October 17, 1972
Page 36759
MUSKIE SPEAKS ON VIETNAM
Mr. STEVENSON. Mr. President, Senator MUSKIE spoke before the City Club in Cleveland on October 9 – precisely 4 years after President Nixon promised the American people that he would end the war in Vietnam if elected President. President Nixon said that if a new President did not end the war within the next 4 years, he did not deserve to be reelected in 1972.
Senator MUSKIE's speech documents the failure of this administration's policy in Vietnam.
Despite all the bombs dropped, all the lives lost, all the resources wasted, the war goes on. Senator MUSKIE's speech is an eloquent indictment of this administration's fundamental failure.
For the benefit of my colleagues, I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD at this point.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THERE IS GOING TO BE A SILENCE
Four years ago today, in an American city not far from us here in Cleveland, Richard Nixon promised the American people he would end the war in Vietnam. He said that any American President who did not end that war within four years should not be re-elected. Four years ago, the American people took Richard Nixon at his word. They made him President.
Now, four years later, we may fairly ask that the President be held to his word. Surely, his pledge to end the war was the central commitment which won him victory in November. Our country was war-weary, discouraged, and deeply divided by three years of major combat in South Vietnam.
Clearly, an end to the war was possible. The bombing had stopped and the bargaining had begun even before President Nixon took office.
Four years is a very long time.
No previous war in our history had ever lasted four years. Now, after nearly a decade, the war in Vietnam goes on.
During these four years, more bombs have been dropped in Vietnam than in all the years and all the wars we fought before. But the war in Vietnam goes on.
Twenty thousand American men – 40% of all the men we have lost in Vietnam – have been killed in these four years. Yet the war goes on.
500,000 fighting men have been killed. A million South Vietnamese have been killed or wounded, and millions more have been made refugees during these four years. As the war goes on.
More than 50 billion dollars – 40% of the cost of the war – has been drained out of our country during these four years to pay for war in Vietnam. Ten billion dollars we need at home is being spent there this year. And the war goes on.
During these four years, the fighting has spread to Cambodia and Laos, and Americans have died in these two new countries as well as in Vietnam. Still, the war goes on.
We have bombed the cities and mined the harbors, but the war goes on.
We have made peace with Communist China, but the war goes on.
We signed arms limitation agreements with Russia. The war goes on.
The war goes on and on. It is as if some madness gripped the tools of war – or seized our very minds themselves – to make us stagger on and on in this war which has lost every shred of meaning it ever had for our people.
A week ago, in a press conference in Washington, President Nixon said that the negotiations and the war had reached a "sensitive stage," but he could not predict when a settlement might come – another secret plan!
Americans long for an end to the war, and will give the President credit if he can end it. What most Americans do not understand is why we cannot have peace now.
At each critical expansion of the war during these four years, the President has told us that added destruction and wider war was necessary to speed an end to the conflict.
When he invaded Cambodia in 1970, it was to speed an end to the war.
When he invaded Laos in 1971, it was to speed an end to the war.
When he mined North Vietnam and resumed the massive bombing of the cities in 1972, it was to speed an end to the war.
None of these massive expansions of the war have ended it. Instead, the increased violence has simply led to more violence.
Indeed, no one knows how or when the war will end.
Throughout the bitter campaign in 1968, Richard Nixon sowed the impression that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam. He said he could not reveal the details for fear of jeopardizing success, but he declared: "There is a difference between an administration burdened by accumulated distrust, and a new administration that can tell the truth to the American people and be believed."
And his administration is no longer believed. Those who did believe in his "secret plan" must ask what happened to it.
He told us in May of this year that the expanded bombing and the blockade would deny the enemy the means to continue the war. But the very latest intelligence reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Air Force show that the bombing and the mining and the patrolling have not worked.
In six weeks from the beginning of August to the middle of September, North Vietnam succeeded in sending 20,000 fresh troops into the South to join 80,000 already there – 14 divisions in all. Moreover, the best current estimate is that these soldiers are receiving 5,000 tons of supplies – including weapons, fuel and food – from the North every day. In the Mekong Delta, supposedly the most pacified region in South Vietnam, Hanoi's forces have increased ten-fold since last March.
In short, the Nixon strategy has failed. It has not brought North Vietnam to its knees or to realistic peace terms. It has not brought victory on the battlefield or a cease-fire. It has only added to the awful toll of war in a land which has known only war for over 20 years.
And what has the Vietnam war done to us at home? It has kept us a society divided, a Nation with too many priorities and too few resources to meet them. It has drained our self-confidence, inflated our economy and mortgaged our domestic and international future.
For every new refugee in Vietnam in the last 43 months there is an American on welfare who was self-supporting before 1969. Deficit spending which might have fueled progress in America, has, instead, created devastation across the Pacific.
Our bombs have made a wasteland in Indochina big enough to swallow up the cities of Cleveland, New York. St. Louis and San Francisco. And in those cities the air grows dirtier; the water more foul. The ten billion dollars that this administration withheld in the last fiscal year from programs such as highway construction, shipbuilding, urban mass transit, model cities programs and water and sewer grants, disappeared, instead down the rathole of war.
The link between our economic failures at home and our military involvement in Vietnam is a direct one. Full employment could have given us the revenues to finance stable domestic growth and an attack on our most pressing social needs. But while we overspent our resources in Asia, we registered only new records of economic failure – record higher unemployment, record increases in the cost of living, record budget deficits and record deficits in our balance of trade and payments.
Richard Nixon came to office when the unemployment rate stood at 3.3 per cent and the number of jobless totaled 2.7 million. There are now 5 million Americans out of work and the unemployment rate stands – frozen – at 5.5 per cent.
In October 1968 Richard Nixon said, "I have pledged to create 15 million new jobs in the next four years." But while the work force has grown since by eight million, only three million new jobs have been created compared to the ten million jobs created in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.
Richard Nixon promised, and I quote, "to end the alarming inflation." The consumer price index stood at 107.1 when he took office. This August it was 125.7. That is an inflation rate of over 17 per cent, twice the rate of increase of the Kennedy-Johnson years.
Richard Nixon initially pledged to cut the Federal Budget by eight billion dollars and the first budget he submitted on his own was, he said, in balance with a small surplus. But that projected surplus turned into a $23 billion deficit for fiscal 1971, a $26 billion deficit for fiscal 1972 and a projected deficit of $30.8 billion for this year. His total deficits for three years are more than double the total deficits Lyndon Johnson incurred in five years, and the increase in the national debt under the Nixon administration is equal to nearly one-fourth of the total debt incurred since the Republic was founded.
It has been rare in recent years to find America's balance of payments in the black. It did happen in 1968 under Lyndon Johnson. But since Richard Nixon took office, our payments have been in deficit by record amounts – nearly $30 billion in 1971. And for the first time in 80 years we are running an actual deficit in trade. In 1971, the year the dollar was devalued, we imported $1.5 billion worth of goods more than we exported. Since devaluation, we have had only one trading month in the black, and in the first three quarters of 1972 we have accumulated a trade deficit of over $4.3 billion.
We have traded domestic progress for an illusion of international supremacy. And the cost of that is one we count every day in our taxes, in lost production, in jobs that do not exist and prices that are too high.
More than half a decade ago, our ambassador to Vietnam said that many Vietnamese believed that peace would come without negotiations or peace pacts or any public display. Instead, these Vietnamese believed simply that someday "there is going to be a silence."
There is going to be a silence.
This war will end someday. And – someday – when at last it ends, and our children or grandchildren see pictured a screaming child – naked and alone on a road aflame with napalm – and ask if our country did that – there is going to be a silence.
In whatever way the war ends, after all the negotiations and secret plans, there is going to be a silence.
There is going to be a silence amid the twenty million bomb craters which blister the countryside of Vietnam.
There is going to be a silence in the cell of the last American POW freed from North Vietnam.
There is going to be a silence in the homes in many lands where sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers are gone forever.
And there will be a silence in our hearts when we ask – why?