REPUBLICANS: Nixon’s Offensive for Peace

In Beverly Hills, Calif., the day after the third TV debate, Vice President Nixon made his major foreign-policy speech of the campaign. “It is time to launch a great new effort,” he said, “an all-out offensive for peace and freedom.” Key point in organizing the offensive: a series of conferences. Items:

¶ A council of the new Administration’s defense chiefs, civilian and military, to “reexamine” U.S. defense programs in the light of Soviet policies and “the rapid pace of technological change.” He would “work with these leaders.” said Nixon, to develop “policies that will insure that America, already militarily the strongest nation in the world, will maintain this superiority.”

¶A meeting of “perhaps 100 men and women representing a cross section of America’s life” to scrutinize the entire range of U.S. nonmilitary international programs, both governmental and private. The conference would submit to Nixon proposals for achieving a “mobilization of America’s brainpower and heartpower” in the “cause of peace and freedom.” ¶Four regional conferences of Free World heads of government—separate conferences for the NATO countries, Latin America, Africa and Asia—to work out new regional programs.

The real political plus in Nixon’s speech was his promise to set up Vice President Henry Cabot Lodge as coordinator of all U.S. nonmilitary cold-war programs, and to use Nelson Rockefeller “to the extent that the duties of his office would permit.” and above all. his announcement that President Eisenhower had agreed, after leaving office, to make his “wise guidance and rich experience” available to a Nixon Administration.