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thrust upon him-nor has he sought to take-the responsibility which must be mine until 12 o'clock noon on January 20. hope and believe we have found means whereby the incoming President But together I can obtain the full and detailed information he will need to assume the responsibility the moment he takes the oath of office.

The President-elect is about to take up the greatest burdens, the most compelling responsibilities, given to any man. and all Americans, wish for him all possible success in undertaking And I, with you the tasks that will so soon be his.

What are these tasks? The President is Chief of State, electe d representative of all the people, national spokesman for them and to them. He is Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces. He is charged with the conduct of our foreign relations. He is Chief Executive of the Nation's largest civilian organization. He must select and nominate all top officials of the executive branch and all Federal judges. And, on the legislative side, he has the obligation and the opportunity to recommend and to approve or veto legislation. Besides all this, it is to him that a great political party turns naturally for leadership, and that, too, he must provide as President.

This bundle of burdens is unique; there is nothing else like it on the face of the earth. Each task could be a full-time job. Together they would be a tremendous undertaking in the easiest of times.

But our times are not easy; they are hard-as hard and complex, perhaps, as any in our history. Now the President not only has to carry on these tasks in such a way that our democracy may grow and flourish and our people prosper, but he also has to lead the whole free world in overcoming the Communist menace and all this under the shadow of the atomic bomb.

This is a huge challenge to the human being who occupies the Presidential office. But it is not a challenge to him alone, for in reality he cannot meet it alone. but to his whole administration, to the Congress, to the country. The challenge runs not just to him Ultimately, no President can master his responsibilities, save as his fellow citizens—indeed, the whole people-comprehend the challenge of our times and move, with him, to meet it.

8

It has been my privilege to hold the Presidential office for nearly years now, and much has been done in which I take great pride. But this is not personal pride. It is pride in the people, in the Nation. It is pride in our political system and our form of government-balky sometimes, mechanically deficient perhaps, in many ways, but Republic on the right course, rising to the great occasions, accomplishenormously alive and vigorous; able through these years to keep the ing the essentials, meeting the basic challenge of our times.

There have been misunderstandings and controversies these past 8 years, but through it all the President of the United States has had that measure of support and understanding without which no man could sustain the burdens of the Presidential office, or hope to discharge

its responsibilities.

For this I am profoundly grateful-grateful to my associates in the executive branch, most of them nonpartisan civil servants; grateful,

despite our disagreements, to the Members of the Congress on both sides of the aisle; grateful especially to the American people, the citizens of this Republic, governors of us all.

We are still so close to recent controversies that some of us may find it hard to understand the accomplishments of these past 8 years. But the accomplishments are real and very great, not as the President's, not as the Congress', but as the achievements of our country and all the people in it.

Let me remind you of some of the things we have done since I first assumed my duties as President of the United States.

I took the oath of office on April 12, 1945. In May of that same year the Nazis surrendered. Then, in July,2 that great white flash of light, man-made at Alamogordo, heralded swift and final victory in World War II and opened the doorway to the atomic age.

Consider some of the great questions that were posed for us by sudden, total victory in World War II. Consider also how well we, as a Nation, have responded.

I come now to the most vital question of all, the greatest of our concerns: Could there be built in the world a durable structure of security, a lasting peace for all the nations, or would we drift, as after World War I, toward another terrible disaster a disaster which this time might be the holocaust of atomic war?

That is still the overriding question of our time. We cannot know the answer yet; perhaps we will not know it finally for a long time to come. But day and night, these past 8 years, we have been building for peace, searching out the way that leads most surely to security and freedom and justice in the world for us and all mankind.

This, above all else, has been the task of our Republic since the end of World War II, and our accomplishment so far should give real pride to all Americans. At the very least a total war has been averted, each day up to this hour. And at the most we may already have succeeded in establishing conditions which can keep that kind of war from happening, for as far ahead as man can see.

The Second World War radically changed the power relationships of the world. Nations once great were left shattered and weak; channels of communication, routes of trade, political and economic ties of many kinds were ripped apart.

And in this changed, disrupted, chaotic situation, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the two strongest powers of the world. Each had tremendous human and natural resources, actual or potential, on a scale unmatched by any other nation.

Nothing could make plainer why the world is in its present stateand how that came to pass than an understanding of the diametrically opposite principles and policies of these two great powers in a warruined world.

For our part, we in this Republic were-and are-free men, heirs of

1 The instrument of surrender was signed May 8, 1945; see A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 505-506.

2 July 16, 1945.

the American Revolution, dedicated to the truths of our Declaration of Independence:

... that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, . .

....

Our postwar objective has been in keeping with this great idea. The United States has sought to use its preeminent position of power to help other nations recover from the damage and dislocation of the war. We held out a helping hand to enable them to restore their national lives and to regain their positions as independent, self-supporting members of the great family of nations. This help was given without any attempt on our part to dominate or control any nation. We did not want satellites but partners.

The Soviet Union, however, took exactly the opposite course.

Its rulers saw in the weakened condition of the world not an obligation to assist in the great work of reconstruction, but an opportunity to exploit misery and suffering for the extension of their power. Instead of help, they brought subjugation. They extinguished, blotted out, the national independence of the countries that the military operations of World War II had left within their grasp.

The difference stares at us from the map of Europe today. To the west of the line that tragically divides Europe we see nations continuing to act and live in the light of their own traditions and principles. On the other side we see the dead uniformity of a tyrannical system imposed by the rulers of the Soviet Union. Nothing could point up more clearly what the global struggle between the free world and the Communists is all about.

It is a struggle as old as recorded history; it is freedom versus tyranny.

For the dominant idea of the Soviet regime is the terrible conception that men do not have rights but live at the mercy of the state.

Inevitably this idea of theirs and all the consequences flowing from it collided with the efforts of free nations to build a just and peaceful world. The "cold war" between the Communists and the free world is nothing more or less than the Soviet attempt to checkmate and defeat our peaceful purposes, in furtherance of their own dread objective.

We did not seek this struggle; God forbid. We did our utmost to avoid it. In World War II we and the Russians had fought side by side, each in our turn attacked and forced to combat by the aggressors. After the war we hoped that our wartime collaboration could be maintained, that the frightful experience of Nazi invasion, of devastation in the heart of Russia, had turned the Soviet rulers away from their old proclaimed allegiance to world revolution and Communist dominion. But instead they violated, one by one, the solemn agreements they had made with us in wartime. They sought to misuse the rights and privileges they had obtained in the United

1 See A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 919-933, and infra, pp. 1937-1944.

Nations; to frustrate its purposes and cut down its powers as an effective agent of world progress and the keeper of the world's peace.

Despite this outcome the efforts we made toward peaceful collaboration are a source of our present strength. They demonstrated that we believed what we proclaimed, that we actually sought honest agreements as the way to peace. Our whole moral position, our leadership in the free world today, is fortified by that fact.

The world is divided, not through our fault or failure, but by Soviet design. They, not we, began the cold war. And because the free world saw this happen-because men know we made the effort and the Soviet rulers spurned it-the free nations have accepted leadership from our Republic in meeting and mastering the Soviet offensive.

It seems to me especially important that all of us be clear, in our own thinking, about the nature of the threat we have faced-and will face for a long time to come. The measures we have devised to meet it take shape and pattern only as we understand what we were, and are, up against.

The Soviet Union occupies a territory of 8,000,000 square miles. Beyond its borders, east and west, are the nearly 5,000,000 square miles of the satellite states-virtually incorporated into the Soviet Union-and of China, now its close partner. This vast land mass contains an enormous store of natural resources sufficient to support an economic development comparable to our own.

That is the Stalinist world. It is a world of great natural diversity in geography and climate, in distribution of resources, in population, language, and living standards, in economic and cultural development. It is a world whose people are not all convinced Communists by any means. It is a world where history and national traditions, particularly in its borderlands, tend more toward separation than unification, and run counter to the enforced combination that has been made of these areas today.

But it is also a world of great man-made uniformities, a world that bleeds its population white to build huge military forces; a world in which the police are everywhere and their authority unlimited; a world where terror and slavery are deliberately administered both as instruments of government and as means of production; a world where all effective social power is the state's monopoly yet the state itself is the creature of the Communist tyrants.

The Soviet Union, with its satellites, and China are held in the tight grip of Communist Party chieftains. The party dominates all social and political institutions. The party regulates and centrally directs the whole economy. In Moscow's sphere, and in Peiping's, all history, philosophy, morality, and law are centrally established by rigid dogmas, incessantly drummed into the whole population and subject to interpretation, or to change, by none except the party's own inner circle.

And, lest their people learn too much of other ways of life, the Communists have walled off their world, deliberately and uniformly, from the rest of human society.

That is the Communist base of operation in their cold war. In addition they have at their command hundreds and thousands of dedicated foreign Communists, people in nearly every free country who will serve Moscow's ends. Thus the masters of the Kremlin are provided with deluded followers all through the free world, whom they can manipulate, cynically and quite ruthlessly, to serve the purposes of the Soviet state.

Given their vast internal base of operations, and their agents in foreign lands, what are the Communist rulers trying to do?

Inside their homeland the Communists are trying to maintain and modernize huge military forces. And, simultaneously, they are endeavoring to weld their whole vast area and population into a completely self-contained, advanced industrial society. They aim, some day, to equal or better the production levels of Western Europe and North America combined-thus shifting the balance of world economic power, and war potential, to their side.

They have a long way to go, and they know it. But they are prepared to levy upon living generations any sacrifice that helps strengthen their armed power, or speed industrial development. Externally the Communist rulers are trying to expand the boundaries of their world, whenever and wherever they can. This expansion they have pursued steadfastly since the close of World War II, using any means available to them.

Where the Soviet Army was present, as in the countries of Eastern Europe, they have gradually squeezed free institutions to death.

Where postwar chaos existed in industrialized nations, as in Western Europe, the local Stalinists tried to gain power through political processes, politically inspired strikes, and every available means for subverting free institutions to their evil ends.

Where conditions permitted, the Soviet rulers have stimulated and aided armed insurrection by Communist-led revolutionary forces, as in Greece,' Indochina," the Philippines, and China, or outright aggression by one of their satellites, as in Korea. 5

3

Where the forces of nationalism, independence, and an economic change were at work throughout the great sweep of Asia and Africa, the Communists tried to identify themselves with the cause of progress, tried to picture themselves as the friends of freedom and advancement-surely one of the most cynical efforts of which history offers record.

Thus everywhere in the free world the Communists seek to fish in troubled waters, to seize more countries, to enslave more millions of human souls. They were, and are, ready to ally themselves with any group, from the extreme left to the extreme right, that offers them an opportunity to advance their ends.

A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 753-782 and 1252-1267.

2 Infra, pp. 2363-2369.

Infra, pp. 2357-2359.

A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 691-728, and United States Relations with China with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949 (Department of State State publication 3573; 1949).

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See infra, pp. 2536-2626.

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