"They Are All Alike"

Bess Truman was down with a cold, so like the dutiful husband he is, the President had dinner at home. But at 9 o'clock he slipped over to Washington's Hotel Statler, and dropped in to make a few off-the-cuff remarks before a banquet of the Society of Business Magazine Editors.

There had always been aggressors in the world, said the President, and there had always been a struggle between the free world and the dictators who wanted to enslave it. "It is a struggle between people who believe in spiritual values," he said, "and people who believe in nothing but materialism. We are fighting for freedom, for the right to worship as we please, in any church we choose to attend, the right to read what we please, the right to speak what we please, and the right to elect public officials of our own choosing--and then give them hell after they are elected."

"Dictators don't believe that," he said, and "there is no difference between dictators, if you study your history. There has not been any difference in any police state that ever existed in the history of the world. They are all alike. They are all for the enslavement of the individual for the benefit of the state. We believe that the state exists for the benefit of the individual, and that is what we are fighting for.

"There isn't any difference between Hitler and Mussolini, Tarquin in ancient Rome, the tyrants in Sparta, Charles I of England, Louis XIV and Stalin. They are all just alike. Alexander I of Russia was just as much a dictator as any that ever existed. They believed in the enslavement of the common people."

As far as any White House aide could remember, it was the first time that Harry Truman had mentioned Stalin by name in public since his famous back-platform remark in Eugene, Ore., during the 1948 campaign. Then he had affectionately admitted that "I like old Joe," and hopefully added: "He is a decent fellow, but he is a prisoner of the Politburo." Now the President was tagging Stalin as a so-and-so in his own right.

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