Saturday, June 05, 2004

"There's no substitute for victory, Mr. President" 

The blogosphere is redolent in tributes to Reagan tonight, and it seems presumptuous to put anything about this here. But as I was flipping through the web looking at Reagan's speeches (I was looking for some of the radio messages that were written up in this fabulous collection -- Captain Ed, read them now!) I remembered the 1976 Republican Convention. In case anyone has forgotten, the speech Reagan gave in support of President Ford that night was extemporaneous, and was under 800 words. Yet within those words he laid a vision of America that resonates with a call to us to this day.
Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.

It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and the issues today. I set out to do so

...Then as I tried to write--let your own minds turn to that task. You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don't know what kind of a world they will be living in.

And suddenly I thought to myself if I write of the problems, they will be the domestic problems the President spoke of here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom that has taken place ...

And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in.

And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.

Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction"?

And if we failed, they probably won't get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won't be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.

We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.

Thanks to you, Mr. President, we're twenty-eight years closer to your letter read in a still-free world. In his memory, let's see to the other seventy-two.

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