Our Gang (16 page)

he, Charles Curtis Flood, had had enough of law

and order and life within the system. There will be

no mollycoddling of a man who undertook to

subvert and corrupt the youth of this country by

the most insidious means imaginable, with a

recklessness and a viciousness equalled not even by

the most hardened drug pushers and the most

loathsome pornographers.

No, it was not to the dissolute, unprincipled and

overindulged on our college campuses that Charles

Curtis Flood turned with his plan to destroy

America. Nor was this yet another call to violence

to the dropout and hippies and flagdefilers of the

left.

Who then, you ask, did he seek to corrupt? The

answer, my fellow Americans, is the Boy Scouts of

America. Not only did Charles Curtis Flood incite

them to riot, and tamper with their morals, but

what is even worse, it was he and he alone who

drove the Boy Scouts headlong into the tragedy

that occurred here yesterday in Washington, D.C.

Surely the great majority of Americans will agree

that it is a tragedy in every sense of the word when

the brave fighting men of our Army are called

upon to risk their lives in the streets of

Washington, D.C., instead of in a foreign coun
try.

But that is what happened here in the na

TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 10g

lion's capital, when, through a long day and a long

night, our brave soldiers, armed only with loaded

rifles, fixed bayonets, tear-gas canisters and gas

masks, faced a mob of Boy Scouts, numbering

nearly ten thousand.

I am sure you all know by now the nature of the

chants and the songs that these ten thousand Boy

Scouts were singing in the streets of the nation's

capital. I am sure you are familiar with the kind of

placards they were waving before the television

cameras. I do not intend to repeat to you the

wording of those posters. It should suffice to say

that they did justice to the language and interests of

Charles Curtis Flood, whose favorite city, according

to his own writings, is Copenhagen, Denmark, the

pornography capital of the world.

The posters are presently in the hands of the FBI,

whose laboratories have already begun the

painstaking job of fingerprinting each and every

poster, and submitting them to blood tests so as to

determine the correlation between the obscenity

printed on an individual poster and the blood type

of the Boy Scout bearing the poster containing

those objectionable words. If such correlations can

be established with a reasonable degree of accuracyand

we think they can-it will of course be of great

assistance to our law enforcement agencies. Under

our program of "preventive detention," we will be

able to round up

110 OUR GANG

those with suspect blood types before sueh

demonstrations as this even get under way, thus

preventing them from violating community standards

of decency, and the ordinary everyday rules of

courtesy, decorum and good taste that are sacred to

the great majority of Americans.

As you all know from the headlines, of the

approximately ten thousand Boy Scouts who assembled

here in Washington during the two-day

uprising to threaten the lives of our brave fighting

men, it was necessary to kill only three in order to

maintain law and order. That breaks down to one

and one-half Scouts dead per diem, while nine

thousand nine hundred and ninetyeight and a half

Scouts continued to live full and active lives the first

day, and nine thousand, nine hundred and ninetyseven

the second.

Now I would think that by anyone's standards, a

mortality rate in a crisis of this kind of
.0003
is a

wonderful tribute to the very great restraint with

which we were able to confront what could have

been a terrible' tragedy for our soldiers. Certainly it

should give solace to all of those who detest

bloodshed as much as I do, and put the lie once and

for all to the vicious charge that it was the military

and not the Scouts who were responsible for the

violence. On the other hand, I think the fact that we

did have three Scouts dead by the end of the second

day is a good indication of the necessary firmness

with

TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 111

which we always try to balance off our very great

restraint.

Of course, I am sure the great majority of

Americans realize that there is always going to be a

small, vocal minority of cavilers and critics, who are

never going to be satisfied, no matter how perfectly

balanced the restraint and the firmness with which

we deal with civil disruptions of this kind. Even if

there should be only one person dead over a twoday

period, or as little as half a person a day; even if

over a two-day period there should be only one

person who is slightly maimed-these critics will

begin to talk as though the tragedy wasn't the overwhelming

danger to which tens of thousands of our

brave soldiers were subjected, but the maiming of

one person out of only ten thousand, and what is

more than likely, an out-of-towner who, unlike our

brave soldiers, had only to remain at home to stay

out of harm's way.

Well, to this small vocal minority, let me make

one thing very clear.

I too have great sympathy for the families of the

three Boy Scouts who were killed here in

Washington. I am a father, and I know full well how

important children can be to a man's career; and

incidentally, in that connection, a wife. As a matter

of fact, my wife and I and our wonderful children

had condolence messages prepared for far more

than the three who died

112 OUR GANG

here, and were prepared to dispatch them on a

moment's notice. Throughout the crisis I was in

continuous touch with the morgue here in Washington,

as I am with the morgues around the

country, by a special "hot line," and had it been

necessary to wire not three, but three thousand such

messages, I assure you that my family and I would

have seen that those words of sympathy had left the

White House before the bodies were even cold. I

am proud to say that my wife and my daughters

were prepared to work' far into the night in order

that families less fortunate than our own might have

some small comfort in their hour of need. Nor do

we intend to forget these people when Christmas

time rolls around.

But let there be no mistake about it: quick on the

trigger as I may be with compassion for the

innocent families, I am equally swift in my condemnation

of these three guilty Scouts. And I say

"guilty" because if they were not guilty they would

not be dead. That is not the kind of country we live

in.

Now I know there are those apologists for the

Boy Scout uprising who have attempted to arouse

sympathy for the three guilty Scouts by pointing

out that while one had attained the rank of Eagle

Scout, the other two were "only" Tenderfoots. If

pressed they will concede that an Eagle Scout is a

highly trained and disciplined youngster, capable of

functioning as a guerrilla

TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 113

insurrectionist because of the various survival tactics

he has had to master in order to attain his key

position in the Scout infrastructure. But what of the

two Tenderfoots, they ask. How could two little

Tenderfoots pose so serious a threat to our national

security as to make it necessary to kill them?

Well, let me answer that question, my fellow

Americans, by showing you the weapons that were

found concealed, hanging from the belts, of these

"two little Tenderfoot Scouts" when their bodies

were searched by the FBI, the Secret Service, the

CIA, the Military Police, the Shore Patrol, the

Attorney General's office, the Capitol Police Force,

the Police Force of the District of Columbia, as well

as by law enforcement officers summoned from

around the country, to guarantee the probity and

thoroughness of this investigation.

Now I am sure that we all still remember with a

sad and mournful heart the 6.5-millimeter Italian

carbine rifle purchased for $12.78 from a Chicago

mail-order house by President Charisma's assassin,

Lee Harvey Oswald, whom I mentioned earlier in

connection with James Earl Ray and Charles Curtis

Flood. In the mail-order catalog that rifle probably

did not appear to be any more sophisticated than

the weapon I am about to show you now, or any

more capable of changing the course of history.

And yet none of

114 OUR GANG

us will ever forget the impact it had upon President

Charisma's career and my own. I know that to many

of you this object that I am holding in my right

hand looks as innocent and harmless as that $12.78

mail-order rifle undoubtedly did in the mail-order

catalog. But let there be no mistake about it, it is just

as effective, if not more so.

Firstly: whereas the rifle that destroyed President

Charisma's political career measured forty inches

overall, this knife that I hold here in my hand

measures, with the blades sheathed, only four and

five-eighths inches. This makes it an ideal weapon

to use in public places, as opposed to a forty-inch

rifle which might arouse suspicion on a school bus,

or in a supermarket, or any of the hundred places

where you and your loved ones find yourselves in

the course of an ordinary day.

Secondly: it is a far more vicious weapon than an

ordinary rifle and, needless to say, does not even

begin to approach in humaneness a simple

thousand-pound bomb, let alone a nuclear
ex
plosive.

As one who was raised as a Quaker, you

know, I have a particularly strong interest in being

humane. That is why, since coming to office, I have

done everything I can to get Congress to

appropriate money for a weapons system that would

make us number one in the world in that

department. Surely there is no reason why a coun

TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 115

try with our scientific and technological resources

cannot develop weapons with destructive powers so

total and immediate as to guarantee to every man,

woman and child on this planet what until now has

been reserved for those few fortunate people who