1/10/77

Mr. Alden, Ladies and Gentlemen:

There are so many distinguished guests here today
that I shall not attempt to mention each of them
individually. But there are six people here at the
head table with me who do deserve special attention.

When I first came to Washington -- in fact, before
I ever sat foot in the place -- I had been warned repeatedly
to beware of the Lion of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, its Chairman, Senator Fulbright. Fortunately
for my peace of mind and sense of security, my White House
job made it possible for me to avoid public or executive
sessions before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for
several years. Nevertheless, I did, during that time, have
occasion to meet privately with Senator Fulbright on a number
of occasions. To my surprise, I found him a gentleman.

When I became Secretary in 1973 the form of our
relationship changed. I appeared on numerous occasions
before him and consulted with him on an informal basis
frequently. Once again, although we did not always
agree, I found Bill Fulbright was a man of great
intellect with deep love for his country. He was never
mean nor petty; he was a great leader of his Committee
and a great member of the Senate. He and I worked,
I believe, closely and well together and I shall forever
be in his debt. He is a mighty foe, an invaluable ally,
and a good friend.

Chairman Morgan has also done me the honor of being
here today. Doc and I have fought many battles together
and seldom lost a one. Doc managed what I had expected to
be an unruly Committee with firmness, but with absolute
fairness as well. He was a steady rock of support who
believed from his heart that foreign policy was not a

matter for partisan debate or advantage. He was, as
well, a man who never lost his cool -- or perhaps I
should say only lost it once every two years when
he was afraid that his reelection might be in jeopardy
because his opponent had a firm grip on 20% of the vote.

In reflecting on my battles here in Washington, I
suspect that I can fairly say that I have gone to the
trenches more with Bill Simon than with either Bill
Fulbright or Doc Moran. We have not always agreed on
international economic matters, but that is on the way
to repair since Bill has finally agreed to lend me his
copy of "Adam Smith."

In all seriousness, I believe that the Departments
of Treasury and State have during our time in office developed
a remarkable partnership. There are indeed many issues on
which our two departments have disagreed. But these

- 4 -

disagreements have always been resolved in a spirit of
compromise and good will. He leaves office with my
respect for everything he has done for his country and
my thanks for his friendship.

Look long and hard at Brent Scowcroft because you
may be seeing the only man in Washington who spends
more time in the office than I do. Fortunately his
trials and tribulations will soon be over because he
can hardly afford to lose any more weight. That, I might
add, is a problem totally foreign to me.

General Scowcroft has worked with me for a number
of years and I can say with utter honesty that I have
never met a finer, more decent, more devoted man. He
served me well; he has served President Ford with equal
vigor, grace and style. I can perhaps offer no higher
compliment that to say in my eight years in Washington I
have met no one for whom I have such great liking and
affection.

- 5 -

Scotty Reston sits here as the representative of
the press. Incorruptible, thoughtful, a gentleman,
but tough for all that, and a friend.

He has not always treated me with the deference
I thought I deserved but he has never written an unfair
or mean word. He is the epitomy of what a free press in a
free country can produce.

And finally, ladies and gentlemen there is my wife
Nancy. I have never before in a public forum -- or in
private for that matter -- expressed me gratitude for the
strength and support she has given me in what for her
have certainly been difficult times. I doubt that I will
ever do so again so this is an historic moment. Let me
simply say that for all its challenges and excitement, life
in Washington is a strain on the toughest of us. It is, I
suspect, an even more trying place for those who stand by

NATIONAL PRESS CLUB

You will all be relieved to learn that my departure
from office does not mean the end of my relationship with
the press. But I see it as a two-way street. You can be
of great help to me with my memoirs since some of you are
such superb creative writers. For my part, I will reciprocate
by giving a lecture course at an appropriate school of
journalism on "the Art of the Press Conference -- from
'Peace is at Hand' to Salzburg!" Or, "Interviewers I have
known -- from Oriana Fallaci to Otis Pike."

To those of you who have travelled so many miles
with me, I am sorry to report that my last official trip
abroad was to Europe. I had intended to take one final

ii

world junket, and my staff was to set it up. I was on the
verge of leaving, but then thought better of it. I discovered
that my plane had been routed over the Bermuda Triangle.

I am reassured, by Cy Vance, that there will always
be a place for me in the State Department. True, the basement
is cold in the winter and full of exhaust fumes in the summer,
but there is a consolation: I will be able to spend a lot of time
admiring my official portrait, since I understand they intend
to hang it there.

I want to announce today that in response to pressure
from the National Enquirer and a flurry of letters from
the Archivist of the United States, I am reluctantly turning
over 3000 bags of my personal garbage to the Archives.

iii

The transfer will be made as soon as Eagleburger finishes
screening it for material that should properly be in the
Department of State. I am sure he will find we already have
most of it.

I expect to lead a happy and full life once I leave
government. But I will miss my session with the Department's
Press Spokesman prior to his daily briefing. I will be sorry
to be deprived of the opportunity to instruct him each day
on the virtues of frankness, honesty and openness.

I will miss, as well, the dogged determination of the
members of the State Department Press Corps, with their
cheerful and inquiring faces. I have, as a farewell gift,
instructed that each one be presented with a tie clasp. It will
be in the shape of a piranha fish.

I am grateful for this opportunity to appear before you today. It is almost like coming home, for we have so much in common: a reluctance to see our names in print, a uniform appreciation of the goodness of mankind, total subordination of ego, and a basic reliance on working within the system, and, above all, humility.

In these last few weeks many of you have asked me how I would sum up the successes and failures of our foreign policy. As you know, my hearing consistently fails during the second part of that question. But since I shall soon settle the issue conclusively in my memoirs, let me confine myself today to some general principles.

I have participated in the conduct of American foreign
policy during a period of fundamental change. As always in
such times, that policy emerged from an amalgam of
factors: objective circumstances, domestic pressures, the
values of our society and the decisions of individual leaders.
The relative weight to be given to each can be left to historians.
But their mix shaped a profound transition in our nation's
foreign policy. The trauma of Vietnam transformed our
international perceptions; the nightmare of Watergate brought
into question the validity of our domestic institutions. These
upheavals coincided with radical alterations in the international
environment. We have had to cope, over the past decade,
with an increasingly complex and turbulent world in which
America must seek to achieve its principles and its

purposes under circumstances greatly at variance with
traditional attitudes.

Through the greater part of the past two centuries
America defined and justified its role in the world in terms
of abstract principle. Our isolation, vast margins of safety,
and a preoccupation with developing our own continent produced
a sense of American uniqueness, and a conviction that our
power and the uses we made of it were but the physical expression
of our moral purpose. We tended to believe that in foreign
affairs our involvement or non-involvement was a matter of
our choice, and that we needed to act only when our democratic
principles bade us do so.

In the early years of this century we found ourselves
alone among the democracies, sufficiently powerful to maintain

a precarious world balance. But then, shunning the claims
of security and alliance, we fell back on our traditional
isolationism; we sought, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to
substitute law for politics and to legislate solutions to
international conflicts.

After World War II, we finally accepted the responsibilities
of world leadership. But the great exertions we undertook
were based on the premise that they would be temporary -- that at
some point our allies would need us no longer; that poor nations
would embrace democracy and move toward self-sufficiency; that our
adversaries would change or that their systems would collapse.
We applied abroad policies and programs modelled after our

-5-

domestic experience of the New Deal and wartime mobilization; we acted as if any political problem anywhere could be solved by overwhelming it with our resources; as if the revolutions of our time had primarily economic, rather than political and even spiritual causes.

The Sixties were the last full flowering of these impulses -- the belief in our omnipotence, in our self-sufficiency, in our ability to remake other societies in our image. But these temptations remain with us and occasionally surface in our domestic debate or our legislation.

As the decade of the Sixties drew to a close, we began to learn that we cannot legislate our own moral preferences upon the world at a time when we no longer enjoy physical

-6-

predominance. We came to see that abstract principles are
not self-fulfilling; they can lead to an overinvolvement as
pernicious as our earlier isolation. We live today in a
world of many centers of power and contending ideologies; a
collection of some 150-odd nations sharing few agreed legal
or moral assumptions; an international economic system in
which the wellbeing of all peoples is inextricably intertwined;
in short, a set of new historical realities in which the challenges
of peace, prosperity and justice are unending.

Seldom before has foreign policy had to be conducted
against the background of such vast ideological divisions; never
before has it been conducted in the knowledge that miscalculation
could mean the end of civilized life. The need for a global
structure has long been evident, but the gap between developed

and developing countries -- a constant challenge to
tranquility -- has continued to widen. The growing reality
of our interdependence is in constant tension with the compelling
trends of separatism and intense nationalism.

At the end of the Sixties our cardinal task was to
disengage from a war that had placed 550 thousand Americans
on the mainland of Asia in a way that preserved our ability to
design and influence the development of a new international
order. Newly conscious of our limits, we sought to put into
place a foreign policy of the kind less favored nations had to
conduct throughout history -- a foreign policy that depended
on the correct perception of priorities, a feeling for the
importance of nuance, and a realization that there could be no
terminal date to our efforts. Our traditional predisposition

-8-

for moral, legal and clear-cut solutions was not abandoned,
but we attempted to reconcile them with a new understanding
of the geopolitical realities of our time. Above all, we needed
to rally and maintain the support of the American people for
the long haul.

We have sought to infuse our relations with the industrial democracies with new purposes that go beyond our traditional ties of military defense; to manage relations between the nuclear superpowers to avert holocaust and develop cooperation; to reestablish contact with the People's Republic of China and progressively to strengthen that relationship; to expand the world economy to embrace the needs and contributions of the scores of new nations on the path of development; to resolve conflicts in areas such as the Middle East and Africa that, on a

-9-

shrinking planet, could ignite a wider conflagration; to
contain the menace of nuclear proliferation, while developing
the peaceful benefits of the atom for an energy-hungry world;
and to move beyond stability to bring about, by cooperative
international action if possible, improvement in the quality of
human life and the observance of elementary standards of
right and justice.

It is in the nature of our foreign policy problem that
such an agenda cannot be concluded in one Administration. I
believe that we have emerged from one of the most trying
decades in our history with new maturity with the foundations
of a long-term policy in place, with the world and America
more tranquil than we found them and with considerable
opportunities for constructive achievement before us. We are

-10-

no longer innocent, but neither have we grown cynical.

Above all, we have reconfirmed our historic responsibility
to contribute to the eternal quest of all peoples to live in
security and peace, free from fear, oppression or foreign
domination. We must never forget that no other free nation
is strong enough or cohesive enough to replace us. If we
falter, no one can step into the breach, and hostile purposes
and incompatible values will then shape the future of mankind.
Without our commitment there can be no security; without our
contribution there can be no progress. This is America's
inescapable burden; its incontestable glory.

So let us dedicate ourselves to the task of ensuring
that our common purposes transcend our differences. No matter
how strong the foundations we have laid, the challenges confronting

O)

-11-

the next Administration will be complex, difficult, and
painful. The task of building a new international order
will not be completed for decades. There will continue
to be, as there have been in the past, many difficult
choices to make; and there will continue to be intense
dispute over the wisdom of the choices made and the
courses set. Achievement will inevitably fall short of hope
and expectation, as it has in every Administration. The
new Administration may avoid some or all of the mistakes
we made; it will surely make some new ones of its own.
But all of us owe those who carry the burden of responsibility

-12-

the benefit of the doubt, a healthy understanding for
the magnitude of their problems and compassion for
the narrow range of choices available.

Long before I had any expectation that I would be
leaving office, I emphasized the vital importance of a non-partisan
foreign policy. I repeat that plea now with equal fervor. The
divisions that have characterized the last decade and a half in
this country must finally end. The deeds demanded of America
in the coming decade can only be accomplished by a united

people and government acting with boldness, perserverance
and vision.

This is the time to build a new foreign policy consensus
similar in scope though different in content than that which
sustained the post-World War II generation. Americans must
once again conduct their foreign policy debates with a recognition
that we are, after all, partners in a vital national endeavor
on which depends our future and that of the world. Let us behave
during these years so that we shall remember them as the time
when the American people rediscovered their unity. For my own
part, I wish my successors well. I will do my best to contribute
to an informed, constructive and supportive public dialogue.

-14-

You ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate have a
stake in this enterprise. If I may make a parting request it
is to look upon my successor's challenges with some sympathy;
to remember that what often appears to an outsider as lack of
candor may in reality be the best judgment of serious people
grappling with events emerging from a fog of confusing reports
and putting forward policies which they believe to be right, but
which they cannot *know* to be right until the time for decision is
past.

The profound alterations over the past decade in our per-
ceptions of morality and political propriety have affected every
aspect of our public life; and they have had a dramatic impact
upon the relationship between government and the press. The days
when statesmen and journalists coexisted in an atmosphere of

CD

-15-

trust and shared confidences have given way to a state of
almost perpetual inquest which, at its worst, can degenerate
into a relationship of hunter and hunted, deceiver and dupe.

But in its best sense these new attitudes have been -- and
will be -- centrally important to the health and vitality of our
democracy. What public servant who bears that title with pride
and integrity ultimately will not be grateful for a press that
relentlessly holds its officials to high standards of truth and
integrity? Can one ever forget the sinking feeling of being asked
a question at a press conference by a reporter who already knows
the answer from an earlier background session? What official
has not been aged by the panicky knowledge that some journalist
is seducing another source to confirm what he has been told on
an off-the-record basis? And who can avoid the special anguish

-16-

of knowing that if the reporter succeeds, one has gotten exactly
what one deserves.

You and I have been good protagonists. The jokes and
the conflicts, the cooperation and the pain that we have had over
the past eight years reflect the fact that, under our system, the
press and the government are natural sparring partners that
nevertheless need each other. Both are powerful institutions
attempting to serve the public interest by their own lights, and
according to their own legitimate purposes. The aim of the
executive branch is to govern and lead and implement public
policy; yours is to illuminate, question, and analyze. The fact
that we are always right and you are wrong does not change the
basic elements of a relationship made up on both sides of respect,
fear, deference, and the attempt by each to get the better of the
other.

-17-

Nor can it avoid the difference in perspective inherent
in its two positions. I know how exciting it is for reporters to
be given access to arcane classified documents, even though
they are usually appallingly written and generally incomprehensible.

I, of course, hold to the view that the real essence of our foreign
policy is to be found in the equally arcane and only slightly more
comprehensible series of speeches I have given around the country.
These, of course, have often been slighted (I consider anything
except running the full text as being slighted). -- I suspect because
they were unclassified. But I have one consolation. If you had
had all the classified documents that were available to me, you
would be as confused as I often was.

We shall not settle this debate here -- all the less so since
after January 20 I hope to profit from the leaks you print. This

-18-

may be the occasion to say that for all my needling, I have
admired the objectivity, the honesty and the fundamental fairness
of the press corps which covers the Department of State and the
White House. They are the most amusing and perceptive collection
of outrageous individualists I have known. They have, at times,
left me breathless with exasperation. But they have sharpened my
wits as well. They have even made me concede that there may
be something in Thomas Jefferson's claim that were it left to
him to decide between a government without newspapers or
newspapers without a government, he would prefer the latter.
Luckily for us all, Jefferson never had to pronounce himself
regarding television.

We have had -- to put it mildly -- an intense experience,
and we are now at the end of our time together until late January

-19-

1981. As a result of the extraordinary record of discourse between us, we understand each other better. And if I may be so bold, I believe that our discourse has also served the American people, for they know more, as a result, about the role and responsibilities of this nation in the world.

This nation has never lost its spirit, or its faith in its
destiny. Even in the difficult times through which we so recently
passed, we kept our balance and showed the world the resiliency of
free institutions. And we should forever thank the fates that watch
over us for the steady hand of the President it has been my honor
to serve for more than two years. His strength, his simple
honesty, calmed our troubled land and restroed our pride, our
integrity, and our sense of decency. President Ford leaves to
Governor Carter a nation recovered; a nation confident in the

-20-

progressive fulfillment of the American dream.

Our new President and Secretary of State deserve the
understanding and the support of all Americans -- for today our
relations with other nations affect every citizen. The search
for peace is -- in this age of nuclear weapons -- a moral and
practical imperative. The pursuit of wellbeing, a traditional
concern of nations, becomes now -- in an age of interdependence --
one that can only be realized in cooperation with others. The
problem of justice takes on fresh urgency and complexity
when the future of democracy rests in the hands of a dwindling
number of countries. Today America's leaders must address the
familiar goals of peace, prosperity and justice in a global land-
scape that has been transformed and for which our historical

-21-

experience offers little guidance. Let us, for the first time in
over a decade, chart our future as a united people.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Three and a half years ago I, an immigrant and naturalized
citizen, was sworn in as Secretary of State of my adopted country,
the greatest nation on earth. The responsibilities once borne by
such men as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall, and
Acheson were temporarily bequeathed to me. In no other country
in the world would this have been possible. Because of my origin,
I have perhaps had a unique perspective of what America means to
the cause of freedom and human dignity. And I have had no higher
aim than to repay in some small measure my debt to this country
which saved me from totalitarianism and the world from slavery.

-22-

I leave to you, for a time, the great domain of public
policy. I would be hypocritical if I pretended that to part is easy.

I envy you the excitement, the responsibility, the opportunities
to contribute, that will be yours. I shall never forget how hard
you tested me. I shall always cherish the experiences we enjoyed
together. And I will think of you with affection tinged with
exasperation.

Thank you.