There was another question posed for us at the war’s end, which equally concerned the future course of our democracy:  Could the machinery of government and politics in this Republic be changed, improved, adapted rapidly enough to carry through, responsibly and well, the vast, new complicated undertakings called for in our time?

We have answered this question, too, answered it by tackling the most urgent, most specific, problems which the war experience itself had brought into sharp focus.  The reorganization of the Congress in 1946; the unification of our armed services, beginning in 1947; the closer integration of foreign and military policy through the National Security Council created that same year; and the Executive reorganizations, before and after the Hoover-Acheson Commission Report in 1949—­these are landmarks in our continuing endeavor to make government an effective instrument of service to the people.

I come now to the most vital question of all, the greatest of our concerns:  Could there be built in the world a durable structure of security, a lasting peace for all the nations, or would we drift, as after World War I, toward another terrible disaster—­a disaster which this time might be the holocaust of atomic war?

That is still the overriding question of our time.  We cannot know the answer yet; perhaps we will not know it finally for a long time to come.  But day and night, these past eight years, we have been building for peace, searching out the way that leads most surely to security and freedom and justice in the world for us and all mankind.

This, above all else, has been the task of our Republic since the end of World War II, and our accomplishment so far should give real pride to all Americans.  At the very least, a total war has been averted, each day up to this hour.  And at the most, we may already have succeeded in establishing conditions which can keep that kind of war from happening, for as far ahead as man can see.

The Second World War radically changed the power relationships of the world.  Nations once great were left shattered and weak, channels of communication, routes of trade, political and economic ties of many kinds were ripped apart.

And in this changed, disrupted, chaotic situation, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the two strongest powers of the world.  Each had tremendous human and natural resources, actual or potential, on a scale unmatched by any other nation.

Nothing could make plainer why the world is in its present state—­and how that came to pass—­than an understanding of the diametrically opposite principles and policies of these two great powers in a war-ruined world.

For our part, we in this Republic were-and are—­free men, heirs of the American Revolution, dedicated to the truths of our Declaration of Independence: 

“...  That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”