Statement About the Election Campaign and National Security

IT HAS been suggested by some that I ought to take off from the White House and campaign virtually full time between now and election day.

I want to win this election. I particularly want to win California. I would welcome the opportunity to take the case for this Administration directly to the American people. But my first responsibility is to do my job as President of the United States. I intend to meet that responsibility. I shall campaign only when I conclude it will not interfere with doing the job the people elected me to do.

Vice President Agnew made the right decision when he left the campaign to come back to Washington yesterday so that he could be ready, if necessary, to break a tie on a critically important foreign policy vote.

Proposals that would put the United States in the position of having the second strongest Navy, the second strongest Air Force, the second strongest Army in the world would massively increase the danger of aggression around the world. It would be a move toward war, not a move toward peace.

If we reduce our Army, Navy, and Air Force to the point that the only option open to us, when a friend or ally of the United States is threatened, is to launch a nuclear war and bring massive nuclear attack on the United States, our commitments to small nations whose survival did not directly affect the security of the United States would not be worth the paper they were written on.

The policy of massive nuclear retaliation during the Eisenhower years, when we had a 15- to 20-to-1 superiority over the Soviet Union, was a credible policy. A policy which would leave the United States with only a nuclear option at a time when the Soviet Union and the United States are approximately equal in their nuclear capability would have no credibility whatever where the survival of small nations was involved.