Remarks in New Orleans Before the 50th Annual National Convention of the American Legion.

Mr. Chairman, Commander Galbraith, Senator Ellender, Congressman Teague, distinguished members of the American Legion and Ladies Auxiliary, my fellow Americans:

I am deeply touched and very grateful for your thoughtfulness and for the presentation of this award, on behalf of the men who have demonstrated their love of country.

Today, I have come here to your convention to speak to you in a keynote talk about world peace--about your President's efforts to achieve it--the progress we have made--as well as the tasks that lie ahead.

It was 50 years ago this very month that the eyes of the world were turned on the efforts of the American doughboys to reach a railroad running across France, which happened to be the main supply line, at that time, of the German Army.

I remember then, as a 10-year-old boy, how we followed the news of the Meuse-Argonne offensive in that fall of the year 1918.

Some of you in this room no doubt fought through that battle.

Some of you were there, 2 months later, when the first world war in history was brought to an end.

Now we know how brief the illusion of peace was, on that Armistice Day a half a century ago. In the course of five stormy decades, we have learned how carefully peace must be built in a complex and dangerous world--as well as how well peace must be guarded.

World War I had been ignited by a very small flame in the Balkans. That was our first lesson. Others followed in rapid profusion:

--We saw depressions leap continents.

We saw democracy weaken and break under their weight.

--We witnessed the rise of dictators and we watched aggressors stalk across borders.

--We fought through the Second World War which came in the wake of their bootmarks--and before the dust of war had really settled, we saw the rise of a new aggression.

--We beheld the dawn of a nuclear age.

--We saw the birth of new nations, and the death of old colonialism.

--And from a dozen different parts of the globe, we heard the long pent-up cry for food and land and a new day of hope and dignity.

These are the conditions and the developments of our turbulent times. Around them, America has constructed a policy to try to promote peace in the world.

That policy did not begin in my administration. That has been our policy for more than 20 years in the making. It was shaped in a bipartisan spirit, by Republicans and Democrats.

It has been followed by four different American Presidents.

I have built upon it. I have strengthened it where I could. I have modified it where I needed to, to meet the changing demands of the changing years. But we have always held to four essential imperatives.

The first imperative--constant from President Truman's day to mine--is this: The United States of America must remain the strongest nation in all the world.

I have tried to take steps, even small ones, that would move us toward more normal relations with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries.

We shall continue that progress in every honorable way that is open to us. World safety demands that the two greatest powers on earth reduce--if they possibly can--the tensions that have held mankind in mortal bondage for more than a generation.

But I have always also been deeply aware--and I have constantly and steadily warned--that many dangerous and unresolved problems face us.

Some, however, concluded that changes of such magnitude were taking place in the Communist world that we could relax our vigilance, trusting that the Communists wanted the same kind of world that we Americans wanted.

Today, the events in Eastern Europe make it clear--and make it clear with the force of steel--that we are still a long way--a long way--from the peaceful world that we Americans all wish to see.

The message out of Czechoslovakia is plain: The independence of nations and the liberty of men are today still under challenge. The free parts of the world will survive only if they are capable of maintaining their strength and capable of maintaining and building their unity.

So, peace remains our objective. But we shall never achieve it by wishful thinking, nor by disunity, nor by weakness.

The second imperative of our policy for peace is that we must meet our commitments and keep our promises to use our strength in the face of common danger to oppose aggression.

Self-interest has always been--and must always be--at the root of every action which commits the lives of American men.

When we entered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, we did so because the threat of a Communist takeover of Europe was real, and because we knew that America's security was linked to the security of Western Europe.

If its human and material resources in Europe were to fall into hostile hands, then the balance of world power would be against America. We would have to become a bristling defensive fortress here at home, organized against an enormous, dangerous threat. We would have to live under conditions that are drastically different from any conditions that we have ever known.

So that is why America helped formulate, organize, and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And that is why we are a strong part of that organization today.

When we fought to keep aggression from swallowing up South Korea, it was President Harry S. Truman who defined the self-interest that impelled our stand. Unchallenged aggression, President Truman said, and I quote him, "would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war."

When President Eisenhower sent troops into Lebanon, it was to keep a situation from developing that could trigger in the Middle East, and then could draw us in.

When President Eisenhower committed us to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and he submitted it to our United States Senate during the Eisenhower administration, it was voted and ratified there by a vote of 82 to r. It was because President Eisenhower saw Southeast Asia as the key to political equilibrium in the Orient that vitally affected America's future.

When President Kennedy brought in additional troops to Berlin in 1961, it was because America's self-interest demanded that we stand behind our pledge and our commitment to keep West Berlin free.

When President Kennedy put our forces on alert during the Cuban missile crisis the following year, it was because Soviet missiles in the Western Hemisphere jeopardized American security.

When the first American soldiers went into South Vietnam in the early 1960's, it was because this Nation saw that if the Communist aggression there succeeded, the entire region of Southeast Asia would be in mortal danger, and the threat of world war would be more ominous.

We have heard many voices raised in opposition to this stand. Indeed, I have sought some of these voices out. For, as your President, I assure you in these long days and nights for more than 5 years now, we have searched every avenue of thought and opinion on this issue that so troubles all of our people today.

But after investigating carefully every possible course of action, I always come back to that warning of President Harry S. Truman about how unchallenged aggression could lead to another world war.

Inevitably, I always come back to that judgment of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said that if South Vietnam were captured by the Communists, "The freedom of 12 million people would be lost immediately, and that of 150 million others in adjacent lands would be seriously endangered. The loss of South Vietnam," President Eisenhower said, "would set in motion a crumbling process that could, as it progressed, have grave consequences for us and for freedom."

I always come back to these words, not of President Truman or President Eisenhower, but the late, beloved John Fitzgerald Kennedy, when he said, "for us to withdraw from that effort [in Vietnam] would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there."

The judgments of these three former Presidents, as mine has been, were formed in positions of the greatest responsibility. After seeing, hearing, reading, and studying all the evidence, their judgments were formed and were unshakable. The American Constitution obliges the President to make his judgment, as Commander in Chief, according to what he believes is in the best interest of all the American people.

And I have believed--as these three Presidents believed who went before me--that a Communist military takeover in South Vietnam would lead to developments that could imperil the security of the American people for generations to come.

I know very well the cost of our commitment. Every day and every night I mourn every man who has been lost or who has been wounded.

But a President, a President worthy of this title, if he is true to his trust, must think not only in terms of those who have fallen. He must think in terms of the casualties that might have been--or the dead who might be.

How many American lives would eventually have been lost if our forces had not stood in Europe in the late 1940's to block the aggression that threatened, at that time, to sweep the English Channel?

More than 34,000 American men fell in Korea, and hundreds of thousands more bear the wounds of Korean battle. But how many more doughboys would have died if the aggressor had not been stopped there, and the war had spread to other parts of the world?

If we had not drawn the line against aggression in Vietnam, in keeping with the treaty that we signed, the SEATO obligations, and if the erosion of freedom had begun that President Eisenhower told you about when I quoted him a moment ago, some American President--some President-some day would have to draw the line somewhere else. And I ask you, at how much greater cost? How many millions of young Americans would be lost in the larger war that would surely and inevitably come?

Well, these are the sobering questions that no President or no Commander in Chief can escape.

From the very first, our objective in Vietnam has been to prevent the aggressor from taking that land by force.

We Americans have sought no advantage--except the advantage of peace. We have tried to fight a limited war--not to destroy an enemy, not to win a military victory, but to try in every way we knew how, as best we could, to protect our friends, remain true to our obligations, and win a peace in that part of the world.

We believed that to be very much in America's national interest then, and we believe it to be in America's national interest now.

On the night of March 31st, in a television address to this Nation, we launched a major new effort for peace. That was the latest of many.

We had already had eight bombing pauses. But on that night we announced that we would withdraw 90 percent of the population of Vietnam, almost 80 percent of the territory, from the area that our men were permitted to bomb.

As the result of that effort, our negotiating team would be willing to meet with the representatives of North Vietnam. The enemy suggested that we meet in Cambodia, and then he suggested that we meet in Poland. Against great odds and against the advice of some of our more eager people, we finally agreed not to meet in either of those places, but to meet in Paris. The wisdom of that decision, I think, is pretty clear to almost any of you today.

We continue now to hope that something productive is going to come out of those meetings.

All we have heard so far is a demand that we do something else without their having responded to our first bombing restrictions.

Now let me make it as clear as I possibly can why we are still bombing and will continue to bomb the panhandle of North Vietnam--why reestablishing the DMZ, I think, is so critical to peace in Vietnam.

In the area just below the DMZ, we and our allies have some four divisions of men and the necessary people to support them, involving more than 60,000 Americans and one division of South Vietnamese. Just behind them in the rest of I Corps are an additional 164,000 American and allied fighting men.

Those close to the DMZ are subjected daily to artillery fire and the direct movement of enemy forces across that DMZ against them. All those men in I Corps are constantly subjected to a massive flow of supplies and infiltrators and rocket fire, through the panhandle to the northern part of the battlefield.

Now, these are just hard, inescapable facts that a Commander in Chief must face up to and confront.

So what are our choices?

First, we could invade North Vietnam with our men. We could overrun their military positions. We could throttle the supply routes in North Vietnam itself. This we do not wish to do, although it should be clear that the North Vietnamese do wish to invade South Vietnam, and they are doing so--although they don't want to admit it.

Second, we could withdraw our forces. We could retreat and surrender on the installment plan, as some have suggested, by taking our men from below the DMZ, and turn over the I Corps area, that part of South Vietnam, turn it over to the North Vietnamese. This, I assure you, we shall not do.

If we cannot take our men in, and we are not going to take our men out, it appears to me, third, that the best thing we can do is to bring our planes to bear in the panhandle across the line against the artillery, the trucks, and the rocket launchers that are being fired on our men, and to bring it to bear against the enemy trucks, the enemy troops, and the enemy supplies that are coming through. Because every secondary explosion--and there were thousands there last month-means that that powder and that steel doesn't have to be brought back from South Vietnam by some American soldier in his body, if it is stopped in North Vietnam.

We are today exacting a very substantial price from the enemy. It requires patience of all of us. But we are limiting his capacity to bring weight against our forces and our allies. There is not the slightest doubt that if we should stop the bombing in the panhandle, the military capacity of the enemy to hurt our forces would greatly increase, and our casualties would skyrocket.

Just a few days ago, I went to the field with a cable and asked the commander of our troops in South Vietnam, one of the ablest commanders ever to wear a uniform, General Abrams, to give me his viewpoint on what would happen if I should order him to carry out the suggestion that had been made by some of our enemies abroad and some of our friends at home to stop the bombing.

His reply was simply this: If you should require me to stop the bombing of North Vietnam, you would permit the enemy to increase his capability several fold in 10 days, and if he did, I would be forced to withdraw our men from that area because they could no longer stand their ground.

Now, I am not going to issue any order like that.

General Abrams--and not a single field commander we have has made that recommendation to me. I am not a prophet or a speculator, but I do prophesy that some of these men who recommend it now would not do so if they were there on the DMZ, and could see there what our men face every day and face every night.

Therefore, the Commander in Chief has insisted that the bombing will not stop until we are confident that it will not lead to an increase in American casualties. That is why we have placed such emphasis on reestablishing the DMZ.

We yearn for the day when the violence subsides. We yearn for the day when our men can come home. No man can predict when that day will come, because we are there to bring an honorable, stable peace to Southeast Asia, and no less will justify the sacrifices that our men have died for.

But President Thieu, the President of Vietnam, stated his intention at Honolulu-"to continue to assume all the responsibility that the scale of the forces of South Vietnam and their equipment will permit, while preparing the Vietnamese nation and armed forces for the important and decisive role that will be theirs in the coming stages of the struggle." Every report I receive from Saigon reports that the gallant, determined people of South Vietnam are acting in accordance with that statement.

The third imperative of our program to promote peace in the world, like the other two I have stated, is our effort to assist other countries to improve their economies. A man's home, however grand it is, is not secure if it stands on a street of crumbling slums, where people are hungry and in despair.

Whatever that man does to build up his neighborhood is an investment in his own security. This is the principle which has been the base of our program. It is here that the quiet work has progressed. This is slow work and this is stubborn work. But from South Korea to Turkey--from Taiwan to Iran--from Pakistan to Tunisia--there are many success stories in which Americans can share the great pride of accomplishment.

Let me tell you, briefly, what has been happening in just one area in our hemisphere, in Latin America, in the last few years. With our help, a great struggle has been taking place to overcome hunger and ignorance. These are the victories:

--The average per capita growth has more than doubled.

--43 million acres of land have been distributed to almost 400,000 families.

--Food production has increased 14 percent, and manufacturing production has gone up 23 percent.

--There are 340,000 new schools, and 7 million more children getting an education today.

--Infant mortality has dropped 14 percent. The growth of confidence, the birth of hope, have changed history around the globe. And this is the kind of change which helps us to build peace.

We have always hoped and believed that as our friends and allies grew in strength, our burden would grow less lonely. We have been moving over the last few years toward a long-term position in which the United States would be able to assume its responsibility in enterprises of common concern, and our partners would be able to assume theirs.

This progress, too, is often hard to see. But it is there. In Asia, six Pacific allies are fighting beside us in South Vietnam. By far the greatest burden in that struggle-contrary to what is often said--is carried not by these allies, but carried by the South Vietnamese themselves. Since the beginning of the current offensive in mid-August of this year, they have suffered almost 50 percent more casualties than we Americans have suffered.

By the end of this year, the South Vietnamese will have 1 million men under arms--1 million--993,000, to be exact; 7,000 short of a million. That is out of a nation of 17 million. We have there 550,000, not a million, out of a nation of 200 million. But they have a million men under arms out of a nation of 17 million, and they don't control all of that 17 million.

The equivalent figure, in terms of population, if we had as high a percentage of our people at the front as they have, instead of having 500,000, we would have 12 million.

So this is a rather remarkable effort by a hard-pressed, small nation that is fighting and dying for liberty that you don't always hear very much about.

The contribution of our NATO partners offers another example of partnership. U.S.. forces are one-eighth of the ground forces in NATO Europe. But they are a critical element in the balance, because they--and their nuclear weapons that are there with them--supply the shield which enables our allies to provide increasingly for the defense of Western Europe.

We have a right to expect Europe to do more--and we might as well say that plainly and frankly. We have a right to expect them to do more in their own defense.

The world of free men and independent nations is weakened by European isolationism and disunity--as it was once weakened by an isolationist America that it took President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill a long time to wake up.

We must look to the further enlargement of Europe's assumption of responsibilities of their own in the future. In monetary affairs, in trade negotiations, in emergency food problems--across Asia and Europe and Latin America--the shift to partnership effort has already, I assure you, been substantial. Our relative burdens, as the years go by, become lighter.

I believe the day will soon come--which we have been building toward for 20 years-when some American President will be able to say to the American people that the United States is assuming its fair share of responsibility for promoting peace and progress in the world, but the United States of America is assuming no more or no less than its fair share.

While we can reduce our responsibilities, we must all be cautious enough never to allow anyone to persuade us to neglect them. In the 1960's, I warn you there just must be no return to the isolationism of the 1930's that brought on World War II.

I warn you that the voice of isolationism is becoming strident once again in some of the places that we heard this same isolationist voice a generation ago. Some of it is in Congress. Some of it is on the campuses. Some of it is on the farms. Some of it is on the streets.

We say, "Oh, why should we be bothered with the problems across the seas?" We might say we don't need to be bothered with smallpox in the next block, but the facts of life are, if it is in the next block, we have to watch it and help stamp it out before it gets to our house.

The fourth imperative for peace is that we use our influence, however we can, to keep trouble from erupting into an all-out war-or to keep wars themselves from spreading. Through the United Nations, through the Organization of American States, and sometimes, but rarely, alone, we have already helped to dampen the fires of many potential conflicts in the last 10 years.

America shouldered arms half a century ago "to make the world safe for democracy." Later it became quite fashionable to deride that slogan. For it seemed to belong to a simpler time, a time that was uncomplicated by a shrinking globe, and the new face of aggression, and the restlessness of emerging nations.

But I wonder today, looking back, if the derision did not come too soon. Democracy has had its times of frustration, it is true. Democracy has even had its times of failure. We know it is the best--but we also know it is the most difficult--way for men to organize their own affairs.

Today, vast reaches of this world have become safe for democracy. There is something deep in the human spirit which, in the end, demands government as a result of the consent of those governed.

Democracy is showing the strength which prophets 30 years ago did not believe it could show. We are not evangelizing democracy around the world. We are content to let every people choose their own paths for development. But we are working to promote peace. And as it happens, peace is the only environment in which democracy can actually grow and thrive.

In conclusion, I would remind every loyal son of the Legion, the men who have worn the uniform of this country and have carried Old Glory to every corner of the world, and brought her back without a stain on it: I would warn you, peace lovers, those men who love peace more than you love life, but are willing to defend freedom with your own life, that the ingredients of peace are these: strength, conviction, principle, compassion, constancy, patience, and above all, my fellow Legionnaires, courage.

Treaties--treaties--yes, we have hundreds of them. Meaningful treaties are not hammered out by cowards who are afraid to stand up for what is right when the going is tough, or afraid to die for freedom when they are required to do so.

So, this afternoon I appeal to you to support your country, to support your fighting men, to support peace by maintaining strength in this country; by refusing, always, to bow to the demands of the moment; by refusing, always, to sacrifice principle and the things we hold dear; by standing as firm at home as you expect your sons to stand abroad, and ask yourself if you are doing it.

If you do this, then I think history will say that we caught up with the promise of Pershing's doughboys. I can think of no finer judgment to be made on you, or on me, or on our times, or on the America that we all love.

Thank you very much.