A Choice Not an Echo

Updated and Expanded 50th Anniversary Edition

Phyllis Schlafly

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781621573364
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over 3 Million Copies Sold! Celebrate 50 years since the release of Phyllis Schlafly's monumental A Choice Not an Echo, the book that launched the conservative resurgence of the late 20th century. This special updated and expanded edition contains 50 percent new material placing the book in its historical context and applying the book's lessons to the issues of today.

Part I

A Choice Not an Echo

1936–1964

1

The Billion Dollar Robberies

Newspapers still headline stories about the $7 million London train robbery of 1963 and the earlier $1.2 million Brink’s robbery in 1950 in Boston. Yet the press is strangely silent about the $13 billion robbery of 1940, the $98 billion robbery of 1944, the $39 billion robbery of 1948, or the $81 billion robbery of 1960.

In each of those years the American people were robbed of their constitutional birthright to a presidential choice. At stake was control of the annual federal spending which rose from $13 billion in 1941 to $100 billion in 1964.

The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to insure control of the largest cash market in the world: the executive branch of the United States government.

Most Americans think the next president of the United States will be selected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November 1964 when we go to the polls to vote. Most Americans think they will vote for a candidate who has been selected in their party’s political convention by delegates who voted their honest convictions and chose the man best qualified to lead their party to victory. This may be what is taught in the schoolbooks, but this ideal is frequently contrary to political reality.

From 1936 through 1960 the Republican presidential nominee was selected by a small group of secret kingmakers who are the most powerful opinion makers in the world. They dictated the choice of the Republican presidential nominee just as completely as the Paris dressmakers control the length of women’s skirts. In the 1940s when the decree went out from Paris that all women’s skirts should be only fourteen inches off the floor, every family budget in the United States was unbalanced in a frantic effort to achieve the “new look.”

Each fall sixty-six million American women don’t spontaneously decide their dresses should be an inch or two shorter, or longer, than last year. Like sheep, they bow to the wishes of a select clique of couturiers whom they have never seen, and whose names they may not even know.

It is easy to predict that, when skirts get about as short as they can possibly go, a Paris edict will be handed down again, and otherwise-sensible American women, even when they cannot afford such extravagance, will throw or give away perfectly good dresses in order to buy new ones which will meet the fashion dictates of a half dozen dressmakers in Paris.

In the same way, a few secret kingmakers based in New York selected every Republican presidential nominee from 1936 through 1960, and successfully forced their choice on a free country where there are more than thirty-four million Republican voters. Fantastic? In this book, we will examine the record and see how they did it. The strategy of politics, like an iceberg, is eight-ninths under the surface.

But, first, let us look at the issues of the 1964 election year.

2

Who’s Looney Now?

Every newspaper, every newscast on radio and television, every statement of public officials testifies to the numerous important political issues of the 1964 campaign year.

I. Defeats around the world. A map of the world reveals the collapse of American foreign policy everywhere.

Laos, as a result of the troika coalition government forced upon our friends by Ambassador Averell Harriman, is now under communist control. This is in spite of the fact that Laos received more United States foreign aid per capita than any nation in the world, and was the scene of the dedicated private charity of the heroic Dr. Tom Dooley.

Vietnam, slipping fast into Communist clutches, is now embroiled in a bloody war in which American boys are fighting and dying with little hope, under the policies of the present administration, of winning.

Cambodia, which has received generous amounts of foreign aid, has ordered our diplomatic representatives out of the country.

Pakistan and India are angry at us for the military aid we have given the other.

Greece, the country we saved from communism under the Greek-Turkish Aid Program, has been the scene of rampaging anti-American mobs which burn President Johnson in effigy.

France and England, our old friends, have broken with American policy, recognized Red China, and told President Johnson they will trade with Cuba and the Soviet Union whether we like it or not.

We have lost the friendship of our NATO ally Portugal because our State Department sided with Portugal’s enemies when they seized Goa and attempted to seize Angola.

We have lost the friendship of our NATO ally the Netherlands because the Democratic policy under Bobby Kennedy encouraged Sukarno to steal Dutch New Guinea.

The Congo, as a direct result of the coalition policy forced upon it by the Democratic State Department through the UN, is in utter chaos, with gangs of savages terrorizing and killing missionaries and other white people.

In Algeria, communist Ben Bella, who was welcomed to America by the Democratic Administration with a 21-gun salute on the White House lawn, is building a Castro-like state.

In 1960 the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates made a major issue of our “image” abroad. They promised to increase respect for America among foreign countries. Four years later, Americans are more hated by more people than ever in our history. In many countries on every continent, the American flag is being dragged down, American property is being confiscated, American citizens are being seized and humiliated.

II. Castro and Cuba. After the Bay of Pigs invasion that turned into a triumph for Castro, and after the phony “blockade” of October 1962 that turned into a triumph for Khrushchev, the problem of Cuba is still with us. The Johnson administration apparently has no plans for doing anything to solve it. No one knows how many Soviet missiles are still in Cuba, aimed at targets in the United States. No one knows how many Soviet troops and “technicians” are directing military operations in Cuba and training Latin Americans for subversion.

We do have documented evidence that Castro is a fountainhead for subversion in Panama, Venezuela, throughout Latin America, and all the way to Zanzibar.

On January 17, 1964, Khrushchev repeated his claim that he had moved missiles out of Cuba only in return for a United States pledge not to invade that island. He said:

We got a pledge that there will be no invasion of Cuba.¹

Not a single responsible official of the Johnson Administration denied Khrushchev’s boast. The American people can only conclude that the Democrats in fact did make such a pledge, and that the Johnson administration intends to fulfill it. Worse, the Democrats not only pledged no invasion of Cuba by the United States, but they are using our Navy and Coast Guard to prevent the Cuban Freedom Fighters from conducting guerrilla warfare against Castro.

The slogan of the Johnson administration seems to be:

Don’t worry about the Reds—they are still 90 miles away!

How long can we tolerate this communist base in Cuba, with Castro insulting and harassing us, spreading his infection throughout the Western Hemisphere giving the Soviets the opportunity to zero in their missiles on American cities?

III. Survival. Hitler told the world his plans for world conquest in Mein Kampf. Western leaders refused either to read or to believe his clear design for aggression. The Communists also have laid out their blueprint for world conquest.

On November 18, 1956, Khrushchev told Western diplomats at a Moscow reception:

Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.²

Each year Khrushchev has accelerated his time-table. On July 6, 1960 in Kaprun, Austria, he said:

In the short time I still have to live, I would like to see the day when the Communist flag flies over the whole world.³

On January 17, 1961, Khrushchev predicted that the “victory of world Communism is no longer far off.”⁴ In Bucharest, Romania on July 19, 1962, Khrushchev boasted:

I am convinced that tomorrow the Red flag will fly over the United States. But, we will not fly the flag. The American people will hoist it themselves.⁵

Khrushchev has tested and exploded super hydrogen bombs many megatons more powerful than ours. Communism controls one-fourth of the earth’s land surface and one-third of its population. In the last three years, our enemy has acquired missile and submarine bases in Africa and in the Western Hemisphere.

The most important national problem is the survival of American freedom and independence in the face of the communist threat. Instead of promising to protect our Republic from the greatest threat in our history, the response of the present Democratic administration is summed up in three policy documents:

1) State Department Publication 7277 entitled “Freedom From War,” which lays out the official policy of the present administration to abolish our Army, our Navy, our Air Force and our nuclear weapons, and make us subject to a “United Nations Peace Force.”⁶

2) The Rostow Report, a master plan on foreign policy and disarmament authored by Walt W. Rostow, chairman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Board.⁷ The thesis of the Rostow Report is that the communists are “mellowing,” that we must abandon our first-strike weapons, that we must not seek victory of the United States over the Soviet Union or of capitalism over communism, that we must never give any encouragement to revolts behind the Iron Curtain, that we should deny U.S. foreign aid to countries in order to force them into coalition governments with the communists as was done in Laos, that we must work toward general and complete disarmament, and that the administration should embark on a systematic publicity campaign in order to sell Congress and the American people on disarmament. These are now the policies of the Johnson administration.

3) The Phoenix Report, prepared for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.⁸ The thesis of the Phoenix Report is that we should abandon the old objectives of “containment” and “coexistence” in favor of a “detente” or “interdependence” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, that we should have only parity of military force with the USSR, that the president should trick the American people into unilateral disarmament by a tax cut which would force a decrease in spending on national defense, and that we should seriously consider “unification” of the U.S. and the USSR.

The American people would never vote for State Department Publication 7277, the Rostow Report or the Phoenix Report if given a chance at the polls! The big question is, can the Johnson administration with help of the New York kingmakers put these policies into effect without the American people realizing it until it is too late?

IV. The Panama Canal. In early January 1964, communist-led mobs riot...