Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

Remarks at Ceremony Marking the Issuance of the President Magsaysay Champion of Liberty Stamp.

August 30, 1957

My Friends:

It is indeed a very great and distinct privilege to join so many distinguished guests in honoring a true champion of liberty. I want especially to mention the presence here of representatives of other governments, because by your presence you acknowledge your devotion to the same concept that you have heard praised in the case of President Magsaysay. Yourselves, your governments and your countries stand also ready to sacrifice and to give for this great concept.

As I am an added starter on the program, I am not expected to make a speech, but with your permission I advert for one moment to one part of Ambassador Romulo's statement. Incidentally, he is a gentleman who has been my good friend for more than twenty-two years--since I first served in the Philippines.

He said Magsaysay did not sustain, support and worship freedom merely in words, however eloquent. He did it in flaming action--in the words of Carlos Romulo. He understood that freedom is not possible to sustain, unless there is some economic base--some way of allowing a man to gain his self-respect through earning his own living. He had behind him a long history of Spanish occupation in the Philippines and he knew how the grandees of that time had suppressed and enslaved, in truth, the common people of the Philippines. Traces of it were still alive when Magsaysay came along. He realized that the town needed more rice, that liberty was impossible to sustain unless you made it possible for the people to grow that rice--to have a better living--to gain some kind of education--to get doctors into the barrios and out into the hinterland where none had ever penetrated before.

For these things he worked, I submit, not only to my fellow countrymen here today, but to all of the people representative of other countries, if we are really to do our full part in combating communism, we must as a unit stand not only ready as Magsaysay did to bare his breast to the bayonet, if it comes to that, but to work day by day for the betterment--the spiritual, moral, intellectual and material betterment--of the people who live under freedom, so that not only may they venerate it, but they can support it.

This Magsaysay did, and in this I believe is his true greatness, the kind of greatness that will be remembered long after any words we can speak here will have been forgotten.

Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke in the Postmaster General's Office. The Vice President, the Secretary of State, Ambassador Romulo, and the Postmaster General also spoke on this occasion.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks at Ceremony Marking the Issuance of the President Magsaysay Champion of Liberty Stamp. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/233503

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