A Chance For Peace

     In a real sense, the Republicans have nothing I can sense in common with this philosophy, shared by DD Eisenhower on April 16, 1953.  Later, the junior Senator from Massachusetts called Eisenhower "soft on defense" and beat RM Nixon in a closely contested election.

     Chance for Peace

"First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

"Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

"Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

"Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

"And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations."

" Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

"This world in arms is not spending money alone.

"It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

"It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

"It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

"It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

"We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

"We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

"This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

" This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."