Author: William D. Pawley & Richard R. Tryon
Chapter One
America Is In Peril
1
America has been good to me, as it has to most of my countrymen. Therefore, it is with sadness, and often with incredulity, that I am impelled to render my own eyewitness report on the pattern of events-and a consistent pattern it has been for forty years-which now threatens to transform a bright dream into a nightmare:the loss of our nations’s freedom, or even the possibility of our nation’s extinction.
The Soviet Union has already forged ahead of the United States in the battle for men’s minds, as nations around the world increasingly gravitate toward worship of the false god “State” rather than the God of individual integrity in which the architects of our Republic anchored their faith.
And, of more deadly concern, the Russians have surpassed us militarily, as of early 1976, in land, sea, air, and nuclear strike forces.
The Soviet leaders have publicly disputed our contention that “there can be no winner in a nuclear war.”
Anyone has but to read “The Role of Nuclear Forces in Current Soviet Strategy,” a study by the University of Miami’s Center for Advanced International Studies, to find proof that the leaders of the Communist world declare they can and will win a nuclear showdown, and that they are preparing full throttle to that end.
A warning was given to our people and our President six years ago by President Nixon’s non-partisan “Blue Ribbon Defense Panel.” The Supplemental Statement was prepared by distinguished citizens who served on the Panel.
“It is not too much to say that in the 1970’s neither the vital interests of the United States nor the lives and freedom of its citizens will be secure.”
The Panel’s prophetic conclusion, little publicized at the time, much less heeded, has indeed been supported by events.
Instead of rising to so grave a challenge, as has been our proud tradition, we have steadily retreated from it, as we have retreated in other arenas wherein the balance of power is determined.
2
The first great mistake our country made with respect to the Bolshevik regime was to accord it diplomatic recognition and thus worldwide status.
This occurred in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was barely a few months old. There were those of his advisers who were misled into thinking that the label “Socialist” applied to the Marxist regime. Others thought that Bolshevism was just another “Populist” idea. Some, I am sorry to acknowledge, considered Marxism the wave of the future, to take the place of traditional private enterprise.
At any rate, it has become clear in Russia since the seizure of the government in November, 1917, and the elimination of all democratic institutions, the communism had identified itself for exactly what it was: The most reactionary government on earth. No free elections were permitted. Voting was forced to conform to what the tiny group of men in the Kremlin had already decided. There were no freedoms as we know them in our Bill of Rights -- the freedom to practice religion, freedom of speech, of the press, of peaceful assembly and of petition. There was no guarantee that one accused of a crime would have a fair trial.
In fact, the “knock on the door” in the dead of night signaled the end of the line, the end of hope and of existence itself, for millions of people in Russia during those years when the Marxist system was fastening its iron grip about the lives of the people.
All that humankind had gained in the centuries of struggle for political and social freedom, from the Magna Carta to that year of 1933, was denied in the Bolshevist regime. It was as though the clock of human progress had been turned back hundreds of years.
Of course, the old plea was made that “recognition does not mean approval of the regime,” -- the stock excuse to justify such action. Yet that is exactly what it meant to the Soviet Union. It meant lifting the former discredited Bolshevist regime to the level of respectability. It signified that the United States of America could do business with their leaders on a basis of mutual trust. And most important of all, it meant the opening of an Embassy in the nation that commanded the respect of all the communities of the world.
The only proviso attached to the recognition of the Red Russian government which has been seized by Lenin, Trotsky, and their disciples was an agreement that the Kremlin should not engage in subversive activities in America -- a tacit admission that the Reds would engage in such activities when the chance presented itself.
The dictator of the Red Russian regime at that time was Josef Stalin. He had given ample proof that he ruled by terror, torture, and ruthless cruelty in his own country, and that he carried on programs of subversion and infiltration abroad. And that is precisely what Stalin did, as he prepared for World War II, in cooperation with his budding partner Adolf Hitler during the next half dozen years.
Every Soviet embassy and consulate immediately became what it was intended to be -- a spy organization. The most experienced spies were placed in the most responsible positions. Certainly the offices of the Soviet embassy in Washington were promptly filled with them. And there they have remained, faithfully at work ever since.
Was it any wonder that when Stalin was informed by an emissary from the White House of the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima that he merely shrugged and said. “Yes, I know about your atomic bomb!”
I share Lincoln’s views that the sound judgment of the American people, in the last analysis, is our nation’s greatest strength. I do not subscribe to the pessimistic view of Alexis de Tocqueville, the astute French political philosopher and admirer of the American experiment, who sensed a fatal flaw in any democracy which gave the vote to everyone, He called it “decision by the best brains.”
Too often, public servants of superior intelligence and so-called “intellectuals” who have been tragically lacking in common sense, have lagged behind the basic instincts of the majority of the people as to what was best for America.
I do not write from rancor, animosity nor a wish to smear any man -- least of all our Presidents
3
If the reader is inclined to challenge the premises which alarm me and other concerned citizens, let him reflect anew on the frightening contrast between America’s posture today, in 1976, with what it was at the close of World War II, and still was at the end of President Eisenhower’s term.
In 1945 the United States stood at a pinnacle of authority and power which no nation at any time had ever equaled.
Our country enjoyed an absolute monopoly of nuclear devices.
Her armies were equipped with the most powerful weapons known to man. Her aircraft were masters of the world’s skies; her navy was supreme over the seven seas. She possessed, in short, a military machine of such awe-inspiring power as to make her the arbiter of the world.
In the midst of war-devastated continents, America’s economy was strong enough to reconstruct both the victors and the vanquished. In science, literature, scholarship and the arts, her leadership was widely respected. Her political prestige was perhaps even greater.
After the long night of Nazi totalitarianism, the world was repelled by a Soviet system which so closely resembled the despotism that had just been destroyed. America, by contrast, was viewed as the visible embodiment of what free men could achieve. America was still, in the words of Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1801, “the world’s best hope.” Jefferson referred in that historic speech to the struggle of the people of the Eastern Hemisphere against tyranny as “the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty.” By contrast, he considered the United States “the strongest government on earth, the only one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the standard of the law and would meet invasions of the public order as his personal cause.”
Since that time, any American President, regardless of limitations of education, insight or vision he might possess, could speak with authority as the leader of the free world.
Only a generation before World War II, it was fashionable to believe that Americans were politically naive and had much to learn from sophisticated Europe. In fact, some European lecturers had made a good living by explaining to paying audiences of Americans how naive and simple-minded they were. As people looked at the havoc of Europe in the backwash of war, this judgment seemed less tenable. There was a more general realization that the American achievement of government for her citizens during the entire span of the nation’s history was in shining contrast to the record of many more venerable and sophisticated countries.
What other nation had solved all her internal problems, with the exception of the Civil War, by peaceful means? Within the shelter of her free institutions, America has achieved a greater degree of material well-being for all her people than any other nation has ever achieved. These are not small accomplishments. They give the United States the right to speak with authority and to validate her leadership of the free world.
We faced, at the close of World War II, a visible struggle for world leadership between the United States, as the leader of free nations, and the Soviet Union, as the directing center of a new totalitarian system. The system was similar to the Nazi-led Axis, equally dedicated to world domination. But it was more insidious, subtle, persistent, patient and far more dangerous, because it exerted an appeal to other nations, whereas Nazism’s appeal was confined almost entirely to Germany.
The Communist crusade is not merely a dynastic struggle between rival superpowers. The issue is the future shape of the world. It is the welfare of mankind, or its subjugation to the fallacies that the weak can be strengthened by weakening the strong and that thinking is best done by the State without any back-talk from the citizen. The Communist leaders teach that self-sufficient Man is now free to repudiate his historical belief in moral principles, rooted in his faith in God. The actual course of civilization is thus at stake.
At the inception of this struggle, the United States wielded preponderant power in every significant form which political power can assume. She was equally strong in intellectual authority, in the ability of inspire men’s minds, to evoke their loyalty, to give them goals and vision for the future of their societies.
4
What has happened in the quarter of a century that followed? I have watched, heartsick, while these great advantages and unparalleled opportunities have been frittered away.
I spent more than a decade in the Far East, building the military aircraft factories Nationalist China needed for survival, and establishing production complexes to produce trainer, fighter and bomber planes on the Burma-China border and subsequently in Bangalore, India. During the year immediately prior to United States entry into World War II, I organized the American Volunteer Group (“Flying Tigers”) which played so gallant and brilliant a role in the destruction of Japanese air power over China and Burma, flying under the command of Major General Claire L. Chennault.
Having devoted such a large part of my working life to working in China while the Chinese were trying to repel Japanese aggression against China from without and Soviet subversion of the great country from within, I watched helplessly while Free China was sacrificed to the Communists. In conjunction with many equally concerned American leaders, I protested vigorously against what I regarded as the inevitable consequences of policies of appeasement and surrender. Sometimes we protesters received attention at the Cabinet and Presidential levels, but our advice was ignored and our recommendations rejected by the leftist bureaucrats at the “working level.”
Well might every thoughtful citizen ask “Why? Why?”
The reasons form a constant pattern. It is a pattern whose background is composed of ignorance as to the Communist aims and methods. Interwoven in the wool of the pattern is trust on the part of this country, and of the democracies generally, that the Red regime can be treated with the same respect our government and people treat other regimes. More than a half a century of history clearly proves otherwise. The warp of the pattern is made up of fear. There is fear that if given offense Red Russia might retaliate with military action. This has restrained firm action on our part at a time when the Communists were in no position to wage war because of our overpowering military superiority. This was clearly demonstrated in the Berlin Blockade; sponsorship (with China) of the aggression against the Republic of Korea, the aggression against Hungary in 1956, and the sponsorship (with China) of the aggression against Vietnam and all Indochina, which we countered with armed resistance to a certain point and then refused to win a victory.
The whole pattern is now colored with a thin, pasty coating call “detente,” a Communist tactic to prepare the trusting democracies for the kill. Detente, in its present usage, means a lessening of tensions, less confrontation and more peaceful co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union. We should seek that. But detente must be a two-way street, in which, dealing from strength, we can insist at the very least upon the kind of fair exchange which has been so conspicuously absent when we have met the Soviets at the bargaining table. We gave up far more than we received in the recent economic and SALT negotiations. We took a sound beating on our selling wheat to the Russians, and in agreements for arms limitations. Such lopsided detente becomes appeasement. It can end only in surrender.
By what downhill road have we retreated from an impregnable position, on the high ground of power, to what could be our present last-ditch line of defense? Basically, by stupidity, which I shall document. It is the kind of sheer folly that might be indulged in by a victim who would help tie the strings of the straight-jacket into which his enemy has thrust him.
My purpose is to report to my fellow Americans, as honestly and as accurately as I can, from the vantage point of a frequent adviser to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower; to our State and Defense Departments, and to other government agencies.
As America entered the postwar era, in addition to my role as presidential adviser, I served my country and my government as American ambassador to Peru and Brazil, as special assistant to two Secretaries of State and to the Secretary of Defense and in various other unofficial and confidential missions. I had close associations in my public life with three Presidents -- two of them Democrats and one Republican. Each was a “liberal” in the true sense of the word, and each drafted me for important assignments and sought my advice. Each I greatly admired.
My public service was not continuous. I never had to rely on government employment for a livelihood or to lend zest to my life. I believe this has enabled me to preserve a degree of detachment, and to assess trends, more readily than a bureaucrat harassed by administrative demands or financial pressures.
Have we already approached the point of no return to our traditional position of strength and leadership? We have, unless drastic remedial steps are taken. That such a prospect can be seriously predicted shows the degree of internal disintegration and failure of direction and courage which has already occurred in America.
Less than twenty years ago my good friend Henry Luce of Time, Inc. proclaimed “the American Century.” Today, Americans of equal responsibility and intellectual distinction are asking not whether the century belongs to us, but whether we can survive it as a free nation.
Can the tide of defeatism and surrender be halted, and reversed? I believe it can. But it will take the same kind of courage displayed by those founders of our nation two hundred years ago. It will take the same type of sacrifices they were willing to endure to see their dreams of freedom come true -- the same kind of dedication to the principles that made of us, and have preserved for us, a great nation.
Meanwhile, let me explain how these calls came to the private American business man, and why I responded as I did.
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