To the Congress of the United States: I have the honor to report to the Congress on the state of the Union. This is the eighth such report that, as President, I have been privileged to present to you and to the country. On previous occasions, it has been my custom to set forth proposals for legislative action in the coming year. But that is not my purpose today. The presentation of a legislative program falls properly to my successor, not to me, and I would not infringe upon his responsibility to chart the forward course. Instead, I wish to speak of the course we have been following the past eight years and the position at which we have arrived. In just two weeks, General Eisenhower will be inaugurated as President of the United States and I will resume--most gladly--my 'place as a private citizen of this Republic. The Presidency last changed hands eight years ago this coming April. That was a tragic time: a time of grieving for President Roosevelt--the great and gallant human being who had been taken from us; a time of unrelieved anxiety to his successor, thrust so suddenly into the complexities and burdens of the Presidential office. Not so this time. This time we see the normal transition under our democratic system. One President, at the conclusion of his term, steps back to private life; his successor, chosen by the people, begins his tenure of the office. And the Presidency of the United States continues to function without a moment's break. 
Since the election, I have done my best to assure that the transfer from one Administration to another shall be smooth and orderly. From General Eisenhower and his associates, I have had friendly and understanding collaboration in this endeavor. I have not sought to thrust upon him--nor has he sought to take--the responsibility which must be mine until twelve o'clock noon on January twentieth. But together, I hope and believe we have found means whereby the incoming President 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 I, with you and all Americans, wish for him all possible success in undertaking the tasks that will so soon be his. What are these tasks? The President is Chief of State, elected 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. The challenge runs not just to him but to his whole Administration, to the Congress, to the country. 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. It has been my privilege to hold the Presidential office for nearly eight 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 enormously alive and vigorous; able through these years to keep the Republic on the right course, rising to the great occasions, accomplishing the essentials, meeting the basic challenge of our times. There have been misunderstandings and controversies these past eight 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 non-partisan 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 eight 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, 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. Would the American economy collapse, after the war? That was one question. Would there be another depression here--a repetition of 1921 or 1929? The free world feared and dreaded it. The communists hoped for it and built their policies upon that hope. We answered that question--answered it with a resounding "no." Our economy has grown tremendously. Free enterprise has flourished as never fore. Sixty-two million people are now gainfully employed, compared with 51 million seven years ago. Private businessmen and farmers have invested more than 200 billion dollars in new plant and equipment since the end of World War II. Prices have risen further than they should have done--but incomes, by and large, have risen even more, so that real living standards are now considerably higher than seven years ago. Aided by sound government policies, our expanding economy has shown the strength and flexibility for swift and almost painless reconversion from war to peace, in 1945 and 1946; for quick reaction and recovery-- well before Korea--from the beginnings of recession in 1949. Above all, this live and vital economy of ours has now shown the remarkable capacity to sustain a great mobilization program for defense, a vast outpouring of aid to friends and allies all around the world--and still to produce more goods and services for peaceful use at home than we have ever known before. This has been our answer, up to now, to those who feared or hoped for a depression in this country. How have we handled our national finances? That was another question arising at war's end. In the administration of the Government, no problem takes more of the President's time, year in and year out, than fashioning the Budget, and the related problem of managing the public debt. Financing World War II left us with a tremendous public debt, which reached 279 billion dollars at its peak in February, 1946. Beginning in July, 1946, when war and reconversion financing had ended, we have held quite closely to the sound standard that in times of high employment and high national income, the Federal Budget should be balanced and the debt reduced. For the four fiscal years from July 1, 1946, to June 30, 1950, we had a net surplus of 4.3 billion dollars. Using this surplus, and the Treasury's excess cash reserves, the debt was reduced substantially, reaching a low point of 251 billion dollars in June, 1949, and ending up at 257 billion dollars on June 30, 1950. In July of 1950, we began our rapid rearmament, and for two years held very close to a pay-as-we-go policy. But in the current fiscal year and the next, rising expenditures for defense will substantially outrun receipts. This will pose an immediate and serious problem for the new Congress. Now let me turn to another question we faced at the war's end. Would we take up again, and carry forward, the great projects of social welfare--so badly needed, so long overdue--that the New Deal had introduced into our national life? Would our Government continue to have a heart for the people, or was the progress of the New Deal to be halted in the aftermath of war as decisively as the progress of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom had been halted after the first world war? This question, too, we have answered. We have answered it by doubling old age insurance benefits and extending coverage to ten million more people. We have answered it by increasing our minimum wage. We have answered by the three million privately constructed homes that the Federal Government has helped finance since the war--and the 155 thousand units of low rent public housing placed under construction since 1949. We have answered with the 42 thousand new hospital beds provided since 1946 through the joint efforts of the Federal Government and local communities. We have answered by helping eight million veterans of World War II to obtain advanced education, 196 thousand to start in business, and 64 thousand to buy farms. We have answered by continuing to help farmers obtain electric power, until today nearly 90 per cent of our farms have power line electric service. In these and other ways, we have demonstrated, up to now, that our democracy has not forgotten how to use the powers of the Government to promote the people's welfare and security. Another of the big post-war questions was this: What we would do with the Nation's natural resources--its soils and water, forests and grasslands. Would we continue the strong conservation movement of the 1930's, or would we, as we did after the First World War, slip back into the practices of monopoly, exploitation, and waste ? The answer is plain. All across our country, the soil conservation movement has spread, aided by Government programs, enriching private and public lands, preserving them from destruction, improving them for future use. In our river basins, we have invested nearly 5 billion dollars of public funds in the last eight years--invested them in projects to control floods, irrigate farmlands, produce low-cost power and get it to the housewives and farmers and businessmen who need it. We have been vigilant in protecting the people's property--lands and forests and oil and minerals. We have had to fight hard against those who would use our resources for private greed; we have met setbacks; we have had to delay work because of defense priorities, but on the whole we can be proud of our record in protecting our natural heritage, and in using our resources for the public good. Here is another question we had to face at the war's close: Would we continue, in peace as well as war, to promote equality of opportunity for all our citizens, seeking ways and means to guarantee for all of them the full enjoyment of their civil rights? During the war we achieved great economic and social gains for millions of our fellow citizens who had been held back by prejudice. Were we prepared, in peacetime, to keep on moving toward full realization of the democratic promise? Or would we let it be submerged, wiped out, in post-war riots and reaction, as after World War I? We answered these questions in a series of forward steps at every level of government and in many spheres of private life. In our armed forces, our civil service, our universities, our railway trains, the residential districts of our cities--in stores and factories all across the Nation--in the polling booths as well--the barriers are coming down. This is happening, in part, at the mandate of the courts; in part, at the insistence of Federal, State and local governments; in part, through the enlightened action of private groups and persons in every region and every walk of life. There has been a great awakening of the American conscience on the issues of civil rights. And all this progress--still far from complete but still continuing--has been our answer, up to now, to those who questioned our intention to live up to the promises of equal freedom for us all. There was another question posed for us at the war's end, which equally concerned the future course of our democracy: Could the machinery of government and politics in this Republic be changed, improved, adapted rapidly enough to carry through, responsibly and well, the vast, new complicated undertakings called for in our time ? We have answered this question, too, answered it by tackling the most urgent, most specific, problems which the war experience itself had brought into sharp focus. The reorganization of the Congress in 1946; the unification of our armed services, beginning in 1947; the closer integration of foreign and military policy through the National Security Council created that same year; and the Executive reorganizations, before and after the Hoover-Acheson Commission Report in 1949--these are landmarks in our continuing endeavor to make government an effective instrument of service to the people. 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 eight 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 state--and how that came to pass--than an understanding of the diametrically opposite principles and policies of these two great powers in a war-ruined world. For our part, we in this Republic were-and are--free men, heirs of 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 post-war objective has been in keeping with this great idea. The United States has sought to use its pre-eminent 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 use the rights and privileges they had obtained in the United 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 million square miles. Beyond its borders, East and West, are the nearly five million 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 post-war 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, Indo-China, the Philippines, and China, or outright aggression by one of their satellites, as in Korea. Where the forces of nationalism, independence, and 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. Geography gives them a central position. They are both a European and an Asian power, with borders touching many of the most sensitive and vital areas in the free world around them. So situated, they can use their armies and their economic power to set up simultaneously a whole series of threats--or inducements--to such widely dispersed places as Western Germany, Iran, and Japan. These pressures and attractions can be sustained at will, or quickly shifted from place to place. Thus the communist rulers are moving, with implacable will, to create greater strength in their vast empire, and to create weakness and division in the free world, preparing for the time their false creed teaches them must come: the time when the whole world outside their sway will be so torn by strife and contradictions that it will be ripe for the communist plucking. This is the heart of the distorted Marxist interpretation of history. This is the glass through which Moscow and Peiping look out upon the world, the glass through which they see the rest of us. They seem really to believe that history is on their side. And they are trying to boost "history" along, at every opportunity, in every way they can. I have set forth here the nature of the communist menace confronting our Republic and the whole free world. This is the measure of the challenge we have faced since World War II--a challenge partly military and partly economic, partly moral and partly intellectual, confronting us at every level of human endeavor and all around the world. It has been and must be the free world's purpose not only to organize defenses against aggression and subversion, not only to build a structure of resistance and salvation for the community of nations outside the iron curtain, but in addition to give expression and opportunity to the forces of growth and 'progress in the free world, to so organize and unify the cooperative community of free men that we will not crumble but grow stronger over the years, and the Soviet empire, not the free world, will eventually have to change its ways or fall. Our whole program of action to carry out this purpose has been directed to meet two requirements. The first of these had to do with security. Like the pioneers who settled this great continent of ours, we have had to carry a musket while we went about our peaceful business. We realized that if we and our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing Soviet military threat, we would never have the opportunity to carry forward our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order--the only environment in which our free institutions could survive and flourish. Did this mean we had to drop everything else and concentrate on armies and weapons ? Of course it did not: side-by-side with this urgent military requirement, we had to continue to help create conditions of economic and social progress in the world. This work had to be carried forward alongside the first, not only in order to meet the non-military aspects of the communist drive for power, but also because this creative effort toward human progress is essential to bring about the kind of world we as free men want to live in. These two requirements--military security and human progress--are more closely related in action than we sometimes recognize. Military security depends upon a strong economic underpinning and a stable and hopeful political order; conversely, the confidence that makes for economic and political progress does not thrive in areas that are vulnerable to military conquest. These requirements are related in another way. Both of them depend upon unity of action among the free nations of the world. This, indeed, has been the foundation of our whole effort, for the drawing together of the free people of the world has become a condition essential not only to their progress, but to their survival as free people. This is the conviction that underlies all the steps we have been taking to strengthen and unify the free nations during the past seven years. What have these steps been? First of all, how have we gone about meeting the requirement of providing for our security against this world-wide challenge? Our starting point, as I have said on many occasions, has been and remains the United Nations. We were prepared, and so were the other nations of the free world, to place our reliance on the machinery of the United Nations to safeguard peace. But before the United Nations could give full expression to the concept of international security embodied in the Charter, it was essential that the five permanent members of the Security Council honor their solemn pledge to cooperate to that end. This the Soviet Union has not done. I do not need to outline here the dreary record of Soviet obstruction and veto and the unceasing efforts of the Soviet representatives to sabotage the United Nations. It is important, however, to distinguish clearly between the principle of collective security embodied in the Charter and the mechanisms of the United Nations to give that principle effect. We must frankly recognize that the Soviet Union has been able, in certain instances, to stall the machinery of collective security. Yet it has not been able to impair the principle of collective security. The free nations of the world have retained their allegiance to that idea. They have found the means to act despite the Soviet veto, both through the United Nations itself and through the application of this principle in regional and other security arrangements that are fully in harmony with the Charter and give expression to its purposes. The free world refused to resign itself to collective suicide merely because of the technicality of a Soviet veto. The principle of collective measures to forestall aggression has found expression in the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, the North Atlantic Treaty, now extended to include Greece and Turkey, and the several treaties we have concluded to reinforce security in the Pacific area. But the free nations have not this time fallen prey to the dangerous illusion that treaties alone will stop an aggressor. By a series of vigorous actions, as varied as the nature of the threat, the free nations have successfully thwarted aggression or the threat of aggression in many different parts of the world. Our country has led or supported these collective measures. The aid we have given to people determined to act in defense of their freedom has often spelled the difference between success and failure. We all know what we have done, and I shall not review in detail the steps we have taken. Each major step was a milepost in the developing unity, strength and resolute will of the free nations. The first was the determined and successful effort made through the United Nations to safeguard the integrity and independence of Iran in 1945 and 1946. Next was our aid and support to embattled Greece, which enabled her to defeat the forces threatening her national independence. In Turkey, cooperative action resulted in building up a bulwark of military strength for an area vital to the defenses of the entire free world. In 1949, we began furnishing military aid to our partners in the North Atlantic Community and to a number of other free countries. The Soviet Union's threats against Germany and Japan, its neighbors to the West and to the East, have been successfully withstood. Free Germany is on its way to becoming a member of the peaceful community of nations, and a partner in the common defense. The Soviet effort to capture Berlin by blockade was thwarted by the courageous Allied airlift. An independent and democratic Japan has been brought back into the community of free nations. In the Far East, the tactics of communist imperialism have reached heights of violence unmatched elsewhere--and the problem of concerted action by the free nations has been at once more acute and more difficult. Here, in spite of outside aid and support, the free government of China succumbed to the communist assault. Our aid has enabled the free Chinese to rebuild and strengthen their forces on the island of Formosa. In other areas of the Far East-in Indo-China, Malaya, and the Philippines--our assistance has helped sustain a staunch resistance against communist insurrectionary attacks. The supreme test, up to this point, of the will and determination of the free nations came in Korea, when communist forces invaded the Republic of Korea, a state that was in a special sense under the protection of the United Nations. The response was immediate and resolute. Under our military leadership, the free nations for the first time took up arms, collectively, to repel aggression. Aggression was repelled, driven back, punished. Since that time, communist strategy has seen fit to prolong the conflict, in spite of honest efforts by the United Nations to reach an honorable truce. The months of deadlock have demonstrated that the communists cannot achieve by persistence, or by diplomatic trickery, what they failed to achieve by sneak attack. Korea has demonstrated that the free world has the will and the endurance to match the communist effort to overthrow international order through local aggression. It has been a bitter struggle and it has cost us much in brave lives and human suffering, but it has made it plain that the free nations will fight side by side, that they will not succumb to aggression or intimidation, one by one. This, in the final analysis, is the only way to halt the communist drive to world power. 
At the heart of the free world's defense is the military strength of the United States. From 1945 to 1949, the United States was sole possessor of the atomic bomb. That was a great deterrent and protection in itself. But when the Soviets produced an atomic explosion--as they were bound to do in time--we had to broaden the whole basis of our strength. We had to endeavor to keep our lead in atomic weapons. We had to strengthen our armed forces generally and to enlarge our productive capacity-our mobilization base. Historically, it was the Soviet atomic explosion in the fall of 1949, nine months before the aggression in Korea, which stimulated the planning for our program of defense mobilization. What we needed was not just a central force that could strike back against aggression. We also needed strength along the outer edges of the free world, defenses for our allies as well as for ourselves, strength to hold the line against attack as well as to retaliate. We have made great progress on this task of building strong defenses. In the last two and one half years, we have more than doubled our own defenses, and we have helped to increase the protection of nearly all the other free nations. All the measures of collective security, resistance to aggression, and the building of defenses, constitute the first requirement for the survival and progress of the free world. But, as I have pointed out, they are interwoven with the necessity of taking steps to create and maintain economic and social progress in the free nations. There can be no military strength except where there is economic capacity to back it. There can be no freedom where there is economic chaos or social collapse. For these reasons, our national policy has included a wide range of economic measures. In Europe, the grand design of the Marshall Plan permitted the people of Britain and France and Italy and a half dozen other countries, with help from the United States, to lift themselves from stagnation and find again the path of rising production, rising incomes, rising standards of living. The situation was changed almost overnight by the Marshall Plan; the people of Europe have a renewed hope and vitality, and they are able to carry a share of the military defense of the free world that would have been impossible a few years ago. Now the countries of Europe are moving rapidly towards political and economic unity, changing the map of Europe in more hopeful ways than it has been changed for 500 years. Customs unions, European economic institutions like the Schuman Plan, the movement toward European political integration, the European Defense Community-all are signs of practical and effective growth toward greater common strength and unity. The countries of Western Europe, including the free Republic of Germany are working together, and the whole free world is the gainer. It sometimes happens, in the course of history, that steps taken to meet an immediate necessity serve an ultimate purpose greater than may be apparent at the time. This, I believe, is the meaning of what has been going on in Europe under the threat of aggression. The free nations there, with our help, have been drawing together in defense of their free institutions. In so doing, they have laid the foundations of a unity that will endure as a major creative force beyond the exigencies of this period of history. We may, at this close range, be but dimly aware of the creative surge this movement represents, but I believe it to be of historic importance. I believe its benefits will survive long after communist tyranny is nothing but an unhappy memory. In Asia and Africa, the economic and social problems are different but no less urgent. There hundreds of millions of people are in ferment, exploding into the twentieth century, thrusting toward equality and independence and improvement in the hard conditions of their lives. Politically, economically, socially, things cannot and will not stay in their pre-war mold in Africa and Asia. Change must come--is coming--fast. Just in the years I have been President, 12 free nations, with more than 600 million people, have become independent: Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, Israel, Libya, India, Pakistan and Ceylon, and the three Associated States of Indo-China, now members of the French Union. These names alone are testimony to the sweep of the great force which is changing the face of half the world. Working out new relationships among the peoples of the free world would not be easy in the best of times. Even if there were no Communist drive for expansion, there would be hard and complex problems of transition from old social forms, old political arrangements, old economic institutions to the new ones our century demands--problems of guiding change into constructive channels, of helping new nations grow strong and stable. But now, with the Soviet rulers striving to exploit this ferment for their own purposes, the task has become harder and more urgent--terribly urgent. In this situation, we see the meaning and the importance of the Point IV program, through which we can share our store of know-how and of capital to help these people develop their economies and reshape their societies. As we help Iranians to raise more grain, Indians to reduce the incidence of malaria, Liberians to educate their children better, we are at once helping to answer the desires of the people for advancement, and demonstrating the superiority of freedom over communism. There will be no quick solution for any of the difficulties of the new nations of Asia and Africa--but there may be no solution at all if we do not press forward with full energy to help these countries grow and flourish in freedom and in cooperation with the rest of the free world. Our measures of economic policy have already had a tremendous effect on the course of events. Eight years ago, the Kremlin thought post-war collapse in Western Europe and Japan--with economic dislocation in America--might give them the signal to advance. We demonstrated they were wrong. Now they wait with hope that the economic recovery of the free world has set the stage for violent and disastrous rivalry among the economically developed nations, struggling for each other's markets and a greater share of trade. Here is another test that we shall have to meet and master in the years immediately ahead. And it will take great ingenuity and effort--and much time--before we prove the Kremlin wrong again. But we can do it. It is true that economic recovery presents its problems, as does economic decline, but they are problems of another order. They are the problems of distributing abundance fairly, and they can be solved by the process of international cooperation that has already brought us so far. These are the measures we must continue. This is the path we must follow. We must go on, working with our free associates, building an international structure for military defense, and for economic, social, and political progress. We must be prepared for war, because war may be thrust upon us. But the stakes in our search for peace are immensely higher than they have ever been before. For now we have entered the atomic age, and war has undergone a technological change which makes it a very different thing from what it used to be. War today between the Soviet empire and the free nations might dig the grave not only of our Stalinist opponents, but of our own society, our world as well as theirs. This transformation has been brought to pass in the seven years from Alamogordo to Eniwetok. It is only seven years, but the new force of atomic energy has turned the world into a very different kind of place. Science and technology have worked so fast that war's new meaning may not yet be grasped by all the .peoples who would be its victims; nor, perhaps, by the rulers in the Kremlin. But I have been President of the United States, these seven years, responsible for the decisions which have brought our science and our engineering to their present place. I know what this development means now. I know something of what it will come to mean in the future. We in this Government realized, even before the first successful atomic explosion, that this new force spelled terrible danger for all mankind unless it were brought under international control. We promptly advanced proposals in the United Nations to take this new source of energy out of the arena of national rivalries, to make it impossible to use it as a weapon of war. These proposals, so pregnant with benefit for all humanity, were rebuffed by the rulers of the Soviet Union. The language of science is universal, the movement of science is always forward into the unknown. We could not assume that the Soviet Union would not develop the same weapon, regardless of all our precautions, nor that there were not other and even more terrible means of destruction lying in the unexplored field of atomic energy. We had no alternative, then, but to press on, to probe the secrets of atomic power to the uttermost of our capacity, to maintain, if we could, our initial superiority in the atomic field. At the same time, we sought persistently for some avenue, some formula, for reaching an agreement with the Soviet rulers that would place this new form of power under effective restraints--that would guarantee no nation would use it in war. I do not have to recount here the proposals we made, the steps taken in the United Nations, striving at least to open a way to ultimate agreement. I hope and believe that we will continue to make these efforts so long as there is the slightest possibility of progress. All civilized nations are agreed on the urgency of the problem, and have shown their willingness to agree on effective measures of control--all save the Soviet Union and its satellites. But they have rejected every reasonable proposal. Meanwhile, the progress of scientific experiment has outrun our expectations. Atomic science is in the full tide of development; the unfolding of the innermost secrets of matter is uninterrupted and irresistible. Since Alamogordo we have developed atomic weapons with many times the explosive force of the early models, and we have produced them in substantial quantities. And recently, in the thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok, we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy. From now on, man moves into a new era of destructive power, capable of creating explosions of a new order of magnitude, dwarfing the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have no reason to think that the stage we have now reached in the release of atomic energy will be the last. Indeed, the speed of our scientific and technical progress over the last seven years shows no signs of abating. We are being hurried forward, in our mastery of the atom, from one discovery to another, toward yet unforeseeable peaks of destructive power. Inevitably, until we can reach international agreement, this is the path we must follow. And we must realize that no advance we make is unattainable by others, that no advantage in this race can be more than temporary. The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past--and destroy the very structure of a civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men. We know this, but we dare not assume that others would not yield to the temptation science is now placing in their hands. With that in mind, there is something I would say, to Stalin: You claim belief in Lenin's prophecy that one stage in the development of communist society would be war between your world and ours. But Lenin was a pre-atomic man, who viewed society and history with pre-atomic eyes. Something profound has happened since he wrote. War has changed its shape and its dimension. It cannot now be a "stage" in the development of anything save ruin for your regime and your homeland. I do not know how much time may elapse before the communist rulers bring themselves to recognize this truth. But when they do, they will find us eager to reach understandings that will protect the world from the danger it faces today. It is no wonder that some people wish that we had never succeeded in splitting the atom. But atomic power, like any other force of nature, is not evil in itself. Properly used, it is an instrumentality for human betterment. As a source of power, as a tool of scientific inquiry, it has untold possibilities. We are already making good progress in the constructive use of atomic power. We could do much more if we were free to concentrate on its peaceful uses exclusively. Atomic power will be with us all the days of our lives. We cannot legislate it out of existence. We cannot ignore the dangers or the benefits it offers. I believe that man can harness the forces of the atom to work for the improvement of the lot of human beings everywhere. That is our goal. As a nation, as a people, we must understand this problem, we must handle this new force wisely through our democratic processes. Above all, we must strive, in all earnestness and good faith, to bring it under effective international control. To do this will require much wisdom and patience and firmness. The awe-inspiring responsibility in this field now falls on a new Administration and a new Congress. I will give them my sup?port, as I am sure all our citizens will, in whatever constructive steps they may take to make this newest of man's discoveries a source of good and not of ultimate destruction. We cannot tell when or whether the attitude of the Soviet rulers may change. We do not know how long it may be before they show a willingness to negotiate effective control of atomic energy and honorable settlements of other world problems. We cannot measure how deep-rooted are the Kremlin's illusions about us. We can be sure, however, that the rulers of the communist world will not change their basic objectives lightly or soon. The communist rulers have a sense of time about these things wholly unlike our own. We tend to divide our future into short spans, like the two-year life of this Congress, or the four years of the next Presidential term. They seem to think and plan in terms of generations. And there is, therefore, no easy, short-run way to make them see that their plans cannot prevail. This means there is ahead of us a long hard test of strength and stamina, between the free world and the communist domain-our politics and our economy, our science and technology against the best they can do--our liberty against their slavery--our voluntary concert Of free nations against their forced amalgam of "people's republics"--our strategy against their strategy-our nerve against their nerve. Above all, this is a test of the will and the steadiness of the people of the United States. There has been no challenge like this in the history of our Republic. We are called upon to rise to the occasion, as no people before us. What is required of us is not easy. The way we must learn to live, the world we have to live in, cannot be so pleasant, safe or simple as most of us have known before, or confidently hoped to know. Already we have had to sacrifice a number of accustomed ways of working and of living, much nervous energy, material resources, even human life. Yet if one thing is certain in our future, it is that more sacrifice still lies ahead. Were we to grow discouraged now, were we to weaken and slack off, the whole structure we have built, these past eight years, would come apart and fall away. Never then, no matter by what stringent means, could our free world regain the ground, the time, the sheer momentum, lost by such a move. There can and should be changes and improvements in our programs, to meet new situations, serve new needs. But to desert the spirit of our basic policies, to step back from them now, would surely start the free world's slide toward the darkness that the communists have prophesied-toward the moment for which they watch and wait. If we value our freedom and our way of life and want to see them safe, we must meet the challenge and accept its implications, stick to our guns and carry out our policies. I have set out the basic conditions, as I see them, under which we have been working in the world, and the nature of our basic policies. What, then, of the future? The answer, I believe, is this: As we continue to confound Soviet expectations, as our world grows stronger, more united, more attractive to men on both sides of the iron curtain, then inevitably there will come a time of change within the communist world. We do not know how that change will come about, whether by deliberate decision in the Kremlin, by coup d'etat, by revolution, by defection of satellites, or perhaps by some unforeseen combination of factors such as these. But if the communist rulers understand they cannot win by war, and if we frustrate their attempts to win by subversion, it is not too much to expect their world to change its character, moderate its aims, become more realistic and less implacable, and recede from the cold war they began. Do not be deceived by the strong face, the look of monolithic power that the communist dictators wear before the outside world. Remember their power has no basis in consent. Remember they are so afraid of the free world's ideas and ways of life, they do not dare to let their people know about them. Think of the massive effort they put forth to try to stop our Campaign of Truth from reaching their people with its message of freedom. The masters of the Kremlin live in fear their power and position would collapse were their own people to acquire knowledge, information, comprehension about our free society. Their world has many elements of strength, but this one fatal flaw: the weakness represented by their iron curtain and their police state. Surely, a social order at once so insecure and so fearful, must ultimately lose its competition with our free society. Provided just one thing--and this I urge you to consider carefully--provided that the free world retains the confidence and the determination to outmatch the best our adversary can accomplish and to demonstrate for uncertain millions on both sides of the iron curtain the superiority of the free way of life. That is the test upon all the free nations; upon none more than our own Republic. Our resources are equal to the task. We have the industry, the skills, the basic economic strength. Above all, we have the vigor of free men in a free society. We have our liberties. And while we keep them, while we retain our democratic faith, the ultimate advantage in this hard competition lies with us, not with the communists. But there are some things that could shift the advantage to their side. One of the things that could defeat us is fear--fear of the task we face, fear of adjusting to it, fear that breeds more fear, sapping our faith, corroding our liberties, turning citizen against citizen, ally against ally. Fear could snatch away the very values we are striving to defend. Already the danger signals have gone up. Already the corrosive process bas begun. And every diminution of our tolerance, each new act of enforced conformity, each idle accusation, each demonstration of hysteria-each new restrictive law--is one more sign that we can lose the battle against fear. The communists cannot deprive us of our liberties--fear can. The communists cannot stamp out our faith in human dignity-fear can. Fear is an enemy within ourselves, and if we do not root it out, it may destroy the very way of life we are so anxious to protect. To beat back fear, we must hold fast to our heritage as free men. We must renew our confidence in one another, our tolerance, our sense of being neighbors, fellow citizens. We must take our stand on the Bill of Rights. The inquisition, the star chamber, have no place in a free society. Our ultimate strength lies, not alone in arms, but in the sense of moral values and moral truths that give meaning and vitality to the purposes of free people. These values are our faith, our inspiration, the source of our strength and our indomitable determination. We face hard tasks, great dangers. But we are Americans and we have faced hardships and uncertainty before, we have adjusted before to changing circumstances. Our whole history has been a steady training for the work it is now ours to do. No one can lose heart for the task, none can lose faith in our free ways, who stops to remember where we began, what we have sought, and what accomplished, all together as Americans. I have lived a long time and seen much happen in our country. And I know out of my own experience, that we can do what must be done. When I think back to the country I grew up in--and then look at what our country has become--I am quite certain that having done so much, we can do more. After all, it has been scarcely fifteen years since most Americans rejected out-of-hand the wise counsel that aggressors must be "quarantined". The very concept of collective security, the foundation-stone of all our actions now, was then strange doctrine, shunned and set aside. Talk about adapting; talk about adjusting; talk about responding as a people to the challenge of changed times and circumstances--there has never been a more spectacular example than this great change in America's outlook on the world. Let all of us pause now, think back, consider carefully the meaning of our national experience. Let us draw comfort from it and faith, and confidence in our future as Americans. The Nation's business is never finished. The basic questions we have been dealing with, these eight years past, present themselves anew. That is the way of our society. Circumstances change and current questions take on different forms, new complications, year by year. But underneath, the great issues remain the same--prosperity, welfare, human rights, effective democracy, and above all, peace. Now we turn to the inaugural of our new President. And in the great work he is called upon to do he will have need for the support of a united people, a confident people, with firm faith in one another and in our common cause. I pledge him my support as a citizen of our Republic, and I ask you to give him yours. To him, to you, to all my fellow citizens, I say, Godspeed. 
May God bless our country and our cause. HARRY S. TRUMAN
To the Congress of the United States: I have the honor to report to the Congress on the state of the Union. This is the eighth such report that, as President, I have been privileged to present to you and to the country. On previous occasions, it has been my custom to set forth proposals for legislative action in the coming year. But that is not my purpose today. The presentation of a legislative program falls properly to my successor, not to me, and I would not infringe upon his responsibility to chart the forward course. Instead, I wish to speak of the course we have been following the past eight years and the position at which we have arrived. In just two weeks, General Eisenhower will be inaugurated as President of the United States and I will resume--most gladly--my 'place as a private citizen of this Republic. The Presidency last changed hands eight years ago this coming April. That was a tragic time: a time of grieving for President Roosevelt--the great and gallant human being who had been taken from us; a time of unrelieved anxiety to his successor, thrust so suddenly into the complexities and burdens of the Presidential office. Not so this time. This time we see the normal transition under our democratic system. One President, at the conclusion of his term, steps back to private life; his successor, chosen by the people, begins his tenure of the office. And the Presidency of the United States continues to function without a moment's break. Since the election, I have done my best to assure that the transfer from one Administration to another shall be smooth and orderly. From General Eisenhower and his associates, I have had friendly and understanding collaboration in this endeavor. I have not sought to thrust upon him--nor has he sought to take--the responsibility which must be mine until twelve of the clock noon on January twentieth. But together, I hope and believe we have found means whereby the incoming President 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 I, with you and all Americans, wish for him all possible success in undertaking the tasks that will so soon be his. What are these tasks? The President is Chief of State, elected 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. The challenge runs not just to him but to his whole Administration, to the Congress, to the country. 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. It has been my privilege to hold the Presidential office for nearly eight 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 enormously alive and vigorous; able through these years to keep the Republic on the right course, rising to the great occasions, accomplishing the essentials, meeting the basic challenge of our times. There have been misunderstandings and controversies these past eight 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 non-partisan 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 eight 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, 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. Would the American economy collapse, after the war? That was one question. Would there be another depression here--a repetition of 1921 or 1929? The free world feared and dreaded it. The communists hoped for it and built their policies upon that hope. We answered that question--answered it with a resounding "no." Our economy has grown tremendously. Free enterprise has flourished as never fore. Sixty-two million people are now gainfully employed, compared with 51 million seven years ago. Private businessmen and farmers have invested more than 200 billion dollars in new plant and equipment since the end of World War II. Prices have risen further than they should have done--but incomes, by and large, have risen even more, so that real living standards are now considerably higher than seven years ago. Aided by sound government policies, our expanding economy has shown the strength and flexibility for swift and almost painless reconversion from war to peace, in 1945 and 1946; for quick reaction and recovery-- well before Korea--from the beginnings of recession in 1949. Above all, this live and vital economy of ours has now shown the remarkable capacity to sustain a great mobilization program for defense, a vast outpouring of aid to friends and allies all around the world--and still to produce more goods and services for peaceful use at home than we have ever known before. This has been our answer, up to now, to those who feared or hoped for a depression in this country. How have we handled our national finances? That was another question arising at war's end. In the administration of the Government, no problem takes more of the President's time, year in and year out, than fashioning the Budget, and the related problem of managing the public debt. Financing World War II left us with a tremendous public debt, which reached 279 billion dollars at its peak in February, 1946. Beginning in July, 1946, when war and reconversion financing had ended, we have held quite closely to the sound standard that in times of high employment and high national income, the Federal Budget should be balanced and the debt reduced. For the four fiscal years from July 1, 1946, to June 30, 1950, we had a net surplus of 4.3 billion dollars. Using this surplus, and the Treasury's excess cash reserves, the debt was reduced substantially, reaching a low point of 251 billion dollars in June, 1949, and ending up at 257 billion dollars on June 30, 1950. In July of 1950, we began our rapid rearmament, and for two years held very close to a pay-as-we-go policy. But in the current fiscal year and the next, rising expenditures for defense will substantially outrun receipts. This will pose an immediate and serious problem for the new Congress. Now let me turn to another question we faced at the war's end. Would we take up again, and carry forward, the great projects of social welfare--so badly needed, so long overdue--that the New Deal had introduced into our national life? Would our Government continue to have a heart for the people, or was the progress of the New Deal to be halted in the aftermath of war as decisively as the progress of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom had been halted after the first world war? This question, too, we have answered. We have answered it by doubling old age insurance benefits and extending coverage to ten million more people. We have answered it by increasing our minimum wage. We have answered by the three million privately constructed homes that the Federal Government has helped finance since the war--and the 155 thousand units of low rent public housing placed under construction since 1949. We have answered with the 42 thousand new hospital beds provided since 1946 through the joint efforts of the Federal Government and local communities. We have answered by helping eight million veterans of World War II to obtain advanced education, 196 thousand to start in business, and 64 thousand to buy farms. We have answered by continuing to help farmers obtain electric power, until today nearly 90 per cent of our farms have power line electric service. In these and other ways, we have demonstrated, up to now, that our democracy has not forgotten how to use the powers of the Government to promote the people's welfare and security. Another of the big post-war questions was this: What we would do with the Nation's natural resources--its soils and water, forests and grasslands. Would we continue the strong conservation movement of the 1930's, or would we, as we did after the First World War, slip back into the practices of monopoly, exploitation, and waste ? The answer is plain. All across our country, the soil conservation movement has spread, aided by Government programs, enriching private and public lands, preserving them from destruction, improving them for future use. In our river basins, we have invested nearly 5 billion dollars of public funds in the last eight years--invested them in projects to control floods, irrigate farmlands, produce low-cost power and get it to the housewives and farmers and businessmen who need it. We have been vigilant in protecting the people's property--lands and forests and oil and minerals. We have had to fight hard against those who would use our resources for private greed; we have met setbacks; we have had to delay work because of defense priorities, but on the whole we can be proud of our record in protecting our natural heritage, and in using our resources for the public good. Here is another question we had to face at the war's close: Would we continue, in peace as well as war, to promote equality of opportunity for all our citizens, seeking ways and means to guarantee for all of them the full enjoyment of their civil rights? During the war we achieved great economic and social gains for millions of our fellow citizens who had been held back by prejudice. Were we prepared, in peacetime, to keep on moving toward full realization of the democratic promise? Or would we let it be submerged, wiped out, in post-war riots and reaction, as after World War I? We answered these questions in a series of forward steps at every level of government and in many spheres of private life. In our armed forces, our civil service, our universities, our railway trains, the residential districts of our cities--in stores and factories all across the Nation--in the polling booths as well--the barriers are coming down. This is happening, in part, at the mandate of the courts; in part, at the insistence of Federal, State and local governments; in part, through the enlightened action of private groups and persons in every region and every walk of life. There has been a great awakening of the American conscience on the issues of civil rights. And all this progress--still far from complete but still continuing--has been our answer, up to now, to those who questioned our intention to live up to the promises of equal freedom for us all. There was another question posed for us at the war's end, which equally concerned the future course of our democracy: Could the machinery of government and politics in this Republic be changed, improved, adapted rapidly enough to carry through, responsibly and well, the vast, new complicated undertakings called for in our time ? We have answered this question, too, answered it by tackling the most urgent, most specific, problems which the war experience itself had brought into sharp focus. The reorganization of the Congress in 1946; the unification of our armed services, beginning in 1947; the closer integration of foreign and military policy through the National Security Council created that same year; and the Executive reorganizations, before and after the Hoover-Acheson Commission Report in 1949--these are landmarks in our continuing endeavor to make government an effective instrument of service to the people. 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 eight 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 state--and how that came to pass--than an understanding of the diametrically opposite principles and policies of these two great powers in a war-ruined world. For our part, we in this Republic were-and are--free men, heirs of 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 post-war objective has been in keeping with this great idea. The United States has sought to use its pre-eminent 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 use the rights and privileges they had obtained in the United 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 million square miles. Beyond its borders, East and West, are the nearly five million 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 post-war 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, Indo-China, the Philippines, and China, or outright aggression by one of their satellites, as in Korea. Where the forces of nationalism, independence, and economic change were at work throughout the great sweep of Asia and Africa, the communists tried to identify themselves with the because 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. Geography gives them a central position. They are both a European and an Asian power, with borders touching many of the most sensitive and vital areas in the free world around them. So situated, they can use their armies and their economic power to set up simultaneously a whole series of threats--or inducements--to such widely dispersed places as Western Germany, Iran, and Japan. These pressures and attractions can be sustained at will, or quickly shifted from place to place. Thus the communist rulers are moving, with implacable will, to create greater strength in their vast empire, and to create weakness and division in the free world, preparing for the time their false creed teaches them must come: the time when the whole world outside their sway will be so torn by strife and contradictions that it will be ripe for the communist plucking. This is the heart of the distorted Marxist interpretation of history. This is the glass through which Moscow and Peiping look out upon the world, the glass through which they see the rest of us. They seem really to believe that history is on their side. And they are trying to boost "history" along, at every opportunity, in every way they can. I have set forth here the nature of the communist menace confronting our Republic and the whole free world. This is the measure of the challenge we have faced since World War II--a challenge partly military and partly economic, partly moral and partly intellectual, confronting us at every level of human endeavor and all around the world. It has been and must be the free world's purpose not only to organize defenses against aggression and subversion, not only to build a structure of resistance and salvation for the community of nations outside the iron curtain, but in addition to give expression and opportunity to the forces of growth and 'progress in the free world, to so organize and unify the cooperative community of free men that we will not crumble but grow stronger over the years, and the Soviet empire, not the free world, will eventually have to change its ways or fall. Our whole program of action to carry out this purpose has been directed to meet two requirements. The first of these had to do with security. Like the pioneers who settled this great continent of ours, we have had to carry a musket while we went about our peaceful business. We realized that if we and our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing Soviet military threat, we would never have the opportunity to carry forward our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order--the only environment in which our free institutions could survive and flourish. Did this mean we had to drop everything else and concentrate on armies and weapons ? Of course it did not: side-by-side with this urgent military requirement, we had to continue to help create conditions of economic and social progress in the world. This work had to be carried forward alongside the first, not only in order to meet the non-military aspects of the communist drive for power, but also because this creative effort toward human progress is essential to bring about the kind of world we as free men want to live in. These two requirements--military security and human progress--are more closely related in action than we sometimes recognize. Military security depends upon a strong economic underpinning and a stable and hopeful political order; conversely, the confidence that makes for economic and political progress does not thrive in areas that are vulnerable to military conquest. These requirements are related in another way. Both of them depend upon unity of action among the free nations of the world. This, indeed, has been the foundation of our whole effort, for the drawing together of the free people of the world has become a condition essential not only to their progress, but to their survival as free people. This is the conviction that underlies all the steps we have been taking to strengthen and unify the free nations during the past seven years. What have these steps been? First of all, how have we gone about meeting the requirement of providing for our security against this world-wide challenge? Our starting point, as I have said on many occasions, has been and remains the United Nations. We were prepared, and so were the other nations of the free world, to place our reliance on the machinery of the United Nations to safeguard peace. But before the United Nations could give full expression to the concept of international security embodied in the Charter, it was essential that the five permanent members of the Security Council honor their solemn pledge to cooperate to that end. This the Soviet Union has not done. I do not need to outline here the dreary record of Soviet obstruction and veto and the unceasing efforts of the Soviet representatives to sabotage the United Nations. It is important, however, to distinguish clearly between the principle of collective security embodied in the Charter and the mechanisms of the United Nations to give that principle effect. We must frankly recognize that the Soviet Union has been able, in certain instances, to stall the machinery of collective security. Yet it has not been able to impair the principle of collective security. The free nations of the world have retained their allegiance to that idea. They have found the means to act despite the Soviet veto, both through the United Nations itself and through the application of this principle in regional and other security arrangements that are fully in harmony with the Charter and give expression to its purposes. The free world refused to resign itself to collective suicide merely because of the technicality of a Soviet veto. The principle of collective measures to forestall aggression has found expression in the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, the North Atlantic Treaty, now extended to include Greece and Turkey, and the several treaties we have concluded to reinforce security in the Pacific area. But the free nations have not this time fallen prey to the dangerous illusion that treaties alone will stop an aggressor. By a series of vigorous actions, as varied as the nature of the threat, the free nations have successfully thwarted aggression or the threat of aggression in many different parts of the world. Our country has led or supported these collective measures. The aid we have given to people determined to act in defense of their freedom has often spelled the difference between success and failure. We all know what we have done, and I shall not review in detail the steps we have taken. Each major step was a milepost in the developing unity, strength and resolute will of the free nations. The first was the determined and successful effort made through the United Nations to safeguard the integrity and independence of Iran in 1945 and 1946. Next was our aid and support to embattled Greece, which enabled her to defeat the forces threatening her national independence. In Turkey, cooperative action resulted in building up a bulwark of military strength for an area vital to the defenses of the entire free world. In 1949, we began furnishing military aid to our partners in the North Atlantic Community and to a number of other free countries. The Soviet Union's threats against Germany and Japan, its neighbors to the West and to the East, have been successfully withstood. Free Germany is on its way to becoming a member of the peaceful community of nations, and a partner in the common defense. The Soviet effort to capture Berlin by blockade was thwarted by the courageous Allied airlift. An independent and democratic Japan has been brought back into the community of free nations. In the Far East, the tactics of communist imperialism have reached heights of violence unmatched elsewhere--and the problem of concerted action by the free nations has been at once more acute and more difficult. Here, in spite of outside aid and support, the free government of China succumbed to the communist assault. Our aid has enabled the free Chinese to rebuild and strengthen their forces on the island of Formosa. In other areas of the Far East-in Indo-China, Malaya, and the Philippines--our assistance has helped sustain a staunch resistance against communist insurrectionary attacks. The supreme test, up to this point, of the will and determination of the free nations came in Korea, when communist forces invaded the Republic of Korea, a state that was in a special sense under the protection of the United Nations. The response was immediate and resolute. Under our military leadership, the free nations for the first time took up arms, collectively, to repel aggression. Aggression was repelled, driven back, punished. Since that time, communist strategy has seen fit to prolong the conflict, in spite of honest efforts by the United Nations to reach an honorable truce. The months of deadlock have demonstrated that the communists cannot achieve by persistence, or by diplomatic trickery, what they failed to achieve by sneak attack. Korea has demonstrated that the free world has the will and the endurance to match the communist effort to overthrow international order through local aggression. It has been a bitter struggle and it has cost us much in brave lives and human suffering, but it has made it plain that the free nations will fight side by side, that they will not succumb to aggression or intimidation, one by one. This, in the final analysis, is the only way to halt the communist drive to world power. At the heart of the free world's defense is the military strength of the United States. From 1945 to 1949, the United States was sole possessor of the atomic bomb. That was a great deterrent and protection in itself. But when the Soviets produced an atomic explosion--as they were bound to do in time--we had to broaden the whole basis of our strength. We had to endeavor to keep our lead in atomic weapons. We had to strengthen our armed forces generally and to enlarge our productive capacity-our mobilization base. Historically, it was the Soviet atomic explosion in the fall of 1949, nine months before the aggression in Korea, which stimulated the planning for our program of defense mobilization. What we needed was not just a central force that could strike back against aggression. We also needed strength along the outer edges of the free world, defenses for our allies as well as for ourselves, strength to hold the line against attack as well as to retaliate. We have made great progress on this task of building strong defenses. In the last two and one half years, we have more than doubled our own defenses, and we have helped to increase the protection of nearly all the other free nations. All the measures of collective security, resistance to aggression, and the building of defenses, constitute the first requirement for the survival and progress of the free world. But, as I have pointed out, they are interwoven with the necessity of taking steps to create and maintain economic and social progress in the free nations. There can be no military strength except where there is economic capacity to back it. There can be no freedom where there is economic chaos or social collapse. For these reasons, our national policy has included a wide range of economic measures. In Europe, the grand design of the Marshall Plan permitted the people of Britain and France and Italy and a half dozen other countries, with help from the United States, to lift themselves from stagnation and find again the path of rising production, rising incomes, rising standards of living. The situation was changed almost overnight by the Marshall Plan; the people of Europe have a renewed hope and vitality, and they are able to carry a share of the military defense of the free world that would have been impossible a few years ago. Now the countries of Europe are moving rapidly towards political and economic unity, changing the map of Europe in more hopeful ways than it has been changed for 500 years. Customs unions, European economic institutions like the Schuman Plan, the movement toward European political integration, the European Defense Community-all are signs of practical and effective growth toward greater common strength and unity. The countries of Western Europe, including the free Republic of Germany are working together, and the whole free world is the gainer. It sometimes happens, in the course of history, that steps taken to meet an immediate necessity serve an ultimate purpose greater than may be apparent at the time. This, I believe, is the meaning of what has been going on in Europe under the threat of aggression. The free nations there, with our help, have been drawing together in defense of their free institutions. In so doing, they have laid the foundations of a unity that will endure as a major creative force beyond the exigencies of this period of history. We may, at this close range, be but dimly aware of the creative surge this movement represents, but I believe it to be of historic importance. I believe its benefits will survive long after communist tyranny is nothing but an unhappy memory. In Asia and Africa, the economic and social problems are different but no less urgent. There hundreds of millions of people are in ferment, exploding into the twentieth century, thrusting toward equality and independence and improvement in the hard conditions of their lives. Politically, economically, socially, things cannot and will not stay in their pre-war mold in Africa and Asia. Change must come--is coming--fast. Just in the years I have been President, 12 free nations, with more than 600 million people, have become independent: Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, Israel, Libya, India, Pakistan and Ceylon, and the three Associated States of Indo-China, now members of the French Union. These names alone are testimony to the sweep of the great force which is changing the face of half the world. Working out new relationships among the peoples of the free world would not be easy in the best of times. Even if there were no Communist drive for expansion, there would be hard and complex problems of transition from old social forms, old political arrangements, old economic institutions to the new ones our century demands--problems of guiding change into constructive channels, of helping new nations grow strong and stable. But now, with the Soviet rulers striving to exploit this ferment for their own purposes, the task has become harder and more urgent--terribly urgent. In this situation, we see the meaning and the importance of the Point IV program, through which we can share our store of know-how and of capital to help these people develop their economies and reshape their societies. As we help Iranians to raise more grain, Indians to reduce the incidence of malaria, Liberians to educate their children better, we are at once helping to answer the desires of the people for advancement, and demonstrating the superiority of freedom over communism. There will be no quick solution for any of the difficulties of the new nations of Asia and Africa--but there may be no solution at all if we do not press forward with full energy to help these countries grow and flourish in freedom and in cooperation with the rest of the free world. Our measures of economic policy have already had a tremendous effect on the course of events. Eight years ago, the Kremlin thought post-war collapse in Western Europe and Japan--with economic dislocation in America--might give them the signal to advance. We demonstrated they were wrong. Now they wait with hope that the economic recovery of the free world has set the stage for violent and disastrous rivalry among the economically developed nations, struggling for each other's markets and a greater share of trade. Here is another test that we shall have to meet and master in the years immediately ahead. And it will take great ingenuity and effort--and much time--before we prove the Kremlin wrong again. But we can do it. It is true that economic recovery presents its problems, as does economic decline, but they are problems of another order. They are the problems of distributing abundance fairly, and they can be solved by the process of international cooperation that has already brought us so far. These are the measures we must continue. This is the path we must follow. We must go on, working with our free associates, building an international structure for military defense, and for economic, social, and political progress. We must be prepared for war, because war may be thrust upon us. But the stakes in our search for peace are immensely higher than they have ever been before. For now we have entered the atomic age, and war has undergone a technological change which makes it a very different thing from what it used to be. War today between the Soviet empire and the free nations might dig the grave not only of our Stalinist opponents, but of our own society, our world as well as theirs. This transformation has been brought to pass in the seven years from Alamogordo to Eniwetok. It is only seven years, but the new force of atomic energy has turned the world into a very different kind of place. Science and technology have worked so fast that war's new meaning may not yet be grasped by all the .peoples who would be its victims; nor, perhaps, by the rulers in the Kremlin. But I have been President of the United States, these seven years, responsible for the decisions which have brought our science and our engineering to their present place. I know what this development means now. I know something of what it will come to mean in the future. We in this Government realized, even before the first successful atomic explosion, that this new force spelled terrible danger for all mankind unless it were brought under international control. We promptly advanced proposals in the United Nations to take this new source of energy out of the arena of national rivalries, to make it impossible to use it as a weapon of war. These proposals, so pregnant with benefit for all humanity, were rebuffed by the rulers of the Soviet Union. The language of science is universal, the movement of science is always forward into the unknown. We could not assume that the Soviet Union would not develop the same weapon, regardless of all our precautions, nor that there were not other and even more terrible means of destruction lying in the unexplored field of atomic energy. We had no alternative, then, but to press on, to probe the secrets of atomic power to the uttermost of our capacity, to maintain, if we could, our initial superiority in the atomic field. At the same time, we sought persistently for some avenue, some formula, for reaching an agreement with the Soviet rulers that would place this new form of power under effective restraints--that would guarantee no nation would use it in war. I do not have to recount here the proposals we made, the steps taken in the United Nations, striving at least to open a way to ultimate agreement. I hope and believe that we will continue to make these efforts so long as there is the slightest possibility of progress. All civilized nations are agreed on the urgency of the problem, and have shown their willingness to agree on effective measures of control--all save the Soviet Union and its satellites. But they have rejected every reasonable proposal. Meanwhile, the progress of scientific experiment has outrun our expectations. Atomic science is in the full tide of development; the unfolding of the innermost secrets of matter is uninterrupted and irresistible. Since Alamogordo we have developed atomic weapons with many times the explosive force of the early models, and we have produced them in substantial quantities. And recently, in the thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok, we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy. From now on, man moves into a new era of destructive power, capable of creating explosions of a new order of magnitude, dwarfing the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have no reason to think that the stage we have now reached in the release of atomic energy will be the last. Indeed, the speed of our scientific and technical progress over the last seven years shows no signs of abating. We are being hurried forward, in our mastery of the atom, from one discovery to another, toward yet unforeseeable peaks of destructive power. Inevitably, until we can reach international agreement, this is the path we must follow. And we must realize that no advance we make is unattainable by others, that no advantage in this race can be more than temporary. The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past--and destroy the very structure of a civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men. We know this, but we dare not assume that others would not yield to the temptation science is now placing in their hands. With that in mind, there is something I would say, to Stalin: You claim belief in Lenin's prophecy that one stage in the development of communist society would be war between your world and ours. But Lenin was a pre-atomic man, who viewed society and history with pre-atomic eyes. Something profound has happened since he wrote. War has changed its shape and its dimension. It cannot now be a "stage" in the development of anything save ruin for your regime and your homeland. I do not know how much time may elapse before the communist rulers bring themselves to recognize this truth. But when they do, they will find us eager to reach understandings that will protect the world from the danger it faces today. It is no wonder that some people wish that we had never succeeded in splitting the atom. But atomic power, like any other force of nature, is not evil in itself. Properly used, it is an instrumentality for human betterment. As a source of power, as a tool of scientific inquiry, it has untold possibilities. We are already making good progress in the constructive use of atomic power. We could do much more if we were free to concentrate on its peaceful uses exclusively. Atomic power will be with us all the days of our lives. We cannot legislate it out of existence. We cannot ignore the dangers or the benefits it offers. I believe that man can harness the forces of the atom to work for the improvement of the lot of human beings everywhere. That is our goal. As a nation, as a people, we must understand this problem, we must handle this new force wisely through our democratic processes. Above all, we must strive, in all earnestness and good faith, to bring it under effective international control. To do this will require much wisdom and patience and firmness. The awe-inspiring responsibility in this field now falls on a new Administration and a new Congress. I will give them my sup?port, as I am sure all our citizens will, in whatever constructive steps they may take to make this newest of man's discoveries a source of good and not of ultimate destruction. We cannot tell when or whether the attitude of the Soviet rulers may change. We do not know how long it may be before they show a willingness to negotiate effective control of atomic energy and honorable settlements of other world problems. We cannot measure how deep-rooted are the Kremlin's illusions about us. We can be sure, however, that the rulers of the communist world will not change their basic objectives lightly or soon. The communist rulers have a sense of time about these things wholly unlike our own. We tend to divide our future into short spans, like the two-year life of this Congress, or the four years of the next Presidential term. They seem to think and plan in terms of generations. And there is, therefore, no easy, short-run way to make them see that their plans cannot prevail. This means there is ahead of us a long hard test of strength and stamina, between the free world and the communist domain-our politics and our economy, our science and technology against the best they can do--our liberty against their slavery--our voluntary concert Of free nations against their forced amalgam of "people's republics"--our strategy against their strategy-our nerve against their nerve. Above all, this is a test of the will and the steadiness of the people of the United States. There has been no challenge like this in the history of our Republic. We are called upon to rise to the occasion, as no people before us. What is required of us is not easy. The way we must learn to live, the world we have to live in, cannot be so pleasant, safe or simple as most of us have known before, or confidently hoped to know. Already we have had to sacrifice a number of accustomed ways of working and of living, much nervous energy, material resources, even human life. Yet if one thing is certain in our future, it is that more sacrifice still lies ahead. Were we to grow discouraged now, were we to weaken and slack off, the whole structure we have built, these past eight years, would come apart and fall away. Never then, no matter by what stringent means, could our free world regain the ground, the time, the sheer momentum, lost by such a move. There can and should be changes and improvements in our programs, to meet new situations, serve new needs. But to desert the spirit of our basic policies, to step back from them now, would surely start the free world's slide toward the darkness that the communists have prophesied-toward the moment for which they watch and wait. If we value our freedom and our way of life and want to see them safe, we must meet the challenge and accept its implications, stick to our guns and carry out our policies. I have set out the basic conditions, as I see them, under which we have been working in the world, and the nature of our basic policies. What, then, of the future? The answer, I believe, is this: As we continue to confound Soviet expectations, as our world grows stronger, more united, more attractive to men on both sides of the iron curtain, then inevitably there will come a time of change within the communist world. We do not know how that change will come about, whether by deliberate decision in the Kremlin, by coup d'etat, by revolution, by defection of satellites, or perhaps by some unforeseen combination of factors such as these. But if the communist rulers understand they cannot win by war, and if we frustrate their attempts to win by subversion, it is not too much to expect their world to change its character, moderate its aims, become more realistic and less implacable, and recede from the cold war they began. Do not be deceived by the strong face, the look of monolithic power that the communist dictators wear before the outside world. Remember their power has no basis in consent. Remember they are so afraid of the free world's ideas and ways of life, they do not dare to let their people know about them. Think of the massive effort they put forth to try to stop our Campaign of Truth from reaching their people with its message of freedom. The masters of the Kremlin live in fear their power and position would collapse were their own people to acquire knowledge, information, comprehension about our free society. Their world has many elements of strength, but this one fatal flaw: the weakness represented by their iron curtain and their police state. Surely, a social order at once so insecure and so fearful, must ultimately lose its competition with our free society. Provided just one thing--and this I urge you to consider carefully--provided that the free world retains the confidence and the determination to outmatch the best our adversary can accomplish and to demonstrate for uncertain millions on both sides of the iron curtain the superiority of the free way of life. That is the test upon all the free nations; upon none more than our own Republic. Our resources are equal to the task. We have the industry, the skills, the basic economic strength. Above all, we have the vigor of free men in a free society. We have our liberties. And while we keep them, while we retain our democratic faith, the ultimate advantage in this hard competition lies with us, not with the communists. But there are some things that could shift the advantage to their side. One of the things that could defeat us is fear--fear of the task we face, fear of adjusting to it, fear that breeds more fear, sapping our faith, corroding our liberties, turning citizen against citizen, ally against ally. Fear could snatch away the very values we are striving to defend. Already the danger signals have gone up. Already the corrosive process bas begun. And every diminution of our tolerance, each new act of enforced conformity, each idle accusation, each demonstration of hysteria-each new restrictive law--is one more sign that we can lose the battle against fear. The communists cannot deprive us of our liberties--fear can. The communists cannot stamp out our faith in human dignity-fear can. Fear is an enemy within ourselves, and if we do not root it out, it may destroy the very way of life we are so anxious to protect. To beat back fear, we must hold fast to our heritage as free men. We must renew our confidence in one another, our tolerance, our sense of being neighbors, fellow citizens. We must take our stand on the Bill of Rights. The inquisition, the star chamber, have no place in a free society. Our ultimate strength lies, not alone in arms, but in the sense of moral values and moral truths that give meaning and vitality to the purposes of free people. These values are our faith, our inspiration, the source of our strength and our indomitable determination. We face hard tasks, great dangers. But we are Americans and we have faced hardships and uncertainty before, we have adjusted before to changing circumstances. Our whole history has been a steady training for the work it is now ours to do. No one can lose heart for the task, none can lose faith in our free ways, who stops to remember where we began, what we have sought, and what accomplished, all together as Americans. I have lived a long time and seen much happen in our country. And I know out of my own experience, that we can do what must be done. When I think back to the country I grew up in--and then look at what our country has become--I am quite certain that having done so much, we can do more. After all, it has been scarcely fifteen years since most Americans rejected out-of-hand the wise counsel that aggressors must be "quarantined". The very concept of collective security, the foundation-stone of all our actions now, was then strange doctrine, shunned and set aside. Talk about adapting; talk about adjusting; talk about responding as a people to the challenge of changed times and circumstances--there has never been a more spectacular example than this great change in America's outlook on the world. Let all of us pause now, think back, consider carefully the meaning of our national experience. Let us draw comfort from it and faith, and confidence in our future as Americans. The Nation's business is never finished. The basic questions we have been dealing with, these eight years past, present themselves anew. That is the way of our society. Circumstances change and current questions take on different forms, new complications, year by year. But underneath, the great issues remain the same--prosperity, welfare, human rights, effective democracy, and above all, peace. Now we turn to the inaugural of our new President. And in the great work he is called upon to do he will have need for the support of a united people, a confident people, with firm faith in one another and in our common because. I pledge him my support as a citizen of our Republic, and I ask you to give him yours. To him, to you, to all my fellow citizens, I say, Godspeed. May God bless our country and our because. HARRY S. TRUMAN
to the congress of the united states i have the honor to report to the congress on the state of the union this is the eighth such report that as president i have been privileged to present to you and to the country on previous occasions it has been my custom to set forth proposals for legislative action in the coming year but that is not my purpose today the presentation of a legislative program falls properly to my successor not to me and i would not infringe upon his responsibility to chart the forward course instead i wish to speak of the course we have been following the past eight years and the position at which we have arrived in just two weeks general eisenhower will be inaugurated as president of the united states and i will resume most gladly my as a private citizen of this republic the presidency last changed hands eight years ago this coming april that was a tragic time a time of grieving for president roosevelt the great and gallant human being who had been taken from us a time of unrelieved anxiety to his successor thrust so suddenly into the complexities and burdens of the presidential office not so this time this time we see the normal transition under our democratic system one president at the conclusion of his term steps back to private life his successor chosen by the people begins his tenure of the office and the presidency of the united states continues to function without a moment break since the election i have done my best to assure that the transfer from one administration to another shall be smooth and orderly from general eisenhower and his associates i have had friendly and understanding collaboration in this endeavor i have not sought to thrust upon him nor has he sought to take the responsibility which must be mine until twelve of the clock noon on january twentieth but together i hope and believe we have found means whereby the incoming president can obtain the full and detailed information he will need to assume the responsibility the moment he takes the oath of office the is about to take up the greatest burdens the most compelling responsibilities given to any man and i with you and all americans wish for him all possible success in undertaking the tasks that will so soon be his what are these tasks the president is chief of state elected representative of all the people national spokesman for them and to them he is of our armed forces he is charged with the conduct of our foreign relations he is chief executive of the nation 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 job together they would be a tremendous undertaking in the easiest of times but our times are not easy they are 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 can not meet it alone the challenge runs not just to him but to his whole administration to the congress to the country ultimately no president can master his responsibilities save as his fellow the whole people comprehend the challenge of our times and move with him to meet it it has been my privilege to hold the presidential office for nearly eight 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 enormously alive and vigorous able through these years to keep the republic on the right course rising to the great occasions accomplishing the essentials meeting the basic challenge of our times there have been misunderstandings and controversies these past eight 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 civil servants grateful despite our 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 eight years but the accomplishments are real and very great not as the president 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 that great white flash of light 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 would the american economy collapse after the war that was one question would there be another depression here a repetition of 1921 or 1929 the free world feared and dreaded it the communists hoped for it and built their policies upon that hope we answered that question answered it with a resounding no our economy has grown tremendously free enterprise has flourished as never fore million people are now gainfully employed compared with 51 million seven years ago private businessmen and farmers have invested more than 200 billion dollars in new plant and equipment since the end of world war ii prices have risen further than they should have done but incomes by and large have risen even more so that real living standards are now considerably higher than seven years ago aided by sound government policies our expanding economy has shown the strength and flexibility for swift and almost painless reconversion from war to peace in 1945 and 1946 for quick reaction and recovery well before korea from the beginnings of recession in 1949 above all this live and vital economy of ours has now shown the remarkable capacity to sustain a great mobilization program for defense a vast outpouring of aid to friends and allies all around the world and still to produce more goods and services for peaceful use at home than we have ever known before this has been our answer up to now to those who feared or hoped for a depression in this country how have we handled our national finances that was another question arising at war end in the administration of the government no problem takes more of the president time year in and year out than fashioning the budget and the related problem of managing the public debt financing world war ii left us with a tremendous public debt which reached 279 billion dollars at its peak in february 1946 beginning in july 1946 when war and reconversion financing had ended we have held quite closely to the sound standard that in times of high employment and high national income the federal budget should be balanced and the debt reduced for the four fiscal years from july 1 1946 to june 30 1950 we had a net surplus of billion dollars using this surplus and the treasury excess cash reserves the debt was reduced substantially reaching a low point of 251 billion dollars in june 1949 and ending up at 257 billion dollars on june 30 1950 in july of 1950 we began our rapid rearmament and for two years held very close to a policy but in the current fiscal year and the next rising expenditures for defense will substantially outrun receipts this will pose an immediate and serious problem for the new congress now let me turn to another question we faced at the war end would we take up again and carry forward the great projects of social welfare so badly needed so long overdue that the new deal had introduced into our national life would our government continue to have a heart for the people or was the progress of the new deal to be halted in the aftermath of war as decisively as the progress of woodrow wilson new freedom had been halted after the first world war this question too we have answered we have answered it by doubling old age insurance benefits and extending coverage to ten million more people we have answered it by increasing our minimum wage we have answered by the three million privately constructed homes that the federal government has helped finance since the war and the 155 thousand units of low rent public housing placed under construction since 1949 we have answered with the 42 thousand new hospital beds provided since 1946 through the joint efforts of the federal government and local communities we have answered by helping eight million veterans of world war ii to obtain advanced education 196 thousand to start in business and 64 thousand to buy farms we have answered by continuing to help farmers obtain electric power until today nearly 90 per cent of our farms have power line electric service in these and other ways we have demonstrated up to now that our democracy has not forgotten how to use the powers of the government to promote the people welfare and security another of the big questions was this what we would do with the nation natural resources its soils and water forests and grasslands would we continue the strong conservation movement of the 1930 or would we as we did after the first world war slip back into the practices of monopoly exploitation and waste the answer is plain all across our country the soil conservation movement has spread aided by government programs enriching private and public lands preserving them from destruction improving them for future use in our river basins we have invested nearly 5 billion dollars of public funds in the last eight years invested them in projects to control floods irrigate farmlands produce power and get it to the housewives and farmers and businessmen who need it we have been vigilant in protecting the people property lands and forests and oil and minerals we have had to fight hard against those who would use our resources for private greed we have met setbacks we have had to delay work because of defense priorities but on the whole we can be proud of our record in protecting our natural heritage and in using our resources for the public good here is another question we had to face at the war close would we continue in peace as well as war to promote equality of opportunity for all our citizens seeking ways and means to guarantee for all of them the full enjoyment of their civil rights during the war we achieved great economic and social gains for millions of our fellow citizens who had been held back by prejudice were we prepared in peacetime to keep on moving toward full realization of the democratic promise or would we let it be submerged wiped out in riots and reaction as after world war i we answered these questions in a series of forward steps at every level of government and in many spheres of private life in our armed forces our civil service our universities our railway trains the residential districts of our cities in stores and factories all across the nation in the polling booths as well the barriers are coming down this is happening in part at the mandate of the courts in part at the insistence of federal state and local governments in part through the enlightened action of private groups and persons in every region and every walk of life there has been a great awakening of the american conscience on the issues of civil rights and all this progress still far from complete but still continuing has been our answer up to now to those who questioned our intention to live up to the promises of equal freedom for us all there was another question posed for us at the war end which equally concerned the future course of our democracy could the machinery of government and politics in this republic be changed improved adapted rapidly enough to carry through responsibly and well the vast new complicated undertakings called for in our time we have answered this question too answered it by tackling the most urgent most specific problems which the war experience itself had brought into sharp focus the reorganization of the congress in 1946 the unification of our armed services beginning in 1947 the closer integration of foreign and military policy through the national security council created that same year and the executive reorganizations before and after the commission report in 1949 these are landmarks in our continuing endeavor to make government an effective instrument of service to the people 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 can not know the answer yet perhaps we will not know it finally for a long time to come but day and night these past eight 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 state and how that came to pass than an understanding of the diametrically opposite principles and policies of these two great powers in a world for our part we in this republic are free men heirs of 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 objective has been in keeping with this great idea the united states has sought to use its 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 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 use the rights and privileges they had obtained in the united nations to frustrate its purposes and cut down its powers as an effective agent of world progress and the keeper of the world 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 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 million square miles beyond its borders east and west are the nearly five million 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 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 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 sphere and in peiping 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 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 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 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 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 chaos existed in industrialized nations as in western europe the local stalinists tried to gain power through political processes 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 revolutionary forces as in greece the philippines and china or outright aggression by one of their satellites as in korea where the forces of nationalism independence and economic change were at work throughout the great sweep of asia and africa the communists tried to identify themselves with the because 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 geography gives them a central position they are both a european and an asian power with borders touching many of the most sensitive and vital areas in the free world around them so situated they can use their armies and their economic power to set up simultaneously a whole series of threats or inducements to such widely dispersed places as western germany iran and japan these pressures and attractions can be sustained at will or quickly shifted from place to place thus the communist rulers are moving with implacable will to create greater strength in their vast empire and to create weakness and division in the free world preparing for the time their false creed teaches them must come the time when the whole world outside their sway will be so torn by strife and contradictions that it will be ripe for the communist plucking this is the heart of the distorted marxist interpretation of history this is the glass through which moscow and peiping look out upon the world the glass through which they see the rest of us they seem really to believe that history is on their side and they are trying to boost history along at every opportunity in every way they can i have set forth here the nature of the communist menace confronting our republic and the whole free world this is the measure of the challenge we have faced since world war ii a challenge partly military and partly economic partly moral and partly intellectual confronting us at every level of human endeavor and all around the world it has been and must be the free world purpose not only to organize defenses against aggression and subversion not only to build a structure of resistance and salvation for the community of nations outside the iron curtain but in addition to give expression and opportunity to the forces of growth and in the free world to so organize and unify the cooperative community of free men that we will not crumble but grow stronger over the years and the soviet empire not the free world will eventually have to change its ways or fall our whole program of action to carry out this purpose has been directed to meet two requirements the first of these had to do with security like the pioneers who settled this great continent of ours we have had to carry a musket while we went about our peaceful business we realized that if we and our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing soviet military threat we would never have the opportunity to carry forward our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order the only environment in which our free institutions could survive and flourish did this mean we had to drop everything else and concentrate on armies and weapons of course it did not with this urgent military requirement we had to continue to help create conditions of economic and social progress in the world this work had to be carried forward alongside the first not only in order to meet the aspects of the communist drive for power but also because this creative effort toward human progress is essential to bring about the kind of world we as free men want to live in these two requirements military security and human progress are more closely related in action than we sometimes recognize military security depends upon a strong economic underpinning and a stable and hopeful political order conversely the confidence that makes for economic and political progress does not thrive in areas that are vulnerable to military conquest these requirements are related in another way both of them depend upon unity of action among the free nations of the world this indeed has been the foundation of our whole effort for the drawing together of the free people of the world has become a condition essential not only to their progress but to their survival as free people this is the conviction that underlies all the steps we have been taking to strengthen and unify the free nations during the past seven years what have these steps been first of all how have we gone about meeting the requirement of providing for our security against this challenge our starting point as i have said on many occasions has been and remains the united nations we were prepared and so were the other nations of the free world to place our reliance on the machinery of the united nations to safeguard peace but before the united nations could give full expression to the concept of international security embodied in the charter it was essential that the five permanent members of the security council honor their solemn pledge to cooperate to that end this the soviet union has not done i do not need to outline here the dreary record of soviet obstruction and veto and the unceasing efforts of the soviet representatives to sabotage the united nations it is important however to distinguish clearly between the principle of collective security embodied in the charter and the mechanisms of the united nations to give that principle effect we must frankly recognize that the soviet union has been able in certain instances to stall the machinery of collective security yet it has not been able to impair the principle of collective security the free nations of the world have retained their allegiance to that idea they have found the means to act despite the soviet veto both through the united nations itself and through the application of this principle in regional and other security arrangements that are fully in harmony with the charter and give expression to its purposes the free world refused to resign itself to collective suicide merely because of the technicality of a soviet veto the principle of collective measures to forestall aggression has found expression in the treaty of rio de janeiro the north atlantic treaty now extended to include greece and turkey and the several treaties we have concluded to reinforce security in the pacific area but the free nations have not this time fallen prey to the dangerous illusion that treaties alone will stop an aggressor by a series of vigorous actions as varied as the nature of the threat the free nations have successfully thwarted aggression or the threat of aggression in many different parts of the world our country has led or supported these collective measures the aid we have given to people determined to act in defense of their freedom has often spelled the difference between success and failure we all know what we have done and i shall not review in detail the steps we have taken each major step was a milepost in the developing unity strength and resolute will of the free nations the first was the determined and successful effort made through the united nations to safeguard the integrity and independence of iran in 1945 and 1946 next was our aid and support to embattled greece which enabled her to defeat the forces threatening her national independence in turkey cooperative action resulted in building up a bulwark of military strength for an area vital to the defenses of the entire free world in 1949 we began furnishing military aid to our partners in the north atlantic community and to a number of other free countries the soviet union threats against germany and japan its neighbors to the west and to the east have been successfully withstood free germany is on its way to becoming a member of the peaceful community of nations and a partner in the common defense the soviet effort to capture berlin by blockade was thwarted by the courageous allied airlift an independent and democratic japan has been brought back into the community of free nations in the far east the tactics of communist imperialism have reached heights of violence unmatched elsewhere and the problem of concerted action by the free nations has been at once more acute and more difficult here in spite of outside aid and support the free government of china succumbed to the communist assault our aid has enabled the free chinese to rebuild and strengthen their forces on the island of formosa in other areas of the far malaya and the philippines our assistance has helped sustain a staunch resistance against communist insurrectionary attacks the supreme test up to this point of the will and determination of the free nations came in korea when communist forces invaded the republic of korea a state that was in a special sense under the protection of the united nations the response was immediate and resolute under our military leadership the free nations for the first time took up arms collectively to repel aggression aggression was repelled driven back punished since that time communist strategy has seen fit to prolong the conflict in spite of honest efforts by the united nations to reach an honorable truce the months of deadlock have demonstrated that the communists can not achieve by persistence or by diplomatic trickery what they failed to achieve by sneak attack korea has demonstrated that the free world has the will and the endurance to match the communist effort to overthrow international order through local aggression it has been a bitter struggle and it has cost us much in brave lives and human suffering but it has made it plain that the free nations will fight side by side that they will not succumb to aggression or intimidation one by one this in the final analysis is the only way to halt the communist drive to world power at the heart of the free world defense is the military strength of the united states from 1945 to 1949 the united states was sole possessor of the atomic bomb that was a great deterrent and protection in itself but when the soviets produced an atomic explosion as they were bound to do in time we had to broaden the whole basis of our strength we had to endeavor to keep our lead in atomic weapons we had to strengthen our armed forces generally and to enlarge our productive mobilization base historically it was the soviet atomic explosion in the fall of 1949 nine months before the aggression in korea which stimulated the planning for our program of defense mobilization what we needed was not just a central force that could strike back against aggression we also needed strength along the outer edges of the free world defenses for our allies as well as for ourselves strength to hold the line against attack as well as to retaliate we have made great progress on this task of building strong defenses in the last two and one half years we have more than doubled our own defenses and we have helped to increase the protection of nearly all the other free nations all the measures of collective security resistance to aggression and the building of defenses constitute the first requirement for the survival and progress of the free world but as i have pointed out they are interwoven with the necessity of taking steps to create and maintain economic and social progress in the free nations there can be no military strength except where there is economic capacity to back it there can be no freedom where there is economic chaos or social collapse for these reasons our national policy has included a wide range of economic measures in europe the grand design of the marshall plan permitted the people of britain and france and italy and a half dozen other countries with help from the united states to lift themselves from stagnation and find again the path of rising production rising incomes rising standards of living the situation was changed almost overnight by the marshall plan the people of europe have a renewed hope and vitality and they are able to carry a share of the military defense of the free world that would have been impossible a few years ago now the countries of europe are moving rapidly towards political and economic unity changing the map of europe in more hopeful ways than it has been changed for 500 years customs unions european economic institutions like the schuman plan the movement toward european political integration the european defense are signs of practical and effective growth toward greater common strength and unity the countries of western europe including the free republic of germany are working together and the whole free world is the gainer it sometimes happens in the course of history that steps taken to meet an immediate necessity serve an ultimate purpose greater than may be apparent at the time this i believe is the meaning of what has been going on in europe under the threat of aggression the free nations there with our help have been drawing together in defense of their free institutions in so doing they have laid the foundations of a unity that will endure as a major creative force beyond the exigencies of this period of history we may at this close range be but dimly aware of the creative surge this movement represents but i believe it to be of historic importance i believe its benefits will survive long after communist tyranny is nothing but an unhappy memory in asia and africa the economic and social problems are different but no less urgent there hundreds of millions of people are in ferment exploding into the twentieth century thrusting toward equality and independence and improvement in the hard conditions of their lives politically economically socially things can not and will not stay in their mold in africa and asia change must come is coming fast just in the years i have been president 12 free nations with more than 600 million people have become independent burma indonesia the philippines korea israel libya india pakistan and ceylon and the three associated states of now members of the french union these names alone are testimony to the sweep of the great force which is changing the face of half the world working out new relationships among the peoples of the free world would not be easy in the best of times even if there were no communist drive for expansion there would be hard and complex problems of transition from old social forms old political arrangements old economic institutions to the new ones our century demands problems of guiding change into constructive channels of helping new nations grow strong and stable but now with the soviet rulers striving to exploit this ferment for their own purposes the task has become harder and more urgent terribly urgent in this situation we see the meaning and the importance of the point iv program through which we can share our store of and of capital to help these people develop their economies and reshape their societies as we help iranians to raise more grain indians to reduce the incidence of malaria liberians to educate their children better we are at once helping to answer the desires of the people for advancement and demonstrating the superiority of freedom over communism there will be no quick solution for any of the difficulties of the new nations of asia and africa but there may be no solution at all if we do not press forward with full energy to help these countries grow and flourish in freedom and in cooperation with the rest of the free world our measures of economic policy have already had a tremendous effect on the course of events eight years ago the kremlin thought collapse in western europe and japan with economic dislocation in america might give them the signal to advance we demonstrated they were wrong now they wait with hope that the economic recovery of the free world has set the stage for violent and disastrous rivalry among the economically developed nations struggling for each other markets and a greater share of trade here is another test that we shall have to meet and master in the years immediately ahead and it will take great ingenuity and effort and much time before we prove the kremlin wrong again but we can do it it is true that economic recovery presents its problems as does economic decline but they are problems of another order they are the problems of distributing abundance fairly and they can be solved by the process of international cooperation that has already brought us so far these are the measures we must continue this is the path we must follow we must go on working with our free associates building an international structure for military defense and for economic social and political progress we must be prepared for war because war may be thrust upon us but the stakes in our search for peace are immensely higher than they have ever been before for now we have entered the atomic age and war has undergone a technological change which makes it a very different thing from what it used to be war today between the soviet empire and the free nations might dig the grave not only of our stalinist opponents but of our own society our world as well as theirs this transformation has been brought to pass in the seven years from alamogordo to eniwetok it is only seven years but the new force of atomic energy has turned the world into a very different kind of place science and technology have worked so fast that war new meaning may not yet be grasped by all the who would be its victims nor perhaps by the rulers in the kremlin but i have been president of the united states these seven years responsible for the decisions which have brought our science and our engineering to their present place i know what this development means now i know something of what it will come to mean in the future we in this government realized even before the first successful atomic explosion that this new force spelled terrible danger for all mankind unless it were brought under international control we promptly advanced proposals in the united nations to take this new source of energy out of the arena of national rivalries to make it impossible to use it as a weapon of war these proposals so pregnant with benefit for all humanity were rebuffed by the rulers of the soviet union the language of science is universal the movement of science is always forward into the unknown we could not assume that the soviet union would not develop the same weapon regardless of all our precautions nor that there were not other and even more terrible means of destruction lying in the unexplored field of atomic energy we had no alternative then but to press on to probe the secrets of atomic power to the uttermost of our capacity to maintain if we could our initial superiority in the atomic field at the same time we sought persistently for some avenue some formula for reaching an agreement with the soviet rulers that would place this new form of power under effective restraints that would guarantee no nation would use it in war i do not have to recount here the proposals we made the steps taken in the united nations striving at least to open a way to ultimate agreement i hope and believe that we will continue to make these efforts so long as there is the slightest possibility of progress all civilized nations are agreed on the urgency of the problem and have shown their willingness to agree on effective measures of control all save the soviet union and its satellites but they have rejected every reasonable proposal meanwhile the progress of scientific experiment has outrun our expectations atomic science is in the full tide of development the unfolding of the innermost secrets of matter is uninterrupted and irresistible since alamogordo we have developed atomic weapons with many times the explosive force of the early models and we have produced them in substantial quantities and recently in the thermonuclear tests at eniwetok we have entered another stage in the development of atomic energy from now on man moves into a new era of destructive power capable of creating explosions of a new order of magnitude dwarfing the mushroom clouds of hiroshima and nagasaki we have no reason to think that the stage we have now reached in the release of atomic energy will be the last indeed the speed of our scientific and technical progress over the last seven years shows no signs of abating we are being hurried forward in our mastery of the atom from one discovery to another toward yet unforeseeable peaks of destructive power inevitably until we can reach international agreement this is the path we must follow and we must realize that no advance we make is unattainable by others that no advantage in this race can be more than temporary the war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow demolish the great cities of the world wipe out the cultural achievements of the past and destroy the very structure of a civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations such a war is not a possible policy for rational men we know this but we dare not assume that others would not yield to the temptation science is now placing in their hands with that in mind there is something i would say to stalin you claim belief in lenin prophecy that one stage in the development of communist society would be war between your world and ours but lenin was a man who viewed society and history with eyes something profound has happened since he wrote war has changed its shape and its dimension it can not now be a stage in the development of anything save ruin for your regime and your homeland i do not know how much time may elapse before the communist rulers bring themselves to recognize this truth but when they do they will find us eager to reach understandings that will protect the world from the danger it faces today it is no wonder that some people wish that we had never succeeded in splitting the atom but atomic power like any other force of nature is not evil in itself properly used it is an instrumentality for human betterment as a source of power as a tool of scientific inquiry it has untold possibilities we are already making good progress in the constructive use of atomic power we could do much more if we were free to concentrate on its peaceful uses exclusively atomic power will be with us all the days of our lives we can not legislate it out of existence we can not ignore the dangers or the benefits it offers i believe that man can harness the forces of the atom to work for the improvement of the lot of human beings everywhere that is our goal as a nation as a people we must understand this problem we must handle this new force wisely through our democratic processes above all we must strive in all earnestness and good faith to bring it under effective international control to do this will require much wisdom and patience and firmness the responsibility in this field now falls on a new administration and a new congress i will give them my sup port as i am sure all our citizens will in whatever constructive steps they may take to make this newest of man discoveries a source of good and not of ultimate destruction we can not tell when or whether the attitude of the soviet rulers may change we do not know how long it may be before they show a willingness to negotiate effective control of atomic energy and honorable settlements of other world problems we can not measure how are the kremlin illusions about us we can be sure however that the rulers of the communist world will not change their basic objectives lightly or soon the communist rulers have a sense of time about these things wholly unlike our own we tend to divide our future into short spans like the life of this congress or the four years of the next presidential term they seem to think and plan in terms of generations and there is therefore no easy way to make them see that their plans can not prevail this means there is ahead of us a long hard test of strength and stamina between the free world and the communist politics and our economy our science and technology against the best they can do our liberty against their slavery our voluntary concert of free nations against their forced amalgam of people republics our strategy against their nerve against their nerve above all this is a test of the will and the steadiness of the people of the united states there has been no challenge like this in the history of our republic we are called upon to rise to the occasion as no people before us what is required of us is not easy the way we must learn to live the world we have to live in can not be so pleasant safe or simple as most of us have known before or confidently hoped to know already we have had to sacrifice a number of accustomed ways of working and of living much nervous energy material resources even human life yet if one thing is certain in our future it is that more sacrifice still lies ahead were we to grow discouraged now were we to weaken and slack off the whole structure we have built these past eight years would come apart and fall away never then no matter by what stringent means could our free world regain the ground the time the sheer momentum lost by such a move there can and should be changes and improvements in our programs to meet new situations serve new needs but to desert the spirit of our basic policies to step back from them now would surely start the free world slide toward the darkness that the communists have the moment for which they watch and wait if we value our freedom and our way of life and want to see them safe we must meet the challenge and accept its implications stick to our guns and carry out our policies i have set out the basic conditions as i see them under which we have been working in the world and the nature of our basic policies what then of the future the answer i believe is this as we continue to confound soviet expectations as our world grows stronger more united more attractive to men on both sides of the iron curtain then inevitably there will come a time of change within the communist world we do not know how that change will come about whether by deliberate decision in the kremlin by coup by revolution by defection of satellites or perhaps by some unforeseen combination of factors such as these but if the communist rulers understand they can not win by war and if we frustrate their attempts to win by subversion it is not too much to expect their world to change its character moderate its aims become more realistic and less implacable and recede from the cold war they began do not be deceived by the strong face the look of monolithic power that the communist dictators wear before the outside world remember their power has no basis in consent remember they are so afraid of the free world ideas and ways of life they do not dare to let their people know about them think of the massive effort they put forth to try to stop our campaign of truth from reaching their people with its message of freedom the masters of the kremlin live in fear their power and position would collapse were their own people to acquire knowledge information comprehension about our free society their world has many elements of strength but this one fatal flaw the weakness represented by their iron curtain and their police state surely a social order at once so insecure and so fearful must ultimately lose its competition with our free society provided just one thing and this i urge you to consider carefully provided that the free world retains the confidence and the determination to outmatch the best our adversary can accomplish and to demonstrate for uncertain millions on both sides of the iron curtain the superiority of the free way of life that is the test upon all the free nations upon none more than our own republic our resources are equal to the task we have the industry the skills the basic economic strength above all we have the vigor of free men in a free society we have our liberties and while we keep them while we retain our democratic faith the ultimate advantage in this hard competition lies with us not with the communists but there are some things that could shift the advantage to their side one of the things that could defeat us is fear fear of the task we face fear of adjusting to it fear that breeds more fear sapping our faith corroding our liberties turning citizen against citizen ally against ally fear could snatch away the very values we are striving to defend already the danger signals have gone up already the corrosive process bas begun and every diminution of our tolerance each new act of enforced conformity each idle accusation each demonstration of new restrictive law is one more sign that we can lose the battle against fear the communists can not deprive us of our liberties fear can the communists can not stamp out our faith in human can fear is an enemy within ourselves and if we do not root it out it may destroy the very way of life we are so anxious to protect to beat back fear we must hold fast to our heritage as free men we must renew our confidence in one another our tolerance our sense of being neighbors fellow citizens we must take our stand on the bill of rights the inquisition the star chamber have no place in a free society our ultimate strength lies not alone in arms but in the sense of moral values and moral truths that give meaning and vitality to the purposes of free people these values are our faith our inspiration the source of our strength and our indomitable determination we face hard tasks great dangers but we are americans and we have faced hardships and uncertainty before we have adjusted before to changing circumstances our whole history has been a steady training for the work it is now ours to do no one can lose heart for the task none can lose faith in our free ways who stops to remember where we began what we have sought and what accomplished all together as americans i have lived a long time and seen much happen in our country and i know out of my own experience that we can do what must be done when i think back to the country i grew up in and then look at what our country has become i am quite certain that having done so much we can do more after all it has been scarcely fifteen years since most americans rejected the wise counsel that aggressors must be quarantined the very concept of collective security the of all our actions now was then strange doctrine shunned and set aside talk about adapting talk about adjusting talk about responding as a people to the challenge of changed times and circumstances there has never been a more spectacular example than this great change in america outlook on the world let all of us pause now think back consider carefully the meaning of our national experience let us draw comfort from it and faith and confidence in our future as americans the nation business is never finished the basic questions we have been dealing with these eight years past present themselves anew that is the way of our society circumstances change and current questions take on different forms new complications year by year but underneath the great issues remain the same prosperity welfare human rights effective democracy and above all peace now we turn to the inaugural of our new president and in the great work he is called upon to do he will have need for the support of a united people a confident people with firm faith in one another and in our common because i pledge him my support as a citizen of our republic and i ask you to give him yours to him to you to all my fellow citizens i say godspeed may god bless our country and our because harry truman
congress united states honor report congress state union eighth report president privileged present country previous occasions custom set forth proposals legislative action coming year purpose today presentation legislative program falls properly successor would infringe upon responsibility chart forward course instead wish speak course following past eight years position arrived two weeks general eisenhower inaugurated president united states resume gladly private citizen republic presidency last changed hands eight years ago coming april tragic time time grieving president roosevelt great gallant human taken us time unrelieved anxiety successor thrust suddenly complexities burdens presidential office time time see normal transition democratic system one president conclusion term steps back private life successor chosen people begins tenure office presidency united states continues function without moment break since election done best assure transfer one administration another shall smooth orderly general eisenhower associates friendly understanding collaboration endeavor sought thrust upon sought take responsibility must mine twelve clock noon january twentieth together hope believe found means whereby incoming president obtain full detailed information need assume responsibility moment takes oath office take greatest burdens compelling responsibilities given man americans wish possible success undertaking tasks soon tasks president chief state elected representative people national spokesman armed forces charged conduct foreign relations chief executive nation largest civilian organization must select nominate top officials executive branch federal judges legislative side obligation opportunity recommend approve veto legislation besides great political party turns naturally leadership must provide president bundle burdens unique nothing else like face earth task could job together would tremendous undertaking easiest times times easy hard complex perhaps history president carry tasks way democracy may grow flourish people prosper also lead whole free world overcoming communist menace shadow atomic bomb huge challenge human occupies presidential office challenge alone reality meet alone challenge runs whole administration congress country ultimately president master responsibilities save fellow whole people comprehend challenge times move meet privilege hold presidential office nearly eight years much done take great pride personal pride pride people nation pride political system form government balky sometimes mechanically deficient perhaps many ways enormously alive vigorous able years keep republic right course rising great occasions accomplishing essentials meeting basic challenge times misunderstandings controversies past eight years president united states measure support understanding without man could sustain burdens presidential office hope discharge responsibilities profoundly grateful grateful associates executive branch civil servants grateful despite members congress sides aisle grateful especially american people citizens republic governors us still close recent controversies us may find hard understand accomplishments past eight years accomplishments real great president congress achievements country people let remind things done since first assumed duties president united states took oath office april 12 1945 may year nazis surrendered july great white flash light alamogordo heralded swift final victory world war ii opened doorway atomic age consider great questions posed us sudden total victory world war ii consider also well nation responded would american economy collapse war one question would another depression repetition 1921 1929 free world feared dreaded communists hoped built policies upon hope answered question answered resounding economy grown tremendously free enterprise flourished never fore million people gainfully employed compared 51 million seven years ago private businessmen farmers invested 200 billion dollars new plant equipment since end world war ii prices risen done incomes large risen even real living standards considerably higher seven years ago aided sound government policies expanding economy shown strength flexibility swift almost painless reconversion war peace 1945 1946 quick reaction recovery well korea beginnings recession 1949 live vital economy shown remarkable capacity sustain great mobilization program defense vast outpouring aid friends allies around world still produce goods services peaceful use home ever known answer feared hoped depression country handled national finances another question arising war end administration government problem takes president time year year fashioning budget related problem managing public debt financing world war ii left us tremendous public debt reached 279 billion dollars peak february 1946 beginning july 1946 war reconversion financing ended held quite closely sound standard times high employment high national income federal budget balanced debt reduced four fiscal years july 1 1946 june 30 1950 net surplus billion dollars using surplus treasury excess cash reserves debt reduced substantially reaching low point 251 billion dollars june 1949 ending 257 billion dollars june 30 1950 july 1950 began rapid rearmament two years held close policy current fiscal year next rising expenditures defense substantially outrun receipts pose immediate serious problem new congress let turn another question faced war end would take carry forward great projects social welfare badly needed long overdue new deal introduced national life would government continue heart people progress new deal halted aftermath war decisively progress woodrow wilson new freedom halted first world war question answered answered doubling old age insurance benefits extending coverage ten million people answered increasing minimum wage answered three million privately constructed homes federal government helped finance since war 155 thousand units low rent public housing placed construction since 1949 answered 42 thousand new hospital beds provided since 1946 joint efforts federal government local communities answered helping eight million veterans world war ii obtain advanced education 196 thousand start business 64 thousand buy farms answered continuing help farmers obtain electric power today nearly 90 per cent farms power line electric service ways demonstrated democracy forgotten use powers government promote people welfare security another big questions would nation natural resources soils water forests grasslands would continue strong conservation movement 1930 would first world war slip back practices monopoly exploitation waste answer plain across country soil conservation movement spread aided government programs enriching private public lands preserving destruction improving future use river basins invested nearly 5 billion dollars public funds last eight years invested projects control floods irrigate farmlands produce power get housewives farmers businessmen need vigilant protecting people property lands forests oil minerals fight hard would use resources private greed met setbacks delay work defense priorities whole proud record protecting natural heritage using resources public good another question face war close would continue peace well war promote equality opportunity citizens seeking ways means guarantee full enjoyment civil rights war achieved great economic social gains millions fellow citizens held back prejudice prepared peacetime keep moving toward full realization democratic promise would let submerged wiped riots reaction world war answered questions series forward steps every level government many spheres private life armed forces civil service universities railway trains residential districts cities stores factories across nation polling booths well barriers coming happening part mandate courts part insistence federal state local governments part enlightened action private groups persons every region every walk life great awakening american conscience issues civil rights progress still far complete still continuing answer questioned intention live promises equal freedom us another question posed us war end equally concerned future course democracy could machinery government politics republic changed improved adapted rapidly enough carry responsibly well vast new complicated undertakings called time answered question answered tackling urgent specific problems war experience brought sharp focus reorganization congress 1946 unification armed services beginning 1947 closer integration foreign military policy national security council created year executive reorganizations commission report 1949 landmarks continuing endeavor make government effective instrument service people come vital question greatest concerns could built world durable structure security lasting peace nations would drift world war toward another terrible disaster disaster time might holocaust atomic war still overriding question time know answer yet perhaps know finally long time come day night past eight years building peace searching way leads surely security freedom justice world us mankind else task republic since end world war ii accomplishment far give real pride americans least total war averted day hour may already succeeded establishing conditions keep kind war happening far ahead man see second world war radically changed power relationships world nations great left shattered weak channels communication routes trade political economic ties many kinds ripped apart changed disrupted chaotic situation united states soviet union emerged two strongest powers world tremendous human natural resources actual potential scale unmatched nation nothing could make plainer world present state came pass understanding diametrically opposite principles policies two great powers world part republic free men heirs american revolution dedicated truths declaration independence men created equal endowed creator certain unalienable rights secure rights governments instituted among men deriving powers consent governed objective keeping great idea united states sought use position power help nations recover damage dislocation war held helping hand enable restore national lives regain positions independent members great family nations help given without attempt part dominate control nation want satellites partners soviet union however took exactly opposite course rulers saw weakened condition world obligation assist great work reconstruction opportunity exploit misery suffering extension power instead help brought subjugation extinguished blotted national independence countries military operations world war ii left within grasp difference stares us map europe today west line tragically divides europe see nations continuing act live light traditions principles side see dead uniformity tyrannical system imposed rulers soviet union nothing could point clearly global struggle free world communists struggle old recorded history freedom versus tyranny dominant idea soviet regime terrible conception men rights live mercy state inevitably idea consequences flowing collided efforts free nations build peaceful world cold war communists free world nothing less soviet attempt checkmate defeat peaceful purposes furtherance dread objective seek struggle god forbid utmost avoid world war ii russians fought side side turn attacked forced combat aggressors war hoped wartime collaboration could maintained frightful experience nazi invasion devastation heart russia turned soviet rulers away old proclaimed allegiance world revolution communist dominion instead violated one one solemn agreements made us wartime sought use rights privileges obtained united nations frustrate purposes cut powers effective agent world progress keeper world peace despite outcome efforts made toward peaceful collaboration source present strength demonstrated believed proclaimed actually sought honest agreements way peace whole moral position leadership free world today fortified fact world divided fault failure soviet design began cold war free world saw happen men know made effort soviet rulers spurned free nations accepted leadership republic meeting mastering soviet offensive seems especially important us clear thinking nature threat face long time come measures devised meet take shape pattern understand soviet union occupies territory 8 million square miles beyond borders east west nearly five million square miles satellite states virtually incorporated soviet union china close partner vast land mass contains enormous store natural resources sufficient support economic development comparable stalinist world world great natural diversity geography climate distribution resources population language living standards economic cultural development world whose people convinced communists means world history national traditions particularly borderlands tend toward separation unification run counter enforced combination made areas today also world great uniformities world bleeds population white build huge military forces world police everywhere authority unlimited world terror slavery deliberately administered instruments government means production world effective social power state monopoly yet state creature communist tyrants soviet union satellites china held tight grip communist party chieftains party dominates social political institutions party regulates centrally directs whole economy moscow sphere peiping history philosophy morality law centrally established rigid dogmas incessantly drummed whole population subject interpretation change none except party inner circle lest people learn much ways life communists walled world deliberately uniformly rest human society communist base operation cold war addition command hundreds thousands dedicated foreign communists people nearly every free country serve moscow ends thus masters kremlin provided deluded followers free world manipulate cynically quite ruthlessly serve purposes soviet state given vast internal base operations agents foreign lands communist rulers trying inside homeland communists trying maintain modernize huge military forces simultaneously endeavoring weld whole vast area population completely advanced industrial society aim day equal better production levels western europe north america combined thus shifting balance world economic power war potential side long way go know prepared levy upon living generations sacrifice helps strengthen armed power speed industrial development externally communist rulers trying expand boundaries world whenever wherever expansion pursued steadfastly since close world war ii using means available soviet army present countries eastern europe gradually squeezed free institutions death chaos existed industrialized nations western europe local stalinists tried gain power political processes strikes every available means subverting free institutions evil ends conditions permitted soviet rulers stimulated aided armed insurrection revolutionary forces greece philippines china outright aggression one satellites korea forces nationalism independence economic change work throughout great sweep asia africa communists tried identify progress tried picture friends freedom advancement surely one cynical efforts history offers record thus everywhere free world communists seek fish troubled waters seize countries enslave millions human souls ready ally group extreme left extreme right offers opportunity advance ends geography gives central position european asian power borders touching many sensitive vital areas free world around situated use armies economic power set simultaneously whole series threats inducements widely dispersed places western germany iran japan pressures attractions sustained quickly shifted place place thus communist rulers moving implacable create greater strength vast empire create weakness division free world preparing time false creed teaches must come time whole world outside sway torn strife contradictions ripe communist plucking heart distorted marxist interpretation history glass moscow peiping look upon world glass see rest us seem really believe history side trying boost history along every opportunity every way set forth nature communist menace confronting republic whole free world measure challenge faced since world war ii challenge partly military partly economic partly moral partly intellectual confronting us every level human endeavor around world must free world purpose organize defenses aggression subversion build structure resistance salvation community nations outside iron curtain addition give expression opportunity forces growth free world organize unify cooperative community free men crumble grow stronger years soviet empire free world eventually change ways fall whole program action carry purpose directed meet two requirements first security like pioneers settled great continent carry musket went peaceful business realized allies military strength meet growing soviet military threat would never opportunity carry forward efforts build peaceful world law order environment free institutions could survive flourish mean drop everything else concentrate armies weapons course urgent military requirement continue help create conditions economic social progress world work carried forward alongside first order meet aspects communist drive power also creative effort toward human progress essential bring kind world free men want live two requirements military security human progress closely related action sometimes recognize military security depends upon strong economic underpinning stable hopeful political order conversely confidence makes economic political progress thrive areas vulnerable military conquest requirements related another way depend upon unity action among free nations world indeed foundation whole effort drawing together free people world become condition essential progress survival free people conviction underlies steps taking strengthen unify free nations past seven years steps first gone meeting requirement providing security challenge starting point said many occasions remains united nations prepared nations free world place reliance machinery united nations safeguard peace united nations could give full expression concept international security embodied charter essential five permanent members security council honor solemn pledge cooperate end soviet union done need outline dreary record soviet obstruction veto unceasing efforts soviet representatives sabotage united nations important however distinguish clearly principle collective security embodied charter mechanisms united nations give principle effect must frankly recognize soviet union able certain instances stall machinery collective security yet able impair principle collective security free nations world retained allegiance idea found means act despite soviet veto united nations application principle regional security arrangements fully harmony charter give expression purposes free world refused resign collective suicide merely technicality soviet veto principle collective measures forestall aggression found expression treaty rio de janeiro north atlantic treaty extended include greece turkey several treaties concluded reinforce security pacific area free nations time fallen prey dangerous illusion treaties alone stop aggressor series vigorous actions varied nature threat free nations successfully thwarted aggression threat aggression many different parts world country led supported collective measures aid given people determined act defense freedom often spelled difference success failure know done shall review detail steps taken major step milepost developing unity strength resolute free nations first determined successful effort made united nations safeguard integrity independence iran 1945 1946 next aid support embattled greece enabled defeat forces threatening national independence turkey cooperative action resulted building bulwark military strength area vital defenses entire free world 1949 began furnishing military aid partners north atlantic community number free countries soviet union threats germany japan neighbors west east successfully withstood free germany way becoming member peaceful community nations partner common defense soviet effort capture berlin blockade thwarted courageous allied airlift independent democratic japan brought back community free nations far east tactics communist imperialism reached heights violence unmatched elsewhere problem concerted action free nations acute difficult spite outside aid support free government china succumbed communist assault aid enabled free chinese rebuild strengthen forces island formosa areas far malaya philippines assistance helped sustain staunch resistance communist insurrectionary attacks supreme test point determination free nations came korea communist forces invaded republic korea state special sense protection united nations response immediate resolute military leadership free nations first time took arms collectively repel aggression aggression repelled driven back punished since time communist strategy seen fit prolong conflict spite honest efforts united nations reach honorable truce months deadlock demonstrated communists achieve persistence diplomatic trickery failed achieve sneak attack korea demonstrated free world endurance match communist effort overthrow international order local aggression bitter struggle cost us much brave lives human suffering made plain free nations fight side side succumb aggression intimidation one one final analysis way halt communist drive world power heart free world defense military strength united states 1945 1949 united states sole possessor atomic bomb great deterrent protection soviets produced atomic explosion bound time broaden whole basis strength endeavor keep lead atomic weapons strengthen armed forces generally enlarge productive mobilization base historically soviet atomic explosion fall 1949 nine months aggression korea stimulated planning program defense mobilization needed central force could strike back aggression also needed strength along outer edges free world defenses allies well strength hold line attack well retaliate made great progress task building strong defenses last two one half years doubled defenses helped increase protection nearly free nations measures collective security resistance aggression building defenses constitute first requirement survival progress free world pointed interwoven necessity taking steps create maintain economic social progress free nations military strength except economic capacity back freedom economic chaos social collapse reasons national policy included wide range economic measures europe grand design marshall plan permitted people britain france italy half dozen countries help united states lift stagnation find path rising production rising incomes rising standards living situation changed almost overnight marshall plan people europe renewed hope vitality able carry share military defense free world would impossible years ago countries europe moving rapidly towards political economic unity changing map europe hopeful ways changed 500 years customs unions european economic institutions like schuman plan movement toward european political integration european defense signs practical effective growth toward greater common strength unity countries western europe including free republic germany working together whole free world gainer sometimes happens course history steps taken meet immediate necessity serve ultimate purpose greater may apparent time believe meaning going europe threat aggression free nations help drawing together defense free institutions laid foundations unity endure major creative force beyond exigencies period history may close range dimly aware creative surge movement represents believe historic importance believe benefits survive long communist tyranny nothing unhappy memory asia africa economic social problems different less urgent hundreds millions people ferment exploding twentieth century thrusting toward equality independence improvement hard conditions lives politically economically socially things stay mold africa asia change must come coming fast years president 12 free nations 600 million people become independent burma indonesia philippines korea israel libya india pakistan ceylon three associated states members french union names alone testimony sweep great force changing face half world working new relationships among peoples free world would easy best times even communist drive expansion would hard complex problems transition old social forms old political arrangements old economic institutions new ones century demands problems guiding change constructive channels helping new nations grow strong stable soviet rulers striving exploit ferment purposes task become harder urgent terribly urgent situation see meaning importance point iv program share store capital help people develop economies reshape societies help iranians raise grain indians reduce incidence malaria liberians educate children better helping answer desires people advancement demonstrating superiority freedom communism quick solution difficulties new nations asia africa may solution press forward full energy help countries grow flourish freedom cooperation rest free world measures economic policy already tremendous effect course events eight years ago kremlin thought collapse western europe japan economic dislocation america might give signal advance demonstrated wrong wait hope economic recovery free world set stage violent disastrous rivalry among economically developed nations struggling markets greater share trade another test shall meet master years immediately ahead take great ingenuity effort much time prove kremlin wrong true economic recovery presents problems economic decline problems another order problems distributing abundance fairly solved process international cooperation already brought us far measures must continue path must follow must go working free associates building international structure military defense economic social political progress must prepared war war may thrust upon us stakes search peace immensely higher ever entered atomic age war undergone technological change makes different thing used war today soviet empire free nations might dig grave stalinist opponents society world well transformation brought pass seven years alamogordo eniwetok seven years new force atomic energy turned world different kind place science technology worked fast war new meaning may yet grasped would victims perhaps rulers kremlin president united states seven years responsible decisions brought science engineering present place know development means know something come mean future government realized even first successful atomic explosion new force spelled terrible danger mankind unless brought international control promptly advanced proposals united nations take new source energy arena national rivalries make impossible use weapon war proposals pregnant benefit humanity rebuffed rulers soviet union language science universal movement science always forward unknown could assume soviet union would develop weapon regardless precautions even terrible means destruction lying unexplored field atomic energy alternative press probe secrets atomic power uttermost capacity maintain could initial superiority atomic field time sought persistently avenue formula reaching agreement soviet rulers would place new form power effective restraints would guarantee nation would use war recount proposals made steps taken united nations striving least open way ultimate agreement hope believe continue make efforts long slightest possibility progress civilized nations agreed urgency problem shown willingness agree effective measures control save soviet union satellites rejected every reasonable proposal meanwhile progress scientific experiment outrun expectations atomic science full tide development unfolding innermost secrets matter uninterrupted irresistible since alamogordo developed atomic weapons many times explosive force early models produced substantial quantities recently thermonuclear tests eniwetok entered another stage development atomic energy man moves new era destructive power capable creating explosions new order magnitude dwarfing mushroom clouds hiroshima nagasaki reason think stage reached release atomic energy last indeed speed scientific technical progress last seven years shows signs abating hurried forward mastery atom one discovery another toward yet unforeseeable peaks destructive power inevitably reach international agreement path must follow must realize advance make unattainable others advantage race temporary war future would one man could extinguish millions lives one blow demolish great cities world wipe cultural achievements past destroy structure civilization slowly painfully built hundreds generations war possible policy rational men know dare assume others would yield temptation science placing hands mind something would say stalin claim belief lenin prophecy one stage development communist society would war world lenin man viewed society history eyes something profound happened since wrote war changed shape dimension stage development anything save ruin regime homeland know much time may elapse communist rulers bring recognize truth find us eager reach understandings protect world danger faces today wonder people wish never succeeded splitting atom atomic power like force nature evil properly used instrumentality human betterment source power tool scientific inquiry untold possibilities already making good progress constructive use atomic power could much free concentrate peaceful uses exclusively atomic power us days lives legislate existence ignore dangers benefits offers believe man harness forces atom work improvement lot human beings everywhere goal nation people must understand problem must handle new force wisely democratic processes must strive earnestness good faith bring effective international control require much wisdom patience firmness responsibility field falls new administration new congress give sup port sure citizens whatever constructive steps may take make newest man discoveries source good ultimate destruction tell whether attitude soviet rulers may change know long may show willingness negotiate effective control atomic energy honorable settlements world problems measure kremlin illusions us sure however rulers communist world change basic objectives lightly soon communist rulers sense time things wholly unlike tend divide future short spans like life congress four years next presidential term seem think plan terms generations therefore easy way make see plans prevail means ahead us long hard test strength stamina free world communist politics economy science technology best liberty slavery voluntary concert free nations forced amalgam people republics strategy nerve nerve test steadiness people united states challenge like history republic called upon rise occasion people us required us easy way must learn live world live pleasant safe simple us known confidently hoped know already sacrifice number accustomed ways working living much nervous energy material resources even human life yet one thing certain future sacrifice still lies ahead grow discouraged weaken slack whole structure built past eight years would come apart fall away never matter stringent means could free world regain ground time sheer momentum lost move changes improvements programs meet new situations serve new needs desert spirit basic policies step back would surely start free world slide toward darkness communists moment watch wait value freedom way life want see safe must meet challenge accept implications stick guns carry policies set basic conditions see working world nature basic policies future answer believe continue confound soviet expectations world grows stronger united attractive men sides iron curtain inevitably come time change within communist world know change come whether deliberate decision kremlin coup revolution defection satellites perhaps unforeseen combination factors communist rulers understand win war frustrate attempts win subversion much expect world change character moderate aims become realistic less implacable recede cold war began deceived strong face look monolithic power communist dictators wear outside world remember power basis consent remember afraid free world ideas ways life dare let people know think massive effort put forth try stop campaign truth reaching people message freedom masters kremlin live fear power position would collapse people acquire knowledge information comprehension free society world many elements strength one fatal flaw weakness represented iron curtain police state surely social order insecure fearful must ultimately lose competition free society provided one thing urge consider carefully provided free world retains confidence determination outmatch best adversary accomplish demonstrate uncertain millions sides iron curtain superiority free way life test upon free nations upon none republic resources equal task industry skills basic economic strength vigor free men free society liberties keep retain democratic faith ultimate advantage hard competition lies us communists things could shift advantage side one things could defeat us fear fear task face fear adjusting fear breeds fear sapping faith corroding liberties turning citizen citizen ally ally fear could snatch away values striving defend already danger signals gone already corrosive process bas begun every diminution tolerance new act enforced conformity idle accusation demonstration new restrictive law one sign lose battle fear communists deprive us liberties fear communists stamp faith human fear enemy within root may destroy way life anxious protect beat back fear must hold fast heritage free men must renew confidence one another tolerance sense neighbors fellow citizens must take stand bill rights inquisition star chamber place free society ultimate strength lies alone arms sense moral values moral truths give meaning vitality purposes free people values faith inspiration source strength indomitable determination face hard tasks great dangers americans faced hardships uncertainty adjusted changing circumstances whole history steady training work one lose heart task none lose faith free ways stops remember began sought accomplished together americans lived long time seen much happen country know experience must done think back country grew look country become quite certain done much scarcely fifteen years since americans rejected wise counsel aggressors must quarantined concept collective security actions strange doctrine shunned set aside talk adapting talk adjusting talk responding people challenge changed times circumstances never spectacular example great change america outlook world let us pause think back consider carefully meaning national experience let us draw comfort faith confidence future americans nation business never finished basic questions dealing eight years past present anew way society circumstances change current questions take different forms new complications year year underneath great issues remain prosperity welfare human rights effective democracy peace turn inaugural new president great work called upon need support united people confident people firm faith one another common pledge support citizen republic ask give fellow citizens say godspeed may god bless country harry truman
congress united state honor report congress state union eighth report president privilege present country previous occasion custom set forth proposal legislative action come year purpose today presentation legislative program fall properly successor would infringe upon responsibility chart forward course instead wish speak course follow past eight year position arrive two week general eisenhower inaugurated president united state resume gladly private citizen republic presidency last change hand eight year ago come april tragic time time grieve president roosevelt great gallant human take u time unrelieved anxiety successor thrust suddenly complexities burden presidential office time time see normal transition democratic system one president conclusion term step back private life successor choose people begin tenure office presidency united state continue function without moment break since election do best assure transfer one administration another shall smooth orderly general eisenhower associate friendly understand collaboration endeavor seek thrust upon sought take responsibility must mine twelve clock noon january twentieth together hope believe find mean whereby incoming president obtain full detail information need assume responsibility moment take oath office take great burden compel responsibility give man americans wish possible success undertaking task soon task president chief state elect representative people national spokesman arm force charge conduct foreign relation chief executive nation large civilian organization must select nominate top official executive branch federal judge legislative side obligation opportunity recommend approve veto legislation besides great political party turn naturally leadership must provide president bundle burden unique nothing else like face earth task could job together would tremendous undertake easy time times easy hard complex perhaps history president carry task way democracy may grow flourish people prosper also lead whole free world overcome communist menace shadow atomic bomb huge challenge human occupy presidential office challenge alone reality meet alone challenge run whole administration congress country ultimately president master responsibility save fellow whole people comprehend challenge time move meet privilege hold presidential office nearly eight year much do take great pride personal pride pride people nation pride political system form government balky sometimes mechanically deficient perhaps many way enormously alive vigorous able year keep republic right course rise great occasion accomplish essential meet basic challenge time misunderstandings controversy past eight year president unite state measure support understand without man could sustain burden presidential office hope discharge responsibility profoundly grateful grateful associate executive branch civil servant grateful despite member congress side aisle grateful especially american people citizen republic governor u still close recent controversy u may find hard understand accomplishment past eight year accomplishments real great president congress achievement country people let remind thing do since first assume duty president united state take oath office april 12 1945 may year nazis surrender july great white flash light alamogordo herald swift final victory world war ii open doorway atomic age consider great question pose u sudden total victory world war ii consider also well nation respond would american economy collapse war one question would another depression repetition 1921 1929 free world fear dreaded communist hop built policy upon hope answer question answer resound economy grown tremendously free enterprise flourish never fore million people gainfully employ compare 51 million seven year ago private businessmen farmer invest 200 billion dollar new plant equipment since end world war ii price rise do incomes large risen even real living standard considerably high seven year ago aid sound government policy expand economy show strength flexibility swift almost painless reconversion war peace 1945 1946 quick reaction recovery well korea beginning recession 1949 live vital economy show remarkable capacity sustain great mobilization program defense vast outpouring aid friend ally around world still produce good service peaceful use home ever know answer fear hop depression country handle national finance another question arise war end administration government problem take president time year year fashion budget relate problem manage public debt financing world war ii leave u tremendous public debt reach 279 billion dollar peak february 1946 begin july 1946 war reconversion financing end hold quite closely sound standard time high employment high national income federal budget balance debt reduce four fiscal year july 1 1946 june 30 1950 net surplus billion dollar use surplus treasury excess cash reserve debt reduce substantially reach low point 251 billion dollar june 1949 end 257 billion dollar june 30 1950 july 1950 begin rapid rearmament two year hold close policy current fiscal year next rise expenditure defense substantially outrun receipt pose immediate serious problem new congress let turn another question face war end would take carry forward great project social welfare badly need long overdue new deal introduce national life would government continue heart people progress new deal halt aftermath war decisively progress woodrow wilson new freedom halt first world war question answer answered double old age insurance benefit extend coverage ten million people answer increase minimum wage answer three million privately construct home federal government help finance since war 155 thousand unit low rent public housing place construction since 1949 answer 42 thousand new hospital bed provide since 1946 joint effort federal government local community answer help eight million veteran world war ii obtain advanced education 196 thousand start business 64 thousand buy farm answer continue help farmer obtain electric power today nearly 90 per cent farm power line electric service way demonstrate democracy forget use power government promote people welfare security another big question would nation natural resource soil water forest grassland would continue strong conservation movement 1930 would first world war slip back practice monopoly exploitation waste answer plain across country soil conservation movement spread aid government program enrich private public land preserve destruction improve future use river basin invest nearly 5 billion dollar public fund last eight year invested project control flood irrigate farmland produce power get housewives farmer businessmen need vigilant protect people property land forest oil mineral fight hard would use resource private greed meet setback delay work defense priority whole proud record protect natural heritage use resource public good another question face war close would continue peace well war promote equality opportunity citizen seek way mean guarantee full enjoyment civil right war achieve great economic social gain million fellow citizen hold back prejudice prepare peacetime keep move toward full realization democratic promise would let submerge wiped riot reaction world war answer question series forward step every level government many sphere private life arm force civil service university railway train residential district city store factory across nation polling booth well barrier come happen part mandate court part insistence federal state local government part enlighten action private group person every region every walk life great awakening american conscience issue civil right progress still far complete still continue answer question intention live promise equal freedom u another question pose u war end equally concerned future course democracy could machinery government politics republic change improve adapt rapidly enough carry responsibly well vast new complicate undertaking call time answered question answer tackle urgent specific problem war experience bring sharp focus reorganization congress 1946 unification arm service begin 1947 close integration foreign military policy national security council create year executive reorganization commission report 1949 landmarks continue endeavor make government effective instrument service people come vital question great concern could build world durable structure security last peace nation would drift world war toward another terrible disaster disaster time might holocaust atomic war still override question time know answer yet perhaps know finally long time come day night past eight year build peace search way lead surely security freedom justice world u mankind else task republic since end world war ii accomplishment far give real pride american least total war avert day hour may already succeed establish condition keep kind war happen far ahead man see second world war radically change power relationship world nation great leave shattered weak channel communication route trade political economic tie many kind rip apart change disrupt chaotic situation unite state soviet union emerge two strong power world tremendous human natural resource actual potential scale unmatched nation nothing could make plain world present state come pas understand diametrically opposite principle policy two great power world part republic free men heirs american revolution dedicate truths declaration independence men create equal endow creator certain unalienable right secure right government institute among men derive power consent govern objective keep great idea unite state seek use position power help nation recover damage dislocation war hold help hand enable restore national life regain position independent member great family nation help give without attempt part dominate control nation want satellite partner soviet union however take exactly opposite course ruler saw weaken condition world obligation assist great work reconstruction opportunity exploit misery suffering extension power instead help brought subjugation extinguish blotted national independence country military operation world war ii leave within grasp difference stare u map europe today west line tragically divide europe see nation continue act live light tradition principle side see dead uniformity tyrannical system impose ruler soviet union nothing could point clearly global struggle free world communists struggle old record history freedom versus tyranny dominant idea soviet regime terrible conception men right live mercy state inevitably idea consequence flow collide effort free nation build peaceful world cold war communist free world nothing less soviet attempt checkmate defeat peaceful purpose furtherance dread objective seek struggle god forbid utmost avoid world war ii russian fought side side turn attack force combat aggressor war hop wartime collaboration could maintain frightful experience nazi invasion devastation heart russia turn soviet ruler away old proclaim allegiance world revolution communist dominion instead violate one one solemn agreement make u wartime seek use right privilege obtain united nation frustrate purpose cut power effective agent world progress keeper world peace despite outcome effort make toward peaceful collaboration source present strength demonstrate believe proclaim actually seek honest agreement way peace whole moral position leadership free world today fortify fact world divide fault failure soviet design begin cold war free world saw happen men know make effort soviet ruler spurn free nation accept leadership republic meeting master soviet offensive seem especially important u clear think nature threat face long time come measure devise meet take shape pattern understand soviet union occupy territory 8 million square mile beyond border east west nearly five million square mile satellite state virtually incorporate soviet union china close partner vast land mass contain enormous store natural resource sufficient support economic development comparable stalinist world world great natural diversity geography climate distribution resource population language living standard economic cultural development world whose people convince communist mean world history national tradition particularly borderland tend toward separation unification run counter enforce combination make area today also world great uniformities world bleeds population white build huge military force world police everywhere authority unlimited world terror slavery deliberately administer instrument government mean production world effective social power state monopoly yet state creature communist tyrant soviet union satellite china hold tight grip communist party chieftain party dominate social political institution party regulate centrally direct whole economy moscow sphere peiping history philosophy morality law centrally establish rigid dogma incessantly drum whole population subject interpretation change none except party inner circle l people learn much way life communist wall world deliberately uniformly rest human society communist base operation cold war addition command hundred thousand dedicated foreign communist people nearly every free country serve moscow end thus master kremlin provide deluded follower free world manipulate cynically quite ruthlessly serve purpose soviet state give vast internal base operation agent foreign land communist ruler try inside homeland communist try maintain modernize huge military force simultaneously endeavor weld whole vast area population completely advanced industrial society aim day equal good production level western europe north america combine thus shift balance world economic power war potential side long way go know prepared levy upon live generation sacrifice help strengthen armed power speed industrial development externally communist ruler try expand boundary world whenever wherever expansion pursue steadfastly since close world war ii use mean available soviet army present country eastern europe gradually squeeze free institution death chaos exist industrialized nation western europe local stalinist try gain power political process strike every available mean subvert free institution evil end condition permit soviet ruler stimulate aid armed insurrection revolutionary force greece philippine china outright aggression one satellite korea force nationalism independence economic change work throughout great sweep asia africa communists try identify progress try picture friend freedom advancement surely one cynical effort history offer record thus everywhere free world communists seek fish troubled water seize country enslave million human souls ready ally group extreme leave extreme right offer opportunity advance end geography give central position european asian power border touch many sensitive vital area free world around situate use army economic power set simultaneously whole series threat inducements widely disperse place western germany iran japan pressure attraction sustain quickly shift place place thus communist ruler move implacable create great strength vast empire create weakness division free world preparing time false creed teach must come time whole world outside sway torn strife contradiction ripe communist pluck heart distort marxist interpretation history glass moscow peiping look upon world glass see rest u seem really believe history side try boost history along every opportunity every way set forth nature communist menace confront republic whole free world measure challenge face since world war ii challenge partly military partly economic partly moral partly intellectual confront u every level human endeavor around world must free world purpose organize defense aggression subversion build structure resistance salvation community nation outside iron curtain addition give expression opportunity force growth free world organize unify cooperative community free men crumble grow strong year soviet empire free world eventually change way fall whole program action carry purpose direct meet two requirement first security like pioneer settle great continent carry musket go peaceful business realize ally military strength meet grow soviet military threat would never opportunity carry forward effort build peaceful world law order environment free institution could survive flourish mean drop everything else concentrate army weapon course urgent military requirement continue help create condition economic social progress world work carry forward alongside first order meet aspect communist drive power also creative effort toward human progress essential bring kind world free men want live two requirement military security human progress closely related action sometimes recognize military security depend upon strong economic underpinning stable hopeful political order conversely confidence make economic political progress thrive area vulnerable military conquest requirement relate another way depend upon unity action among free nation world indeed foundation whole effort draw together free people world become condition essential progress survival free people conviction underlies step take strengthen unify free nation past seven year step first go meeting requirement provide security challenge start point say many occasion remain united nation prepare nation free world place reliance machinery united nation safeguard peace united nation could give full expression concept international security embody charter essential five permanent member security council honor solemn pledge cooperate end soviet union do need outline dreary record soviet obstruction veto unceasing effort soviet representative sabotage united nation important however distinguish clearly principle collective security embody charter mechanism united nation give principle effect must frankly recognize soviet union able certain instance stall machinery collective security yet able impair principle collective security free nation world retain allegiance idea find mean act despite soviet veto united nation application principle regional security arrangement fully harmony charter give expression purpose free world refuse resign collective suicide merely technicality soviet veto principle collective measure forestall aggression find expression treaty rio de janeiro north atlantic treaty extend include greece turkey several treaty conclude reinforce security pacific area free nation time fall prey dangerous illusion treaty alone stop aggressor series vigorous action vary nature threat free nation successfully thwart aggression threat aggression many different part world country lead supported collective measure aid give people determine act defense freedom often spell difference success failure know do shall review detail step take major step milepost develop unity strength resolute free nation first determine successful effort make united nation safeguard integrity independence iran 1945 1946 next aid support embattle greece enable defeat force threaten national independence turkey cooperative action result building bulwark military strength area vital defense entire free world 1949 begin furnish military aid partner north atlantic community number free country soviet union threat germany japan neighbor west east successfully withstood free germany way become member peaceful community nation partner common defense soviet effort capture berlin blockade thwart courageous allied airlift independent democratic japan bring back community free nation far east tactic communist imperialism reach height violence unmatched elsewhere problem concert action free nation acute difficult spite outside aid support free government china succumb communist assault aid enable free chinese rebuild strengthen force island formosa area far malaya philippine assistance help sustain staunch resistance communist insurrectionary attack supreme test point determination free nation come korea communist force invade republic korea state special sense protection unite nation response immediate resolute military leadership free nation first time take arm collectively repel aggression aggression repel drive back punish since time communist strategy see fit prolong conflict spite honest effort unite nation reach honorable truce month deadlock demonstrate communist achieve persistence diplomatic trickery fail achieve sneak attack korea demonstrate free world endurance match communist effort overthrow international order local aggression bitter struggle cost u much brave life human suffer make plain free nation fight side side succumb aggression intimidation one one final analysis way halt communist drive world power heart free world defense military strength unite state 1945 1949 united state sole possessor atomic bomb great deterrent protection soviet produce atomic explosion bound time broaden whole basis strength endeavor keep lead atomic weapon strengthen arm force generally enlarge productive mobilization base historically soviet atomic explosion fall 1949 nine month aggression korea stimulate planning program defense mobilization need central force could strike back aggression also need strength along outer edge free world defenses ally well strength hold line attack well retaliate make great progress task building strong defense last two one half year double defense help increase protection nearly free nation measure collective security resistance aggression building defense constitute first requirement survival progress free world point interwoven necessity take step create maintain economic social progress free nation military strength except economic capacity back freedom economic chaos social collapse reason national policy include wide range economic measure europe grand design marshall plan permit people britain france italy half dozen country help united state lift stagnation find path rise production rise income rise standard live situation change almost overnight marshall plan people europe renew hope vitality able carry share military defense free world would impossible year ago country europe move rapidly towards political economic unity change map europe hopeful way change 500 year customs union european economic institution like schuman plan movement toward european political integration european defense sign practical effective growth toward great common strength unity country western europe include free republic germany work together whole free world gainer sometimes happen course history step take meet immediate necessity serve ultimate purpose great may apparent time believe mean go europe threat aggression free nation help draw together defense free institution lay foundation unity endure major creative force beyond exigency period history may close range dimly aware creative surge movement represent believe historic importance believe benefit survive long communist tyranny nothing unhappy memory asia africa economic social problem different less urgent hundred million people ferment explode twentieth century thrust toward equality independence improvement hard condition live politically economically socially thing stay mold africa asia change must come come fast year president 12 free nation 600 million people become independent burma indonesia philippine korea israel libya india pakistan ceylon three associate state member french union name alone testimony sweep great force change face half world work new relationship among people free world would easy best time even communist drive expansion would hard complex problem transition old social form old political arrangement old economic institution new one century demand problem guide change constructive channel help new nation grow strong stable soviet ruler strive exploit ferment purpose task become hard urgent terribly urgent situation see mean importance point iv program share store capital help people develop economy reshape society help iranian raise grain indian reduce incidence malaria liberians educate child well help answer desire people advancement demonstrate superiority freedom communism quick solution difficulty new nation asia africa may solution press forward full energy help country grow flourish freedom cooperation rest free world measure economic policy already tremendous effect course event eight year ago kremlin think collapse western europe japan economic dislocation america might give signal advance demonstrate wrong wait hope economic recovery free world set stage violent disastrous rivalry among economically develop nation struggle market great share trade another test shall meet master year immediately ahead take great ingenuity effort much time prove kremlin wrong true economic recovery present problem economic decline problem another order problem distribute abundance fairly solved process international cooperation already bring u far measure must continue path must follow must go work free associate build international structure military defense economic social political progress must prepare war war may thrust upon u stake search peace immensely high ever enter atomic age war undergone technological change make different thing use war today soviet empire free nation might dig grave stalinist opponent society world well transformation bring pas seven year alamogordo eniwetok seven year new force atomic energy turn world different kind place science technology work fast war new meaning may yet grasp would victim perhaps ruler kremlin president united state seven year responsible decision bring science engineering present place know development mean know something come mean future government realize even first successful atomic explosion new force spell terrible danger mankind unless brought international control promptly advanced proposal united nation take new source energy arena national rivalry make impossible use weapon war proposal pregnant benefit humanity rebuffed ruler soviet union language science universal movement science always forward unknown could assume soviet union would develop weapon regardless precaution even terrible mean destruction lie unexplored field atomic energy alternative press probe secret atomic power uttermost capacity maintain could initial superiority atomic field time seek persistently avenue formula reach agreement soviet ruler would place new form power effective restraint would guarantee nation would use war recount proposal make step take united nation strive least open way ultimate agreement hope believe continue make effort long slight possibility progress civilize nation agree urgency problem show willingness agree effective measure control save soviet union satellite reject every reasonable proposal meanwhile progress scientific experiment outrun expectation atomic science full tide development unfold innermost secret matter uninterrupted irresistible since alamogordo develop atomic weapon many time explosive force early model produce substantial quantity recently thermonuclear test eniwetok enter another stage development atomic energy man move new era destructive power capable create explosion new order magnitude dwarf mushroom cloud hiroshima nagasaki reason think stage reach release atomic energy last indeed speed scientific technical progress last seven year show sign abate hurried forward mastery atom one discovery another toward yet unforeseeable peak destructive power inevitably reach international agreement path must follow must realize advance make unattainable others advantage race temporary war future would one man could extinguish million live one blow demolish great city world wipe cultural achievement past destroy structure civilization slowly painfully build hundred generation war possible policy rational men know dare assume others would yield temptation science place hand mind something would say stalin claim belief lenin prophecy one stage development communist society would war world lenin man view society history eye something profound happen since write war change shape dimension stage development anything save ruin regime homeland know much time may elapse communist ruler bring recognize truth find u eager reach understanding protect world danger face today wonder people wish never succeed split atom atomic power like force nature evil properly use instrumentality human betterment source power tool scientific inquiry untold possibility already make good progress constructive use atomic power could much free concentrate peaceful use exclusively atomic power u day live legislate existence ignore danger benefit offer believe man harness force atom work improvement lot human being everywhere goal nation people must understand problem must handle new force wisely democratic process must strive earnestness good faith bring effective international control require much wisdom patience firmness responsibility field fall new administration new congress give sup port sure citizen whatever constructive step may take make new man discovery source good ultimate destruction tell whether attitude soviet ruler may change know long may show willingness negotiate effective control atomic energy honorable settlement world problem measure kremlin illusion u sure however ruler communist world change basic objective lightly soon communist ruler sense time thing wholly unlike tend divide future short span like life congress four year next presidential term seem think plan term generation therefore easy way make see plan prevail mean ahead u long hard test strength stamina free world communist politics economy science technology best liberty slavery voluntary concert free nation force amalgam people republic strategy nerve nerve test steadiness people united state challenge like history republic call upon rise occasion people u require u easy way must learn live world live pleasant safe simple u know confidently hop know already sacrifice number accustom way work live much nervous energy material resource even human life yet one thing certain future sacrifice still lie ahead grow discourage weaken slack whole structure build past eight year would come apart fall away never matter stringent mean could free world regain ground time sheer momentum lose move change improvement program meet new situation serve new need desert spirit basic policy step back would surely start free world slide toward darkness communist moment watch wait value freedom way life want see safe must meet challenge accept implication stick gun carry policy set basic condition see work world nature basic policy future answer believe continue confound soviet expectation world grow strong united attractive men side iron curtain inevitably come time change within communist world know change come whether deliberate decision kremlin coup revolution defection satellite perhaps unforeseen combination factor communist ruler understand win war frustrate attempt win subversion much expect world change character moderate aim become realistic less implacable recede cold war begin deceive strong face look monolithic power communist dictator wear outside world remember power basis consent remember afraid free world idea way life dare let people know think massive effort put forth try stop campaign truth reach people message freedom master kremlin live fear power position would collapse people acquire knowledge information comprehension free society world many element strength one fatal flaw weakness represent iron curtain police state surely social order insecure fearful must ultimately lose competition free society provide one thing urge consider carefully provide free world retain confidence determination outmatch best adversary accomplish demonstrate uncertain million side iron curtain superiority free way life test upon free nation upon none republic resource equal task industry skills basic economic strength vigor free men free society liberty keep retain democratic faith ultimate advantage hard competition lie u communists thing could shift advantage side one thing could defeat u fear fear task face fear adjust fear breed fear sap faith corrode liberty turn citizen citizen ally ally fear could snatch away value strive defend already danger signal go already corrosive process ba begin every diminution tolerance new act enforce conformity idle accusation demonstration new restrictive law one sign lose battle fear communist deprive u liberty fear communist stamp faith human fear enemy within root may destroy way life anxious protect beat back fear must hold fast heritage free men must renew confidence one another tolerance sense neighbor fellow citizen must take stand bill right inquisition star chamber place free society ultimate strength lie alone arm sense moral value moral truth give mean vitality purpose free people value faith inspiration source strength indomitable determination face hard task great danger american face hardship uncertainty adjust change circumstance whole history steady training work one lose heart task none lose faith free way stop remember begin seek accomplish together american live long time see much happen country know experience must do think back country grow look country become quite certain do much scarcely fifteen year since american reject wise counsel aggressor must quarantine concept collective security action strange doctrine shun set aside talk adapt talk adjust talk respond people challenge change time circumstance never spectacular example great change america outlook world let u pause think back consider carefully mean national experience let u draw comfort faith confidence future americans nation business never finish basic question deal eight year past present anew way society circumstance change current question take different form new complication year year underneath great issue remain prosperity welfare human right effective democracy peace turn inaugural new president great work call upon need support unite people confident people firm faith one another common pledge support citizen republic ask give fellow citizen say godspeed may god bless country harry truman