I staggered back, half blinded by the blow, feeling hurt and alone. I found the elevator button and leaned against it, remembering that hired girl who let me fall out of the carriage and get run over, her big lap, big to me, yet not big enough. I could almost smell her as she came to tuck us in, fresh from washing up. To listen to our prayers. Read to us from James Whitcomb Riley: “Listen, boys…”—the elevator door gaped: a big mouth — I was frightened of it and took the stairs down, jumping them three at a time—“… I’m tellin’ you…
“The Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out!”
INTERMEZZO: The War Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness: The Vision of Dwight David Eisenhower
(from Public Papers of the Presidents, January 20–June 19, 1953)
Tonight,
as you sit in your homes all across this broad land,
I want to talk to you about an issue
affecting all our lives — the question
that stirs the hearts of all sane men:
How far have we come in man’s long pilgrimage
from darkness toward the light?
Are we nearing the light—
a day of freedom and peace for all mankind?
Or are the shadows of another night
closing in upon us?
Since the century’s beginning,
a time of tempest has seemed to come upon
the continents of the earth — great nations of Europe
have fought their bloodiest wars; thrones
have toppled and vast empires have disappeared.
The shadow of fear has darkly lengthened across the world.
We sense with all our faculties
that forces of Good and Evil are massed and armed and opposed
as rarely before in history.
No principle or treasure that we hold,
from the spiritual knowledge of our free schools and churches
to the creative magic of free labor and capital,
nothing lies safely
beyond the reach of this struggle.
You are even puzzled
as to whether it is wise to say anything,
because anything that one in my position might say
could be used as an excuse to make
these conditions worse.
But do you cure cancer
by pretending it does not exist?
We must see, clearly and steadily,
just exactly what is the danger before us;
it is more than merely a military threat.
The forces threatening this continent strike directly
at the faith of our fathers and the lives of our sons,
at the very ideals by which our peoples live!
Freedom is pitted against slavery;
lightness against the dark!
Here, then, is joined no argument
between slightly differing philosophies—
for this whole struggle, in the deepest sense,
is waged neither for land
nor for food nor for power
— but for the Soul of Man himself!
We are Christian nations,
deeply conscious that the foundation
of all liberty is religious faith:
we trust in the merciful providence of God,
whose image, within every man,
is the source and substance
of each man’s dignity and freedom.
This faith rules our whole way of life—
we live by it and we intend to practice it.
I think that is not hard to prove
in the case of America: when we came
to that turning point in history, when we intended
to establish a government for free men
and a Declaration and a Constitution to make it last,
in order to explain such a system we had to say:
“We hold that all men are endowed by their Creator”
— thus establishing once and for all
that our civilization and our form of government
is deeply imbedded in a religious faith.
Indeed, those men felt that
unless we recognized that relationship
between our form of government and religious faith,
that form of government made no sense!
Now, that is the doctrine of the administration.
It is most certainly the doctrine of the Republican Party
and those Republican leaders in Congress.
The faith we hold
belongs not to us alone
but the free of all the world.
This common bond
joins the grower of rice in Burma
and the planter of wheat in Iowa,
the shepherd in southern Italy
and the mountaineer in the Andes,
the French soldier who dies in Indochina,
the British soldier killed in Malaya,
the American life given in Korea.
We believe.
The enemies of this faith
know no god but force, no devotion but its use;
they tutor men in treason;
they seek not to eradicate poverty and its causes
but to exploit it and those who suffer it—
they feed upon the hunger of others.
These forces
seek to bind nations not by trust but by fear—
whatever defies them, they torture,
especially the truth. Against these forces
the widest oceans offer no sure defense.
We live in a time of peril.
This is one of those times in the affairs of nations
when the gravest choices must be made — a moment
when man’s power to achieve good or to inflict evil
surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears
of all ages.
The worst to be feared
and the best to be expected can be simply stated:
the worst is atomic war…the best:
a life of perpetual fear and tension.
We must act from a lesson learned at terrible cost:
to serve our reasoned hope for the best,
we must be ready steadfastly to meet the worst.
These plain and cruel truths
define the peril and point the hope
that come with this spring of 1953.
The world, at least, need be divided no longer
in its clear knowledge of who has condemned
humankind to this fate — we all know something
of the long record of deliberately planned Communist aggression!
It has been coldly calculated by the Soviet leaders,
for by their military threat they have hoped
to force upon America and the free world
an unbearable security burden leading to
economic disaster!
They have plainly said
that free people cannot preserve their way of life
and at the same time provide enormous military establishments
— Communist guns, in this sense,
have been aiming at an economic target
no less than a military target: prolonged inflation
could be as destructive of a truly free economy
as could a chemical attack against an army in the field!
They seek to promote,
among those of us who remain free and unafraid,