REPUBLICANS: The Rediscovery

A great American soldier disclosed political greatness this week and rediscovered courage as a policy for the nation. Out of his own wide experience with the fateful issues of the 20th century, Dwight D. Eisenhower phrased a definition of the peril besetting the U.S. and proposed a moral basis for meeting that peril. It was a definition so compelling that it set old political issues in a new frame. And it displayed, as nothing Ike has said before, his credentials as a candidate for President of the U.S.

He delivered his speech to the American Legion national convention in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden. The speech was supposed to be nonpolitical. No speech under such circumstances could be nonpolitical. But it was the speech his friends and well-wishers had been waiting for, hoping he would make—a good speech, in both the moral and political sense of the word.

The Change. “Seven years ago this very month I left the Army with no possible thought that I should ever enter politics,” said Eisenhower. “But seven years ago today no one in our whole country would have dreamed that today we would be prey to fear. Who would have thought, as we disbanded that great Army, a great Navy and a great Air Force, that only seven years later America would have to be studying and analyzing the world in terms of fear and concern.

“We are threatened by a great tyranny, a tyranny that is brutal in its primitiveness. It is a tyranny that has brought thousands—millions of people—into slave camps and is attempting to make all human kind its chattel.”

The Losses. Ike calculated with grim arithmetic the free world’s recent territory losses to Russia. In Europe: Latvia, Estonia, Poland, East Germany, East Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania, with a total of 94 million people. “All these people are blood kin to us . . . The American conscience can never know peace until these people are restored again to be masters of their own fate . . .

“On its Asiatic periphery the Kremlin has made captive China and Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Northern Korea . . . the northern half of Indo-China . . . It has added 500 million people to its arsenal of manpower. Most of these peoples of the Far East have been our friends . . . Through a dismal decade of false starts, fractional measures, loud policies and faint deeds, we have lost them. Again I can hear you say the conscience of America shall never be free until these peoples have opportunity to choose their own path.”

The Purpose. He turned to the kind of shrewd analysis of Communist forces which the U.S. seldom hears from its officials. The Russians, he said, have not yet attained a position from which they can accomplish the most important of their objectives, “economic containment and gradual strangulation of America . . . They know that our productive power, our economic strength is acutely dependent upon vast quantities of critical materials that we import from other sections of the globe. Their method, therefore, is to infiltrate those areas, to seize them, control them and so deny us those materials that we so badly need . . .

“Their efforts . . . are accompanied by virulent subversion and propaganda inside the free world. And though we say it in shame, as we say it in anger, they have penetrated into many critical spots of our own country, even into our Government.”

The Perspective. Ike saluted the Legion for its long fight against subversion and offered to enlist in such a fight “for the duration.” Having stressed the imperative of routing subversion, he put the political issue of Joe McCarthy in its proper perspective. “You have done your work,” said Ike warmly, “without recklessly injuring the reputations of innocent people.”

Then Ike returned to Communism’s other face—the external threat. “Now in order to obtain their objectives, Stalin has said there may have to be another international war, unless the free nations become so convinced of the hopelessness of the struggle that they will surrender . . .

“Moscow is not going to make the mistake that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made. They were supported . . . only by fractional economies. Stalin will never attack . . . unless war comes about by an accident of the powder keg variety . . . until he is certain there has been gathered under the iron fists of the Kremlin that amount of material, human organized military strength, that he believes will bring ultimate victory . . . All this means that we have some time, because they do not feel ready yet to challenge us in this final fashion. But it means also that . . . we must at once find the right answer.”

The Course. “We have no time for complacency but I assure you there is also no cause for fear. One hundred and fifty-five million united Americans are still the greatest temporal force in the world. We . . . must not abate our efforts until we have banished from the free world the last probability of Communist aggression.”

Ike ticked off three markers on “the course to peace”:

¶ “America must be militarily and productively strong [equipped with] security forces whose destructive and retaliatory power is so great that it causes nightmares in the Kremlin whenever they think of attacking us . . .

¶ “We will build that world with all of those who are ready to stand with us, work with us and support with us the organisms that are necessary to make sure that we cannot be damaged . . .

¶ “We must tell the Kremlin that never shall we desist in our aid to every man and woman of those shackled lands who seek refuge with us, any man who keeps burning among his own people the flame of freedom or who is dedicated to the liberation of his fellows . . .

“These three elements are necessary and immediate, nor may we suffer delay in other crucial areas if we are to achieve prosperity in the free world.”

The Domestic Issues. And what of those catchword issues of the current political campaign? In Ike’s frame of reference they fell easily into their proper place:

¶ Discrimination: “In a time when America needs all the skills, all the spiritual strength and dedicated services of its 155 million people, discrimination is criminally stupid.”

¶ Social Welfare: “Despite propaganda that all the social ills have been legislated out of existence, we know that the realities of life are still tough, harsh and disheartening for many Americans. These ills cannot be abolished by the mere passage of a law, but they will disappear in an America whose men & women understand that not one of us—whatever his position—can stand alone, and that all of us, bound in spiritual unity, are injured by any injury to any of us.”

¶ Corruption: “Let us end corruption in public office, at every level of government. In world opinion and in world effectiveness, the U.S. is measured by the moral firmness of its public officials.

“For you veterans,” said Ike in summary, “these resolves require no effort approaching the demands made on you in war. Yet the reward for America and for the free world will be as great as any victory in battle or in any campaign. The world—all the world—will again recognize the United States of America as the spiritual and material realization of the dreams that men have dreamt since the dawn of history.

“Then the story of America will be repeated on tom-toms of the African jungle, in the gossip of Arab bazaars, under the shady trees of the Champs Elysées, in the temples and along the holy rivers of the East. The ring of truth around the world will drown the strident lies of Moscow’s propaganda. One hundred years ago America was the wonder of humanity and the symbol of man’s hopes and goals everywhere.

“We can make it that again.”