The 1995 Architect of the New Century Dinner
Honoring Newt Gingrich
MAYFLOWER
HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D.C.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1995
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ), Founding Board Member of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom: As most of you know, politics is my second career. There have been times when the frustrations of this profession have made me acutely nostalgic for the Navy. Sentimental musings about one's past are a luxury in which I try very hard not to indulge, but it proves irresistible on those occasions when the essence of my current profession seems contrary to the essence of military service. To serve a cause greater than oneself, to sacrifice comfort for country, to risk personal interest for public principles: these are the qualities of patriotism that should define public service, be that service in uniform or in politics. For a time, however, I worried that those virtues had become an impediment to success in politics. I don't worry about that much anymore, in large part because the man I am introducing has, with considerable courage, recovered the virtues of public service, boldly leading a revolution to protect and augment the greatness of the American experiment.
I can think of few Americans whose efforts have done more to reacquaint the world with the genius of the American experiment than Newt Gingrich. If not singlehandedly, he has done more to reinvigorate our democracy than any American in public service today. Under Speaker Gingrich's leadership, the static, predictable pursuits of personal and parochial interests which had come to define Congress have been replaced by an exhilarating, visionary massed attack on the status quo and relentless pursuit of the common good, beckoning the country to turn again to its strengths and to its virtue. No greater service could any American render to the cause of human liberty than by showing the world that democracies do not inevitable lapse into corruption and decay; they are self-renewing and they are the natural state of mankind. Jefferson said that "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." I'm glad I'm in politics now to rally to the rebellion Newt Gingrich leads, to show the world that American still defines its times, to competently assert our claim to greatness: we have virtue, we love liberty, and we can organize ourselves to protect it. Ladies and gentleman, please welcome my friend and, as I have often called him before, my hero: the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Honorable Newt Gingrich. (Applause.)
REP. NEWT GINGRICH (R-GA), Speaker of the House: I am truly torn by John McCain's introduction. I'd normally get up and make light of the notion that this is a city where if you listen carefully to the introduction, it gets dangerous because after a while you get excited about hearing from the speaker yourself and then you realize it's you. But let me just say to all of you who I think do know of John McCain's service in the Navy, his experience as a prisoner of war, his commitment to politics first in the House then the Senate, that to have him use the word "hero" to apply to any living American is such an extraordinary thing that I am awestruck even to be here. Now John, I can't tell you how deeply grateful I am that you would even put me in that kind of a league. (Applause.)
To me this is a remarkable evening. Now, we didn't plan it this way but I literally left the Capitol shortly after we passed an interesting resolution on Bosnia in which the House voted 315 to 103 in favor of requesting the President not to make any commitments in Dayton, Ohio, that he had not initially consulted with the American people and the Congress about and not to commit troops without American support. (Applause.)
I want to comment on that in a few minutes, but I think its historic in that it continues what is a great dialogue among the American people. And maybe its particularly appropriate to have that occur on a night when we are here celebrating the contribution of Richard Nixon and the continuing contribution of the Nixon Library and the Nixon Center to American life and to the freedom of the human race. Let me say that I am delighted in particular to be here because I think John Taylor is doing and extraordinary job, and I have had three occasions now to be at the Library, twice this year, once when bless their hearts over 2000 people came and allowed me to sign books they had purchased something which drove David Bonior crazy, and the other time recently when Congressman Jay Kim invited me out and we had a wonderful event just a few days ago at the Library and it was just magnificent. I want to commend you for the leadership you're showing and the remarkable institution that you're leading in California. I'm glad to be here tonight to help celebrate that and, hopefully, raise a small amount of resources for it.
But, I couldn't help as I was sitting there thinking about it, Richard Nixon, for at least people in my age group, dominated our lives politically. I decided in 1958 between my freshman and sophomore years in high school that public life mattered, that civilizations could die, and that having people who committed themselves to trying to make sure that freedom survived was an integral part as to be boring"; he said, "that tradition was there when I was a freshman and you have managed to maintain it successfully for a generation." (Laughter.) "Yet," he said, "you cannot change the country, unless you are interesting and attract attention and to do that you have to have a group." And, literally, the Conservative Opportunity Society, whose membership now overwhelmingly dominates the leadership -- in fact I don't know of anybody whose in the leadership, Chris you might, I don't know of anybody who doesn't come through that pattern -- was a direct descendant of Richard Nixon's advice, and so he has literally spanned more than a generation. He has actually relaunched the conservative movement in the broad sense that we represent into the 21st century.
Now, we also were very excited to sponsor his first visit back to Capitol Hill and I can tell all of you that those of our Members who heard him on his last visit, when he stood on the House floor and spoke with absolutely extraordinary clarity and candor without notes, as all of you who have ever heard him know, for over an hour. It was a spellbinding performance and it recommitted, I think, this party to a kind of intelligent, rational, and effective internationalism which meant, for example, that last year, despite the current president, we gave a higher percentage of support to the Foreign Aid Bill than any Republican Party has ever given under any President. I think ite going to succeed over a very long period of time; the reason I think is that we resonate with two things which our friends on the left don't get -- and two things which I think Richard Nixon would thoroughly have understood, and I think the vision of President Nixon sitting there with his yellow pad listening to the results, and you're exactly right, picking up the phone about oh, 9:00 in the evening; actually he would have picked up the phone four days earlier and said, "Now that you know you're going to be Speaker, have you thought about the following seven things?" At least four of which I would not have thought about, but I would have taken notes. I use a white legal pad; it's one of the major changes in the modern era -- but the whole notion of where we're going and how we're getting there and the process, I think we're a revolution, a successful revolution.
First, because I believe we resonate with the American people. I believe the silent majority has ceased to be silent: nine million more people turned out to vote Republican in 1994 than voted Republican in 1990. That is the largest increase in turnout in an off year in history, and the last time you had a turnout of that scale was 1934, when the Democrats, in fact, were consolidated in their base. So in that sense I think there's a resonance. When we talk about reforming welfare in order to create a work ethic, in order to reassert what America's all about -- somethist temporarily been kicked off the ballot on a technicality, because the six candidates who wanted to run sent faxes instead of letters, and therefore literally, an entire party, which had fielded more candidates than any other party and had just filed a million signatures to be on the ballot is currently temporarily off the ballot, and we'll see how this particular soap opera works out.
Now in Quebec, when I walked in, the Separatist movement was leading 52-47, but they were early returns from rural precincts, and we don't know that that means much, except that we do know that it means that the separatist movement is probably stronger than it was; we do know that among the young, it is stronger than its general vote; we do know that its core sense of seeking an identity other than Canadian is gaining energy and strength and, in fact, gaining a sense of definition which it did not have thirty years ago. And, if you're an American, it should suggest to you that's its an interesting warning that maybe English should be our official language and that the time to stop these kind of developments is long before they even start. Therefore, I predict that 1996 -- one of the results of the Quebec vote will be that English as an official language -- will be a decisive election campaign and that the President will be on both sides of the issue with enormous vigor, finally coming down in favor of it in the Presidential debates next fall. (Lauyou should not make commitments in Dayton in the peace talks that you have not convinced the American public and the Congress to sustain and you should not commit American ground forces without having the approval of Congress." Just a binding sentiment. 222 Republicans voted "yes," but from the President's standpoint, the Democratic Party split 93 in favor of the resolution and only 100 against. The only unified group was the one Socialist who voted "yes," and the result was (laughter) that the net -- there were two Republicans who voted no -- so the total vote was 315 in favor of a resolution said to the President, in substance, you haven't convinced us this is a good policy, please do not convince the peacemakers that they ought to rely on American force, and please do not commit American troops without our approval and the approval of the America people. Now when you get a 3 to 1 vote, it has to be sobering.
And I don't think that any of us should feel gleeful or partisan or happy about this. If there was a good peace treaty, if there was a command structure that made sense, if our allies wanted our leadership, if we had a n administration that could establish some bond of trust and belief and credible to the American people, it would be an appropriate thing for America to do. And in that sense, the vote tonight is far more a referendum on this administration's incapability of convincing anyone to trust them. An incapabilitr retreated into isolationism, and, the truth is, we remained the dominant military power on the planet for fifty year period until the Soviet empire collapsed. It is an astonishing accomplishment of a free society to be able to say to itself, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, we are going to move in this broad general direction and we're going to spend a lot of tax money and we're going to send our young men and women across the planet and w are going to contain an empire until it fails. And we undervalue how unique that achievement was and how much everyone who participated in it can take some enormous pleasure that they were part of a team that did in fact meet John F. Kennedy's challenge but in a more rational way, frankly, than the Kennedy administration ever dreamed of. We did pay a lot of prices, we did go a lot of places, and we did carry a lot of burdens, and the result was that freedom won and the Soviet Empire failed -- something which , by the way, the modern academics and the modern elite media are totally unwilling to describe. If you'll notice, the politically correct reference is "the end of the Cold War," as though this was this bad argument, a divorce argument, between a couple, luckily it failed and the couple managed to get back together; as opposed to say, "the victory of freedom," "the defeat of totalitarianism," a number of ways you could have described it that would have been politically painful foryou are going to practice democratic leadership, small "d", the leadership of a free society and a free people, you have to listen to other people a lot.
Then you have to lead within a framework they can understand, and that may mean it takes awhile to explain your vision and to explain your strategies, but at the present time, we spend all too much time bullying, all too much time posturing, and all too much time neglecting, and all too little time, as an official structure, listening, trying to truly understand: what are other people going through and how do we help them get through it to move in the direction we want to go to. That doesn't mean you compromise or cave or give in on your core values, but you at least understand where are they at and how can we work together to move further down the road.
Now, I would suggest a step deeper than that: and that is a combination of the rise of the world market and the rise of the information age means that there are an amazing number of American corporations today which have better international systems of information and communication than the State Department. I mean, if you were to do a study, and this is something, frankly, which might want to pick up on, if you were to do a study of who has the most sophisticated analysts, who has the best real time information, who can communicate on worldwide basis, my guess is that you'd find the State Department was not in the top twenty. This is not a slam at the State Department. Because I am a conservative, it is the natural result of a bureaucratic industrial age system which adapts and modifies its behavior slower than a market-driven entrepreneurial society. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me, that the folks who make money will shift faster that the people who get GS-15. And that's absolutely predictive in a long-term model; it's what the Austrian school of economics would have suggested. But the result is that we have to now think through at much deeper levels.
I have asked Congressman Doug Beureuter who's here tonight to help us take the lead in figuring out how do we reach out -- not just foreign ministries to State Department -- but, for example, how do the elected legislatures of the planet communicate? What would it be like to have the Egyptian legislators and the American legislators routinely in contact? What would it be like to have the Turkish legislators and the American legislators routinely in contact? The members of the Knesset? So you begin to get a patterning. And, for example, if Chile makes a breakthrough in the Demming model of quality, if Chile's best practice with social security is the best way to shift people towards a high savings account, what would it be like to get the Chileans talking with everyone else on the planet so that two ore three years from now, you had thirty or forty or fifty countries saying: "Wow. This is obligation to dramatically overextend either our intellectual resources or our political resources or our military resources trying to keep bad things from happening. I mean you could make a pretty good argument that Rwanda, for example, involves even more human tragedy than Bosnia but nobody has suggested 25,000 American troops to patrol Rwanda. But if you were to list the places you would most worry about on the planet and the things of greatest importance to us in terms of our leadership ought to spend its time on, you would not put Bosnia in the first ten. You would almost certainly put China, a billion 200 million people is always worth paying attention to; you would certainly put Russia, the only other power with enough nuclear weapons to truly be decisively destructive; you would almost certainly put Iran, the primary funder of state terrorism on the planet and a country, which if it gets nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in chemical and biological terms, will be extraordinarily dangerous.
I would argue that the number one requirement of American national defense in the next ten years is to be getting a serious anti-ballistic missile program (applause) because we are mathematically almost certain to face at least one power by 2005 that has at least one ICBM capable of eliminating a city and to face a power with a limited first strike capability, knowing that you have the engineering capability of defeating it and have done nothing about it is an act of such extraordinary irresponsibility which could lead to such enormous loss of human life that it is almost unimaginable that we have, for cultural reasons, allowed the left to block us from using our capabilities and therefore put at risk American civilians on a grand scale.
But that's a totally different dialogue than what you're going to get out of The Post or The Times -- this is not a comment on The Post or The Times, this is a comment on how our political structure works. Whereas our planning model is vision, strategies, projects and tactics and the great role of leadership is to constantly seek occasions to get back up to vision -- Marshall's speech at Harvard was a vision-level speech. But it is the nature of life to occur on an tactical level: what is tomorrow's story? It's got to be easy to understand, you can put the headline in a very small amount of space, it should have relatively short words, and ideally it involves something that people can already identify with, so they don't have to learn very much, because that way they'll read it quicker, and if you can get it down to a level of banality where it actually fits Phil Donahue, it is truly an important issue. And, yet, that is not how a great society leads itself.
Now I say all this just to suggest to you that as we enter the information age and was we enter a world in which the world market and the power of communications, I think, is going to inevitably involve us in a very simple premise: we have to lead the human race because we can't hide. The President loves creating phony opponents, so the President gets up and says he's worried about isolationism. With exception of a very tiny handful of a few fringe people in American politics, I know of any real isolationists. I know of people who have serious questions about effective internationalism versus fantasy internationalism. I know people who want to make sure that if we risk young Americans, it's for a cause that is worth their lives, it's in a situation that really matters, and we have the potential to implement our will and get the job done. I know of people who want to make sure that we are building a better alliance and not simply frittering our resources away because of the way of this public relations campaign. But I don't know anybody who thinks that isolationism is a rational future, so what I am suggesting to you in part is that as we enter 1996 and as we look at Bosnia as one example of a series of decisions we need to make, what we need is a kind of idealistic realism. We ought to do the best things for the human race that we are capable of sustaining. We ought to do them in a way that os guaranteed to work. And the nice thing about Desert Storm, and the nice thing about Just Cause in Panama, and the nice thing about Grenada, was they worked. And it is useful for a great power to succeed.
So, I would just say that the President carries the following burdens: one, he has to design a strategy for the Balkans that makes sense; two, he has to ensure that his subordinates create an implementation strategy that is defensible and that reasonable people of substantial sophistication can agree will work; three, he has to indicate that he is actually committed to it enough to dedicate the resources to it and to be prepared to stay with it even when it's uncomfortable; and four, he has to be prepared to take that to the country and to devote a very great deal of his time and a very great deal of his effort in a consistent effort to educate the American people in to why this makes sense on a much larger scale than Bosnia, why it makes sense in terms of NATO, why it makes sense in terms of our alliance -- or our relationship, rather -- with Russia, in terms of our alliance in Europe, and why it is part of where we have to go as a country. I can report to you tonight that on every one of those grounds, this administration at the present time has failed.
The vote on the House floor tonight was a sad vote. It was a report to the President; it wasn't a threat, it wasn't an effort to pick a fight, it wasn't an effort to score partisan points, after all, almost half the Democrats voted "yes". It was an effort to say to the President: "Don't believe that you can manipulate us into having to say yes because you ice your word in secret without having first educated the American people. And if you truly believe, Mr. President, that this country has to engage in a process that it does not currently believe in, then you have to be prepared to lead and that leadership has to be systematic, and you have to be prepared to expend your resources, your time, and your commitments in order to educate the American people." None of those conditions have been met yet, and that is why, as of tonight, I think even an idealist would have to tell you a Bosnian commitment on the current terms would be unrealistic and absolutely unsupported by the American people.
Let me, if I might, George, just take questions. (Applause.)
JOHN TAYLOR, Executive Director of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation: In my haste, I deprived Chairman Argyros of a proper introduction. Suffice to say that he is one of California's most visionary and entrepreneurial businessmen. He takes his philanthropy and his politics just as serious as his business. He also a decision maker who passed me the following note: "John, the speaker wants to take questions and answers. I said 'okay.' Yours truly, Chairman Argyros." Historians of the future will ponder the discrepancy between the way the Speaker described that exchange and the way the Chairman described that exchange. For now, before we take questions, I want to mention two more people: Richard Grenier, the newest member of our Advisory Council; also one of Mrs. Nixon's most trusted aides in the White House, a partner to a partner in peace, Helen McCain Smith. Please stand Helen and Mr. Grenier. (Applause.)
If you have a question, put your hands together and shout it. I am doing this now to prove that you can be heard.
MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: Although there is a mike.
REP. GINGRICH: So, if the rest of you want to look a little less silly, feel free to wait for the mike. (Laughter.) Who has a question -- and if there are none, we can just call this over with.
MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: You talked about major foreign policies concerns that face us right now. You talked about three: China, Russia, Iran. What are some of the others?
REP. GINGRICH: Well, I think in some ways, the biggest one is learning how to compete economically in the world market. I think that if we do not become much better negotire is a profound case to be made about leading the world and leading Europe and leading NATO. I think that there is a very important -- this is not about Bosnia -- this is about a much bigger issue, but that also requires that you have an administration that you think is actually able to carry out what it says it will do and it's able to use military force with some minimum level of competence. Frankly. I have seen nothing in the last three weeks -- and I say this and I have not gone to the hearings, but the Members who have gone to the hearings have come back and said - that on a bipartisan basis -- and the vote tonight reinforces this -- on a bipartisan basis, the hearings have been terribly disappointing and have increased the sense that this administration does not know what it is doing and does not know how to do it. So, I'd start by saying that you are asking me a question that sort of goes to the core of the administration. If you had a competent administration and hit had a pattern of being competent and it said in a competent way we would like to do this, could you explain that to the American people? I think that the answer is "sure." The American people are willing to take risks if they believe that they are serious and that people will implement them in a competent way. Okay?
MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: Mr. Speaker?
REP. GINGRICH: Yes, sir.
MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: You have been quoted recently as having said that yodoing it because it overly bureaucratized and overly centralized the system. So, that's an example.
Let me just say that I am told by John's look that I should say "thank you all," so I will now say thank you all. (Applause.)
