The next day, their messages were quoted in newspapers throughout the United States. Crusade chairman Henry Ford II was the moderator of the radio broadcast and began, in part, with these words: “The words you are about to hear cannot be muffled or distorted or hidden away by the Communist suppressors of truth. Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia will carry the story and no force can stop it.”
Eisenhower continued his Cold-War rhetoric of 1950 in his radio address, when he said that the purpose of Radio Free Europe’s broadcast “was actively to oppose communism—to fight the big lie with the big truth.” He added,
Millions of people have listened to an infinite number of Communist lies designed to make them hate us. At the same time, their children have been told it is their duty spy on their parents…The Communists have isolated their people to keep them from ever hearing the truth—to create a vacuum in their minds which will absorb lies because there is nothing else for them to seize on.
In today’s world, freedom cannot live in any nation, no matter how powerful, unless it is preserved also in other significant parts of the globe. The big enemy of freedom everywhere is the big lie. People believe lies only when they have no opportunity to hear the truth.
The only way to frustrate this evil manipulation of human minds and emotions is to supply the truth, which gives the oppressed people a measuring stick to lay against each lie that is told to them.
People believe lies only when they have no opportunity to hear the truth. The Crusade for Freedom, through Radio Free Europe, is supplying the truth.
Men and women who might otherwise have succumbed to the philosophy that it is good to be slaves still keep alive the sparks of freedom in their hearts.
The frenzied counterattacks on both sides of the world prove that these two radio networks are hurting the Reds and giving comfort and encouragement to the oppressed people.
The programs have a spontaneity and freshness, which no official information agency can have. Freedom speaks most clearly between man and man, when its voice is neither muffled nor amplified by government intervention nor other official trappings.
There are mounting indications of the effectiveness of free radio broadcasts…One of the best tests is the shrill violence of the attacks upon them by Radio Moscow betraying the deep concern of the Communist rulers about these efforts.
Freedom is shielded by other things than steel and gunpowder. Vigilance in freedom’s defense is served by other than military means. The survival of freedom is best assured by the will to be free.
It is the work of the crusade tend the flame of the will to be free, to feed and fan it wherever possible, to keep it flickering in places where if may be burning low. The success of the crusade will mean firm friends and allies in places of critical need behind the enemy’s walls – walls erected to keep out the truth.
Henry Ford commented on Eisenhower and Stevenson’s speeches: “The joint statement of the two political rivals showed this nation is strongly united in the cause of freedom.”
