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This file from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, digitized by the Internet Archive, holds Congressman Gerald R. Ford's Fifth District weekly radio scripts from January to June 1966, plus several National Republican Congressional Committee scripts. They deal with President Johnson's budget, inflation, four-year House terms, electoral college reform, foreign aid, the Vietnam War, rent subsidies and Memorial Day. The extracted text does not discuss UFOs.
NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE • 312 CONGRESSIONAL HOTEL • WASHINGTON 3 . D. C. • LINCOLN 4-3010 Script No. 15 April 261 1966 OUR SINKING MERCHANT FLEET This is Congressman~_______;reporting to you from Washington. Four years ago, Secretary of Defense Robert lv\cNamaro decided that the role played by ships in our defense picture could and should be very cons-iderably reduced. Military supplies, h~ decided, could very well be transported by air. That decision, plus the Administration's maritime policy in general, has relegated our huge merchant marine fleet to horse and buggy status, allow-. ing it to become out-dated and dilapidated. This determination is all too clear. At the close of World War II, the U.S. had a merchant marine fleet of over 3,500 vessels. By 1951, there were 1,955 active U.S. flagships. Today, there are only 1,000, including those reactivated for the Vietnam war1 and most of these are over 20 years old and near the end o~ their economic life. It wasn1t long before Secretary McNamara's policy of air-transport for military supplies was put to the acid test. With the accelerated pace of the Vietnamese war, efficient transport c:f military supplies became of crucial importance. But were these vital supplies transported by air? They were not. Two out of every thre~ f~lcllers in Vietnam had to be transported by ships and, as of January of this year1 98 per cent of the supplies for war went in by ship. Secreta'r McNamara had made a disastrous management de··· cision. The fact is that it takes 260 C5A planes to carry the load of a single ship and air transpo:..... tatlon costs five or six times as much per ton mlle. And what have other nations--both friend and. foe--been doing while America has allowed its merchant marine to sink into a crisis of maior pro- portions? In Soviet Russ to, for example 1 orders for new ships rose from 225 tn 1962 to 673 in 1964., Japan has 199 ships under construction, Great Britain 184 vessels, West Germany 176. And how many ships has the United States under construction? On January I, 1966, the United States had only 45 ships under construction. And President Johnson's budget for ~ provides only 85 million dollars for merchant marine construction. T~is represents a cu ~f 4.7 mil- lion dollars from the current year. It could permit construction of only a paltry dozen or so MW ships. -more-
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 65 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.