ADDRESS BY LIEUTENANT GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS BEFORE CHARLOTTESVILLE COMMITTEE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R002000110004-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 23
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2003
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: June 9, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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ADDRESS
by
LIEUTENANT GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS
before
CHARLOTTESVILLE COMMITTEE
COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
Charlottesville, Virginia
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Thank you very much General Porter, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am very happy to be here tonight to see General Porter again.
I think General Porter probably has influenced my life as an army
officer more than any other officer that I have ever known, by
what he was and by the way he did things. He is one of the truly
extraordinary army officers I have met in my life. He is one
of the truly extraordinary Americans I have met in my life. He
is probably as embarrassed as Mrs. Slaven was a minute ago.
Well I did want to talk to you, and I will tell you what
I. would like to do. I would like to talk to you about intelligence.
Basically, what it is, why we need it, how we get it, and some
of the accusations that have been hurdled around rather loosely
over the past year.
Intelligence is basically information concerning the activities,
intentions, or equipment of foreign nations that can in some way im-
pact upon our lives. Why do we need it? We need it for the same
reason that George Washington needed it, but with an added fillip of
which I will speak in a minute. How do we get it? We get it in
three basic ways which I will touch upon in a minute.
In the old days, the United States was considered by most nations
to be unreachable and therefore unbeatable. We were outside, in
a sense, the mainstream of modern history until_a relatively recent
time.
In the past, very few people had large holdings of American cur-
rency. Today we have billions of petro and Eurodollars moving all
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over the world and being used and applied in ways that can affect
the livelihood of an American in Tampa or in Omaha. We must
know what is being done. We must know why these things are
being used, and in what way they are to be used, and we face
for the first time in our national history since the Revolution
another global power. This intelligence is not merely the col-
lection of facts. It is the assembly of facts, the analysis of
these facts in timely fashion. And this analysis, I think, is
one of the great contributions the United States has made to the
technique of intelligence. Many people say that another pro-
fession is the oldest profession. I always claim that intelligence
is the oldest profession, because before anybody could patronize
any other of the other professions they had to know where they
were. This required intelligence.
We have always in our American history had a slightly ambivalent
attitude toward i'ntelli'gence that has continued up to this day.
Now at the CIA we have a statue of Nathan Hale which was put there
over my protest. Not that I don't think Nathan Hale was a very brave
young man and that he made an immortal statement. My view was
that Nathan Hale was an intelligence agent who was caught on his
first mission, and he had all the evidence on him, which is not
what I feel we should be holding up to our young career trainees.
He was sent into Manhattan Island to find out where and when
the British were going to land. They were already there. And
before he went, in a breach of security, he told a friend of his
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that he was going behind the British lines as a spy. And the friend
looked at him and he said, "Nathan, how can you stoop so low as to
become a spy?" He evidently hadn't read his bible or he would have
known that spies were sent into the land of Canaan .20 centuries
before. But we have had this ambivalent attitude toward intelli-
gence, and we sometimes tend to think that we didn't do this sort
of thing in our history. But I will get to that in a minute.
Why do we need intelligence? Well, we face a situation today
in which we see the Soviet Union, a nation with a larger population
than ours, deploying five, possibly six, new systems of inter-
continental ballistic missiles, their third-generation systems --
each one of them carries greater weight and is more accurate than
the missile it replaces. We see the Soviet Union moving in the
last six or seven years from a coast guard type navy to a blue
water navy. We see the Soviet Air Force developing aircraft with
the capability against the United States. We see the Soviet Union
developing and upgrading all of its conventional forces around
the periphery of the Soviet Union, not just facing us but facing
China also. We see a tremendous increase in the support and the
logistics that are given to the Soviet units around the world. We
have recently before us Angola, as a clear indication that the
Soviet Union is not only capable but willing to project its power
10,000 miles from the Soviet Union. I cannot tell you what the
intentions of the Soviet leadership are, but I can tell you what
the capabilities are. And they have these capabilities that I
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have just described. Now it is the duty of the people who work
in intelligence to make the policymakers in our country aware.
After all a sound foreign policy has got to be based on good in-
telligence. If you do not know what the facts are, there is no
way you can prepare to face up to them, or to decide what policy
our country should adopt. And I would submit that the existence
of an effective American intelligence organization is one of the
greatest inhibitions in the world, against anyone attempting another
Pearl Harbor on us. After all we recovered from Pearl Harbor be-
cause we had time and distance. Could we recover from a nuclear
Pearl Harbor? And this is what I think everyone of us in intel-
ligence keeps before him constantly. He faces a threat of a mag-
nitude that this nation has not faced since Valley Forge. Whether
these forces that I speak of are actually to be deployed against
us or not is another question. But these forces exist. For the
first time in our national history, another power has the capa-
bility of inflicting grave or even mortal damage on the United
States. Germany , at the height of her power was a continental
power; apart from sending submarines off our coast, Germany
had no real capability to harm the United States. The Soviet
Union does. China will have that capability tomorrow. As I
see it, we in intelligence owe the American people four over-
riding answers. We owe our policymakers, whoever they may be,
the answer to four overriding questions.
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Five years from today, who will be in control of the Soviet
Union and what will their disposition be toward us and our allies?
What is there in Soviet research and development that will impact on
the lives of Americans tomorrow? And the same two questions for
China? In addition to that, we have a whole series of new things.
We have international terrorism. We have the possible prolifera-
tion of nuclear weapons. We have the whole immense field of
economic intelligence. In many countries, economic intelligence
are the real secrets. It is not the military secrets that are
the real secrets. What that country's economic and financial poli-
cies are going to be is one of the real secrets. And as I say,
the financial situations that exist today -- the possession by
other nations of vast amounts of American currency -?- is vitally
important to us in knowing what we are going to do.
We have come very late to the field of economic intelligence.
In the old days in the United States, economic intelligence used
to be regarded as the sort of by-product of the military capa-
bilities study. Today it is a science unto itself as it has been
in most other countries for many years.
How do we get this intelligence? Basically we get this in-
telligence in three ways. We collect it overtly, that is from the
newspapers, from public radio broadcasts, through our embassies,
through ordinary contacts by private citizens, through all of the
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ways that are perfectly open. And this provides us:, I would say,
with 50 percent of our intelligence. People do not realize that a
very high percentage of what goes into intelligence publications
comes from the very ordinary reporting of American embassies around
the world. They have a vast body of people, especially trained,
highly capable observers, and this comes in. This gives you as I
say, perhaps 50-60 percent of your total take of intelligence. Then
you have the vast technical and electronic systems, which collect
facts that were never available to you before, when working against a
closed society like the Soviet Union or China. In the early 1960s,
we had a tremendous debate about whether or not there was a missile
gap. Such a debate would be impossible today. We know what the
state of missiles is, theirs as against ours. And most important,
they know that we know.
For instance, we have had the Soviet military delegates at
some of the SALT talks take our people aside when we had been dis-
cussing what they had and say to us "Why are you telling our civilians
all these things? They are not supposed to know what we have got."
This is members of the Soviet delegations about other members of
the Soviet delegations. So they know that we know. And that in
itself is an inhibition against any attempt to surprise us.
We collect a very large amount through these technical systems.
And here again, the American inventive genius that has made us the
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great industrial nation that we are, that has taken us to the moon,
has been applied in the sense of enabling us to obtain from these
closed societies the secrets that they can obtain very often in
the United States by simply subscribing to a monthly magazine.
Then maybe you collect 30 percent of your intelligence like
that. And then you have a small additional amount that you must
get from the people. This is the so-called dirty tricks, clandestine,
spying, or anything else depending on the degree of opprobrium you
want to put on it. No satellite will look inside a man's head;
no electronic system can tell you what goes on in a man's brain;
it is only people who can tell you about people. You can find out
all about capabilities from the previous things that I have described.
But to find out what is in someone's mind, you need people. I
sometimes say that we carry around our neck the millstone of
James Bond. This is the part of intelligence that titillates every-
body and excites everybody and they think this is all we do. This
is a very small part of what we do, but very important. The easiest
intelligence is the one you get overtly. The medium intelligence
is the one you get with the technical systems. The really tough,
hard intelligence is the one you get through people., And it takes
a very special kind of people to do this; to collect this kind of
intelligence.
Seventy-six thousand people have passed through the Central
Intelligence Agency since it was founded. Why was it founded?
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It was founded because at the Pearl Harbor investigation it was
discovered that various parts of the US Government all had little
pieces of information which, had they been brought together in one
central place, perhaps couldn't have avoided Pearl Harbor but could
greatly have diminished the effects of it. And it was because since
there was no such central repository that, after the war, it was de-
cided to create the Central Intelligence Agency which came into
being in 1947. Hence, the name even, Central Intelligence Agency,
this was to be the central repository where these things were
brought in.
Now the Congress knew perfectly well when it created the
Central Intelligence Agency that it was creating the Central
Intelligence Agency to spy, to use the current crude word, the
opprobrious word. But that is not what the Congress said in the
Act. They said, "they will do such other things as the National
Security Council may direct," thereby leaving quite deliberately
vague what it was they wanted done.
The last charter under which we, in the Central Intelligence
Agency, were operating before the recent events was the Doolittle
Committee, which in the 50s investigated the Centrall Intelligence
Agency, the collection of intelligence generally, and came up with
the report that the United States faced a ruthless and determined
enemy who was determined to destroy us. And to survive we would
have to match their determination with ours and their ruthlessness
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with ours. Now one of the difficult things to do is to try and
judge what happened yesterday or the day before yesterday in the
light of today's morality. What would we say of the founding
fathers of our country who did not grant universal suffrage, even
at the same time when they said all men were created equal? You
cannot, without grave distortion, judge yesterday by standards of
today.
Now I get to these allegations about the Central Intelligence
Agency which you have heard a great deal about in recent years.
In fact, the other day I saw a cartoon that I thought was pretty
good. It showed a couple at the movies, and one leaned over to
the other and said, "This must be a real old movie, the CIA are
the good guys." We have had a deliberate and malicious attempt
to tell the American people that the real threat to their liberties
was the CIA, and the FBI, and the defense intelligence agencies.
And this is just nonsense, I can't tell you that there haven't
been abuses by these organizations, that there haven't been exercises
of bad judgments, that.we haven't had some nuts and kooks, to speak
alone for the Central Intelligence Agency. As I told you we have had
76,000 people go through there, and I submit that if you took our
record and compared it to any other community of 76:,000 people
over a period of 27 years in the United States that we would look
good, even if you put us alongside of. Health, Education, and Wel-
fare or Agriculture.
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As of tonight not one, with aTl the loose talk of criminality
and illegality and everything else, not one member of that organiza-
tion has been convicted of any crime against the freedoms of the
American people. Not one member of that organization has been
indicted by a grand jury anywhere in the United States for any
such crime. But as I said, I can't tell you that there haven't
been some things done, that I would have preferred not be done.
But you take a body of 76,000 troops in a community of 76,000
people, and look at their record over a couple of years and I
promise you that there would be a couple of murders, and a couple
of other crimes, and so forth, that we either haven't committed or
haven't been found out. And if we haven't been found out, all
that I can say is that Senator Church hasn't been doing as good a
job as we have been told he has been doing. We have had all of our
pockets emptied for the world to see in a striptease that has no
parallel in any democratic country in the world, not just the
United States. And we do not have a monopoly on democracy.
There are other democratic countries, and none of them has ever
been through this sort of thing.
I sometimes receive heads of friendly foreign services in my
office and they come in with a slightly glassy look, and I say,
"What is it?" They say, "When we turned off the road, I saw a
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sign and it said CIA. I've never heard of anybody putting road
signs to their secret intelligence service."
A head of a friendly foreign service told me this story. This
is a story against the Italians, but I really suspect it was against
us Americans. He said that at one point the Soviets recruited
a neopolitan spy in Naples. And they took him to Moscow, and they
trained him in short-wave communications, and microdots, secret
writing and invisible inks and everything else. Then they said,
"You go back to Naples and stay there and we will be getting in
touch with you in a couple of years, and tell you what we want you
to do." So three years later the guy from Moscow went to the address
in Naples. He looked at the door on the outside and Agnello was
the man's name. And he said, "Agnello, ground floor, right." So
he went in and pushed the bell and the man opened the door and he
said, "Mr. Agnello?" and he said "Yes." "I have come from Moscow."
The man looked at him and said "There is a mistake. I am Agnello
the tailor; Agnello the spy is on the third floor."
Sometimes, we have a national vision of ourselves that does not
correspond to historical reality. You get this business of all
this spying and dirty-handed stuff is all right for those dirty old
British, Russians, French, and Germans, but we pure, noble, fine,'
upstanding Americans, we don't do that sort of thing.
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In this bicentennial year, I have been doing some research on
the founding fathers and what they were up to. And you would be
amazed at what the founding fathers were up to.
Let me take the case of George Washington. I would say that
George Washington was probably one of the greatest readers of
other people's mail in American history. He kept sending messages
saying,"Intercept his letters and lay them before me." He also
organized three separate attempts to kidnap Benedict Arnold; all
of which were intelligence failures. He also attempted to kidnap
a 17 year-old midshipman'of the royal navy in New York City in
1781. This midshipman happened to be Prince William who was the
fourth son of George the Third. In fact, there were two people
killed in the attempt to kidnap the Prince. I regret to tell you
that this too was an intelligence failure. There were no post-
mortems of that intelligence failure, however.
Fifty years later the American minister to the Court of
St. James was telling King William the Fourth about this and he
said, "But your Majesty, in your case, General Washington sent
word that you would be treated with great kindness and deference,
unlike Benedict Arnold, and the King said, "Well, I am damn glad
he didn't get a chance to demonstrate it to me." Then we move on
to Benjamin Franklin. Now Benjamin Franklin for three years before
the Revolution when we were all loyal subjects of George III, was
the Assistant Postmaster of British North America. And you know
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what he was doing. He was opening all that mail like crazy. And the
British caught him and they took him to London and they tried him
before the Privy Council and they found him guilty. But before
they could sentence him, he skipped off to France where he set up the
American Commissioners' Office to try to conduct the covert operation
to get the French into the war on our side, in which he was success-
ful. While there, he designed and had the French build him a printing
press. And what was printed on this printing press -- forged British
currency, forged British passports, and most of all, fabricated
atrocity stories for insertion into the British press. However,
he was not totally successful. An ancestor of Anthony Eden was
heading up British intelligence in Paris in those days and he did
a rather successful job against the American Commissioners' Office.
As a matter of fact, 42 hours after Louis XVI's foreign minister
told the 3 American commissioners, and only the 3 American commissioners,
that France was coming into the war on the side of the Revolution,
that information was in the hands of the British government in
London. Now if you took a horse in Paris and rode it at full speed
to the Channel and took a boat and rode a horse from the British coast
to London, it'd take about 42 hours. So the question arises,-?'Who,"
and I regret to tell you there is no answer as to whom.
Not long ago, I had dinner with Anthony Eden, now Lord Avon,
in Florida and he was telling me what a hard time his ancestor,
Robert Eden, Royal Governor of Maryland, had during the Revolution
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because the Americans thought he was a British Tory and the British
thought he was an American spy. And I said, "Yes, Lord Avon, but
in the meantime his brother William was successfully penetrating
the American Commissioners' Office in Paris." He looked at me
rather sharply and he said "Oh, you know about that do you?"
The only thing I will not tell you is that, well, I probably
will, is where these spies during the Revolution were trained. They
were trained not far from here at a fort, which I don't often mention,
the name of the fort was Fort Loony,.which was an unfortunate name.
However, we had very good intelligence and there was a tough time
because it was really in a sense a civil war and the other side
spoke the same language and so forth. John Jay who was made a
chief justice of the US, ran a thing for the Continental Congress
called the Committee of Secret Correspondence. And, one day
the Committee of Secret Correspondence was asked by the Congress to
lay before it the names of its agents and the amounts paid to them.
And John Jay's reply was (and he got away with it),"Experience has
shown that the Congress consists of too many people to keep this
kind of secret and that such revelations have generally been fatal,
not merely to the projects, but to some of the people involved."
Now we have no quarrel with Congressional oversight, providing
it is done in a responsible and discrete fashion. I might add
that if we have Congressional oversight we are going to be the only
democratic country in the world in which the intelligence service
is a branch of the Executive which is responsible to the Congress.
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However, we've organized it that way and we, in intelligence, have
no difficulty in living with any oversight committee. But as of
right now, if we, at the direction of the President., undertake a
covert action program, we have to report it to 7 committees of
the House and Senate constituting more than 50 percent of the
total membership of Congress. We have not proposed a single co-
vert operation since the law went into effect requiring us to report
them, which has not leaked, not one. This kind of leaking has been
used as grist for the propaganda mill of the enemies of the United
States. Other countries do this but they don't feel the same urge
to confess that we do. One of my foreign friends said the other day,
"I marvel that all of you Americans aren't Catholic." I said,
"Why, what has that got to do with it?" "Well," he said, "Remember
it's the only religion that offers confession for everybody." "But,"
he said, "I suppose it's the fact that it is private in a small
wooden box that's the real drawback." They marvel at some of the
things that we do, supposedly. We say, oh, but we're different, and
so forth and so on. And they said, "yes, indeed you are different;
the rest of us could not operate this way."
We would have absolutely no difficulty with the proper reasona-
ble congressional oversight. As I told you, yes, there have been
abuses. Let me go into some of these abuses which have been bandied
around so loosely. First is the assassination story. Well, the
net result of an exhaustive investigation of assassinations by
both the House and Senate committees is that nobody was assassinated.
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Yes, there was a lot of loose talk about it, but nobody was assassi-
nated. Now we had a bunch of Congressmen out the other day at CIA
and the question of assassination came up and somebody said, "Well,
but if you could have assassinated Adolf Hitler in '43 or '44, you
would have probably been the first joint recipient of the Congressional
Medal of Honor and the Victoria Cross." And one of the very young,
very liberal Congressmen said, "But think, if you could have gotten
him in '35 or '36 how many lives you would have saved." And I said,
"Congressmen, do I understand that you are advocating assassination
in peacetime?" He said, "Oh no, but that's different." My own view
of assassination is that I am against it for at least three good
reasons -- it's against the law of God, it's against the law of man,
and it doesn't work -- you just get another fanatic worse than the
first one. But, at the time and to put this into perspective
and this is all I am trying to do; I'm not trying to excuse the
things that were done, I am trying to put them into perspective'.
At the time that this loose talk about assassinating was going.on,
Castro specifically, Fidel Castro was shooting people every day
in front of the television cameras in the national stadium in Havana.
Two presidents of the US, one Republican and one Democratic, had
approved an expedition to land in Cuba by force of arms and I'm
sure that they could not have believed that Fidel Castro was going
to receive us with rose petals, or palm branches, and that there
were going to be people killed. I have no documentary evidence
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to prove it, but I am positive that the people who were talking
about this sort of thing (it was never carried into reality)
believed that they were doing it on the authority of higher
authority. Whether they were or not, I have no evidence, but
I am convinced the way I know that they believed that they did;
net result: nobody was assassinated. But the propaganda use of
this that was made, the Americans are assassinating people and
everything, was tremendous against us. Let's take the next one.
The drugs. Why were we experimenting with drugs? We saw a man
like Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary who had resisted every pressure
the Nazis could bring to bear on him suddenly appear before the
newsreel cameras hollow-eyed to confess to every crime
in the book. We thought this was done with drugs. We thought they
might be used upon our diplomats or upon our military. We had
to find out how they worked and so forth. Obviously the man who
gave the LSD to the man without his knowledge was an imbecile.
But this is why we were investigating this sort of thing. Not just
the CIA and the armed forces, the National Institutes of Health
was conducting the same kind of research. Many universities
were conducting the same kind of research and at that time nobody
felt it was anything particularly monstrous. I might add that the
US renounced the use of poison gas between the two wars, but that
did not prevent the US from making many millions of poison gas
shells for use for retaliation if they were used against us. Every
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nation has contingency plans. Basically what a lot of people
have done is reached into our files and taken out contingency
plans and said, "Ah ha, this is what you were going to do." Toxins
were never used. The dart gun which you saw brandished so photogeni-
cally for the television cameras and everything else, was admittedly
never used. Dart guns like this and similar weapons were used by
the Soviets in the late 50s to kill five or six people in West
Germany. Here again, the problem, this may be used against us,
how does it work, how do we experiment to defend ourselves
against it, but the dart gun was never used. Then you had the
break-ins. Oh, the break-ins! Well, who were these break-ins
and how many of them were there? You have the impression that no
American was safe in his house, that the CIA was breaking into
peoples' houses all over the US. The Director of the Central In-
telligence Agency is the only person in the USA who is charged
by the law with the protection of his sources and methods. And
if you wanted to be loose that would authorize him to do almost
anything. In every case these break-ins were at the homes of
CIA people who were suspected of taking documents home with them.
OK, it isn't legal in the eyes of what we do now, but in the sense
of emergency and the sense of commitment to stop communism that the
US felt, and remember, most of the things we are talking about occurred
15-30 years ago. We're not talking about the recent past of most
of these things. The mail opening. You get the impression that
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the CIA was reading everybody's mail. The only letters that were
opened were letters going to or coming from the Soviet Union or
China. You read about that terrible case of Senator Church's
letter to his mother that was opened. Well, Senator Church posted
that letter in Moscow, and anybody could write that as a return
address on the envelope. No letters were opened that were not
going to or coming from the Soviet Union or China and therefore
no letters were opened by us that had not already been, or
were not about to be opened by the Chinese or the Soviets since
they censor all their international correspondence. Frankly it
is against the law and we cannot do it, but as an American soldier, I
feel much more embarrassed about reading my enlisted mens' mail
during the war than I do about something like this, where we got
many important leads that led us to people who were. doing
things against the US. OK, it's not in the morality of today,
but we opened letters during all our periods of wartime. Now
we have been told that it's not to be done and we are not
doing it. One of the things that concerns me is that our
generation of leadership has been pilloried for its, sins of com-
mission. What I am concerned of is that 10-15 years from today our
successors will not be pilloried for their sins of omission. You
mean we weren't watching this, you mean we weren't taking care of
that, you mean you weren't doing this. Let me go on with these things.
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Telephone taps. The impression here again has been spread around
widely that the CIA was listening to everybody's telephone calls.
Exactly how many of these telephone taps were there, and, here
again, these were mostly on our own people. And we are charged
with the security of our own people by law. There were 32
telephone taps in 27 years. That's 1 and 1/5 telephone taps
a year. But the American people have been given the impression
that everybody was being listened to and this is just not simply
true. This is part of this impression to convey to the American
people that the Soviets are not a threat to us, we have nothing
to fear from the outside, the real threat to our freedom is the
CIA and the FBI. Well, let me go to that. Gestapo secret police.
The CIA has never had authority to arrest anybody. How do you
become a secret police when you can't arrest anybody? I don't
know, but these are some of the things that have been alleged
against us. I'm not trying to justify any. We recognize we
have been restricted against doing them and so forth. But
what the American people want done in this field has varied
greatly with the degree of threat they have felt. If they
feel very threatened they want a great deal done in this area;
if they don't feel very threatened, they don't want; anything
done in this area. Then you get this thing of the CIA has a
private foreign policy of its own and it goes around overthrowing
foreign governments and everything else. The CIA isn't doing
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anything of the sort. The CIA supports the people it is told to
support and it doesn't support the people it is told not to sup-
port by the properly constituted authority of the US. Why do we
have covert action? Every nation in history has had covert action.
Only the US has seen fit to take it apart in a sort, of public dis-
memberment. How does anybody think we got Texas or California?
How does anybody think we got Hawaii? By spontaneous local up-
rising. The French had 17,000 men in North America before France
entered the war against Great Britain. If you put that on a
modern scale it would be the equivalent of having 250,000 men.
The real point of issue is, should the US have anything between
the diplomatic protest and landing American troops. Should we
have any means of quietly assisting our friends when the other
side is very less quietly assisting theirs. You've heard about
the CIA putting $10,000,000 into Chile. In that same period of
time, the Soviet Union and its allies provided $450 million to the
Allende government in one'form or another. You've heard about the
CIA overthrowing the Chilean government. Quite clearly in the
investigations, it came out that the CIA had given help to demo-
cratic parties to democratic newspapers but that the CIA had had
no contact whatsoever with General Pinochet and his military group
who overthrew Salvador Allende. We had had no contact whatsoever
with this group. This was gone into in great detail by the various
investigating committees and they ascertained that this was a fact.
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You know that we Americans sometimes tend to flagellate ourselves.
Something terrible happens in Nepal and immediately we turn in
self-consciously and say what have we done wrong in Nepal? One of
the tendencies of our character is to flagellate ourselves in
this way. I submit that what the United States has done this
century has no parallel with history. We are the only nation in
history ever to finance our competitors back into competition.
We won a number of great wars this century, we have not taken one
piece of territory from anybody, we have not required anybody to
become an American citizen who did not want to become one, and no
where in history has any victor ever reached out and helped up
the vanquished to the degree that we have. I think we have nothing
to be ashamed of in this area. We have lifted these people up,
we have raised their aspirations, we have helped them to move for-
ward in many fields. But as we move into the last quarter of this
century, I think the real issue before the American people is not:
were there, as we readily acknowledge, a number of aberations and
uses of bad judgments in some fields of intelligence; But really,
the issue is this: will the United States in this 'last quarter of
this century, have eyes to see and the ears to hear;, or will we
stumble forward blindly until the day we have to choose between
nuclear blackmail and abject capitulation. And we cannot do this,
for if we fall, there is no one else to pick up the torch.
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