ADDRESS BY LIEUTENANT GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS BEFORE POMPANO BEACH COUNCIL NAVY LEAGUE OF THE UNITED STATES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R002000110002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 26
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2003
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: June 17, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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ADDRESS
by
LIEUTENANT GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS
before
POMPANO BEACH COUNCIL
NAVY LEAGUE OF THE UNITED STATES
Lighthouse Point, Florida
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Mr. President, Gentlemen, I am very happy to have this
occasion to address this Council of the Navy League. I never cease
to marvel at how much the Navy League has done to keep alive the flame
of love of country and what it means to us during some very difficult
times through which we have just come and from which, I believe, we
are now emerging. In our country everything is run by public opinion
and unless you have public opinion behind you, there is very little you
can do. Therefore, I think you have a tremendous role to play in
making the American people aware of how important it is for us to
have the armed forces that our country needs to maintain our freedom
and to join with our allies in maintaining freedom all over the world.
I am particularly pleased to be here tonight and to see present
officers of the United States Navy and the Royal Navy. A s you know,
we and our British cousins had a misunderstanding two centuries ago,
a very serious misunderstanding, but since then in nearly all of the
wars in which both our countries have been involved for the cause of
human freedom, we and they have had disagreements, but in the
important things we have found ourselves together. I would just like
to tell you how happy I am to see them here. They are a very
remarkable people, and don't ever underestimate them. They always
talk in underestimation about themselves, but if you agree with them,
you will be wrong.
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I have an 86-year-old British aunt. When I arrived in England
during the war, I was 22 years old and I asked, "Where is Aunt Ethel? "
The answer was, "Aunt Ethel is in the Royal Air Force. " I said, "Don't
be ridiculous; she is an old woman; she must be 50?" Aunt Ethel was
the Regimental Sergeant Major of the Women's Royal Air Force Depot
at Harrogate. About four months ago I was in London having lunch with
Auht Ethel and we were at a rather fashionable restaurant, Quaglino's,
and the headwaiter came up and with typical British understatement,
he said, "Pm dreadfully sorry, Sir, but there is a bomb scare."
And I said, "Really, where? " He said, "Here, Sir." I said, "Here!
You mean we should leave? " He said, "Everyone else has. " So I
looked around and everyone else had gone. I turned to my 86-year-
old aunt and I said, "Aunt Ethel, there is a bomb scare." She said,
"Really, are they after you? " I said, "I don't think so. I made the
reservation under somebody else's name." "Well, " she said, "that
may be, but I have not finished my fish. " I said, "Aunt Ethel, I don't
think you heard what I said. I said there is a bomb scare." She said,
"My dear boy., you must understand that I have been bombed many
times in my life and at my age these things simply do hot have the
urgency that they do at yours, and I have not finished my fish. " At
this point, the manager of the hotel in which the restaurant is located
came and in a very urgent voice, he said, "Sir, we've had a phone call.
Will you please leave at once and take this lady with you." So I took my
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aunt firmly by the hand and I said, "Aunt, we are leaving." She said,
"In that case my wine goes with me even if my fish doesn't."
I want to talk to you a little bit about intelligence and how it is
run because there are many misconceptions about this. Someone
made reference a little while ago about the fact that: I speak many
languages. This is sometimes rewarding and sometimes dangerous.
When I first came into the Army as a Private, the Master Sergeant
who was interviewing me was very taken by the fact: that I spoke a
large number of languages. This was a period in our history when we
were making the President of General Motors a Lieutenant General
in the Transportation Corps and the head of RCA a :Brigadier General
in the Signal Corps, so I thought, "They'll probably make me a
Lieutenant Colonel in Intelligence, but if they offer me a Majority, I'll
take it since we'll all soon be in the war and have to make sacrifices."
So we went on down the line and everybody was comparing MOS's, and
I said, "What are MOS's?" And they said, "That's your Military
Occupational Specialty. That's what you are going to do in the Army."
I looked at my card and I saw where it had MOS 0506. I thought the
time had come to use some of this leadership that I was going to be
called upon for so soon, so I turned to one of the other guys and said,
"Go find out what 0506 is." It worked like magic, He practically
saluted and went off and came back with a slightly dazed look on his
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face. He said, "0506 is a truck driver." I said, "Oh, somebody's
made a mistake." No one had and guess who drove a truck for quite
a while.
But one day, even in an army without computers, they plucked me
out of this and sent me off to. the Army's Military Intelligence Training
Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. We Americans have always had a
very curious view of Intelligence -- that it wasn't really American or that
there was something dirty about it and so forth -- and we really haven't
done much about it between the wars until recent years. When I got
to that Camp, there was an American Colonel who was nominally the
Commandant, but it was really being run by a British Colonel. That
was the state of American intelligence one year after we were in the
war.
We have always had good intelligence. We have always dismantled
it between the wars. The wreckers have gotten to us and convinced us
that it was immoral or wrong and so forth and we have undone it. Well,
that is not true. All of our leaders throughout our history have used it
and they have used it very successfully. We need it more today than
at any other time in the past because we face a greater threat than we
have ever faced in the whole of our national history. This is the first
time in our history that someone has had the capability of damaging
the United States seriously or even mortally, of inflicting great
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damage on us internally. Therefore we have more need to know
what is going on in the world than we have ever had before.
In the world as we used to know it, there was time, there was
space, there were other powers between us and potential aggressors,
and various other circumstances that we do not enjoy to the same
degree. The world has shrunk. Today the world in which we live is
actually far smaller, even if you take account of the ships crossing the
ocean and everything else, than it was just a few years ago. So we
must know what is going on about us, what threats there are against
us. The lead time of modern equipment is such that if you just find
out that somebody has got some development, it is going to take you
two, three, four or five years to develop some counter to it. Now,
in the old days you were able to do these things much more quickly,
but not totally. When the Germans produced the magnetic mine,
some answer was found very quickly for that, but many of these
answers come in an indirect way from the need for intelligence.
Radar, one of the greatest developments of our time, which was
so instrumental in the British victory at Matapan, was initially
developed as a means of reconnaissance or intelligence to keep track
of other people's ships and airplanes. In fact, the first airplane ever
tracked by British radar before World War II was Neville Chamberlain's
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airplane returning from Munich. They had only one year between then
and the outbreak of war. You do not want to be caught by surprise
because to take effective countermeasures takes longer than that today.
As I said last night in another talk which some of you may have
heard, I am convinced that intelligence is the oldest: profession.
There are other' professions, one specifically, which is alleged to
be older, but I always claim that before that other one could operate,
people had to know where it was. Therefore, intelligence is the
oldest profession in the world. In fact, you will recall spies were
sent into the land of Canaan thousands of years ago,. Nobody who wants
to conduct an organized society can do it without knowing what the poten-
tial threats to that society are. We face today potential threats from
countries that are larger than we are, that have more people, and that
have a kind of government which is willing to turn a far larger
percentage of the gross national product into military expenditures.
We look at the Soviet Union today and we see a country which is
spending more money on defense than we are and is spending it out
of a gross national product less than half as large as ours. One
cannot help wondering, when they are imposing this kind of sacrifice
on their people, why this is being done. A s we look around the world
today, we see the Soviet Union deploying five new systems of
intercontinental ballistic missiles, each more modern, more accurate,
and capable of carrying a heavier warhead than the system it is
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replacing. We see the Soviet Union building other formidable
missiles and putting missiles aboard their submarines which can
reach the United States from their home port waters. We see the
Soviet Union's navy going from a coast-guard-type navy to a blue-
water navy able to present Soviet power all over the world. We have
seen the Soviets developing their air force, developing aircraft with a
capability against the United States. We see them building larger and
more powerful submarines than any they have built up to now with
more tubes for launching missiles than the ones they have had up
to now. We see them updating their ground forces. We see them
filling them in with the logistical and support units they did not used
to have. We see the tremendous sacrifices they are imposing on their
people to do this. What their intentions are is sornething else, but the
fact is they have the most formidable collection of power that has been
arrayed against the United States and its allies in the whole of history.
No nation, not even Germany, has maintained armed forces of this
size in being in peacetime. There is the ever-present question before
us of what do they intend to do with it? We see a tremendous scientific
and research effort going on. We see them pushing; this almost
exclusively in the military area. Soviet research and development
in other areas is a definitely much lower keyed thing than research
and development in the military area. Many visitors to Russia are
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startled because in the best hotels the window panes are of such
poor quality glass that they distort the picture on the outside. But
let me assure you the Soviets are quite capable of making a plexiglass
nose for a bomber that does not distort because this is the area where
they are concentrating the productive genius of a very great people.
We see Mr. Breznev who tells us, yes, he is for detente, but at the
same time making this tremendous military effort right across the
board.
There is a great detente story I heard the other day that I think
is very appropriate. First of all, there is a Russian proverb I would
like to mention. The Russians love proverbs, and some of the greatest
ammunition you can have when talking to a Russian is to have a Russian
proverb that you can throw at him at the right time.. They have some
great proverbs and one of them is: "When you make friends with a bear,
do not let go of your ax. " That is not we saying it. They are saying it.
The detente story was of two young Americans who went to Moscow
and were being taken around by a young Russian. He took them to the
Kremlin and the Novodevechye Monastery and the Lenin University and
the Lumumba University and then finally to the zoo where they saw a
whole number of unusual animals . They went along the cages and
they finally came to this great big cage where there was a huge
Russian bear, eight feet tall weighing five hundred pounds, and in the
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same cage was a small white lamb. The Americans were puzzled
as to why the Russians would put the two of them in the same cage.
They turned to the young Russian and they said, "Why do you put these
two animals in the same cage? " "Oh, " he said, "'This is to prove that
peaceful ocexistence is possible." One of the young Americans said,
"Well, I must say it is pretty impressive." The other said, "Yes,
it sure is. convincing." The young Russian looked around and seeing
no one, bent over and said, "Of course, you understand, every
morning we have to put in a new lamb, but as long as you don't run
out of lambs there is no problem. "
Obviously, all of us hope that we can work out some way of
peaceful coexistence with the Russians but this has got to be a two-
way street. No agreement in which one side derives all the advantages
can last. You've got to have it working to the advantage of both sides.
Both sides have got to have the feeling they are getting something out
of it. We do have one great advantage in negotiating with them today.
That is the fact that we have the kind of intelligence which enables us
to know if they are cheating. In the 1960's we had a great debate as
to whether there was a missile gap between the United States and the
Soviet Union. Such a gap would be impossible today. We know what
they have and, more important, they know that we know. A s a matter
of fact, it is quite interesting at some of the SALT 'Talks when we are
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having discussions with the Russian military and they say to us, "Why
are you telling all our civilians about these things. They are not
supposed to know." That is, the civilians on the Russian Delegation
are not supposed to know what the Russians have got. We have the
means of checking on them and they know it. We have the means
thanks to the technological genius of the American people.
We are a slow people to move, but when we move, we move
quickly. I was a young Corporal in the American Army in 1941 and
at that time, the Germans had overrun all of Western Europe and they
were moving towards Moscow at 15 miles a day on a thousand-mi.le-
long front. The United States Congress voted for universal military
service by a majority of one vote. What message do you think that
sent to the Japanese? They acted on it because five months later they
attacked us and we had to go to war.
Pearl Harbor, in the investigation that followed, showed that
squirrelled away in various parts of the U. S. Government was enough
information to tell us that something like this was quite likely to happen.
But everybody was sitting jealously on his own little piece of information
and there was no central place where all of that information could be
brought together and that resulted in 1947, after the investigation of
Pearl Harbor, in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.
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There is a widespread misunderstanding of how intelligence
operates in the United States. That is one of the things I would like
to talk to you about. Intelligence operates in many ways. We have what
we call the Intelligence Community which is made up of the three
armed services intelligence organizations, of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, of the National Security Agency, of the FBI, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Treasury Department,
the Atomic Energy people and the Justice Department through the FBI.
There is a widespread delusion that everybody is sitting on his own
private little piece of information jealously preventing everybody
else from looking at it. That isn't the way it happens. We are all
working from the same data. When an intelligence telegram comes
into CIA, it doesn't go just to CIA. It goes to Defense Intelligence
and to whichever of the Armed Services is interested in it. We have
disagreements among our analysts and we have disagreements among
our services. We produce estimates or studies. They may be
produced in Defense or they may be produced in CIA. But essentially
all parties who have an interest in them in the Intelligence Community
cooperate in this study. You don't always get everybody to agree and
I'm glad that you don't, but you have different points of view. For
instance, you will get a study that will go forward and you will see in
the study: "CIA and Army agree with this. The Navy and the Air
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Force disagree and think something else. 11 So the policy makers
who must develop our foreign policy and make the decisions which
govern our country's conduct are aware of the fact that there is not
universal agreement within the Intelligence Community on this. They
are aware of who disagrees and they are aware of the reasons why
they disagree.
The other thing I want to stress particularly is that the people
who work in intelligence, whether it be in the services or in CIA,
are not part of the policy making of the United States. We simply
provide intelligence. The policy makers will then say to us: "What
are the possible options we can follow and what would be the
consequences of each one?" We will then make a study and say:
"If you do option one, this will happen. If you do option two, that
will happen. If you do option three, this will happen. If you do
option four, that will happen. " But we do not say, nor are we asked,
which one of those options the United States ought to adopt. I had this
brought home to me very clearly one day. I was down at the White
House, while the Director was away, at a meeting presided over by
Dr. Kissinger, and after I had reviewed the various options and the
possible consequences of each one, he then went around the table to
State, Defense, Treasury and everybody asking them which one of
the options they thought we should adopt. State said one, Treasury
said two, Defense said four and I said three. He said, "You don't
have any vote" and went on around the table. So the idea that the
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CIA or anybody in the Intelligence Community is a sort of state within
a state supporting its own little private friends and having policies
that are different from the policies of the United States Government
is nonsense.
Yes, we have had kooks who have done wrong things or have
used bad judgment. I cannot tell you we haven't. After all, 76, 000
people have gone through the CIA since it was founded and if you get
any group that large, you're going to have some nuts, you are going
to have some odd people, and you are going to have some people show
bad judgment.
You have all heard loose talk about criminal action and horrible
things that were done. What are the facts? The facts are that after all
this evidence had been analyzed, not one single person in CIA has been
condemned for any crime or found guilty of any crime by any court in-'
the United States. Not enough evidence has been marshalled to cause
any grand jury anywhere in the United States to indict anybody in CIA
for doing anything wrong. But if you read the newspapers and you
listen to television, you have the impression that monstrous crimes
have been committed against the American people on a gigantic scale.
I talked a little about this last night and I don't want to repeat it,
but it is important that you have the ammunition and you know what the
facts are. You had an impression conveyed to the American people
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that there was widespread wiretapping of the American public and
everybody's conversations were being listened to, that the mail was
being opened indiscriminately. Let me just give you a few facts
concerning that. The Director of Central Intelligence is. the only
person in the United States who by law is charged with the protection
of his sources and methods. That means he must watch over the
security of the intelligence that comes to him and how it is handled.
Actually, you could loosely interpret that to do almost anything as
far as our own people are concerned. And, in fact, the break-ins
you heard of were break-ins only of CIA people who were suspected
of taking documents home with them. Okay, we shouldn't have done
it if you have one interpretation of the law. But if you take strictly
the interpretation of the charge of the Director to make sure that his
sources are protected, you have at least an explanation of why it was
done.
On the telephone taps, the impression was given that "big brother"
was listening to everything. The CIA is alleged to have conducted 32
telephone taps in 27 years. That is a little more than one per year.
I'm not telling you that all of these were justified. What I am telling
you is that the perspective has been distorted beyond recognition --
the ear of "big brother" listening to everything.
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The mail intercept. We are carrying on as though the mail has
never been opened. Anybody here who is old enough to have been in
World War II knows that he used to read his men's mail officially --
they knew it, he knew it and everybody knew it - - presumably to
prevent enemies of the United States from acquiring valuable
information. But all of a sudden it is converted into a monstrous
crime. The Congress has told us they don't want us to do it and we
won't do it, but whose mail was being opened? The only mail being
opened by the CIA and the FBI was mail going to or from the Soviet
Union or Communist China. The idea was conveyed that mail going
from Fort Lauderdale to Omaha or San Francisco to Boston was
being opened. It was not being opened. The only letters that were
opened were letters which (a) had already been opei-ned by the place
where they came from or (b) were going to be opened when they got
to where they were going. This was presented as a. great threat to
the freedom of the American people.
An enormous effort, a malicious, wicked effort, has been made
to convince the American people that the real threat: to our freedom
comes from the CIA and the FBI or the other members of the
Intelligence Community. The CIA has never had the power to arrest
anybody. How can you run a gestapo if you can't arrest anybody?
A s I said, I cannot tell you that there have not been things done which
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should not have been done. But of course, the perception of the
American people changes in what they want done according to the
degree of threat they feel. After all, during our Civil War when
President Lincoln found out that the Maryland State Assembly was
about to vote Maryland out of the Union, he sent Federal troops over
and closed down the Maryland State Assembly. To my knowledge
there is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that authorizes
the President of the United States to use Federal troops to close down
the assembly of a state. This was done. Regrettably, he had to use
artillery on the Copperheads in New York and a very large number of
people were killed.
If we attempt to judge the past in the light of the present, we are
always going to get a distorted picture. What would we think of our
Founding Fathers who owned slaves, who didn't give universal suffrage?
If we judge them by our standards, this was monstrous. Most of the
things that you hear reproached in the Intelligence Community are
things that were done in the'50s or at the latest in the early 160s. The
perception of the-world was different. The perception of urgency was
different in those days. We face a different time now where, oddly
enough, we seem to feel that there is less of a threat at a time when
the threat is far greater. In the '50s and '60s the Soviet Union simply
did not have the capability of really doing us harm. They do now and
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for some odd reason our people do not feel as threatened today in
general as they did 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago at the time of
the Cuban hiissile crisis Florida may have been in danger but the rest
of the United States was not. Today all of the United States is within
the range of Russian weapons, either from the Soviet Union or from
their submarines. Today a large part of the United States can be
reached by Russian aircraft. On one-way missions; nearly all of it
could be reached by Soviet aircraft. We have to live with the times
as we go along. We have just been given a list of restrictions handed
down by the President and we fully intend to observe those restrictions.
People have asked me what my position is on assassination. First
of an, remember, after all this loose assassination talk, the ultimate
finding was that nobody was ever assassinated. My own position is
that assassination is wrong. It is against the law of God. It is against
the law of man, and it doesn't work. You simply get another fanatic
even more fanatic than the first one, in the light of what has happened.
It is difficult in a democratic society to run an intelligence agency.
We are the only democratic people I know who try to run ours in the
full light of day. We may be able to do it. After all, we're the only
people who have gone to the moon. If we are successful in running
it in that way, we should be very much aware of the fact that we will
be the only people in history who ever have. Other democratic
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countries have intelligence services but they do not conduct a public
striptease of them. They do not empty the pockets of their intelligence
service before the general public. They have found means of correcting
abuses discreetly, quietly and efficiently. You cannot have large
numbers of people without some forms of abuse.
The other day a Congressman said to me, "How can you stop the
abuses in intelligence? " I said, "I know of only one way. Stop using
human beings." If you have large numbers of human beings, and
every one of you who has ever had a unit under him knows, there are
some eightballs and some bad apples. You try to restrict them. You
try to keep them under control. You punish them if they do something
wrong. But if anybody tells you, "I have a recipe for stopping all of
this forever, " he is simply not telling you the truth. This would be a
very interesting theory if we did not face the kind of a world that we
face today.
We face two of the greatest powers in the world, both of whom
swore in greater or lesser measure to destroy the kind of a world
in which we believe. It is a fortunate circumstance: for the time being
that they are kind of mad at one another. But that comes and that
goes. They were close friends a little while ago. Who knows what
will happen when Mao dies. After all, they do share a common
ideology. There is a deep feeling between them that I think we should
recognize. Each one of them is trying to use us in its ploy with the
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other. The Chinese have an old saying: "Against the near barbarians
you must use the far barbarians." That translates simply. Against
the Soviets you try to line up the Americans. The Russians, of
course, are very concerned about the Chinese because the Russians
have fought all their wars against people they generally outnumber
four to one, and the idea of fighting somebody who will outnumber them
by four to one looks to them to be sixteen times as bad as the war
against the Germans and that was about as close a run thing as they
want to be involved in. So they do have this concern with the Chinese.
The Chinese in the meantime are looking at the two powers that
they feel threaten them, namely, the Soviet Union and us, and are
making very considerable efforts in the same general direction. All
of us in the Intelligence Community owe the American people a number
of answers. We owe them answers as to the best estimate we can give
them of who will be in control of the Soviet Union five years from today
and what will their dispositions be toward us and toward our allies?
What is there in Soviet research and development today that will have
an impact on our lives tomorrow? And the same questions for China.
One of the difficult things about intelligence is that it is very hard
to quantify in the fashionable cost-effectiveness mood which pervades
our country today. Before World War II the Germans put a jeweler
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in Scapa Flow which was the home base of the British Home Fleet.
He posed as a Swiss jeweler. In 1937, '38, and '39 he did nothing.
One night in 1941 he told his German superiors that. there were no
nets around the anchorages of the battleships and a German submarine
went in and sank a battleship and an aircraft carrier and amortized
that intelligence project five thousand times over. Had the Germans
had an efficiency cost effectiveness team going around, they would
have said, "In '38, '39, '40, this guy has produced nothing, pull him
out!"
We have this all over the world, this difficulty of explaining
intelligence to people because you cannot trumpet your successes.
If you trumpet your successes, they are not successes anymore.
If somebody knows that someone is looking in through that window,
they will either pull the curtains or turn the lights out. So it's
almost impossible. People keep saying, "Why don't you have a program
like the FBI and point out the successes you have had? "The successes
we've had are by methods we are still using and if we describe these,
they will either find some method of countering thetn.or they will
change their method of operation so that we will no longer be able
to keep track of them. President Kennedy told us, "You are doomed
to be pilloried for your failures and to have your successes passed
over in silence."
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It takes a very special kind of people to work in intelligence.
Anybody who chooses the armed forces as a career has got to be
someone who is not really thinking of material advantage,- and anyone
who chooses intelligence as a career must not expect to have any
public satisfaction. The satisfactions you have are in your heart
when you know what you have done and you have achieved something
tremendous and, believe me, I cannot go into the detail but we have
achieved some fantastic things -- as great as going to the moon --
in the field of intelligence. But if I were to tell you about them,
their effectiveness would stop tomorrow morning. 'We are condemned
to live in this kind of an atmosphere.
I am not an old CIA man. I came there four years ago. But I
want to tell you these are fantastic people. Under a bombardment
which has no parallel in American history, they have continued to
produce superb intelligence. They are Americans just like everybody
else in this room. They live by the same standards of right and
wrong. They have no means of defending themselves against the
attacks. They have no means of making their voices heard to repel
these false charges, to repel these false accusations. If they do, it
simply is not printed. I went down to the National Press Club in
Washington where I spoke for 45 minutes to the Society of Professional
Journalists. I answered questions for an hour. There was not one
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word about it in either of the Washington newspapers the next morning.
We simply have to go forward and do what we know must be done if
our country and freedom are to survive. We have to go, forward
together with our allies who make a tremendous contribution to the
total fund of our knowledge, who have skills and abilities and access
in areas that we do not and whose collaboration is essential.
One of the great jobs I have had in the last years since this
thing started has been to go around and see our friends all over the
world and assure them that we were not going to destroy our intelligence
capability and that we were not going to give away the secrets that
they had entrusted to us and which were fundamentally not American
secrets. They belonged to other powers. And we ]-Lave kept to that.
We have never betrayed them and they have stood steadfastly by our
side. In many areas where we have been prevented from doing
something, they have stepped in and done it because they know from
past experience -- the continental Europeans who have been occupied,
the British who lived on that island surrounded from Norway to the
Spanish border by enemies -- what is at':stake. We are a young people.
We are at the beginning of our career and we have achieved great things,
but we live in a world that as a people we have not known before. The
world is no longer far away. The world is on top of us. You cannot
run away from history because history follows you.
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In the period immediately preceding World War II we were
saying to the British and French, "Why don't you stop Hitler? "
But they thought it could be weathered through and they were led to
a great war that resulted in 25 million lives lost. It is always the
bystanders that want someone else to do something. We are
criticized by many people all over the world. I think we just have
to learn that it is perhaps in the world more important to be respected
than to be loved. We Americans have a passion to be loved by
everybody. It would be far better for us if we were respected and
perhaps not loved as much. Because we are not going to be loved.
The rich and the powerful are not loved. Our British colleagues who
have lived through a long period of this know this. When a nation is
rich-and powerful, its enemies are everywhere. The jealous and the
envious are everywhere seeking to bring it down in some way. The
most important thing is to be respected. If you are respected, people
will not deal lightly with you. I must say, I suppose, I am an old
reactionary, but I have a great deal of good to say for Lord Palmerston
who, when anybody trampled on his people, had a ship off the coast and
they were not trampled on much thereafter. The only real setback
was Bolivia. The Bolivians killed a British Consul and Queen Victoria
demanded that a warship be sent to punish the Bolivians. She was then
informed that Bolivia had no seacoast and was therefore not punishable.
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We face another problem. In addition to those I have mentioned,
we face the problem of international terrorism which is organized
today like a conspiracy all over the world. We see these insane blind
actions like the murder of our Ambassador in Khartoum, the murder
of our Ambassador in Beirut. We see these bombs being set off that
are obviously going to hit only innocent people in an attempt to create
an atmosphere of terror that will pressure the law abiding into giving
In this most technical of developed age we live in an atmosphere
of lawlessness which has no parallel since the dark ages. It is a
blind, mindless sort of thing. It is simply to create a state of fear so
great that the forces of law and order will supinely lie down or give in.
This international terrorism is not tightly connected but it is loosely
in touch with one another. We have Venezuelans killing people in
France and other people killing other people elsewhere. There is
some sort of loose organization between all this and the idea is to
cow the free nations of the world.
It is an odd thing that most of the New Leftists claim to be as
much against the Soviet Union as they are against, the United States.
They have killed American Ambassadors; they have bombed American
installations; they have done all sorts of things to us, but they have
never done them to the Soviet Union. They only talk against them,
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but they take action against the free nations. They highjack the
aircraft of the free nations. Who has ever heard of a Soviet airplane
being highjacked outside the Soviet Union. Yet, how many airplanes
of other nations have been highjacked? There is an old saying that
if it has a mane like a lion, paws like a lion, roars like a lion, there
is a fair chance that it may be a lion. If this action is always taken
against the free world and never against the other side, one cannot
help but wonder. After all, who benefits by it? Who benefits by the
destruction of the ideas of family, country, flag and religion in the
Western nations? Who benefits if we in the West lose our resolution
and resolve? You can't help but wonder.
So we have a very tough proposition and in this you in the Navy
League have a tremendous task to perform to keep alive the flame of
patriotism, the understanding of the American people that we must
have the forces to protect this society which with all its shortcomings
and all its defects has still given a larger number of our people more
of the good things of life than any other society man has been able to
devise. And so we have this task before us, all of us who live in the
20 percent of mankind who enjoy freedom, of keeping that torch
burning brightly. There is no alternative. If we drop it, no one will
pick it up. And who knows how long the night will last. Thank you
very much.
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