This is the heart of the distorted Marxist interpretation of history.  This is the glass through which Moscow and Peiping look out upon the world, the glass through which they see the rest of us.  They seem really to believe that history is on their side.  And they are trying to boost “history” along, at every opportunity, in every way they can.

I have set forth here the nature of the communist menace confronting our Republic and the whole free world.  This is the measure of the challenge we have faced since World War II—­a challenge partly military and partly economic, partly moral and partly intellectual, confronting us at every level of human endeavor and all around the world.

It has been and must be the free world’s purpose not only to organize defenses against aggression and subversion, not only to build a structure of resistance and salvation for the community of nations outside the iron curtain, but in addition to give expression and opportunity to the forces of growth and progress in the free world, to so organize and unify the cooperative community of free men that we will not crumble but grow stronger over the years, and the Soviet empire, not the free world, will eventually have to change its ways or fall.

Our whole program of action to carry out this purpose has been directed to meet two requirements.

The first of these had to do with security.  Like the pioneers who settled this great continent of ours, we have had to carry a musket while we went about our peaceful business.  We realized that if we and our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing Soviet military threat, we would never have the opportunity to carry forward our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order—­the only environment in which our free institutions could survive and flourish.

Did this mean we had to drop everything else and concentrate on armies and weapons?  Of course it did not:  side-by-side with this urgent military requirement, we had to continue to help create conditions of economic and social progress in the world.  This work had to be carried forward alongside the first, not only in order to meet the non-military aspects of the communist drive for power, but also because this creative effort toward human progress is essential to bring about the kind of world we as free men want to live in.

These two requirements—­military security and human progress—­are more closely related in action than we sometimes recognize.  Military security depends upon a strong economic underpinning and a stable and hopeful political order; conversely, the confidence that makes for economic and political progress does not thrive in areas that are vulnerable to military conquest.

These requirements are related in another way.  Both of them depend upon unity of action among the free nations of the world.  This, indeed, has been the foundation of our whole effort, for the drawing together of the free people of the world has become a condition essential not only to their progress, but to their survival as free people.