[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 40, Number 6 (Monday, February 9, 2004)]
[Pages 188-191]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the ``Churchill and the Great Republic'' Exhibit

February 4, 2004

    Thank you all very much. I'm honored to join you as we welcome a 
magnificent collection to the Library of Congress. I've always

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been a great admirer of Sir Winston Churchill, admirer of his career, 
admirer of his strength, admirer of his character--so much so that I 
keep a stern-looking bust of Sir Winston in the Oval Office. He watches 
my every move. [Laughter]
    Like few other men in this or any other age, Churchill is admired 
throughout the world. And through the writings and his personal effects, 
we feel the presence of the great man, himself. As people tour this 
exhibit, I'm sure they'll be able to smell the whiskey and the cigars. 
[Laughter]
    I appreciate Jim Billington for hosting this exhibit and for hosting 
me. It's good to see Marjorie. I appreciate the members of Winston 
Churchill's family who have come: Lady Mary Soames, the daughter; 
Winston Churchill III--the man bears a mighty name--and his wife, Luce; 
Celia Sandys, who is a granddaughter. Thank you all for coming. We're 
honored to have you here in America.
    I'm pleased to see my friend the Ambassador from the United Kingdom 
to America, Sir David Manning, and Lady Manning here as well. I 
appreciate the Members of Congress who have come--the chairman. We've 
got a couple of mighty powerful people here, Winston, with us today: 
Chairmen Lugar and Warner, Senator Bennett, Congressmen Bill Young, Doug 
Bereuter, Jerry Lewis, Tom Petri, Vern Ehlers, and Jane Harman. I'm glad 
you all are here. Thanks for taking time to come.
    This exhibit bears witness to one of the most varied and 
consequential lives of modern history. Churchill's 90 years on Earth 
joined together two ages. He stood in the presence of Queen Victoria, 
who first reigned in 1837. He was the Prime Minister to Elizabeth II, 
who reigns today. Sir Winston met Theodore Roosevelt, and he met Richard 
Nixon.
    Over his long career, Winston Churchill knew success, and he knew 
failure, but he never passed unnoticed. He was a prisoner in the Boer 
War, a controversial strategist in the Great War. He was the rallying 
voice of the Second World War and a prophet of the cold war. He helped 
abolish the sweatshops. He gave coal miners an 8-hour day. He was an 
early advocate of the tank, and he helped draw boundary lines that 
remain on the map of the Middle East. He was an extraordinary man.
    In spare moments, pacing and dictating to harried secretaries, he 
produced 15 books. He said, ``History will be kind to me--for I intend 
to write it.'' [Laughter] History has been kind to Winston Churchill, as 
it usually is to those who help save the world.
    In a decade of political exile during the 1930s, Churchill was 
dismissed as a nuisance and a crank. When the crisis he predicted 
arrived, nearly everyone knew that only one man could rescue Britain. 
The same trait that had made him an outcast eventually made him the 
leader of his country. Churchill possessed, in one writer's words, an 
``absolute refusal, unlike many good and prudent men around him, to 
compromise or to surrender.''
    In the years that followed, as a great enemy was defeated, a great 
partnership was formed. President Franklin Roosevelt found in Churchill 
a confidence and resolve that equaled his own. As they led the Allies to 
victory, they passed many days in each other's company and grew in 
respect and friendship. The President once wrote to the Prime Minister, 
``It is fun to be in the same decade with you.'' And this sense of 
fellowship and common purpose between our two nations continues to this 
day. I have also been privileged to know a fine British leader, a man of 
conscience and unshakable determination. In his determination to do the 
right thing and not the easy thing, I see the spirit of Churchill in 
Prime Minister Tony Blair.
    When World War II ended, Winston Churchill immediately understood 
that the victory was incomplete. Half of Europe was occupied by an 
aggressive empire. And one of Churchill's own finest hours came after 
the war ended in a speech he delivered in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill 
warned of the new danger facing free peoples. In stark but measured 
tones, he spoke of the need for free nations to unite against communist 
expansion. Marshal Stalin denounced the speech as a ``call to war.'' A 
prominent American journalist called the speech an ``almost catastrophic 
blunder.'' In fact, Churchill had set a simple truth before the world, 
that tyranny could not be ignored or appeased without great risk. And he 
boldly asserted that

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freedom--freedom was the right of men and women on both sides of the 
Iron Curtain.
    Churchill understood that the cold war was not just a standoff of 
armies but a conflict of visions, a clear divide between those who put 
their faith in ideologies of power and those who put their faith in the 
choices of free people. The successors of Churchill and Roosevelt, 
leaders like Truman and Reagan and Thatcher, led a confident Alliance 
that held firm as communism collapsed under the weight of its own 
contradictions.
    Today, we are engaged in a different struggle. Instead of an armed 
empire, we face stateless networks. Instead of massed armies, we face 
deadly technologies that must be kept out of the hands of terrorists and 
outlaw regimes.
    Yet in some ways, our current struggles or challenges are similar to 
those Churchill knew. The outcome of the war on terror depends on our 
ability to see danger and to answer it with strength and purpose. One by 
one, we are finding and dealing with the terrorists, drawing tight what 
Winston Churchill called a ``closing net of doom.''
    This war also is a conflict of visions. In their worship of power, 
their deep hatreds, their blindness to innocence, the terrorists are 
successors to the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. And we are 
the heirs of the tradition of liberty, defenders of the freedom, the 
conscience, and the dignity of every person. Others before us have shown 
bravery and moral clarity in this cause. The same is now asked of us, 
and we accept the responsibilities of history.
    The tradition of liberty has advocates in every culture and in every 
religion. Our great challenge is to support the momentum of freedom in 
the greater Middle East. The stakes could not be higher. As long as that 
region is a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will produce men 
and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our friends. We 
seek the advance of democracy for the most practical of reasons, because 
democracies do not support terrorists or threaten the world with weapons 
of mass murder.
    America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle 
East. We're challenging the enemies of reform, confronting the allies of 
terror, and expecting a higher standard from our friends. For too long, 
American policy looked away while men and women were oppressed, their 
rights ignored, and their hopes stifled. That era is over, and we can be 
confident. As in Germany and Japan and Eastern Europe, liberty will 
overcome oppression in the Middle East.
    True democratic reform must come from within. And across the Middle 
East, reformers are pushing for change. From Morocco to Jordan to Qatar, 
we're seeing elections and new protections for women and the stirring of 
political pluralism.
    When the leaders of reform ask for our help, America will give it. 
I've asked the Congress to double the budget for the National Endowment 
for Democracy, raising its annual total to $80 million. We will focus 
its new work on bringing free elections and free markets and free press 
and free speech and free labor unions to the Middle East. The National 
Endowment gave vital service in the cold war, and now we are renewing 
its mission of freedom in the war on terror.
    Freedom of the press and the free flow of ideas are vital 
foundations of liberty. To cut through the hateful propaganda that fills 
the airwaves in the Muslim world and to promote open debate, we're 
broadcasting the message of tolerance and truth in Arabic and Persian to 
tens of millions. In some cities of the greater Middle East, our radio 
stations are rated number one amongst younger listeners. Next week, we 
will launch a new Middle East television network called Al Hurra, Arabic 
for ``the free one.'' The network will broadcast news and movies and 
sports and entertainment and educational programming to millions of 
people across the region. Through all these efforts, we are telling the 
people in the Middle East the truth about the values and the policies of 
the United States, and the truth always serves the cause of freedom.
    America is also taking the side of reformers who have begun to 
change the Middle East. We're providing loans and business advice to 
encourage a culture of entrepreneurship in the Middle East. We've 
established business internships for women to teach them the skills of 
enterprise and to help them achieve social and economic equality. We're 
supporting the work of judicial reformers who

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demand independent courts and the rule of law. At the request of 
countries in the region, we're providing Arabic language textbooks to 
boys and girls. We're helping education reformers improve their school 
systems. The message to those who long for liberty and those who work 
for reform is that they can be certain they have a strong ally, a 
constant ally in the United States of America.
    Our strategy and our resolve are being tested in two countries in 
particular. The nation of Afghanistan was once the primary training 
ground of Al Qaida, the home of a barbaric regime called the Taliban. It 
now has a new constitution that guarantees free election and full 
participation by women.
    The nation of Iraq was for decades an ally of terror ruled by the 
cruelty and caprice of one man. Today, the people of Iraq are moving 
toward self-government. Our coalition is working with the Iraqi 
Governing Council to draft a basic law with a bill of rights. Because 
our coalition acted, terrorists lost a source of reward money for 
suicide bombings. Because we acted, nations of the Middle East no longer 
need to fear reckless aggression from a ruthless dictator who had the 
intent and capability to inflict great harm on his people and people 
around the world. Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell, and Iraqi 
men and women are no longer carried to torture chambers and rape rooms 
and dumped in mass graves. Because the Ba'athist regime is history, Iraq 
is no longer a grave and gathering threat to free nations. Iraq is a 
free nation.
    Freedom still has enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq. All the 
Ba'athists and Taliban and terrorists know that if democracy were to be, 
it would undermine violence--their hope for violence and innocent death. 
They understand that if democracy were to be undermined, then the hopes 
for change throughout the Middle East would be set back. That's what 
they know. That's what they think.
    We know that success of freedom in these nations would be a landmark 
event in the history of the Middle East and the history of the world. 
Across the region, people would see that freedom is the path to progress 
and national dignity. A thousand lies would stand refuted, falsehoods 
about the incompatibility of democrat values in Middle Eastern cultures. 
And all would see, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the success of free 
institutions at the heart of the greater Middle East.
    Achieving this vision will be the work of many nations over time, 
requiring the same strength of will and confidence of purpose that 
propelled freedom to victory in the defining struggles of the last 
century. Today, we're at a point of testing, when people and nations 
show what they're made out of. America will never be intimidated by 
thugs and assassins. We will do what it takes. We will not leave until 
the job is done.
    We will succeed because when given a choice, people everywhere, from 
all walks of life, from all religions, prefer freedom to violence and 
terror. We will succeed because human beings are not made by the 
Almighty God to live in tyranny. We will succeed because of who we are, 
because even when it is hard, Americans always do what is right.
    And we know the work that has fallen to this generation. When great 
striving is required of us, we will always have an example in the man we 
honor today. Winston Churchill was a man of extraordinary personal 
gifts, yet his greatest strength was his unshakable confidence in the 
power and appeal of freedom. It was the great fortune of mankind that he 
was there in an hour of peril. And it remains the great duty of mankind 
to advance the cause of freedom in our time.
    May God bless the memory of Winston Churchill. May God continue to 
bless the United States of America.

Note: The President spoke at 2:31 p.m. in the Northwest Gallery of the 
Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. In his remarks, he 
referred to James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, and his wife, 
Marjorie; Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United 
Kingdom; and former President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.