n022  0932  29 Feb 80
 
BC-SPEECH-REAGAN (Undated) 3takes
    Candidates for the presidential nomination in both major parties
make hundreds of speeches in their campaigns, speeches that vary in
content depending on where they are given and the audience being
addressed.
    But every candidate has a body of material, usually presented in
every speech, that varies little from audience to audience. This
material represents the heart of his message to the voters as he
moves around the country.
    Ronald Reagan's basic speech is the first in a series of texts of
such ''stock speeches,'' heard by millions of Americans but rarely
published at length, that have been collected by The New York Times.
 
c. 1980 N.Y. Times News Service
    When the New Deal was riding high, with a program of social
experiments, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, went on nationwide radio
to tell his fellow Americans he could no longer follow the leadership
of the party he had served 20 years. He said he was taking a walk,
and he asked the Democrats to look at the record.
    It is time now for all of us to look at the record - the record of
Democratic leadership.
    Despite the protests about all the problems he inherited, Jimmy
Carter came into office with the economy expanding, with inflation
reduced to less than 5 percent, and with the dollar a relatively
stable measure of value. In 36 months he has tripled the rate of
inflation; the prime interest rate has risen to the highest level
since the Civil War; the price of gold has risen from $125 an ounce
to more than $600 and fluctuates up there at that level, which
measures the extent to which international confidence in the dollar
has fallen. And that is the indication of the collapse of confidence
of economic policies in the Carter administration.
    After last summer's Cabinet massacre, the departing secretary of the
Treasury confessed that the Carter administration did not bring with
it to Washington any economic philosophy of its own. So the president
and his counselors embraced the only economic philosophy they could
find at hand - the warmed-over McGovernism of the Democrat platform
of 1976.
    Together Mr. Carter, his Democratic Congress and his first choice
for chairman of the Federal Reserve proceeded on the premise of
parallel lanes of national prosperity, federal deficits and easy
money. Pursuing this course together, they made a shambles of our
national economy wiping out in three years' time tens of billions of
dollars of value in our private pensions, savings, insurance, stocks
and bonds.
    I suggest that when one administration can give us the highest
inflation since 1946, the highest interest rates since the Civil War,
and the worst drop in value of the dollar against gold in history,
it's time that administration was turned out of office and a new
administration elected to repair the damage done.
    But when we consider what lies ahead in this new decade, the damage
done to the national economy is insignificant alongside the damage
done to our national security. In May of 1977, five months after he
took the oath of office, President Carter declared at Notre Dame
University, ''We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism
which once led us to embrace any dictator who shared that fear.'' We
are now free, he said, of that inordinate fear of communism which led
to moral poverty in Vietnam.
    Now, it's true Vietnam was not a war fought according to MacArthur's
dictum, ''there is no substitute for victory.'' It may also be true
that Vietnam was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong
time. But 50,000 Americans died in Southeast Asia. They were not
engaged in some racist enterprise, as candidate Carter charged in
1976.
    And when 50,000 Americans make the ultimate sacrifice to defend the
people of a small, defenseless country in Southeast Asia from
Communist tyranny, that, my friends, is a collective act of moral
courage, not an example of moral poverty.
    Our current commander in chief owes an apology to almost three
million Americans who served in Southeast Asia and to the memory of
50,000 who never came home. Isn't it time we recognized the veterans
of that war were men who fought as bravely and as effectively as any
American fighting men have ever fought in any war? And isn't it time
we told them that never again will we allow the immorality of asking
young men to fight and die in a war our government was afraid to let
them win?
    Since Mr. Carter dismissed his fear of communism as inordinate, he
has set about systematically to diminish and dismantle what one of
his predecessors called the great arsenal of democracy:
    - He junked the B-1 bomber program, which was to be the mainstay of
the Strategic Air Command from now well into the next century. In
doing so, he left the air deterrent of the U.S. resting on a few
hundred B-52s representing the 80s with the technology of the 40s -
many of them older in years than the pilots ordered to fly them.
    - Bowing to Kremlin propaganda, Mr. Carter killed the neutron
warhead, a credible NATO deterrent to the Soviet tank arms now massed
at the eastern end of the historic invasion corridors of Western
Europe.
    - To show good faith at the SALT negotiating table, the president
delayed or postponed the cruise missile program, the MX and the
Trident submarine.
    - And after all these unilateral concessions, Mr. Warnke brought
home from Europe the SALT II treaty. The Senate has so far refused to
ratify, as well it should refuse.
    (MORE)
    
    
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n025  0957  29 Feb 80
 
BC-SPEECH-REAGAN 1stadd
NYT UNDATED: should refuse.
    Mr. Carter described the agreement as fair, as just, and for the
security interests of the U.S. But is it fair that subsonic American
bombers 25 years old are counted as strategic weapons, while
supersonic Soviet bombers coming off the assembly line, one every 10
days, are not? Is it fair that severe restrictions are placed upon
the range, number and deployment of our small subsonic cruise
missiles, while no limits are set upon the multiple-warhead
medium-range rockets the Russians are targeting at Western Europe at
the rate of one a week?
    How should the Americans respond to such an agreement? The president
said we must ratify the SALT II treaty because no one will like us if
we don't. He said we should give away the Panama Canal because no one
would like us if we didn't. It is time to tell the president: We
don't care if they like us or not. We intend to be respected
throughout the world.
    We want arms limitation. We want arms control. But the United States
should never place a seal of approval on an unfair, unequal,
dangerous document which legitimizes American strategic inferiority
to a hostile, imperial power whose ambitions extend to the ends of
the earth.
    Now, you may be wondering why I bring this up. With the invasion of
Afghanistan, the president says he has learned the Soviets cannot be
trusted. So he's asked the Senate to hold up ratification of SALT II.
But he made sure the Senate and the Soviets undertstood that he
didn't say ''no'' - he said ''maybe.'' He just doesn't want it
ratified now - later on will do, when he has regained his trust in
the men in the Kremlin.
    For 10 years, the West has searched for detente with the Soviet
Union, no one more avidly than Mr. Carter. As a consequence of this
10 years of detente with us, the Soviet Union is now fueled by
Western capital, run by American computers, fed by American grain.
    Where is the Soviet reciprocity? Where is the Soviet restraint
promised in the code of detente of 1972? Is it visible in the Russian
military buildup in North Korea? Or on the occupied islands north of
Japan? Did we see it in Hanoi's annexation of Indochina? In Soviet
complicity in the starvation of the people of Cambodia? The Soviet
provision of poison gas used against the hill tribesmen of Laos?
    Is Russian restraint evident in their military intervention with
Cuban proxies in wars in Angola and Ethopia? Is it visible in their
imperial invasion of the then independent, neutral nation of
Afghanistan, where they executed their own puppet president and his
entire family, including even the murder of his 3-year-old daughter?
    Consider the case of Cuba. When he took office, Mr. Carter extended
the hand of friendship to Havana as he did to Hanoi. He had an
ideological ally in Senator Kennedy, who has said, ''The United
States should respect the experiment that has taken place in Cuba and
normalize relations with it.'' Will the senator explain why free men
should respect an experiment that required the elimination of human
rights and political freedom?
    Why should we respect an experiment of an American-hating dictator
who betrayed the Cuban people and converted that country into a penal
colony for the Soviet Union?
    And how has Fidel Castro reciprocated the friendship offered by
President Carter? Since 1976, Russian pilots have begun flying air
cover over the island. Soviet submarines have been sent to Castro's
navy. Nuclear-capable fighter bombers have appeared at Cuban air
bases, and a Soviet combat force is discovered holding military
maneuvers there. Apparently, to Mr. Carter, this was the last straw.
The status quo - that's Latin for ''the mess we're in'' - he said was
unacceptable, a few weeks later, it seems, was acceptable.
    It is precisely because of this foreign policy bordering on
appeasement that a student mob can hold hostage, with impunity,
diplomats and marines in the American embassy in Iran.
    And when viewing the Soviet empire established in Eastern Europe in
the first years of the cold war, again Senator Kennedy and Mr. Carter
appeared ideological and political twins. In 1976 Senator Kennedy
wrote, ''With exception of East Germany, Russia has no more
satellites.'' Arriving in Warsaw in 1977, President Carter got off
the plane to announce to a startled satrap who rules that country on
behalf of the Soviet Union, ''Our concept of human rights is
preserved in Poland.''
    What concept of human rights can that be? Would he like to explain
that to millions of Polish Americans who know better, or Czechoslavak
Americans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Hungarian Americans
who know the lands of their fathers are slave states of the Russian
Gulag? But as Abraham Lincoln once said, ''They only have the right
to criticize who have the heart to help.''
    It is time for the Republicn Party to come to the rescue of this
country. When Woodrow Wilson delivered his inaugural address, he made
a comment that applies to both the great political parties. ''The
success of a party means little,'' he said. ''except when a nation is
using the party for large and definite purpose.''
    (MORE)
    
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n026  1004  29 Feb 80
 
BC-SPEECH-REAGAN 2ndadd
NYT UNDATED: definite purpose.''
    The American people are prepared for large and definite purpose. It
is many-faceted:
    - It is to restore in its rightful place this society of high
principle, of equality for all and special privilege for none. You do
not alter the evil character of racial quotas simply by changing the
color of the beneficiary.
    - It is to care, shelter, and protect the least protected among us
and that includes especially the unborn.
    - It is to conserve the environment with which we are blessed
without shackling the free enterprise system that has made a poor
backward agricultural country the greatest nation on earth.
    - It is to set aside forever the discredited dogma from the 1930s
that an endless string of federal deficits is the path to national
prosperity.
    - It is to relieve the small businessman of the burdens of excessive
regulation and to energize the economy by lifting the burden of
taxation from the backs of the working and middle class.
    - It is to look for a solution to the energy crisis, to the genius
of industry, the imagination of management, the energy of labor - not
to some sprawling Cabinet office in Washington which never should
have been created in the first place.
    - It is to guarantee each and every American his or her
constitutional and civil rights, but never to let them forget that as
citizens they have responsibilities and duties as well.
    - It is, lastly, to begin the moral and military rearmament of the
United States for the difficult, dangerous decade ahead, and to tune
out those cynics, pacifists, and appeasers who tell us the Army and
Navy of this country are nothing but the extensions of some
malevolent military-industrial complex.
    We reject that libel - that lie - against millions of American men
and women who are serving in the armed forces of the United States.
There is only one military-industrial complex whose operations should
concern us and it is not located in Arlington, Virginia, but in
Moscow in the Soviet Union.
    One parting note. For years now we have witnessed the agony of
refugees from Asia, starving Cambodian men, women and children,
fleeing Vietnamese, struggling ashore on Malaysia from some leaky
boat after a horrid passage across the South China Sea. Some of these
boats make it; many do not. But all of these boats, as has been
written, carry on them the same inscription: ''This is what happens
to friends of the United States.''
    If there is one message that needs to be sent to all the nations of
the world by the next president, it is this: ''There will be no more
Taiwans and no more Vietnams, regardless of the price or the promise,
be it the oil of Arabia or an ambassador sitting in Beijing, there
will be no more abandonment of friends by the United States of
America.'' I want very much to send that message.
    
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