Remarks to the National Council of the League of Women Voters.

Ladies of the National Council:

When you ask for comments on foreign policy and the operation of foreign policy, you in effect ask for a sort of marathon performance that can go on here for much longer than the time you have to spare, I am sure.

First of all, I would earnestly want to commend you for your interest in this problem. The foreign problem overshadows everything else that we have as an argument at home or as what we would call one of our domestic problems. It either causes that problem or certainly colors it. Our defensive arrangements, in all of their different aspects, account for about sixty-three percent of our budget. So all of the economies that we would like to accomplish in our tax take and in our expenditures finally come back, if we are going to make them in very large amounts, to affect this foreign policy problem that we have.

Now there are a few things that I think we should understand. A foreign policy is not difficult to state. We are for peace, first, last and always, for very simple reasons. We know that it is only in a peaceful atmosphere, a peace with justice, one in which we can be confident, that America can prosper as we have known prosperity in the past. It is the only way that our people can, in the long run, be freed of great burdens and devote their substance to the constructive purposes that we have--in schools and hospitals and helping the development of our people in every way.

We seek that peace from a position of strength. As long as there is abroad in the world a predatory force, seeking to destroy our form of government, we are going to remain strong. It is only prudence, and as a matter of fact, it is the only way to be successful. Because when you are talking to people that respect only force, you must have the ability to use force. But we recognize those defensive arrangements as negative and sterile themselves. And again, we want to get rid of that burden.

Now, as we pursue peace, there was organized some years ago the United Nations. The United Nations is not always effective, of course, in any particular instance, because of circumstances. But it does represent, as we see it, the greatest hope that the world has for establishing finally a forum in which differing viewpoints will be brought and argued and where arrangements may be made that will be necessary, if we finally come to the point that all of us realize we must live peacefully. It can help, therefore, in bringing about peace and much more so in maintaining peace with justice, after we have some kind of workable arrangement that will allow us to reduce armaments.

Now, when a specific problem comes up, for example, the Suez argument of last fall, no one would claim that the United Nations is necessarily the most effective instrument for deciding the particular dispute. But if any nation such as ours, powerful as it is, ignores the United Nations in trying to solve these disputes, what is going to happen to this greatest hope of all mankind for peace?

You must respect it. You must work through it so far as it is possible. But the Charter itself of the United Nations does not preclude the attempt to establish, preserve or restore peace through individual methods. As a matter of fact, the Charter says in case of dispute the first efforts should be made between the contending countries themselves. You can do it also by regional and other organized efforts that do not involve the United Nations, but the United Nations finally--and if the United Nations is ignored, I think we do it to our future peril.

Another point that I think is important for all of us to remember: the strongest force abroad in the world today, particularly among those peoples that we call the more underdeveloped peoples, is the spirit of nationalism. This spirit is stronger than communism in these areas, and fortunately it is stronger than the spirit of any communism in some of them. What I mean by that is this: this desire to be free, to say "I am a citizen" of this country or that country, to say "we are independent"--this is a spirit that has been growing with tremendous leaps and bounds ever since the famous pronouncement of President Wilson of the right of self-determination of small peoples. Today it is a terrific force in the world.

Now this means this: they are going to remain independent, or they believe they are going to remain independent, by whatever means they have to use.

One of the things necessary to remain independent politically is to have an economic base on which that independence can be supported. Their determination to remain independent is so strong that they will get that economic help, that economic investment money, from somebody. And if we don't supply it or do our share of the supplying from the free world basis, the free world standpoint, others will.

Now, we know that they will not long remain independent if they go somewhere else. But they don't.

It is astonishing how frequently we are compared, in the minds of a citizen of one of these countries we call underdeveloped, to Russia in terms of: well, which is the stronger and which is correct, which is trying to take us over, who is trying to be truculent, who is trying to start the war.

We know we are peaceful. We know we are a country that is ruled by ourselves. Government only with the consent of the governed does not start wars, because it is the people that have to fight them that make the decision.

This is not true in dictatorships, but the people of other countries don't understand this. I have been asked by people very high up in some of these governments: why do I not do so and so, why do I not suppress a certain magazine, why do I not do this, that or the other thing? My explanations are often, although I think very convincing--to them they seemingly mean nothing!

A man said to me, "If you were our friend, you would do so and so." They don't understand. Therefore, they do not understand that our form of government is essentially one that is stable in preserving peace, and that it is dictatorships that can undertake the reckless adventure of war.

Now, all of these problems are the kind of things that have to be considered when we are talking about the conflicting considerations of the safety of our country and our desire to keep more of our own money at home so we can spend it for what we please and not give it to the government to spend. And with this last desire, I must say I am earnestly in sympathy and I would very much like to go out of this office some day with another even bigger tax cut than we were able to put over in 1954.

The other day, I was riding in an airplane and I had some friends with me. And they began to criticize our efforts in the foreign field and say they thought we could save a lot of money there. Let us remember, foreign aid doesn't have any pressure group in any Congressman's District. It is something that has to depend on the intelligence of the American people and not on selfish interest.

And they said, "You say you are trying to be economical and you are trying to save money, yet you are spending this money over here, when you won't even give a Texas drought-stricken man so much oil meal and this and that and the other thing."

"Well," I said, "this is what I am going to try to explain in simple terms. We are riding in this airplane and let's assume we own it, but we have been looking at the operational costs and we decide we are spending too much money on it. Now we are going to save some money.

"Well, we find we have two nice stewardesses on this plane. We figure that one can do. All right, one stewardess fired.

"Well, we agree we won't fly it over such long trips so we don't need so much fuel capacity, and we can save money and carry a better payload by getting rid of a tank. We won't fly it in bad weather so we will get rid of an expert navigator and make the co-pilot double up. And we will cut down on the furniture. We will get rid of the carpets, and so on here.

"These are all the services that we have demanded up to date, but now that we find out how much it costs, we are ready to do without these services, but we are still dissatisfied with what we have saved."

So one bright fellow speaks up and says: "Well, let's just cut out one of the engines, we won't use so much gas." Now you are talking about foreign aid. Foreign aid is one of the engines that keeps this ship of ours afloat in the world and going on a steady course. So the rest of the passengers say: "Well, baloney--you take away that engine, then we lose one when we are out over the sea, and we have probably lost our reserves and we are down. We are now in an emergency without the preparation to meet it."

Foreign aid, my friends, is something that is being conducted to keep the United States secure and strong. It is preventing the isolation of the United States as a prosperous, rich, powerful country. There would be isolation if the United States refused to participate in the realization by underdeveloped countries of their proper ambitions for national independence and for the economic base that will support that individual independence. That's all there is to it.

In my opinion, you can't take freedom and allow freedom finally to be pushed back to the shores of the United States and maintain it in the United States. It can't be done. There's too much interdependence in the world.

Now I do not for one instant--this is getting to be a long speech, too, isn't it?--I do not for one instant maintain that every dollar put into this is wisely spent. I know there have been articles published showing where in Iran or somewhere else there were stores of supplies bought for a people and they found out later that they bought gang plows for people that didn't even yet know how to use a hoe, or something like that. Of course there have been mistakes. There have been human people doing this. And sometimes they are trying to do it in a great hurry, or they were obsessed with the idea that money could buy friends and money could keep friends. Well, that is all untrue.

We can, though, with our attitude and with some investment, help these people. It is dangerous to make too close an analogy between our own experience and that of some of these countries. You must remember, when we were developing and money was being invested in our country from abroad, on a loan basis properly, we had great natural resources. Those loans practically constituted a mortgage on all those great resources. We were very low in population. We have been growing up to our resources in population ever since. We have done it under conditions that have produced the greatest prosperity any nation has known.

These other countries are already far over and beyond their capacity, in some instances, in population--without a cent. How do you collect capital in those countries to do the job that needs to be done, to produce roads, railroads, communications--the things that allow people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? That is what we are trying to get people to do because we believe in peace. That's all.

We believe in peace. And we believe that the more these people rule themselves, the more the decision for world action lies in the hands of the people who have to fight wars, there will be fewer wars. That's what we believe.

Now I come back to my first thought, and that is how delighted I am to see you people interested in these things. Because unless the United States understands these simple truths which I have just so roughly touched upon this morning--unless they understand them, ready to push them through--I say the future doesn't look nearly as bright as it should.

If the United States does understand them, then the sacrifice of money is not going to sound in their ears like the sacrifice of our sons on the battlefield. That is what we are trying to prevent.

So let's make all the savings we can in the carpets and the chairs and the extra personnel and all the rest of the things that we have been demanding, wherever we think it is safe and just and fair among ourselves to do it. But let's not throw away the engines of this ship of state.

Thank you very much.