Great social change — as we see in our own country now — does not always come without conflict. Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can do to unite this country? Have I done everything I can to help unite the world, to try to bring peace and hope to all the peoples of the world? Have I done enough? Ask yourselves that question in your homes — and in this hall tonight. Have we, each of us, all done all we could?
Have we done enough? Well, we will choose life. Cold War America. Sinews of Peace Iron Curtain. Inaugural Address. Declaration of Honorary Citizen of United States o Gideon v.
Speech on the Challenger Disaster. Reflections on the Bicentennial of the United Stat Commercial Republic. United States Objectives and Programs for National The Kitchen Debate.
Farewell Address to the Nation Radio and Television Report to the American People The General Market Process. Acceptance Speech at the Republican National Conve Executive Order No. Joint Statement Following Discussions with Leaders Human Rights and Foreign Policy. Fullilove v. Acceptance Speech at Republican Convention. First Inaugural Address State of the Union Address Second Inaugural Address Farewell Address Reagan. Foreign Policy. Chapter Containment and the Truman Doctrine.
Speech on the Marshall Plan. Speech on the Truman Doctrine. Excerpts from Sources of Soviet Conduct. Excerpts from The Cold War. Speech on the North Atlantic Treaty. Speech Explaining the Communist Threat. The Long Telegram. Letter to James Byrnes. Telegram Regarding American Postwar Behavior. Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turk The Truman Doctrine. Argument against Involvement in the Chinese Civil Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt.
Observations on China. Address on the Occasion of the Signing of the Nort Speech on the Far East. Speech at Berkeley, California. Address in Spokane at Gonzaga University. Radio and Television Address on the Situation in K Special Message to the Congress Reporting on the S Excerpt from Broadcast on Radio Peking.
Report to the American People on Korea. Statement on Liberation Policy. Farewell Address to the American People. Statement of Policy by the National Security Counc Observations on Massive Retaliation. Special Message to the Congress on the situation i Report to the American People Regarding the Situat Report to President Kennedy on South Vietnam. Minutes of the Meeting of the Special Group Augme Memorandum for Discussion During the Cuban Missile Soviet Reactions to Certain U.
Courses of Action Proclamation authorizing the naval quarantin Remarks in the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin. Limited Test Ban Treaty. Special Message to the Congress on U. Policy in Joint Resolution of Congress, H. RES Gulf Cutting Our Losses in South Viet-nam.
Statement on the War in Vietnam. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Address on the Vietnam War. Telephone Conversation about Chile. Letter to President Nguyen Van Thieu. Address to the Nation Announcing Conclusion of an The Paris Accords. On Detente. Meeting on Cuba. Address at Commencement Exercises at the Universit President Carter's News Conference.
Address to the Nation on the Soviet Invasion of Af Address to the Nation on the Rescue Attempt for Am Speech to the House of Commons. Speech At Westminster.
Viet-Nam is far away from this quiet campus. We have no territory there, nor do we seek any. The war is dirty and brutal and difficult. And some young men, born into an America that is bursting with opportunity and promise, have ended their lives on Viet-Nam's steaming soil.
Why must this Nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away? We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure. This kind of world will never be built by bombs or bullets. Yet the infirmities of man are such that force must often precede reason, and the waste of war, the works of peace.
We wish that this were not so. But we must deal with the world as it is, if it is ever to be as we wish. Its object is total conquest. Of course, some of the people of South Viet-Nam are participating in attack on their own government. But trained men and supplies, orders and arms, flow in a constant stream from north to south. And it is a war of unparalleled brutality. Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government.
And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks. Large-scale raids are conducted on towns, and terror strikes in the heart of cities. The confused nature of this conflict cannot mask the fact that it is the new face of an old enemy.
Over this war--and all Asia--is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peking. This is a regime which has destroyed freedom in Tibet, which has attacked India, and has been condemned by the United Nations for aggression in Korea. It is a nation which is helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Viet-Nam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes.
We are there because we have a promise to keep. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to he! To dishonor that pledge, to abandon this small and brave nation to its enemies, and to the terror that must follow, would be an unforgivable wrong. We are also there to strengthen world order. Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked.
To leave Viet-Nam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America's word. The result would be increased unrest and instability, and even wider war. We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Viet-Nam would bring an end to conflict.
The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. There are those who say that all our effort there will be futile--that China's power is such that it is bound to dominate all southeast Asia.
But there is no end to that argument until all of the nations of Asia are swallowed up. There are those who wonder why we have a responsibility there. Well, we have it there for the same reason that we have a responsibility for the defense of Europe. World War II was fought in both Europe and Asia, and when it ended we found ourselves with continued responsibility for the defense of freedom. We want nothing for ourselves--only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.
We will do everything necessary to reach that objective. And we will do only what is absolutely necessary. In recent months attacks on South Viet-Nam were stepped up. Thus, it became necessary for us to increase our response and to make attacks by air.
This is not a change of purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Viet-Nam who have bravely borne this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties.
American intelligence and Foreign Service operatives on the ground began requesting new assignments. Johnson believed that if he permitted South Vietnam to fall through a conventional North Vietnamese invasion, the whole containment edifice so carefully constructed since World War II to stop the spread of communism and the influence of the Soviet Union would crumble.
In the spring and summer of Johnson was laboring to get through Congress some of the most controversial of his Great Society programs: the Voting Rights Act, federal aid to education, and Medicare, among others. Both the education bills and Medicare were civil rights measures in their own right, making federal funding to schools and hospitals dependent on desegregation. Johnson, a southerner himself, worked to persuade congressmen and senators from the former Confederacy to acquiesce in, if not actively support, passage of these measures.
The South was both the most segregationist region of the country and the most hawkish on foreign affairs. Johnson believed he could not ask the region to accept both the demise of Jim Crow and the loss of South Vietnam to the communists. Matters were further complicated by the fact that right-wingers led by FBI Director J Edgar Hoover and Alabama governor George Wallace were trying to portray the civil rights sit-ins and demonstrations as communist inspired.
Johnson saw no evidence that President Kennedy had intended to deescalate. They were unanimous and vehement in their advice to stay the course in Vietnam although McNamara would very publicly do a mea culpa years later. LBJ was a nation-builder.
The Great Society comprised more than 1, pieces of legislation and forever altered the social and political landscape of America. Johnson was reluctant to intervene in South East Asia but once strategic and politic exigencies seemd to demand it, he began to develop a not unreasonable vision for the future of South Vietnam, one that helped him stay the course.
Here was a nation born under the direst of circumstances.
0コメント