[N.B.C trade releases]. (1961)

2 Robert W. Sarnoff Text Striking advances have been made, for example, in the task of keeping the public abreast of the great issues and events that are shaping our lives. Never before, thanks in large part to televisions power to stimulate understanding, has a peacetime President of the United States confronted a major foreign crisis with such well-informed and unified support from the American people. The issues of the Cold War, the nature of the enemy, the obligations we have shouldered, the hazards we face - all these, and more, have literally been brought home to the whole nation in its living rooms. Yet, despite this progress, neither broadcasting, the press nor any leader of American opinion has succeeded in developing equal awareness of some of the long-range implications of the struggle that pits the free world against the Communist bloc. It is those implica¬ tions that I want to explore with you today. Understandably, these long-range aspects of the East-West struggle are less urgent and dramatic than the crises in the headlines, especially with the dread possibility that the short-range aspects may be grimly final. Yet if planning for a distant future may seem at times like an act of optimism, it is no less a call to duty. For the challenge to the free world is not only a matter of diplomacy and deterrents, a question of Berlin and the Bomb. Less dramatically perhaps, but just as surely, our survival in freedom also depends upon how we fare in a longrange contest of economic strength, productivity and growth. Even if we avoid the nuclear conflict that would turn the planet into what President Kennedy has called a flaming funeral pyre, we must recognize that the conflict between East and West will continue on other fronts, perhaps for many decades. It will be won by the system which better justifies itself in performance - in its ability to foot (more )