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1964 Goldwater on Vietnam
Barry Goldwater on Vietnam
Speech to National Association of Counties, Washington, D.C.
10 August 1964
Source: Vital Speeches of the Day.
pp. 676 - 678.
. . . To insist on strength, let me impress you, is not warmongering. It is peace-mongering -- the only kind that has ever worked in the whole history of the world.
And that great man, Winston Churchill, once was called an extremist. And that's quite a popular word around today, and I ask the question whether you men want your wives to be extremely faithful to you or just moderately faithful. I've told Peggie what I prefer.
But Mr. Churchill was called an extremist because he spoke up for Britain's defenses at a time when appeasement was very popular. Now, had he, rather than those who called him names been listened to, there is every reason to believe that the Second World War could have been prevented.
Only with the strength to keep the peace can we ever hope for the time in which ideological obsession of Communism will be abandoned by the leaders of the nations which today we call Communist. Yet, there are those who fear that strength may only provoke the enemy.
Was it strength that was responsible for the attacks on our destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin? Or was it the enemy's doubt of our strength and doubt of our will to use it?
And I charge that our policies have become so involved, so twisted with diplomatic red tape that the enemy might well have wondered if we would accept their attacks at sea on the same basis that we have been accepting their attacks on land.
And I support, before anyone gets the wrong idea, as does my party, as do all Americans, the President's firm action in response. But I must point out that it was just that, I must point out that it was just that a response--an incident not a program or a new policy; a tactical reaction, not a new winning strategy.
Yes, all of us support the President in this strong, right action. No, we will not let this one action obscure a multitude of other needed actions.
And no, we will not let our support today silence our basic criticism that the war in Vietnam -- and let's call it what it is, a war--that the war in Vietnam is being fought under policies that obscure our purposes, confuse our allies, particularly the Vietnamese and encourage the enemy to prolong the fighting.
We must, instead, prosecute the war in Vietnam with the object of ending it along with the threats to peace that it poses all over the world.
Taking strong action simply to return to the status quo is not worthy of our sacrifices, our ideals, or our vision of a world of peace, freedom and justice.
Now this doesn't mean the use of military power alone. We have vast resources of economic, political and psychological power which have not even been tapped in our Vietnamese strategy.
These, I suggest, can be peaceful means of waging war on war itself and all I say is, let's use them.
As it is, we seem forever to be making crisis decisions in the middle of the night--crisis decisions for supposedly isolated outbreaks of fire.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, actually Communism remains a global, not an isolated, threat and we must face it as such or risk in some uniformed response to a supposedly isolated crisis, the misstep that could bring us closer to the nuclear war we all want to avoid.
Those who remember that the final defeat of free China occurred while our eyes were riveted on the Berlin blockade cannot help but realize that today while our eyes are fixed on Vietnam, we face another disaster in the heart of Africa, the Congo.
What we Americans need to understand is that a devotion to preparedness is a devotion to peace and that those who rashly would disarm us unilaterally risk tempting our enemies to war, just as they have before every other war of this century. . . .