But of course we cannot undo overnight the judicial mess that we have inherited from the previous administration, and the thirty-five administrations before his. As a result, even as we are winding down the trial system that has caused this country so much expense and confusion, we have still to deal in the courtroom with the likes of Charles Curtis Flood and his team of attorneys.
Now fortunately two different courts have already found against Charles Curtis Flood in his attempt to destroy the game of baseball. These decisions made during the tenure in office of this administration, have gone a long way, I am sure, to restoring the confidence of a public only recently so disappointed by the verdict reached in Mayor John Lancelot’s New York, to free thirteen members of the Black Panther Party.
Of course I have no more right to tell the Mayor of New York how to run his city than he has to tell me how — to run the country or the world. But I must, in all honesty, say that I was as startled as the great majority of Americans, first by that verdict, and second, by Mayor Lancelot’s decision, following the verdict, to allow these thirteen Black Panthers to resume their political activities in his city. All I can say as President is that I trust this will not become the model for the treatment of the acquitted in other cities around the country.
Now I have no doubt that if the Mayor of New York were in my place he would not hesitate to declare a hands-off policy where Charles Curtis Flood is concerned. If self-confessed Black Panthers are to be left free to stalk the streets that are no longer safe for our wives and daughters, why bother to bring to justice a man who has not confessed to being a Black Panther? So, I am afraid, the. logic would run, if another man were in my shoes.
But so long as he is not, so long as I am the duly elected President of the United States, I can assure you that there will be no mollycoddling of any fugitive who, after twice being prevented by the courts from destroying baseball and undermining the youth of this country, decided that 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 country. But that is what happened here in the nation’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 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 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 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.