Speech Transcript:

 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