The Speech That Rocked the Convention

Walter Judd took a novel approach in his opening remarks to the 1960 Republican National Convention: he didn’t claim his party had all the answers. “The times in which we meet are too serious for that. The problems we face are too disturbing. Our country’s safety—your safety and mine—are too gravely endangered,” the Minnesota congressman told the crowd in Chicago. “A powerful enemy threatens us on every front. … And without victory in this struggle, there will be no survival of freedom for any of us—Democrats or Republicans.”

Invoking the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, who received the Republican presidential nomination 100 years prior, Judd insisted that the country must battle human slavery in its new form: Communism. “More human beings are in bondage tonight than ever before in human history. Nine hundred million abroad are denied by their government the right to worship, to speak, to assemble, to join, to own, to choose or to change one’s work, to live one’s own life. In this total situation, the Republican Party stands today as it has from the beginning—for freedom and against slavery.”

It wasn’t just Red Scare rhetoric to Judd. As a medical missionary in China in the 1930s, he was nearly killed by Communist rebels. Upon being elected to Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in 1943, he co-founded the Committee of One Million, aimed to block China’s admission into the United Nations. He lost his seat to Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser in 1963.

After leaving Congress, Judd remained in Washington, D.C., as a public speaker and a radio commentator on the “Washington Report,” sponsored by the American Security Council, from 1964 to 1970. He consulted for every president from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan on Sino-American relations, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981.

“He was the orator of his party at the time,” said former governor Elmer L. Andersen at Judd’s death in 1994. “He was smooth and always spoke with great intensity, but it was never contrived.”

Nowhere was this more evident than at the convention, where the 61-year-old wowed the crowd—and presidential nominee Richard Nixon. “If we in America … are to prove worthy of this most terrible testing in our Nation’s life,” said Judd in closing, “we must resolve with Lincoln at Gettysburg, ‘that, under God, this Nation shall have a new birth of freedom.’

“And now let us get to work!

To save freedom!

Freedom everywhere!”