October 7, 1952
I THANK you very much for that wonderful welcome, and I appreciate that formal reception by the military band over there. You did a good job of it. This is a beautiful place. It has a worldwide reputation as a resort, and I wish I could stop here and take a vacation. But as you may have heard, I am busy. I am out here in one of my capacities as leader of my party, campaigning for a Democratic victory in the election this fall.
You have some fine Democrats as candidates in Colorado. There is John Marsalis who is running for Congress in this district. He made a good Congressman when he was there; and it is my opinion that you ought to send him back.
I am very fond of Bill Metzger, who is running for Governor. I have known him a long time. I am sure they will make you good, honest public servants. And I am highly impressed with all the rest of your candidates. But I don't know them so well as I do the two I have just mentioned.
This year, the Democratic Party has two of the best candidates for President and Vice President that it has ever had; that is, Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman.
I want to ask you to vote for Adlai Stevenson for President. He is extraordinarily well qualified for that great and difficult job. He is qualified by experience, as a chief executive of one of our great States, and a man who has held important posts in our national defense and our foreign policy. He is also qualified by character. He is humble and courageous and honest--honest with himself and honest with all others.
Those are very precious qualities in the Presidency. In the next 4 years, our President may have to face some of the most serious decisions in history. We need a man in that job on whose character we can completely rely.
Remember that the President has the awful responsibility of deciding whether or not to use the atom bomb. And if that question is presented in the next few years--and I hope it never will be--our President's decision on it may well determine the future of our lives and our civilizations. Let me tell you, too, this is a decision that a President has to make for himself--he can't pass the buck. So we need, more than ever, a President who can stand up against political pressure when he has to make tough decisions.
I also want to tell you, as I have told other groups in the last few days, some of the reasons why you should not vote for the Republican candidate for President.
Now, I know a lot of people are wondering why I am so strongly opposed to the Republican candidate.
They ask, "Didn't you yourself once think he was qualified to be President?" That is true. I did. So I think these people are entitled to know the reasons for the campaign I am making. Because this is a matter that goes beyond mere partisan politics.
I knew the Republican candidate well. He was our commander in Europe when I first became President. I later made him Chief of Staff of the Army, and then sent him to Europe to command the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty countries. He did a good job in both capacities. The Republican candidate is a great general. But I made a serious mistake when I thought he had the qualities needed for the highest office in the country.
I realized, of course, that he was totally unfamiliar with politics. I knew he would have trouble in political life, as all military men do, separating the wheat from the chaff, and the political phonies from the men who are really working for the good of the country. But I thought he would always stand up for the things he believed in--for the things his whole career has been dedicated to achieving.
This is not what I see when I look at his campaign. The general whose words I read, whose speeches I hear, is not the general I once knew. Something, my friends, has happened to him.
And I am deeply disturbed by this change.
What I thought were his deep convictions, turn out not to be convictions at all. He has betrayed the more liberal and responsible wing of the Republican Party which supported him for the nomination in the July convention. He has betrayed every principle about our foreign policy and our national defense that I thought he believed in.
What I feel has been well expressed by the student newspaper at Columbia University, the university of which he is president.
In a recent article, that newspaper said, referring to the "great crusade" that the Republican candidate proclaimed at the convention in Chicago, and I quote: "The great crusade, passing through the stage of great compromise, must now be called the great disenchantment."
The newspaper went on to say that the Republican candidate "has compromised every principle to the dictates of party strategy."
And that hits the nail on the head. It has been a sad experience for me. I have gone through a disenchantment, too, in learning that a man I admired can change his convictions so quickly and so easily.
He has openly compromised his principles on foreign policy.
Before the Chicago convention, everybody thought the General had real convictions on foreign policy. That was the big issue, or so it appeared, between the people who supported him at Chicago and the people who supported Senator Taft.
When he talked the other day in Michigan, the home State of the great Senator Vandenberg--who was a Republican of deep and honest convictions--the General sounded almost like Vandenberg. He spoke glowingly of the bipartisan cooperation that had produced what he called "foreign policy achievements" of the past few years. Among these achievements, he mentioned specifically the program of aid that saved Greece and Turkey from communism, and the Marshall plan of aid to the other free countries of Europe.
But the very next day down in Illinois, which is the home territory of the isolationist Chicago Tribune and the isolationist Senator Dirksen--in Illinois, he had no trouble at all talking like an isolationist. He sneered at the same policies of aid to Greece and Turkey, and of aid to Western Europe, which he had praised as "achievements" the day before. He even attacked the Berlin airlift.
And this is not the only time he has attacked the policies he worked so long to build up for our defense and the defense of the free world.
The Republicans who brought him back from Paris and supported him at Chicago thought he had that same feeling that he had always had. And, I thought, because they believed in our policies of international cooperation among the free peoples and mutual aid against communism, that they knew what they were doing. But almost immediately after his nomination they saw him surround himself with men he had attacked as isolationists before Chicago. They now see him condemning our policies of international cooperation which they supported. And many of them are not actively working for him any longer.
He has betrayed his principles and his followers not only on foreign policy but on the defense of the United States. He is saying things now that are quite the opposite of what he appeared to stand for in the past.
He has charged us with cutting our military budgets too low in the postwar period, and perhaps we did. Yet he himself testified before Congress that my decision, prior to Korea, to hold the 1951 budget down was "a very wise decision." Those are his words.
In Illinois, he talked as if he favored ending the draft. And he opposed universal military training, which he used to support. He appeared before my Commission on Universal Military Training and convinced every man on that Commission that they ought to be for it, and half of them were against it when he started to talk.
When he commanded the North Atlantic Treaty troops in Europe, I had every reason to believe he was convinced of the need for a strong national defense and for foreign aid. Yet, he has talked of fantastic budget cuts of up to $40 billion, and he has singled out national defense and foreign aid as the places where he will make the cuts.
When I branded as preposterous his statement that taxes could be cut like that, he changed his position again. Instead of a budget cut of $40 billion or $20 billion in a couple of years, he now promises a budget cut of $20 billion 4 years from now. It seems that he will give you any figure that anybody puts in his mouth, just so long as it sounds like it will bring in votes.
He has tried to win votes by playing upon the casualties and sacrifices in Korea. He talks about the blunders that led up to Korea. Yet, as Army Chief of Staff, he joined in the decision to pull our troops out of Korea in the first place. He gave me that advice himself, with his own mouth.
He has stated that our decision to help the South Koreans was inescapable.
He has said that the best check for sustaining world peace was to take a firm stand in South Korea.
In June of this year, he stated that he did not believe there was any clear-cut answer to the situation in Korea. Today, he implies that if he is elected he can quickly solve it.
In Illinois, a few days ago, he came out with the idea that we ought to train South Koreans to take a greater part in the struggle. He talked as if the Government had never thought of this, or done anything about it. But as a general he knows that we have trained large numbers of Koreans; that the Korean battle casualties outnumber our own; and that we are training new South Korean armies as fast as the limitation of Korean officers permits. He knows that, far from being a novel idea, or a bright solution, the training and equipping of South Korean forces has long been a major part of our efforts there.
He has tried to win votes by asserting that the standard of living in this country has not risen since 1950 because of the taxes we pay. But he himself was a strong supporter of the defense program. And he knows, as everyone else knows, that this program means higher taxes, and holding down the output of civilian goods, if we are not to go insolvent or to have runaway inflation.
By common consent, including the consent of both parties in the Congress, we are giving up some of our "butter" for "guns" for a short period to meet the national emergency. In every public statement of the General's that I know of, before he became a candidate, he supported that program. And yet, he tries now to make political capital out of the taxes that are a part of it-with the deceitful implication that it would have been possible to build $130 billion worth of defense goods without taxes, and without restraint on the production of such things as automobiles and household appliances.
Finally, the Republican candidate has betrayed his principles, by publicly endorsing every Republican candidate in the country, regardless of whether that man is the blackest of reactionaries, a diehard isolationist, or even a moral scoundrel.
Now don't let anybody tell you that every presidential candidate has to do that--that it's just a part of politics. Franklin Roosevelt did not endorse every Democrat, and neither did Harry Truman. Governor Dewey in 1948 did not endorse Republicans who had disgraced the Republican label. But the Republican candidate this year did, with the same betrayal of principle he has shown throughout his campaign.
And now, my friends, I come to the thing that disturbs me most deeply of all. If there is any one man to whom the Republican candidate owes a great debt of loyalty and gratitude, that man is Gen. George Catlett Marshall. It was General Marshall who promoted him to a position of responsibility in the War Department General Staff. It was General Marshall who made him our commander in the European Theater. It was General Marshall, according to the candidate's own book, who made the decision to give him command of the invasion of Europe--a command that Marshall could himself have had, if he wanted to take it.
General Marshall is the finest example of a patriotic American. He was the organizer of our Army, the architect of victory in World War II, a self-sacrificing, tireless public official. He needs no praise from me. He is the standard by which we judge the patriotism and loyalty of other men.
This great man has been the subject of an infamous attack by two Republican isolationist Senators. Acting from purely partisan motives, these two moral pigmies have called this great American a "living lie," a "front for traitors" and the center of an infamous conspiracy. Nothing more contemptible has ever occurred in the long history of human spite and envy. It is unspeakable, and the authors of these slanders are unworthy of the company of decent men and women.
Now what has the Republican candidate done about this outrage? Has he condemned these two slanderers? Has he denounced their lies about his great friend and benefactor ?
I'll tell you what he has done. He has endorsed them both for reelection to the Senate. One he has embraced publicly. The other he has humbly thanked for riding on his campaign train. Never a word of criticism--or even distaste. And why? Because he thinks these two unprincipled men will bring him votes in November.
Now what do you think of a man who deserts his best friend when he is unjustly attacked ? What do any of us say about a fellow who joins hands with those who have tried to stab an honored chief, a friend and a benefactor, in the back ?
It is no different in politics. The same standards of morality and decency apply there as elsewhere in life.
But the candidate has gone even further. With respect to one of these Senators, he has said that he has the same objectives, but he differs as to methods.
Now methods are important. Whether the objective is to stop communism or to be elected President, methods are the most important thing of all. We do not, we never will, subscribe to the doctrine that the end justifies the means.
The Communists and the fascists say that the end justifies the means. They are out to destroy freedom. They use dictatorship and terrorism and concentration camps to attain their ends.
But the great men who founded this country believed the means were just as important as the ends, and that is why we have the Bill of Rights and the rest of our constitutional guarantees. They believed, as I believe, that the right ends can be achieved by the right means.
The Republican candidate showed in Wisconsin what he has shown throughout this campaign--that in his mind, the end of getting elected justifies the means. To him it appears to justify betrayal of principle and of friends.
That kind of moral blindness brands the Republican candidate as unfit to be President of the United States.
finding out what manner of man he is has been to me, my friends, a most sad experience. It has been to me, as it was to the students of his university, "the great disenchantment."
I hope you will understand why, although I once thought the General would make a good president, I am now convinced that I was absolutely wrong.
And I hope you will think also about these very important reasons when you vote on November the fourth.
Thank you.
NOTE: The President spoke at 3:58 p.m. at the trainside in Colorado Springs, Colo. During his remarks he referred to former Representative John H. Marsalis, Democratic candidate for Representative, and John William Metzger, Democratic candidate for Governor, both of Colorado, Arthur H. Vandenberg, Senator from Michigan, 1928-1951, and General of the Army George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 1939-1945.
I THANK you very much for that wonderful welcome, and I appreciate that formal reception by the military band over there. You did a good job of it. This is a beautiful place. It has a worldwide reputation as a resort, and I wish I could stop here and take a vacation. But as you may have heard, I am busy. I am out here in one of my capacities as leader of my party, campaigning for a Democratic victory in the election this fall.
You have some fine Democrats as candidates in Colorado. There is John Marsalis who is running for Congress in this district. He made a good Congressman when he was there; and it is my opinion that you ought to send him back.
I am very fond of Bill Metzger, who is running for Governor. I have known him a long time. I am sure they will make you good, honest public servants. And I am highly impressed with all the rest of your candidates. But I don't know them so well as I do the two I have just mentioned.
This year, the Democratic Party has two of the best candidates for President and Vice President that it has ever had; that is, Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman.
I want to ask you to vote for Adlai Stevenson for President. He is extraordinarily well qualified for that great and difficult job. He is qualified by experience, as a chief executive of one of our great States, and a man who has held important posts in our national defense and our foreign policy. He is also qualified by character. He is humble and courageous and honest--honest with himself and honest with all others.
Those are very precious qualities in the Presidency. In the next 4 years, our President may have to face some of the most serious decisions in history. We need a man in that job on whose character we can completely rely.
Remember that the President has the awful responsibility of deciding whether or not to use the atom bomb. And if that question is presented in the next few years--and I hope it never will be--our President's decision on it may well determine the future of our lives and our civilizations. Let me tell you, too, this is a decision that a President has to make for himself--he can't pass the buck. So we need, more than ever, a President who can stand up against political pressure when he has to make tough decisions.
I also want to tell you, as I have told other groups in the last few days, some of the reasons why you should not vote for the Republican candidate for President.
Now, I know a lot of people are wondering why I am so strongly opposed to the Republican candidate.
They ask, "Didn't you yourself once think he was qualified to be President?" That is true. I did. So I think these people are entitled to know the reasons for the campaign I am making. Because this is a matter that goes beyond mere partisan politics.
I knew the Republican candidate well. He was our commander in Europe when I first became President. I later made him Chief of Staff of the Army, and then sent him to Europe to command the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty countries. He did a good job in both capacities. The Republican candidate is a great general. But I made a serious mistake when I thought he had the qualities needed for the highest office in the country.
I realized, of course, that he was totally unfamiliar with politics. I knew he would have trouble in political life, as all military men do, separating the wheat from the chaff, and the political phonies from the men who are really working for the good of the country. But I thought he would always stand up for the things he believed in--for the things his whole career has been dedicated to achieving.
This is not what I see when I look at his campaign. The general whose words I read, whose speeches I hear, is not the general I once knew. Something, my friends, has happened to him.
And I am deeply disturbed by this change.
What I thought were his deep convictions, turn out not to be convictions at all. He has betrayed the more liberal and responsible wing of the Republican Party which supported him for the nomination in the July convention. He has betrayed every principle about our foreign policy and our national defense that I thought he believed in.
What I feel has been well expressed by the student newspaper at Columbia University, the university of which he is president.
In a recent article, that newspaper said, referring to the "great crusade" that the Republican candidate proclaimed at the convention in Chicago, and I quote: "The great crusade, passing through the stage of great compromise, must now be called the great disenchantment."
The newspaper went on to say that the Republican candidate "has compromised every principle to the dictates of party strategy."
And that hits the nail on the head. It has been a sad experience for me. I have gone through a disenchantment, too, in learning that a man I admired can change his convictions so quickly and so easily.
He has openly compromised his principles on foreign policy.
Before the Chicago convention, everybody thought the General had real convictions on foreign policy. That was the big issue, or so it appeared, between the people who supported him at Chicago and the people who supported Senator Taft.
When he talked the other day in Michigan, the home State of the great Senator Vandenberg--who was a Republican of deep and honest convictions--the General sounded almost like Vandenberg. He spoke glowingly of the bipartisan cooperation that had produced what he called "foreign policy achievements" of the past few years. Among these achievements, he mentioned specifically the program of aid that saved Greece and Turkey from communism, and the Marshall plan of aid to the other free countries of Europe.
But the very next day down in Illinois, which is the home territory of the isolationist Chicago Tribune and the isolationist Senator Dirksen--in Illinois, he had no trouble at all talking like an isolationist. He sneered at the same policies of aid to Greece and Turkey, and of aid to Western Europe, which he had praised as "achievements" the day before. He even attacked the Berlin airlift.
And this is not the only time he has attacked the policies he worked so long to build up for our defense and the defense of the free world.
The Republicans who brought him back from Paris and supported him at Chicago thought he had that same feeling that he had always had. And, I thought, because they believed in our policies of international cooperation among the free peoples and mutual aid against communism, that they knew what they were doing. But almost immediately after his nomination they saw him surround himself with men he had attacked as isolationists before Chicago. They now see him condemning our policies of international cooperation which they supported. And many of them are not actively working for him any longer.
He has betrayed his principles and his followers not only on foreign policy but on the defense of the United States. He is saying things now that are quite the opposite of what he appeared to stand for in the past.
He has charged us with cutting our military budgets too low in the postwar period, and perhaps we did. Yet he himself testified before Congress that my decision, prior to Korea, to hold the 1951 budget down was "a very wise decision." Those are his words.
In Illinois, he talked as if he favored ending the draft. And he opposed universal military training, which he used to support. He appeared before my Commission on Universal Military Training and convinced every man on that Commission that they ought to be for it, and half of them were against it when he started to talk.
When he commanded the North Atlantic Treaty troops in Europe, I had every reason to believe he was convinced of the need for a strong national defense and for foreign aid. Yet, he has talked of fantastic budget cuts of up to $40 billion, and he has singled out national defense and foreign aid as the places where he will make the cuts.
When I branded as preposterous his statement that taxes could be cut like that, he changed his position again. Instead of a budget cut of $40 billion or $20 billion in a couple of years, he now promises a budget cut of $20 billion 4 years from now. It seems that he will give you any figure that anybody puts in his mouth, just so long as it sounds like it will bring in votes.
He has tried to win votes by playing upon the casualties and sacrifices in Korea. He talks about the blunders that led up to Korea. Yet, as Army Chief of Staff, he joined in the decision to pull our troops out of Korea in the first place. He gave me that advice himself, with his own mouth.
He has stated that our decision to help the South Koreans was inescapable.
He has said that the best check for sustaining world peace was to take a firm stand in South Korea.
In June of this year, he stated that he did not believe there was any clear-cut answer to the situation in Korea. Today, he implies that if he is elected he can quickly solve it.
In Illinois, a few days ago, he came out with the idea that we ought to train South Koreans to take a greater part in the struggle. He talked as if the Government had never thought of this, or done anything about it. But as a general he knows that we have trained large numbers of Koreans; that the Korean battle casualties outnumber our own; and that we are training new South Korean armies as fast as the limitation of Korean officers permits. He knows that, far from being a novel idea, or a bright solution, the training and equipping of South Korean forces has long been a major part of our efforts there.
He has tried to win votes by asserting that the standard of living in this country has not risen since 1950 because of the taxes we pay. But he himself was a strong supporter of the defense program. And he knows, as everyone else knows, that this program means higher taxes, and holding down the output of civilian goods, if we are not to go insolvent or to have runaway inflation.
By common consent, including the consent of both parties in the Congress, we are giving up some of our "butter" for "guns" for a short period to meet the national emergency. In every public statement of the General's that I know of, before he became a candidate, he supported that program. And yet, he tries now to make political capital out of the taxes that are a part of it-with the deceitful implication that it would have been possible to build $130 billion worth of defense goods without taxes, and without restraint on the production of such things as automobiles and household appliances.
Finally, the Republican candidate has betrayed his principles, by publicly endorsing every Republican candidate in the country, regardless of whether that man is the blackest of reactionaries, a diehard isolationist, or even a moral scoundrel.
Now don't let anybody tell you that every presidential candidate has to do that--that it's just a part of politics. Franklin Roosevelt did not endorse every Democrat, and neither did Harry Truman. Governor Dewey in 1948 did not endorse Republicans who had disgraced the Republican label. But the Republican candidate this year did, with the same betrayal of principle he has shown throughout his campaign.
And now, my friends, I come to the thing that disturbs me most deeply of all. If there is any one man to whom the Republican candidate owes a great debt of loyalty and gratitude, that man is Gen. George Catlett Marshall. It was General Marshall who promoted him to a position of responsibility in the War Department General Staff. It was General Marshall who made him our commander in the European Theater. It was General Marshall, according to the candidate's own book, who made the decision to give him command of the invasion of Europe--a command that Marshall could himself have had, if he wanted to take it.
General Marshall is the finest example of a patriotic American. He was the organizer of our Army, the architect of victory in World War II, a self-sacrificing, tireless public official. He needs no praise from me. He is the standard by which we judge the patriotism and loyalty of other men.
This great man has been the subject of an infamous attack by two Republican isolationist Senators. Acting from purely partisan motives, these two moral pigmies have called this great American a "living lie," a "front for traitors" and the center of an infamous conspiracy. Nothing more contemptible has ever occurred in the long history of human spite and envy. It is unspeakable, and the authors of these slanders are unworthy of the company of decent men and women.
Now what has the Republican candidate done about this outrage? Has he condemned these two slanderers? Has he denounced their lies about his great friend and benefactor ?
I'll tell you what he has done. He has endorsed them both for reelection to the Senate. One he has embraced publicly. The other he has humbly thanked for riding on his campaign train. Never a word of criticism--or even distaste. And why? Because he thinks these two unprincipled men will bring him votes in November.
Now what do you think of a man who deserts his best friend when he is unjustly attacked ? What do any of us say about a fellow who joins hands with those who have tried to stab an honored chief, a friend and a benefactor, in the back ?
It is no different in politics. The same standards of morality and decency apply there as elsewhere in life.
But the candidate has gone even further. With respect to one of these Senators, he has said that he has the same objectives, but he differs as to methods.
Now methods are important. Whether the objective is to stop communism or to be elected President, methods are the most important thing of all. We do not, we never will, subscribe to the doctrine that the end justifies the means.
The Communists and the fascists say that the end justifies the means. They are out to destroy freedom. They use dictatorship and terrorism and concentration camps to attain their ends.
But the great men who founded this country believed the means were just as important as the ends, and that is why we have the Bill of Rights and the rest of our constitutional guarantees. They believed, as I believe, that the right ends can be achieved by the right means.
The Republican candidate showed in Wisconsin what he has shown throughout this campaign--that in his mind, the end of getting elected justifies the means. To him it appears to justify betrayal of principle and of friends.
That kind of moral blindness brands the Republican candidate as unfit to be President of the United States.
finding out what manner of man he is has been to me, my friends, a most sad experience. It has been to me, as it was to the students of his university, "the great disenchantment."
I hope you will understand why, although I once thought the General would make a good president, I am now convinced that I was absolutely wrong.
And I hope you will think also about these very important reasons when you vote on November the fourth.
Thank you.
NOTE: The President spoke at 3:58 p.m. at the trainside in Colorado Springs, Colo. During his remarks he referred to former Representative John H. Marsalis, Democratic candidate for Representative, and John William Metzger, Democratic candidate for Governor, both of Colorado, Arthur H. Vandenberg, Senator from Michigan, 1928-1951, and General of the Army George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 1939-1945.