedly peddle it as the seeming truth.
The truth is we oppose the other party's means to an end when we know those means
to be unsound.
The Democratic Party now stands before the people to be judged. The
Democratic Party has had seven years in which to demonstrate the wisdom of its
policies, the beneficent fruits of legislation which has been pushed through one
Democratic Congress after another. The people will decide whether to leave the
Nation in the Democratic Party's hands.
Postmaster General Lawrence F. O'Brien, who will manage President Johnson's
1968 campaign, recently said Lyndon Johnson will seek reelection solely upon his
record--the record of his and the preceding Democratic administration. This is
only fair. That is how it should be.
Republicans urge every American to look at the record--to look, and compare.
What does the record reveal?
Today we are at war in Vietnam. Not seven years ago!
(more)
-3-
Today the Soviet Union is close to controlling the Persian Gulf and the
Red Sea. Not seven years ago!
Today the Soviet Union has nearly destroyed American influence in the Middle
East. Not seven years ago!
Today Communists steal our ships. Not seven years ago!
Today inflation robs us of our wage gains, and prices surge up and up. Not
seven years ago!
Today violent civil disorders ravage our cities. Not seven years ago!
Today the thug, the thief, the mur derer and the rapist terrorize us on city
streets throughout America. Not seven years ago!
Today we have lost the respect America had throughout the world. Not seven
years ago!
How do we measure what has happened to America in the last seven years?
The housewife might say the cost of living has gone up nearly 15 per cent.
It costs me $11.43 to buy what $10 would buy in 1960.
A Republican might say the dollar that was worth a dollar when President
Eisenhower left the White House now is worth about 87½ cents.
Both would be right, and that reading of the incontravertible record is
devastating. It means that the Johnson Administration with its policy of planned
deficits has been robbing all of us of purchasing power and, indeed, has been
pauperizing our senior citizens. The Johnson Administration is primarily
responsible for the inflation which has hit us all and has struck most cruelly at
the aged who are living on limited incomes.
The Johnson Administration's own Labor Department reports that inflation has
wiped out the wage gains the country's production workers thought they had made
during the last two years.
The Johnson Administration has so wasted our substance and so heavily
borrowed against the future that we find ourselves plagued with cost inflation,
price inflation, massive federal deficits, some of the highest interest rates
in a century, and repeated attacks on the dollar. There has been a virtual
explosion of federal spending on too many unjustified and wasteful programs and
projects.
Democratic administrations have added $70 billion to the public debt since
1960--the last year the federal budget was balanced. The Johnson Administration
alone is responsible for $60 billion of those accumulated deficits and currently
offers us the prospect of $20 billion deficits back to back unless we load more
taxes on the American people. At the same time, state and local taxes are
(more)
-4-
climbing steadily so that the combined tax burden--federal, state and local--is
the greatest in our history.
It is incredible that Lyndon Johnson has allowed the economy to deteriorate
to the point where runaway inflation is a reality. It is shocking to learn that
because of a lack of faith in America's fiscal integrity foreign holders of U.S.
dollars prefer gold and as a result have steadily depleted our Gold reserves.
The answer to the dollar dilemma eludes Lyndon Johnson because the only
definition of restraint he knows is to slap a spending straitjacket on the
American worker by digging deeper into his pockets for more tax dollars.
The American people today are saddled with a spendthrift Democratic
administration--the wildest of all time.
What other administration would deliberately plan a $12 to $20 billion
deficit for the next fiscal year at a time when the interest on the national
debt has reached the fantastic sum of nearly $15 billion annually? A 46 per cent
annual increase since the Eisenhower Administration left office!
With all this massive spending, the Johnson Administration has failed to
solve the major problems of America wage-robbing inflation, the cost-price
squeeze on the farmer, the cancers of hard-core unemployment and a swiftly rising
crime rate, the widening gulf between the races, the threat of a new kind of
civil war, the disaffection of former allies, nation-building in Southeast Asia
where the balance of power is steadily shifting against US.
What is the farmer's position today? He now receives six per cent less
for the food he produces than he did two decades ago. This shocking fact really
strikes home when we consider that the farmer is paying 30 per cent more for the
supplies he needs.
What progress have we made in the war against crime since 1960? With a
Democratic administration in power, the crime rate has jumped 88 per cent while
the resident population of this country has risen by 11 per cent. Think of it!
The national crime rate has increased eight times as fast as the population.
Through it all, President Johnson crows about his accomplishments in social
welfare fields. And do you know how he measures those accomplishments? Not in
terms of concrete results but in terms of additional billions of federal dollars
being thrown at problems that simply will not yield to the Lyndon Johnson
treatment.
He brags that in 1960 the Administration spent $19 billion for health,
education and welfare, raised it to $23 billion in 1964 and bumped it to $47
billion this year.
He boasts that Federal programs for the poor totalled only $9 billion in
(more)
-5-
1960, climbed to $12 billion in 1964 and now total $28 billion.
He points with pride to the fact that Administration spending of $3 billion
on government training programs in 1960 rose to $4 billion in 1964 and now have
climbed to $12 billion.
Where are the results? Where are the benefits? Republicans want the same
improvements, but we have better and less costly ways to get them. How
ridiculous to claim great achievements in the language of the bureaucratic
dollar sign!
Have we restructured American society? Have we built a Great Society?
Seventy-six major riots have swept the Nation since 1965, killing more than
100 persons and wounding nearly 2,500. These civil explosions produced 7,985 cases
of arson, 28,939 arrests, 5,434 convictions, $210 million in property da tage,
and $504 million in estimated economic losses.
This country has experienced violence and lawlessness on a scale unprecedented
in our history. The widespread disregard for law and order we have witnessed
under the Johnson Administration is tantamount to a virtual breakdown of the rule
of law.
Now some observers are envisioning in 1968 a second civil war in our big
city slums. There is an escalating arms race on both sides as police prepare
for new outbreaks of rioting in the summer of 1968 and Negro militants plan
guerrilla terrorist tactics.
President Johnson has been in office continuously since November 1963. At
all times he has had a Congress controlled by his own party. Yet he waited until
last year to send a Law Enforcement Assistance Act to the Congress, did nothing
to push a 1967 House-approved Law Enforcement Aid Bill through the Senate,
vetoed the 1967 District of Columbia anti-crime bill, opposed a Republican anti-
riot bill last year, sent Congress his own anti-riot bill this year when he
suddenly realized that crime and riots have become a major issue, designated as
the "Mr. Big" of federal anti-crime efforts the attorney general who said the
crime rate has gone up "only a little" in this country.
Picking Attorney General Ramsey Clark as coordinator of all federal crime-
fighting agencies is like naming Dr. Spock head of the Defense Department. Yet
Lyndon Johnson would like the American people to believe he understands the
need for firmness in law enforcement.
Under the Johnson Administration we live in a murky world of half-truths
and contradictions. The American people cry out for truth in government--for
realism, for candor. The answers, when they do come back, are buttered with
(more)
-6-
false optimism and wrapped in pollyanna promises. At best, some administration
statements have proved misleading. At worst, they have constituted outright
deception. Small wonder a Credibility Gap separates the Johnson Administration
from the American people!
The people have every reason to mistrust the Johnson Administration, for they
have been misled almost every step of the way into the sinkhole of war that is
Vietnam.
When the Eisenhower Administration left office, South Vietnam had a
relatively stable and apparently established government. The late President
John F. Kennedy, writing in 1960 as a senator, said in his book "Strategy of Peace"
that U.S. aid to South Vietnamunder Eisenhower had proved "effective." He called
the results "a near miracle."
In 1960 there were fewer than 700 U.S. military personnel stationed n South
Vietnam, sent there to train South Vietnamese forces in the use of American
weapons and equipment. Today more than 525,000 U.S. military personnel have
been committed by Lyndon Johnson to a seemingly interminable land war in Vietnam--
and he hints he will be sending many thousands more. Where will it all end?
Vietnam has become the third largest war in our history. More than 20,500
American have lost their lives in this bitter conflict.
Yet Lyndon Johnson ran for the presidency as a peace candidate in 1964. No
less than five times during that campaign he indicated he would never send large
ground forces to Vietnam.
On August 29, 1964, Lyndon Johnson told the nation: "Some others are eager
to enlarge the conflict. They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job
that Asian boys should do. They ask us to take reckless action which might risk
the lives of millions. We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for
Asian boys. We don't want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people
and get tied down in a land war in Asia."
Lyndon Johnson spoke those words a little more than three years ago. Today
we are tied down in a land war in Asia. The end is nowhere in sight.
It was a Republican Administration-- the Eisenhower Administration- which
brought an end to the Korean War which the Truman Administration would not win
and could not stop. We said in 1952 that we could get and maintain peace with
honor, and we did. A Republican Administration will do likewise in 1969.
The Korean War was the first war we ever fought on the enemy's terms. The
Vietnam War is the second. To have continued the Korean War would have been
madness. To conduct the Vietnam War Lyndon Johnson style has been utterly tragic.
(more)
-7-
The Johnson style of escalation has never dissuaded Communists from an e: panded
and continued naked aggression.
We all recognize we must negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. President
Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end without compromising our own
interests or those of our allies. A new Republican administration will bring
the Vietnam War to an honorable conclusion. The Johnson Administration is
incapable of accomplishing this result, although I would dearly like to see it
happen right tomorrow.
A measure of success in Vietnam is demanded by our own national interests.
But President Johnson has fought the right war in the wrong way. He has over-
committed the American people in Vietnam as well as at home. He has mismanaged
the war, and he has mismanaged the domestic economy.
He has taken this Nation down a destructive and failure-filled path that
has brought us stalemate in Vietnam, humiliation at the hands of North Korea,
the distrust of both the Israelis and the Arabs, a sundering of the nce-strong
ties that bound NATO together, danger that the Soviet Union will surpass us in
nuclear capability, and a shocking loss of credibility among the nations of the
world
both Communist and free.
Look at the Democratic record and compare it with the previous Republican
record.
The Eisenhower Administration prevented half a dozen threats from developing
into wars. There was Trieste, the Mossadegh uprising in Iran, Guatemala, Formosa,
Suez, Lebanon, Quemoy and West Berlin. All these international crises resolved
without war.
Under the present regime Administration witnesses urge expanded East-West
trade while the Soviet Union supplies the Viet Cong with rockets, mortars and
missiles to kill our fighting men in Vietnam, pours billions of dollars worth of
arms into the Mideast, steadily adds to its nuclear arsenal, and rings its cities
with anti-missile systems while ignoring our pleas for an end to the arms race.
Where, indeed, is the spirit of Glassboro?
Americans have no desire to heat up the cold war. Republicans are anxious
to live at peace with the Communists. But we will never settle for a fool's
paradise where detente is nothing but wishful thinking,a word that dangerous
dreams are built on. More than ever before, the times demand realism and the
American people demand the truth. The Johnson Administration is failing them
on both counts.
We are in a time of testing. Indeed, in the words of a great Republican
(more)
-8-
President, it is a testing whether Government of the people, by the people and
for the people can endure.
The Nation must have new leadership--great new leadership that will restore
this country to fiscal sanity, destroy the ghettoes and rebuild our cities, bring
us to honorable peace and make us proud of America again.
This is a moment of great decision, a point of critical choosing as we ponder
our Nation's destiny.
Lincoln and the Republican Party led this country through the cataclysmic
crisis that was the war between the states. I believe the American people will
turn again
now, in this hour of gravest danger
to the Republican Party.
The cup that is borne in the hands of that challenge is bitter. But we
shall not shrink from it. We shall dedicate ourselves to renewing America's soul.
We shall be worthy of the people's trust.
###
CONGRESSMAN
NEWS
GERALD R. FORD
HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADER
RELEASE
--FOR RELEASE AT 6:30 p.m. FRIDAY--
February 23, 1968
An Address by Rep. Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., before aMock Political Convention at
the University of Missouri, Friday evening, Feb. 23, 1968.
Mr. Chairman, Fellow Republicans and Fellow Americans: As we meet here
tonight in convention, America and, indeed, the world resound with alarms.
We are met at a time of grave crisis--a crisis not only for the American
people but for the entire Free World. While our Free World partners see some of
the pieces of this crisis only as in a glass, darkly, we here in America are con-
fronted with the full stark tragedy of it.
This will not be a traditional political convention keynote speech. I have
no intention of promising the American people that the Republican Party if returned
to the White House will solve every problem overnight, increase every benefit,
expand all existing federal programs and start a whole flock of new ones...in
short, give everybody everything he wants, with the devil taking the National
Debt. Let's leave that onus of fiscal irresponsibility to the other major
political party--they deserve it.
Of course, they have been pursuing that course for the last seven years and
they haven't accomplished much except to run up prices, run up interest rates,
run up the National Debt and the interest on it to staggering proportions, nearly
run us out of gold and run the dollar into the ground. Small wonder we recently
witnessed a run on U.S. gold stocks by foreign creditors. No stardust in their
eyes. They haven't swallowed the Administration's Big Lie--the fiction about
84 months of uninterrupted prosperity. And they are fearfully aware of how the
United States is being bled of its men and its treasure in that bottomless pit
known as Vietnam under the Administration's misguided and misdirected policies.
Tonight I want to talk with you about the health and welfare of our Nation.
Not in the limited sense of school lunches or prenatal care for indigent motl ers.
But the health and welfare of all the American people--of every one of us who as
individuals make up the great living community which is the United States of
America.
Where are we tending, and what do we want?
We face many problems--problems that threaten to tear us apart as a people,
RD
problems that demean us in the eyes of the world, problems that threaten us with
LIBRARY
collapse as a Nation.
(more)
-2-
I believe what Americans want to know as we meet here tonight is this:
Which party is best equipped to restore this country to blessed peace and which
party can best promote genuine prosperity, a soundly growing economy with
relative price stability.
Which party best understands the forces at work in America and the world
today--those forces which promise a brighter tomorrow and those other forces
which threaten our very existence?
Which party best recognizes the uses of power and how best to employ it in
the interests of world peace?
Which party does a better job of preserving the value of the dollar so that
a man need not lead a precarious credit-card existence during his working years
and throw himself on the mercy of the government in his old age?
Which party does a better job of watching over tax dollars and seeing to it
that Americans get a fair return for what they "invest" in their governm
Which party offers the American people the kind of moral leadership so
necessary to teach respect for law and order and to preserve this republic as a
government ordained of laws and not merely of men?
Both major parties want what is best for America. We share many of the
same objectives. Where we differ is not on goals and ends but on the means to
those ends.
The other party would have Americans believe that the Republican Party is
the enemy of the people. That is so ridiculous as to be laughable. It would be
laughable if the opposition did not repeatedly peddle it as the seeming truth.
The truth is we oppose the other party's means to an end when we know those means
to be unsound.
The Democratic Party now stands before the people to be judged. The
Democratic Party has had seven years in which to demonstrate the wisdom of its
policies, the beneficent fruits of legislation which has been pushed through one
Democratic Congress after another. The people will decide whether to leave the
Nation in the Democratic Party's hands.
Postmaster General Lawrence F. O'Brien, who will manage President Johnson's
1968 campaign, recently said Lyndon Johnson will seek reelection solely upon his
record--the record of his and the preceding Democratic administration. This is
only fair. That is how it should be.
Republicans urge every American to look at the record--to look, and compare.
What does the record reveal?
Today we are at war in Vietnam. Not seven years ago!
(more)
-3-
Today the Soviet Union is close to controlling the Persian Gulf and the
Red Sea. Not seven years ago!
Today the Soviet Union has nearly destroyed American influence in the Middle
East. Not seven years ago!
Today Communists steal our ships. Not seven years ago!
Today inflation robs us of our wage gains, and prices surge up and
Not
seven years ago!
Today violent civil disorders ravage our cities. Not seven years ago!
Today the thug, the thief, the mur derer and the rapist terrorize us on city
streets throughout America. Not seven years ago!
Today we have lost the respect America had throughout the world. Not seven
years ago!
How do we measure what has happened to America in the last seven years?
The housewife might say the cost of living has gone up nearly 15 per cent.
It costs me $11.43 to buy what $10 would buy in 1960.
A Republican might say the dollar that was worth a dollar when President
Eisenhower left the White House now is worth about 87½ cents.
Both would be right, and that reading of theincontravertible record is
devastating. It means that the Johnson Administration with its policy of planned
deficits has been robbing all of us of purchasing power and, indeed, has bee
pauperizing our senior citizens. The Johnson Administration is primarily
responsible for the inflation which has hit us all and has struck most cruelly at
the aged who are living on limited incomes.
The Johnson Administration's own Labor Department reports that inflation has
wiped out the wage gains the country's production workers thought they had made
during the last two years.
The Johnson Administration has so wasted our substance and so heavily
borrowed against the future that we find ourselves plagued with cost inflation,
price inflation, massive federal deficits, some of the highest interest rates
in a century, and repeated attacks on the dollar. There has been a virtual
explosion of federal spending on too many unjustified and wasteful programs and
projects.
Democratic administrations have added $70 billion to the public debt since
1960 the last year the federal budget was balanced. The Johnson Admini trasion
alone is responsible for $60 billion of those accumulated deficits and currently
offers us the prospect of $20 billion deficits back to back unless we load more
taxes on the American people. At the same time, state and local taxes are
(more)
-4-
climbing steadily so that the combined tax burden--federal, state and local--is
the greatest in our history.
It is incredible that Lyndon Johnson has allowed the economy to deteriorate
to the point where runaway inflation is a reality. It is shocking to learn that
because of a lack of faith in America's fiscal integrity foreign holders of U.S.
dollars prefer gold and as a result have steadily depleted our Gold reserves.
The answer to the dollar dilemma eludes Lyndon Johnson because the only
definition of restraint he knows is to slap a spending straitjacket on the
American worker by digging deeper into his pockets for more tax dollars.
The American people today are saddled with a spendthrift Democratic
administration--the wildest of all time.
What other administration would deliberately plan a $12 to $20 billion
deficit for the next fiscal year at a time when the interest on the national
debt has reached the fantastic sum of nearly $15 billion annually? A 46 per cent
annual increase since the Eisenhower Administration left office!
With all this massive spending, the Johnson Administration has failed to
solve the major problems of America
wage-robbing inflation, the cost-price
squeeze on the farmer, the cancers of hard-core unemployment and a swiftly rising
crime rate, the widening gulf between the races, the threat of a new kind of
civil war, the disaffection of former allies, nation-building in Southeast Asia
where the balance of power is steadily shifting against US.
What is the farmer's position today? He now receives six per cent less
for the food he produces than he did two decades ago. This shocking fact really
strikes home when we consider that the farmer is paying 30 per cent more or the
supplies he needs.
What progress have we made in the war against crime since 1960? With a
Democratic administration in power, the crime rate has jumped 88 per cent while
the resident population of this country has risen by 11 per cent. Think of it!
The national crime rate has increased eight times as fast as the population.
Through it all, President Johnson crows about his accomplishments in social
welfare fields. And do you know how he measures those accomplishments? Not in
terms of concrete results but in terms of additional billions of federal dollars
being thrown at problems that simply will not yield to the Lyndon Johnson
treatment.
He brags that in 1960 the Administration spent $19 billion for health,
education and welfare, raised it to $23 billion in 1964 and bumped it to $47
billion this year.
He boasts that Federal programs for the poor totalled only $9 billi in
(more)
-5-
1960, climbed to $12 billion in 1964 and now total $28 billion.
He points with pride to the fact that Administration spending of $3 billion
on government training programs in 1960 rose to $4 billion in 1964 and now have
climbed to $12 billion.
Where are the results? Where are the benefits? Republicans want the same
improvements, but we have better and less costly ways to get them. How
ridiculous to claim great achievements in the language of the bureaucratic
dollar sign!
Have we restructured American society? Have we built a Great Society?
Seventy-six major riots have swept the Nation since 1965, killing more than
100 persons and wounding nearly 2,500. These civil explosions produced 7,985 cases
of arson, 28,939 arrests, 5,434 convictions, $210 million in property damage,
and $504 million in estimated economic losses.
This country has experienced violence and lawlessness on a scale unprecedented
in our history. The widespread disregard for law and order we have witnessed u
under the Johnson Administration is tantamount to a virtual breakdown of the rule
of law.
Now some observers are envisioning in 1968 a second civil war in our big
city slums. There is an escalating arms race on both sides as police prepare
for new outbreaks of rioting in the summer of 1968 and Negro militants plan
guerrilla terrorist tactics.
President Johnson has been in office continuously since November 19 3. it
all times he has had a Congress controlled by his own party. Yet he waited until
last year to send a Law Enforcement Assistance Act to the Congress, did nothing
to push a 1967 House-approved Law Enforcement Aid Bill through the Senate,
vetoed the 1967 District of Columbia anti-crime bill, opposed a Republican anti-
riot bill last year, sent Congress his own anti-riot bill this year when he
suddenly realized that crime and riots have become a major issue, designated as
the "Mr. Big" of federal anti-crime efforts the attorney general who said the
crime rate has gone up "only a little" in this country.
Picking Attorney General Ramsey Clark as coordinator of all federal crime-
fighting agencies is like naming Dr. Spock head of the Defense Department. Yet
Lyndon Johnson would like the American people to believe he understands the
need for firmness in law enforcement.
Under the Johnson Administration we live in a murky world of half-truths
and contradictions. The American people cry out for truth in government -for
realism, for candor. The answers, when they do come back, are buttered with
(more)
-6-
false optimism and wrapped in pollyanna promises. At best, some administration
statements have proved misleading. At worst, they have constituted outright
deception. Small wonder a Credibility Gap separates the Johnson Administration
from the American people!
The people have every reason to mistrust the Johnson Administration, for they
have been misled almost every step of the way into the sinkhole of war that is
Vietnam.
When the Eisenhower Administration left office, South Vietnam had a
relatively stable and apparently established government. The late President
John F. Kennedy, writing in 1960 as a senator, said in his book "Strategy of Peace"
that U.S. aid to SouthVietnam under Eisenhower had proved "effective." He called
the results "a near miracle."
In 1960 thee were fewer than 700 U.S. military personnel stationed in South
Vietnam, sent there to train South Vietnamese forces in the use of American
weapons and equipment. Today more than 525,000 U.S. military personnel have
been committed by Lyndon Johnson to a seemingly interminable land war in Vietnam--
and he hints he will be sending many thousands more. Where will it all end?
Vietnam has become the third largest war in our history. More than 20,500
American have lost their lives in this bitter conflict.
Yet Lyndon Johnson ran for the presidency as a peace candidate in 1964. No
less than five times during that campaign he indicated he would never send large
ground forces to Vietnam.
On August 29, 1964, Lyndon Johnson told the nation: "Some others are eager
to enlarge the conflict. They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job
that Asian boys should do. They ask us to take reckless action which might risk
the lives of millions. We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for
Asian boys. We don't want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people
and get tied down in a land war in Asia."
Lyndon Johnson spoke those words a little more than three years ago. Today
we are tied down in a land war in Asia. The end is nowhere in sight.
It was a Republican Administration-- the Eisenhower Administration--which
brought an end to the Korean War which the Truman Administration would not : win
and could not stop. We said in 1952 that we could get and maintain peace with
honor, and we did. A Republican Administration will do likewise in 1969.
The Korean War was the first war we ever fought on the enemy's terms. The
Vietnam War is the second. To have continued the Korean War would have been
madness. To conduct the Vietnam War Lyndon Johnson style has been utterly tragic.
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The Johnson style of escalation has never dissuaded Communists from an expanded
and continued naked aggression.
We all recognize we must negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. President
Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end without compromising our own
interests or those of our allies. A new Republican administration will bring
the Vietnam War to an honorable conclusion. The Johnson Administration is in
incapable of accomplishing this result, although I would dearly like to see it
happen right tomorrow.
A measure of success in Vietnam is demanded by our own national interests.
But President Johnson has fought the right war in the wrong way. He has over-
committed the American people in Vietnam as well as at home. He has mismanaged
the war, and he has mismanaged the domestic economy.
He has taken this Nation down a destructive and failure-filled path that
has brought us stalemate in Vietnam, humiliation at the hands of North Korea,
the distrust of both the Israelis and the Arabs, a sundering of the once-strong
ties that bound NATO together, danger that the Soviet Union will surpass us in
nuclear capability, and a shocking loss of credibility among the nations of the
world both Communist and free.
Look at the Democratic record and compare it with the previous Republican
record.
The Eisenhower Administration prevented half a dozen threats from developing
into wars. There was Trieste, the Mossadegh uprising in Iran, Guatemala, Formosa,
Suez, Lebanon, Quemoy and West Berlin. All these international crises resolved
without war.
Under the present regime Administration witnesses urge expanded East-West
trade while the Soviet Union supplies the Viet Cong with rockets, mortars and
missiles to kill our fighting men in Vietnam, pours billions of dollars worth of
arms into the Mideast, steadily adds to its nuclear arsenal, and rings its cities
with anti-missile systems while ignoring our pleas for an end to the arms race.
Where, indeed, is the spirit of Glassboro?
Americans have no desire to heat up the cold war. Republicans are nxious
to live at peace with the Communists. But we will never settle for a fool's
paradise where detente is nothing but wishful thinking,a word that dangerous
dreams are built on. More than ever before, the times demand realism and the
American people demand the truth. The Johnson Administration is failing them
on both counts.
We are in a time of testing. Indeed, in the words of a great Republican
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President, it is a testing whether Government of the people, by the people and
for the people can endure.
The Nation must have new leadership--great new leadership that will restore
this country to fiscal sanity, destroy the ghettoes and rebuild our cities, bring
us to honorable peace and make us proud of America again.
This is a moment of great decision, a point of critical choosing as we ponder
our Nation's destiny.
Lincoln and the Republican Party led this country through the cataclysmic
crisis that was the war between the states. I believe the American people will
turn again...now, in this hour of gravest danger to the Republican Party.
The cup that is borne in the hands of that challenge is bitter. But we
shall not shrink from it. We shall dedicate ourselves to renewing America's soul.
We shall be worthy of the people's trust.
# # #
READING COPY
MISSOURI FEB. 23, 1968
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, U.S.
OFFICE OF THE MINORITY LEADER
Herald R. 3rd
PUBLIC DOCUMENT
M.C.
OFFICIAL BUSINESS
FRIDAY
8:00 P.M.
MOCK POLITICAL CONVENTION
UNIV. OF MISSOURI
NOTE: See reading copy for
Bloomsburg, Pa.
GREATE FORD LIBRARY
march 16,1968