"I have not, and do not, intend to announce the timetable for our program, and there are obvious reasons for this decision which I’m sure you will understand... An announcement of a fixed timetable for our withdrawal would completely remove any incentive for the enemy to negotiate an agreement. They would simply wait until our forces had withdrawn and then move in.
In speaking of the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal, I mentioned that our allies would lose confidence in America. For more dangerous, we would lose confidence in ourselves. Oh, the immediate reaction would be a sense of relief that our men were coming home. But as we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit as a people.
We have faced other crises in our history and we have become stronger by rejecting the easy way out and taking the right way in meeting our challenges. Our greatness as a nation has been our capacity to do what has to be done when we knew our course was right."
--Richard Nixon 11/3/1969
Did the speaker's facility with the English language give it away?
2 comments:
Absolutely. I was reading it and thinking, "Did W get a new speechwriter? Or a teleprompter with phonetic spelling?"
--david
...inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit...
Even if he was promised all the cattle in Texas, he could not speak those words without months of practice.
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