National Affairs: THE TASK OF THE NEXT PRESIDENT

Vice President Nixon has told friends that he has neither the talent nor the personality to be a great orator. But by the time he was halfway through his acceptance speech—much of it memorized, some of it extemporized, all of it the result of weeks of reading and scribbling—he had brought the Republican Convention to its emotional peak. Cheering, foot-stomping delegates interrupted him 74 times (v. 36 for Jack Kennedy) as he laid down his own program for the American future. Excerpts:

WE are in a race tonight, my fellow Americans, in a race for survival in which our lives, our fortunes, our liberties are at stake. We are ahead now. But the only way to stay ahead in a race is to move ahead, and the next President will make decisions which will determine whether we win or whether we lose.

What must he do? These things, I believe: he must resolve first and above all that the United States must never settle for second best in anything. Militarily the security of the United States must be put before all other considerations. Diplomatically, our next President must be firm, firm on principle. But he must never be belligerent. While he must never answer insults in kind, he must leave no doubt at any time that, whether it is in Berlin or in Cuba or anywhere else in the world, America will not tolerate being pushed around by anybody, any place. We have already paid a terrible price in lives and resources to learn that appeasement leads not to peace but to war. And he must develop a grand new strategy that will win the battle for freedom for all men and women without a war. That is the great task of the next President of the United States.

This will be a difficult task. Difficult because at times our next President must tell the people not what they want to hear but what they need to hear. Why, for example, it may be just as essential to the national interest to build a dam in India as in California. It will be difficult, too, because we Americans have always been able to see and understand the danger presented by missiles and airplanes and bombs, but we found it hard to recognize the even more deadly danger of the propaganda that warps the mind, the economic offensive that softens the nation, the subversion that destroys the will to resist tyranny.

The Strike Force

There are some things we must do.

First, we must take the necessary steps which will assure that the American economy grows at a maximum rate so that we can maintain our present massive lead over the Communist bloc.

There isn't any magic formula by which government in a free nation can bring this about. The way to ensure maximum growth in America is not by expanding the functions of government but by increasing the opportunities for investment and creative enterprise for millions of individual Americans.

Second, our government activity must be reorganized—reorganized to take the initiative from the Communists and to develop and carry out a worldwide strategy, an offensive for peace and freedom. The complex of agencies which has grown up through the years for exchange of persons, for technical assistance, for information, for loans and for grants, all these must be welded together into one powerful economic and ideological striking force under the direct supervision and leadership of the President.