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"The biggest fact about the Korean war is this: it was never inevitable, it was never inescapable. No fantastic fiat of history decreed that little South Korea—in the summer of 1950—would fatally tempt Communist aggressors as their easiest victim. No demonic destiny decreed that America had to be bled this way in order to keep South Korea free and to keep freedom itself self-respecting.
"We are not mute prisoners of history. That is a doctrine for totalitarians, it is no creed for free men.
"There is a Korean war—and we are fighting it—for the simplest of reasons: because free leadership failed to check and to turn back Communist ambition before it savagely attacked us. The Korean war—more perhaps than any other war in history—simply and swiftly followed the collapse of our political defenses. There is no other reason than this: we failed to read and to outwit the totalitarian mind . . .
"World War II should have taught us all one lesson. The lesson is this: To vacillate, to hesitate—to appease even by merely betraying unsteady purpose—is to feed a dictator's appetite for conquest and to invite war itself. That lesson—which should have firmly guided every great decision of our leadership through these later years—was ignored in the development of the Administration's policies for Asia ..."
When the Communists invaded South Korea, the U.S. did respond in the only honorable way, with "sheer valor—valor on all the Korean mountain sides that, each day, bear fresh scars of new graves."
"Where do we go from here?" asked Eisenhower. Then he made the campaign's most dramatic pledge: if elected, he will take a "simple, firm resolution: To forego the diversions of politics and to concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war . . . honorably . . .
"That job requires a personal trip to Korea . . .
"I shall go to Korea . . ."
Eisenhower promised other means toward "a just peace": i) a step-up in training and arming South Koreans, so they can bear the chief brunt of their defense, with U.N. forces in reserve; 2) a sharpening of psychological warfare "into a weapon capable of cracking the Communist front"; 3) no appeasement—"in the words of the late Senator Vandenberg, appeasement ... is only surrender on the installment plan . . ."
Said Ike, in his indictment of the Democratic record: "A nation's foreign policy is a much graver matter than rustling papers and bustling conferences. It is much more than diplomatic decisions and trade treaties and military arrangements.
"A foreign policy is the face and voice of a whole people. It is all that the world sees and hears and understands about a single nation. It expresses the character and the faith and the will of that nation. In this, a nation is like any individual of our personal acquaintance: the simplest gesture can betray hesitation or weakness, the merest inflection of voice can reveal doubt or fear.
"It is in this deep sense that our foreign policy has faltered and failed . . ."
"In the American Way." At Philadelphia this week, in the final swing of his campaign, Eisenhower firmly stated his position on subversion in Government: