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This is okay. Oh, yeah. Mm. Uh huh. Mhm. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. You mhm mhm. Hello. I'm Lord Charles, and I want to welcome you to this month's edition of the Lawton Child's update This month. We're going to look at history and actually see history in the making.

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We'll see how one persistent man from Florida won the highest honors his country can give and found his way into every home in the country. But first, let's consider history as it's made for the next few moments. We're going to visit with the senator from our neighbor state of Georgia, and the issue we're going to be talking about is right up front on the list of constitutional responsibilities.

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National defense. In this room, the Senate Armed Services Committee meets to discuss military authorizations. Been a lot of history. A lot of important decisions have been made in this room. Of course, a lot of those decisions are very important to Florida. We have seven major military installations.

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We have over 100 and 50,000 people, military personnel and civilian personnel connected with our defense installations. In addition to that, of course, we have a major high tech industry. In addition to that, uh, we pay a lot of the taxes that go to to pay for the defense authorization and spinning that we're talking about.

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We're very fortunate to have with us today. Senator Sam Nunn. He's the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. He's also sort of recognized as, uh, Mr Defense in the Congress. He's been a student of the military, a student of what we should be doing in our strategic defense posture.

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Uh, and because of the study that he, uh, he makes of this subject and the consideration that he gives it, uh, his advice weighs tremendously in the debates that we have. Sam, you've just spent over a week on the floor with the defense authorization bill. I know that that was a long and tiring expense, but we did get a bill, and I know we're happy to get that.

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I wanted to just start off and ask you something about, uh, the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars. You had a major amendment that kind of shapes what many of us hope will be a new course in direction. In that, why don't you discuss that a minute for us.

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Well, you're exactly right about last week. It was a very long week. We were on the floor or something like 68 hours on the overall defense bill and the Strategic Defense Initiative debate took the first two days. The thing that I think helped facilitate that debate made it a more logical debate.

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Was the fact that the committee itself on amendment that Senator Coin and I had co sponsored by one vote margin had already reduced the president's program down to a level that we thought was about the appropriate program for a robust but sensible and effective effort in that area?

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We also, most importantly, had redefined the strategic defense initiative. That's what's gotten it in so much trouble the president keeps describing as an umbrella of America. He keeps saying that it's going to render nuclear weapons obsolete, and on top of that, he says that we're going to then turn over the technology to the Soviets or sell it to them will have some sort of cooperative sharing of the highest and most classified technology in our arsenal.

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Now that's not a realistic, uh, conceptual design for a very important defense program So I think S d I has important goals. It is a program that really has a great deal of important style country, but you can't start off with that kind of concept, which makes no sense to anyone.

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We said that population defense was a possibility, but we said in our report that we felt that the main effort should be in regard to defending against Soviet missiles in the sense that we would not be vulnerable to a first strike. That means being able to protect our forces, our capability to retaliate, to survive and retaliate.

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And as long as we can survive an attack and retaliate against the Soviet Union, I don't think anyone other than a madman or a group of mad men will ever attack America. The other thing we've got to do is we've got to balance our strategic concerns with our conventional capability.

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And the committee decided to shift uh, about half a billion dollars about $500 million from the Strategic Defense Initiative into high technology work in what we call the conventional arena. And that is the non nuclear arena. We have problems in defending against missiles, no doubt about that we have problems with the Soviet large missiles, no doubt about that.

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But our biggest problems are with Soviet tanks and with Soviet artillery tubes and with some of the tremendous advantages they have on the ground and particularly in Europe and also in the Middle East. So I would say that it would be just as important for America to be able to use our technology to render tanks obsolete and probably a lot more feasible than it would be to ruin the missiles.

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Basically, we were starving off the research in the conventional arms program to provide the money for the exactly, exactly, even with the large defense build up in the last four years, the technology base. And that's where Radar came from. That's where the stealth technology came from.

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That's gone down some 14 15% in real terms. We've cut our overall conventional research and development, and S. D. I, starting at about a billion dollars, is now larger than the whole army research budget. So what we've been doing is bleeding our conventional forces in order to fund a research and development program that is important is is is not the only thing we have to worry about.

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And the ultimate irony would be if we spent so much money on trying to devise this perfect population protector and deploy that we got to the point where we didn't have enough conventional forces to do anything other than have a nuclear response to a non nuclear attack.

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Now, that would really be the ultimate irony. We would have made the world more dangerous rather than make the world safer. And I've said somewhat facetiously, but not completely that, uh, we certainly don't want to wake up in the year 2000, having spent so much money to defend against one threat, albeit an important threat, that we don't have enough conventional forces to retake Grenada if we had to.

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Another area that I know you're vitally concerned with and one in which I come in contact is the budgetary matter. We now find ourselves having to constrain some of the defense build up as we're having to constrain everything, as we have now passed Gramm, Rudman, Hollings to sort of put a gun in our head to make us get our deficit house in order to try to do something about these spiraling deficits that we keep building and the damage that we see them creating to the high dollar and the trade and everything else.

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And now we find that, uh, we don't have all of those dollars. And in our budget resolution this time, we felt like from the Senate side to get the number that was high enough that we would not injure defense. We could not do that without some new revenue.

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And when it looked like we couldn't do that in the budget resolution, we set up this contingency fund a reserve fund, as you know, and we put $3 billion in that fund and said, This is money that we think should be available for defense. Uh, we think we need it.

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But the only way that we can have that is if some funds are made available for that too short to point out to the Congress and the President that we were gonna need those funds. I understand you had a little discussion with the president in this regard.

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Uh, one if you can, uh, share that with us a little bit. Well, we did Senator Goldwater, and I believe that not just this year, but the next 3 to 4 years that if we comply with the budget resolution now, which is essentially flat spending in defense, and I understand the reason for that because of the overall fiscal picture.

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But if we do that and here we got the department defense over there, they are planning for an additional $325 billion billion dollars beyond the budget resolution. First of all, that's a very bad way of planning because it's totally out of touch with reality. And second, it's going to mean that Congress is going to have to make all of these tough decisions now.

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The contingency fund. We really need at least a portion of that fund this year to meet the outlay total without having a disruption with the personnel. And what we ask the president to do is to make a request for that contingency fund. First of all, they weren't nearly as familiar with it at the White House as I would have hoped.

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Uh, Director of the budget uh Jim Miller mentioned that they did think they might request that contingency fund, and I asked him when and he said either September January. By that time, we already halfway in the fiscal year. If it's January and in September our defense bill, which we passed Saturday night, we will already be through with that in conference.

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So it'll be too late to properly prioritize that that money. So it seems to me that the executive branch has a long way to go to to understand the realities of what's happening here in Congress as we try to meet Gramm, Rudman, Hollings, which the president also endorsed but which his budget was some 14 to $15 billion over, he did not send a budget up here in compliance with it.

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So it seems to me there's a creeping realization going on in the executive branch that Congress is serious, serious about deficit reduction. And there's been no realization at all in the Department of Defense that they're going to have to adjust that budgets accordingly. One of the ways of saving money and you've endorsed this for a long period of time is to have some most a year procurement to do not just have to procure every year, but to be able to say we're going to set the chain of spending.

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Uh, you helped with an amendment that I sponsored trying to set forward some multi year procurement. This is the way that we could really make. Our savings is not well, and I think your amendment is going to do a lot of good because what you've said in your amendment is we're about here and what we're doing in multi year, and we ought to be about here.

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And you've set some definite goals and guidelines for the department defense. And I think that we're going to come out of conference with your amendment in it because by buying more than one year at the time, we give the contractors and subcontractors a chance to plan ahead, and we are able to save a lot of money.

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Now. It's important that we only use that multi year in systems that are stable, that we know are ready to go, that we've had the operational tests and all, but we have a number of those, and I think your amendment will go a long way towards making the defense dollars go further.

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We joined together in trying to amend the so called doctrine of Posse Comitatus, so the military could be used and involved in the drug fight. It took us about three years to change that, but we were successful in that. What's your feeling now is to whether the Defense Department is is really doing as much as you and I had hoped in that regard.

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Well, it's a mixed mixed bag. I think the department defense is doing a lot more than they were before we amended Posse Comitatus and allowed them to aid domestic law enforcement. I don't think they're doing as much as they could do. The important thing is for them to build into their own routine.

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That's the exercises that it seems to me if they would simply as part of their training, say that we're going to plot and intercept all of the planes that are approaching this country that are coming in, that we don't have some flight plan on. My goodness, uh, that could be a terrorist plane as well as a plane of drugs and, uh, in the same way of plotting ships that are coming in.

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There's just so much that they can involved in their training in a world of terrorism. Actually, our military forces need to be able to detect and intercept these small planes and small ships because we may very well find over the next 20 years that that is one of the principal threats we face in terms of overt action by terrorist groups against the United States.

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So it seems to me that drugs are are threatening our national security. Uh, no doubt about that in my mind, and the military ought to participate. Now, I'd like to stop short of having them participate in arrest, because once you have the military participate and arrest, you get into how many of them do you train?

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Do your time up in court and all of that. But what we've done now, I think it's very sensible. We've got the U. S. Coast guard, uh, that are charged responsibility of having their people on Navy ships, and any time there's a rest that needs to take place, the Coast Guard can make that arrest, and they are indeed trained in law enforcement.

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That's part of that job. And again, we're putting part of the money in the defense budget to provide for those coast cost Russian, Uh, and we will have also building some planes and uh, other mechanisms for Customs service trying to assist them to. So we've got to do a lot more on the enforcement.

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And But I'm delighted that you and Senator Biden co chair and our legislative thrust in the Senate on drugs because I think we've got to not only go after the supply side and continue to improve that we've got to do an awful lot about education and demand.

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I think the American public and the parents and the young people themselves have to understand what drugs are doing to our culture and the very severe threat the drugs now posed to our national security into our economy. Well, I certainly agree with their 100% and I thank you very much for being with us today, and I'm I'm glad that, uh, that you have completed the bill.

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I know that the next task will be going to conference and putting together the complete legislative package for that bill in the conference. The debate on the defense authorization bill is one of the most important the Senate holds. Every year, Senator done did a top notch job, but this year's debate also marked the last time Senator Barry Goldwater would manage the defense bill.

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He's retiring this year, one of the Senate's most respected elder statesman. As the debate came to a close, the Senate rose to give Senator Goldwater and Ovation for a job well done. And a career of service to our nation certainly will miss his sometimes blunt but always always honest handling of some of the toughest issues we face.

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In a moment, we'll be back to look at some very cold and very hard facts about Florida history. There was this guy, a nationally known sports hero, and then I got busted as a result of my lust for cocaine. I was totally out of control and I didn't even realize it.

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That's what's crazy about cocaine. I had a beautiful family, a big house in the suburbs, everything I wanted. Then I got into cocaine and I almost lost it all. I was crazy from cocaine. I couldn't live without it. That wasn't me. It was somebody else. It's a lie that cocaine is not addictive.

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I didn't choose to be an addict quitting cocaine. One night, my heart freaked out. I thought I was going to die. I risked my health, jail and the people who love me. Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about because you're taking the exact same ride.

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Anyone tells you cocaine is not addictive. They lie cocaine. The big lie. Call 1 806 6 to help the verb Mhm. The very sure lift. Tell little this is what it's like to be functionally illiterate, unable to read a job application, the street sign or a bedtime story to a child.

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Luck. There are 27 million Americans like this. 27 million, and we could help them. But we need your help. So called the Coalition for Literacy. At this number and volunteer, the only degree you need is a degree of caring. I think I can mhm. I think I can.

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I think I can. When I spoke a few moments ago about the cold, hard facts, this is what I was talking about. Ice. It's something we all take for granted. But back in the middle of the last century, anyone who Florida who wanted a glass of ice water had to go to New England to get it.

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Today, the ice is as close as your kitchen man who made it all possible, was a Floridian. He came up with the idea nearly 150 years ago, and people were suspicious, especially since our part of the country was known more for alligators in ice. One New York writer even went so far as to say, a crank down in Florida thinks he can make ice as good as God Almighty.

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Well, we had the last lap. We're in Statuary Hall, where the House of Representatives met during the early years of the Republic. Today, this hall is filled with statues of famous Americans. Each state is entitled to place two statues in the capital. Florida honors Dr John Gorrie this way.

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His statue was dedicated on April 30th, 1914. One of the speakers that day praised Dr Gory for an invention that was a boon to humanity and a blessing to mankind. Dr. Gauri was a medical doctor. He was born in South Carolina and educated in New York before he moved to Appalachia Cola in the Florida Panhandle.

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He was elected to the City Council and was later mayor of Appalachia Cola. But his first loyalty was to medicine And at that time in the 19 in the 18 thirties, malaria and yellow fever were rapid along the Gulf Coast. Of course, Dr Gory had no way of knowing the connection between the mosquito and malaria, but he understood that cooler temperatures made his patients more comfortable.

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His concern and dedication not only earned Dr Gloria placed in Statuary Hall, it brought him recognition here in the American History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. As he searched for better ways to keep room temperatures lower, he rigged up a device with ice in a bucket.

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He hung it from the ceiling, and he pumped air across it through a pipe. It worked well enough, except for two problems. One was what to do when he ran out of ice, but the second was that the pipe kept getting clogged up, stopping the airflow.

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When Gauri looked inside the pipe, he found out what the problem was. Ice It was forming inside the pipe and choking off the air. That gave Dr Gory an idea. If Isis could happen by accident, maybe it could be made by design. That's what led him to US patent number 8080 the gory ice making machine.

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You know, it's impossible to overstate how much Dr Gorey's work really meant to Florida today we can ship are fresh fruit and vegetables anywhere in the country and refrigerated carriers in any season of the year. We can freeze those products and put them on America's dinner tables.

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Each of these machines on display at the Smithsonian have one thing in common. They're all at least the indirect offspring of Dr Gorey's work. While his early work amounted to a genuine breakthrough, he was never able to persuade enough investors to put his own machine into large scale commercial operation.

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In 18 55 at the age of 52 Dr Gory died a sad and disappointed man. He never knew that he was to be remembered as the inventor of the mechanical refrigeration and as the grandfather of air conditioning, Dr John Gorrie, a man from Appalachia Cola who made a real difference in the American way of life.

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Oh yes, the name of Florida's other famous son with a statue in the U. S. Capitol building. He's Kirby Smith, an outstanding Confederate general called the very soul of honor by his opponents in combat. General Smith was wounded at the Battle of Manassas, not far from Washington.

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He was the last Confederate general to have his troops lay down their arms more than a month after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. So General Smith joins Dr John Gorrie in America's Hall of Heroes. You know, time really gets away from us. Summer's ending school started, and before you know it, Election Day will be here.

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Don't forget you can't vote if you don't register. And in Florida, the deadline for voter registration is October the fourth. I had an interesting time in Pensacola recently talking with and presenting awards to some young people in recognition for their work registering new voters. The young people in a program of the Escambia County League of Women voters made a concerted effort to register every 18 year old student in their high school.

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Ernest Ward, High School of all on Hill, won first place by registering 96.4% of its eligible students. We talked in Pensacola about what I believe is the most important office, the most important responsibility in America. Think that George Washington was asked at one time Uh, was it going to be hard for him to give up the emoluments of being president of the United States and to step down.

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And he said, The way I see it, I am giving up one role of being a president, which is somewhat a burden. But he says, I'm going to take on the role of being citizens, and he said That's one of the highest callings that this country has.

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He went on to say that that was one of the reasons that we fought a war for independence, Uh, with England about because we wanted to enjoy the role of citizen. We wanted to enjoy that role of self determination, being able to be the ones as individual citizens who petition our government, who elect our representatives who make our voices heard as to what's going to happen in this government.

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The whole thesis, a rationale upon which our form of government works is the majority of people registered, able to vote and properly informed will make the right decision. Well, that takes a couple of things. One it takes that you're going to have the majority, and in many instances now, if you look and see how many people are voting in elections.

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You see, sometimes, uh, only 20% of the people are bothering to go vote. And if you look and see how many are registered, uh, maybe 30 or 40% of the people are registered, So you're not going to have that majority of the people making decision. You're having smaller and smaller numbers.

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Maybe then you lose the rationale upon which we say this self government works if you're going to have an elite group or just a very small group, Uh, so we have to have that majority. And that's why again, I congratulate uh, you, uh, for the efforts and getting people registered.

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Yes. At Ernest Ward High School, they registered 96.4% of the eligible students to vote. I wish that example could somehow spread across our state, where only 63% of those eligible are now registered. Don't you forget the deadline for registration? It's October the fourth. I hope youll register if you have it already.

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Clearly, the mail that I'm receiving shows that people in our community care and take an active interest in public affairs. A lot of the mail I received this month deals with the Contra issue. Here's a letter from a woman in Jacksonville Dear Senator Charles, Please vote for more money for the Contras in Nicaragua.

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It's important that America continue to show the Russians will not put up with their attempts to take over every small country. This has been one of the most perplexing issues that we have had to deal with. Feelings run very strong on both sides. We know on the one hand that we can't allow Russia through Cuba to put together a satellite state Marxist government right in our backyard and have that Marxist government export revolution into all of the other countries.

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Nicaragua right now is training revolutionaries and sending them into Costa Rica into Guatemala and Honduras. There, the command center for all of the guerilla activity in El Salvador. We just can't have that happen. On the other hand, there's been some problems with the Contras because they're not one unified force there.

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At least three and part of those are made up with some of the old National Guard from the same ocean regime, so they're not the best guys in the world, and in some instances, We don't like everything that they do. What are we left with? Do we sort of pull out of their entirely and allow the Marxist to totally consolidate their regime?

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Or do we say we've got to get the Contras working more in concert with each other? We've got to see that they clean up their act, but at the same time, we've got to bring some pressure on the Sandinistas to try to get them to the conference table in the Contra door process.

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That's the process in which the other democratic countries around there are trying to have a negotiated settlement that will open up political freedom, freedom of press freedom of religion and stop the exporting of revolution to the other countries. I voted for the Contra aid because I feel it's necessary to have some resistance to the Sandinistas and some pressure to try to bring them to the negotiating table.

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We'll see in the days ahead how that works out. Here's a letter from a man in Orlando there, Senator Chows. In the last couple of years, I've heard a lot about the terrible trouble that countries like Mexico and Brazil are in because of their huge international debts.

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Then the other day I heard on the news that the United States had passed all of these countries as the world's largest debtor and that by the end of this year will be over $200 billion in hock to foreigners. How in the world did we end up in this situation?

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Are we going to end up like those other countries in the hole with no way to pay our bills? Well, if we don't do something, we will end up because in three years we have gone from the country with the largest surplus, uh, in international payments to the country with the largest debt.

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We passed Brazil. We've passed Mexico. We passed Argentina. How did this happen? It's basically because of what happened in our balance of trade. Our dollar became so high because of our interest rates, which are because of our deficit, that our goods are so expensive that the other countries won't buy them.

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And yet their goods are such a bargain that our people keep buying them. So we see this balance of trade, which last year was about 100 and $50 billion this year is estimated to be a negative balance of over 100 and $78 billion. That's money that has to be made up.

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How is it made up? It will be made up by a lower standard of living in this country in a future time. How do we turn it around? Well, first, I think we have to get our fiscal house in order. That means that we have to get to a balance, Uh, in our budget, that means then our interest rates could come down, our dollar could come down, we could be competitive and we could trade.

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On the other hand, we've got to do something on the playing field of trade to to see that countries play by the same rules. Right now, our country is the freest country for other countries to send their goods to, and yet we have trouble as we try to trade with Japan and Western Europe with many of our goods.

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I think it's time that we started playing hardball with those countries and told them unless they open up their markets to us, we will close the United States market, which is the world's greatest market. Well, I'm afraid that's all we have time for now. I hope you'll join us again soon.

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On another Lawton child's update. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Okay. Can can mhm you. You okay? Mhm.