Communism and National Security: Internal and External Threats

Communism is so often described as an ideology or a belief that exists somewhere other than in the United States.

Let me ask you, sir, just how serious a threat to our national security are these communist subversive activities in the United States today?

Well, I think they're serious. I think it's a matter that we should continue to, uh, give, uh, great care and attention to.

We should support, uh, the laws which the United States has passed in order to protect us from, uh, those who would destroy us from within.

We should sustain, uh, the Department of Justice in its efforts and the FBI, and we should be continually alert. I think if the United States is maintaining a strong society here in the United States, I think that we can meet any internal threat. The major threat is external and will continue.

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence, on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections,

on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.

It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published.

Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised.

No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a wartime discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.

Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security, and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.