Authors: Philip Roth
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 coun
try.
But that is what happened here in the na
TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 10g
lion'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
110 OUR GANG
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
TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 111
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
112 OUR GANG
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.
But let there be no mistake about it: quick on the
trigger as I may be with compassion for the
innocent families, I am equally swift in my condemnation
of these three guilty Scouts. And I say
"guilty" because if they were not guilty they would
not be dead. That is not the kind of country we live
in.
Now I know there are those apologists for the
Boy Scout uprising who have attempted to arouse
sympathy for the three guilty Scouts by pointing
out that while one had attained the rank of Eagle
Scout, the other two were "only" Tenderfoots. If
pressed they will concede that an Eagle Scout is a
highly trained and disciplined youngster, capable of
functioning as a guerrilla
TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 113
insurrectionist because of the various survival tactics
he has had to master in order to attain his key
position in the Scout infrastructure. But what of the
two Tenderfoots, they ask. How could two little
Tenderfoots pose so serious a threat to our national
security as to make it necessary to kill them?
Well, let me answer that question, my fellow
Americans, by showing you the weapons that were
found concealed, hanging from the belts, of these
"two little Tenderfoot Scouts" when their bodies
were searched by the FBI, the Secret Service, the
CIA, the Military Police, the Shore Patrol, the
Attorney General's office, the Capitol Police Force,
the Police Force of the District of Columbia, as well
as by law enforcement officers summoned from
around the country, to guarantee the probity and
thoroughness of this investigation.
Now I am sure that we all still remember with a
sad and mournful heart the 6.5-millimeter Italian
carbine rifle purchased for $12.78 from a Chicago
mail-order house by President Charisma's assassin,
Lee Harvey Oswald, whom I mentioned earlier in
connection with James Earl Ray and Charles Curtis
Flood. In the mail-order catalog that rifle probably
did not appear to be any more sophisticated than
the weapon I am about to show you now, or any
more capable of changing the course of history.
And yet none of
114 OUR GANG
us will ever forget the impact it had upon President
Charisma's career and my own. I know that to many
of you this object that I am holding in my right
hand looks as innocent and harmless as that $12.78
mail-order rifle undoubtedly did in the mail-order
catalog. But let there be no mistake about it, it is just
as effective, if not more so.
Firstly: whereas the rifle that destroyed President
Charisma's political career measured forty inches
overall, this knife that I hold here in my hand
measures, with the blades sheathed, only four and
five-eighths inches. This makes it an ideal weapon
to use in public places, as opposed to a forty-inch
rifle which might arouse suspicion on a school bus,
or in a supermarket, or any of the hundred places
where you and your loved ones find yourselves in
the course of an ordinary day.
Secondly: it is a far more vicious weapon than an
ordinary rifle and, needless to say, does not even
begin to approach in humaneness a simple
thousand-pound bomb, let alone a nuclear
ex
plosive.
As one who was raised as a Quaker, you
know, I have a particularly strong interest in being
humane. That is why, since coming to office, I have
done everything I can to get Congress to
appropriate money for a weapons system that would
make us number one in the world in that
department. Surely there is no reason why a coun
TRICKY ADDRESSES THE NATION 115
try with our scientific and technological resources
cannot develop weapons with destructive powers so
total and immediate as to guarantee to every man,
woman and child on this planet what until now has
been reserved for those few fortunate people who