I’m very pleased to be standing here in a place which 10 years ago my brother in law, a senator from Massachusetts, occupied. Your hospitality to him on that occasion - Senator Kennedy - was truly extraordinary. He told me he would never forget it because he had to make a stop on the way into the ballroom and so you formed an honor guard all the way to the speaker’s platform from the men’s room. That was a unique reception - you remember.
Senator Kennedy could not have been more proud on that occasion to appear before you 10 years ago than I am today. For then, as now, every American has good reason for turning his attention to the history of Poland. I say every American and I include those particularly occupying the highest offices in our land. Because the history of Poland teaches us that defeat and victory cannot be defined in physical terms, they cannot be weighed exclusively in materialistic scale.
What looks like defeat can turn out to be victory. What looks like victory can often turn out to be as hallow as an empty eggshell.
The Polish people have seen many empty victories. It was your ancestors who watched the haughty cavalry of Napoleon pass over the soil of Poland on the way to Moscow. And it was your ancestors who watched the broken cavalry of Napoleon return to France.
Your ancestors felt the weight of Peter The Great and the encroachment of Bismarck. And later, the Poles felt the agony of subjugation under Hitler.
Even today, your brothers and your cousins know the ugly tide of foreign occupation. But Poland, Poland has never lost its spirit and in truth and in reality, Poland has never been defeated.
Tenacity. Toughness. Wisdom. Compassion. Elegance of style. These are the qualities of spirit for which the people of Poland are admired. Polish people have achieved wisdom. They see current events in the long perspective of history. And I think that today, we Americans need to see current events with that kind of perspective and wisdom.
Scriptures say that unless you lose your life, you shall not find it. I think that even our president today, and even the previous president, President Johnson, lost a sense of perspective and wisdom when they repeat that he - each one of them - will not be the first American President to lose a war.
I think that if we studied the history of Poland, we would know that victory comes, not from hollow phrases about military victories and defeat, not from the desire to save face, but from facing the truth like men.
The truth is, that from June of ’65 to June of ’70 - 5 years - our country has spent 5 billion dollars a state. For every state in the country, we have spent 5 billion dollars in Vietnam. A total of over 200 billion dollars.
I doubt that the members of this convention would like to take 5 billion dollars in tax money from Illinois, or from Michigan, or from Indiana, and spend it in Vietnam, rather than in their own state here at home.
How long, I ask, is it going to be necessary to pour our tax money into the jungles and the black markets and the night clubs of Vietnam. So far as I’m concerned, that process can stop right now.
Now let me emphasize, that this is not impossible to do, nor is it cowardly to do. We have accomplished everything we went to Vietnam to do. We went there to prevent the sudden imposition of a communist dictatorship on the people of South Vietnam. We have accomplished that objective. We have even done much more. We have given that nation of 19 million people approximately new schools, new hospitals, new airports, new roads, new police, a new army, airforce, a navy, new harbors, new radio and television systems, we have helped them to create a new government. Must we stay there forever? “Why can’t we leave now?” as republican senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested several months ago.
It’s no harder militarily to leave than it is to go in, so I say let us return to America and to our problems here. Let us be content with the fact that we have done more for South Vietnam than for any nation in the world. Certainly a lot more than we ever did for Poland.
Let us give the people of South Vietnam, at long last, a chance to be masters of their own land. Masters of their own destiny. That’s the greatest victory we could possibly give to them.
A moment ago, I mentioned John F. Kennedy. When I think of him, I think also of the young Kościuszko. Dashing, brave, humane, and thoroughly civilized. A man who in victory learned gentleness. And in defeat, compassion.
Everyone in the United States knows that Kościuszko distinguished himself in our war of independence. But most of us do not know that while Thomas Jefferson went back to his plantation in Virginia, on which he owned slaves, Kościuszko, before his own death, liberated the serfs on his estate in Poland.
In 1817, Kościuszko issued his own Emancipation Proclamation. The United States had to wait until 1863 for our Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. I wish that all Americans understood this tradition of Polish culture - this commitment to human liberation and human dignity. I wish in particular that the press and the television understood these traditions of Polish culture. I’m tired of those who call the Polish people racists. The Poles want liberty and dignity for themselves. They also want liberty and dignity for every human being, regardless of nationality or race or color.
Doesn’t the press - don’t all of us Americans know, that for 1000 years the Poles have fought against serfdom and oppression? They are not going to stop now. They’re never going to stop.
Two things the people of our country have to understand - the Poles love liberty, the Poles love their own homes and neighborhoods. Is it racist to defend one’s own home? Is it racist to protect one’s own family? Is it racist to be proud of one’s neighborhood? The descendants of Kościuszko are not racist. They are as fiercely and unrelentingly Polish as they are fiercely, and deeply, and unrelentingly American.
Now experts with blueprints and statistics and graphs tell us that the Poles today are part of the silent majority. I don’t think there is a silent majority. The majority of Americans are speaking out. But no one is listening.
Our problem is not a silent majority, our problem is a deaf minority. Deaf city planners, deaf officials, deaf experts, deaf newspaper editors and television commentators, deaf professors, and deaf students. Persons who are deaf to the anxieties and cries of pain of the majority of the American people. Deaf, I said. But deaf to what?
Let me tell you about a few of the voices I have heard, from working Americans. Poles and others in my recent visits around this country. Last Monday night, I was at dinner in Baltimore, where most of the guests were Eastern Europeans. Poles, Bohemians, Lithuanians - they all lived downtown in Baltimore. They lived in a community where each house had white marble steps in front of it and the women scrub those steps every day. They wash the sidewalks. They seem to even scrub the street because it was clean. And at midnight, the young men and women, the young men and women of that neighborhood walked in safety.
Yet one dedicated woman at that dinner told me about what was happening to the older people in that area. She told me she was a social worker. That when going into one of the homes, she noticed a bad odor in the air. And she persuaded the owner, who was a sick and senile woman of about 85, living on social security, to let her go upstairs.
And there she found this lady’s brother, who was about 90, in bed, lying in his own urine, and filth. She called an ambulance, the social worker did. And when they lifted this frail, 90-year-old man from the bed, all of his skin fell off in the sheet.
Four years ago, this social worker told me, the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, had provided her and a team of social workers with $5000 per annum to seek out the old people in that community and get them in touch with doctors or get them whatever aid they needed.
Now, that particular program in the federal government has been reduced to $600, and these elderly people, practically penniless, living on a pittance of social welfare, cannot get the doctor and they cannot get to the hospital. Deafness and heartlessness in Washington has caused and is causing this type of anguish.
Another person at this dinner was a tugboat operator. He had lived in that neighborhood for 37 years. His parents had a house there for 57 years. During the past year, the street in front of his house had been re-zoned against the opposition of the people in the neighborhood. Re-zoned for commercial truck traffic, and now the heavy trucks were shaking the houses so that the plaster was falling from the ceiling and from the front wall.
No one can make repairs to their homes in that area. An improvement loan, if you can get it, costs 12% interest per annum. And if the improvements are made, assessors immediately raise the taxes so that all the houses in that neighborhood are assessed at 70% of that value, not at 30% as they are in the surrounding suburbs.
In that neighborhood in Baltimore, 200 homes are being torn up to make room for an expressway. Family ties are being torn up. A feeling for life and community that cannot be replaced is being wrecked.
Why? For the sake of an industrial park. And these people feel that the politicians there have decided to work for industry, to work for money, and not for the people and not for the neighborhood.
Another guest at that dinner told me that his mother and father have lived in the same house in that neighborhood for 70 years. They worked hard all their lives and now all they have is $96 a month in social security.
He said, “why do we as a nation spend so many billions of dollars overseas? Why not spend some of that money here? 50 years of hard work,” he said, “and what do my parents have to show for it? They obeyed the laws, they respected the government, now they have to be afraid of their own leaders.”
I heard a lot of bitterness and anger in that room. But I also heard the clear voices of people who want nothing more than the things America has always stood for: Control over their own lives. They want political leaders who listen to the citizens and defend the citizens, and who provide democracy - more democracy, more participation, more representation to the people rather than less.
I don’t need to tell you that the working Americans in that living room were angry. You know they’re angry. They were angry about the public schools. One of them said, “psychologizing and sociologizing and not teaching any discipline.”
Some of you may have seen a newspaper story which shocked me - came out of Charlottesville, Virginia - and it told about a successful real-estate man. A paratrooper from World War II - decorated man. This fella had to pay $1000 in ransom to a group of hippies, with whom his 16-year-old daughter had escaped - run away, I think is a better phrase.
He said, now this is a quotation out of the paper, “I worked all my life for her, and put her high on top of a pine tree where I thought she belonged. After this, it’s just like someone took a bucket of manure and threw it in my face.”
He said his daughter’s idea of a big weekend, before this, was a Saturday night dance, and Sunday school the following morning. “But,” he said, “For the last three weeks she lived, free and happy and going from apartment to apartment, in a commune in North Carolina. She wanted to get her freedom. Not to be under her parent’s thumb, to do what she pleased.”
Then he went on, “The kids are disgusted with us and with the way that the country is being run. Vietnam may be the cause of all this,” he said, “but I don’t know. If I had a son, I don’t know if I’d want him to go to Vietnam. But if the kids want to be better citizens, they should unite and change the country, but not the way they’re doing it now.”
This father realizes, sadly, that something deep has gone wrong in our country. You know it, I know it, we know that there is a lack of leadership and a lack of vision.
An acquaintance of mine in Maryland, a plumber, makes about $8.50 an hour. He’s lucky he’s getting a five-day workweek. He’s probably making $15,000, $16,000 a year. He works hard, he’s successful. He lives out in the suburbs, he’s got a barbecue pit, he’s got a Buick, he loves to watch the Baltimore colts.
But he’s not happy. Not with himself, and not with America.
His boy’s got long hair. He doesn’t like the music his daughter listens to. Or the way she dances. Or her short skirts. He doesn’t like the fact that his kids don’t seem to respect him, or his work, or the way he lives. The worst thing of all is that his children don’t want to be like him. They don’t respect his values.
Joe Mankowitz, the famous Hollywood movie director, told me recently, “We’ve taken the future away from our children. They’re not even sure that they have a future.”
Well, let me say that if we did take the future away from them, we didn’t mean to do that. Your grandparents and mine did not come to America so that we would have nothing to look forward to. Our grandparents, and you, have not worked in America so that we would be preoccupied with death the way our children are.
Have you noticed the movies that they like? “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Easy Rider”, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. In every one of these movies, the young hero or the young heroine are slaughtered. They fall in a pool of their own blood. I don’t remember movies like that when I was young.
I want a future for our children. I want to be proud of what America stands for again. I want to feel that this country is going some place again. I want to feel that we’re moving. Moving toward liberty and democracy and in progressive ways.
I can’t stand the apathy that I’ve noticed since I’ve been home. I can’t stand that deafness that I spoke about. I can’t stand the officials who go around giving speeches calling their fellow Americans ugly names, spreading divisiveness, and rage.
One of our highest officials might be called the nation’s great divider - calls people not only names as horrible as so to speak, that hurt as much as “pig” or “nigger” or “polack”, that calls people “fat japs” or effete snobs or rotten apples, traitors.
In these days we need people who multiply compassion, who multiply understanding and respect for one another. We’re all Americans - we should be treated like Americans, at least by the highest officials of the land.
Compare these officials to Abraham Lincoln. Even in the midst of the bloody civil war, the bloodiest war we’ve ever been in, he never called the Southerner’s names. He never called Jefferson Davis a snob, or General Lee a bum, or Stonewall Jackson a traitor, or the young people of the South, rotten apples. They were still Americans to him. The moment the war was over, he said, “With malice toward none, and with charity for all.”
That’s the way our leaders should speak and think and behave.
So I say, I’m tired of officials who divide us and talk so loud that they can’t hear the voice of that 90-year-old man who doesn’t have the bus fare to a hospital and whose skin falls off when the ambulance people pick him up out of the sheets.
I can’t stand the creeping euthanasia, to which all of us are being subjected, when we are told, “lower your voice, lower your profile, be quiet, flatten out, be calm.” I have a feeling somebody is about ready to embalm me.
The people of Poland never let anyone silence them. I don’t have to tell you that. You are not a silent majority. Americans from Poland and Americans from Lithuania. Americans from Ireland and from Italy and from Africa. Americans from Germany and Puerto Rico and Czechoslovakia - I don’t have to tell you that we are a great majority and we are going to be heard.
One man said to me, “Well that’s nice rhetoric, Mr. Shriver, but what do you propose?”
And I’d like to say, I’ve got a couple of things to propose. I don’t have them to propose in detail because it would take too much of your time, but let me say, that after withdrawal from Vietnam, I’d like to see universal national service for peacetime as well as for wartime.
There’s a bill in the congress at this minute, sponsored by Jonathan Bingham from New York, making service not only in programs like Peace Corps and VISTA a substitute for military service but also making it possible to list dozens if not hundreds of private organizations with which our young people can be associated as volunteers and work there would be deemed to be in the national interest of our country.
I favor universal, automatic voter registration for all citizens, carried out by the government. Voter registration, and the right to vote, I should say first, the right to vote is a right of the citizens. All of these obstacles to registration are obstacles created to make it difficult to exercise that right.
But let me say to you, that if they come to you and you haven’t paid your income tax, they can find you. If you practice law without a license, they will find you. If you want to run a beauty shop and you don’t have a license, they will find you and stop you. Why can’t they find you to give you the vote?
There are thousands, millions of Americans effectively disenfranchised today. Our country has the worst record of voter participation of any democracy in the Western world. In the ’68 election, 45 million Americans, who were registered, didn’t vote. President Nixon got 30,800,000 votes, Humphrey got 30,100,000 votes. If all the people who didn’t vote had voted for Judge Adesko, he’d be president.
So I say we ought to get people registered - not by putting obstacles in their way, but by making it easy for them. I was in France for two years - when do they have elections? They have it on Sunday - why? Because nobody is occupied at anything else and it’s easy to get to the polls. What results do they get? 85% of the people vote. England the same way. Germany the same way. Italy the same way. What do we get? 45%.
I’ve got another suggestion to make and all I have to do is refer you to the speech of the Chief Justice of the United States on the state of the judiciary in this country, and of justice. And he said, “what do you need to bring crime under control? What do you need to make law and order effective in America?” He said you need more judges, better police, and more of them, we need a swifter execution of justice in this country.
It’s a crime - I’ll put it around the other way - it’s a travesty when a person can commit a crime and stay out of jail for two years if he’s got a smart lawyer. We don’t have swift justice. We need it. Read what the chief justice said if you want to know what’s needed in America.
We need more jobs. Especially for teenagers. Here in Chicago, 40% of the teenagers in this city are wandering around the streets with no jobs, no work, nothing to do. How many of you parents, with a child - 14, 15, 16, 17 years age, would not find your boy or girl in trouble if they had nothing to do?
Some of you, I think, spend a considerable amount of your time figuring out what your young boy or girl can do when he’s a teenager, looking for work for him. What about the parents who can’t do that? Who don’t have the resources you’ve got or I’ve got? They need work.
Another thing we can do is that we can follow up on the bill that congressman Pushinski from Illinois has put in just recently, calling for the creation of cultural centers where the culture of the Polish people - for Polish people, for example, can be taught, where the Polish language can be taught, Polish dancing, Polish music and so on, so that the young people here in our country of Polish background can take pride in their ancestry and in what the Polish people have contributed to the United States of America.
Now those wouldn’t be centers just for Polish people, you understand. There would be centers like that for Indians or Puerto Ricans or Spanish speaking people or Mexican-Americans, etc. So that each group of people in our country could take pride in their background and in what they’ve done for the benefit of this nation.
Now those are just a few of the things that could be done and could be done right now to create an atmosphere in this country - a progressive atmosphere looking toward the future for this country in keeping with our glorious past.
And so I say to the members of this convention - I not only commend you for being here and participating in the committee meetings and looking forward to the improvement to a lot of the Polish people in our country, but I urge you to get behind some of these programs which can reawaken the spirit of American enterprise in the private sector, a spirit of pride in our nationalistic backgrounds if you will, a spirit of pride in what America stands for and what the future holds for all of us.
Let’s not worry about the past, let’s not be laid out for embalmment, let’s be vigorous, let’s not be silent, let’s fight for a good future for all of our people.
Thank you.
