A Time for Choosing Persuasive Speech
Thank you. 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 words and discuss 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 out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our
government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't
balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've 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 of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don't own an ounce. Foreign
dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've 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're
at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to
the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing 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."
And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's 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 the
sovereign people, is still the newest and the 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 capitol can plan
our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is
no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down - [up] man's old-aged dream, the ultimate in
individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of 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've been
a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things 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 our acceptance of a not
undemocratic socialism." Another voice says, "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 says he is "hobbled in his task by the restrictions
of 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 men and
women 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 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 percent of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has
known a 21 percent increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce.
Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who'd 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 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar
raise. She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea
from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their
humanitarian goals. They say we're always "against" things - we're never "for" anything.
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that
isn't so.
Now, we're for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to
that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we're 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 people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred million
pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified 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 dollars 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're doing just that.
But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program,
especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their
Medicare program is 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're for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think
we're 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 nations
that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population.
I think we're 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 the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.
I think we're for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our
fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating
bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.
We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we
bought a 2 million dollar 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 dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving
foreign aid from this country.
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're 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've 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've
never known a man in my life I believed 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 monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a
utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only
avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll 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 on 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 human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of
freedom because to save our own skins, we're 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." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and
war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace - and you can have it in the next second -
surrender.
Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of 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 or 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're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the
time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will
have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically.
He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red
than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd 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." And this - this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's
"peace through strength."
Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces
are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits - not animals." And he said, "There's 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'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll 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.
