Echo ~ Jack Ryan

Am an avid reader but the following has stuck with me over the years. Seems like the message needs to be given again not only to those protestors, rioters and LunaticLefties, but to Joe and Jane Average before they enter the voting booth. And perhaps they did, given the results of the election last November.

The Scene is in the 12th chapter of Tom Clancy’s “Executive Orders” published in 1966. The President and all but a couple of members of Congress have been killed by a plane flying into the capital during a joint session of Congress. Jack Ryan, who had been chosen to fill the Vice President’s term, is now the President.

The new President Ryan is making a televised speech to the country giving an update on the investigation of the attack and asking for help in forming a new government with voters choosing new Representatives and Senators. I will not include details of the attack here, rather what the new President is asking of his countrymen is much more important:
“Ladies and gentlemen, one man, one disturbed and demented individual thought he could do fatal damage to our country. He was wrong. We have buried our dead. We will mourn their loss for a long time to come. But our country lives, and the friends we lost on that horrible night would not have it any other way.

Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty often requires blood to grow. Well, the blood has been shed and now it’s time for the tree to grow again. America is a country that looks forward, not backward. None of us can change history. But we can learn from it, building on our past successes and correcting our mistakes”

For the moment, I can tell you that our country is safe and secure. Our military is on duty around the world and our potential enemies know that. Our economy has taken a nasty shock, but survived, and is still the strongest in the world. We are still Americans and our future starts with every new day.”

(Omitting several paragraphs as they deal with the fictional attack)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a time for us to do the usual things in the usual way. We need to do better. We can do better.

John Kennedy once told us ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’ These are good words, but we’ve forgotten them. We need to bring them back. Our country needs all of us.

I need your help to do my job. If you think government can fix itself by itself, you’re wrong. If you think that government, fixed or not, can take care of you in every way, you’re wrong. It’s not supposed to be like that. You men and women out there, you ARE the United States of America. I work for you. My job is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I will do that to the best of my ability, but each one of you is on the team as well.

We need our government to do for us the things we cannot do for ourselves, like providing for the common defense, enforcing the law, responding to disaster. That’s what the Constitution says. That document, the one I swore to protect and defend is a set of rules written by a small group of fairly ordinary men. They weren’t even all lawyers, and yet they wrote the most important political document in human history. I want you to think about that. They were fairly ordinary people who did something extraordinary. There’s no magic to being in government.

I need a new Congress to work with me. The Senate will arrive first, because the governors will appoint replacement for the ninety-one men and women we lost last week. The House of Representatives, however has always been the People’s House, and it’s YOUR job to pick those, in a voting booth, exercising your rights.

Therefore, to you, and to the fifty governors, I have a request. Please, do not send me politicians. We do not have the time to do the things that must be done through that process. I need people who do real things in the real world; I need people who do not want to live in Washington; I need people who will not try to work the system; I need people who will come here at great personal sacrifice to do an important job and then return home to their normal lives.
I want engineers who know how things are built. I want physicians who know how to make sick people well. I want cops who know what it means when your civil rights are violated by a criminal. I want farmers who grow real food on real farms. I want people that know what it’s like to have dirty hands and pay a mortgage bill and raise kids and worry about the future. I want people who know they’re working for you and not themselves. That’s what I want. That’s what I need. I think that’s what a lot of you want, too.

Once those people are here, it’s your job to keep an eye on them, to make sure they keep their word, to make sure they keep faith with you. This is YOUR government. A lot of people have told you that, but I mean it. Tell your governors what you expect of them when they make their appointments to the Senate, and then YOU select the right people for the House. These are people who decide how much of your money the government takes, and then how it is spent. It’s your money, not mine. It’s your country. We all work for you.

For my part, I will pick the best Cabinet people I can find, people who know their business, people who have done real work and produced real results. Each of them will have the same orders from this office: to take charge of his or her department, to establish priorities, and make every government agency run efficiently. That’s a big order, and one which you’ve all heard before. But this President did not run an election campaign to get here. I have no one to pay off, no rewards to deliver, no secret promises to keep. I will do my damnedest to execute my duties to the best of my ability. I may not always be right, but when I’m not, it’s your job and that of the people you select to represent you to tell me about it, and I’ll listen to them and to you. I will report to you regularly on what is going on, and what your government is doing.

I want to thank you for listening to me, I will do my job. I need you to do yours.
“Thank you and good night.”

If you haven’t read this book, I urge you to do so. One of the best parts is how the new president deals with Iran.