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353 It Is Time to Reassess Our National Priorities March 26, 1969 Washington, DC Mr. Speaker, on the same day President Nixon announced he had decided the United States will not be safe unless we start to build a defense system against missiles, the Head Start programa in the District of Columbia was cut back for the lack of money. As a teacher, and as a woman, I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending $9 billion—and more, I am sure—on elaborate, unnecessary, and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation’s capital get nothing. When the new administration took office, I was one of the many Americans who hoped it would mean that our country would benefit from the fresh perspectives, the new ideas, the different priorities of a leader who had no part in the mistakes of the past. Mr. Nixon had said things like this. “If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no longer in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart.” And he said, “When you cut expenditures for education, what you are doing is shortchanging the American future.” But frankly, I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do. We have waited to see what the new administration is going to do. The pattern is now becoming clear. Apparently launching those new programs can be delayed for a while, after all. It seems we have to get some missiles launched first. Recently the new secretary of a. Federal program begun in 1965 to provide educational and health services to low-income preschool children. A major feature of the program is mandatory parental involvement. Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm 354 commerce spelled it out. The secretary, Mr. Stans,b told a reporter that the new administration is “pretty well agreed it must take time out from major social objectives” until it can stop inflation. The new secretary of health, education, and welfare, Robert Finch,c came to the Hill to tell the House Education and Labor Committee that he thinks we should spend more on education, particularly in city schools. But, he said, unfortunately we cannot “afford” to, until we have reached some kind of honorable solution to the Vietnam War. I was glad to read that the distinguished Member from Oregon [Mrs. Green] asked Mr. Finch this: “With the crisis we have in education, and the crisis in our cities, can we wait to settle the war? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Unless we can meet the crisis in education, we really can’t afford the war.” Secretary of Defense Melvin Lairdd came to Capitol Hill, too. His mission was to sell the antiballistic missile insanity to the Senate. He was asked what the new administration is doing about the war. To hear him, one would have thought it was 1968, that the former secretary of statee was defending the former policies, that nothing had ever happened, a president had never decided not to run because he knew the nation would reject him in despair over this tragic war we have blundered into. Mr. Laird talked of being prepared to spend at least two more years in Vietnam. Two more years. Two more years of hunger for Americans, of death for our best young men, of children here at home suffering the lifelong handicap of not having a good education when they are young. Two more years of high taxes collected to feed the cancerous growth of a Defense Department budget that now consumes two-thirds of our federal income. Two more years of too little being done to fight our greatest enemies— poverty, prejudice, and neglect—here in our own country. Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs. Our country cannot survive two more years, or four, of these kinds of policies. It must stop this year—now. b. Maurice Stans (1908–1998): Secretary of commerce for President Nixon from 1969 to 1972. c. Robert Finch (1925–1995) : served as campaign manager for Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign, as lieutenant governor of California under Ronald Reagan from 1967 to 1969, as secretary of health, education and welfare under President Nixon from 1969 to 1970, and from 1970 to 1973 was...

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