TOWN HALL JOURNAL - SPRING 2007
In its 70 years, Town Hall Los Angeles has presented over 4500 speakers, including 126 Ambassadors,
65 Governors, 50 Senators, 26 Attorneys General,
22 Mayors, 19 Judges, 17 Presidents, 7 Nobel Prize winners, 5 Rabbis, 4 Astronauts, 2 Queens, and at least 1 Dominican Monk, as well as hundreds of Professors and dozens of Authors, Entertainers, Publishers, Physicians, Artists, Attorneys, Military Leaders and University Presidents. This timeline represents a small fraction of Town Hall’s history.
1940s
Pearl S. Buck, Author
November 1, 1943
“All of the colored races in our midst have suffered discrimination at the hands of the white majority.”
Margaret Mead, Anthropologist
October 9, 1944
“In international relations, human understanding must no more be overlooked than economics.”
Harry S. Truman, US Senator from Missouri
October 16, 1944
“There is nothing at stake now except the winning of the war and the winning of the peace. The winning of the war is the relatively easier of the two.”
Averell Harriman, US Secretary of Commerce
May 19, 1947
“Peace can be maintained if the United States sticks to its principles and goes forward in a spirit of generosity and achievement.”
Earl Warren, Governor of California
February 24, 1949
“There must be no vitriolic speeches in which personal hatreds are spewed. We must also encourage minorities by showing sportsmanship toward them.”
Dean Rusk, US Deputy Under Secretary of State
October 20, 1949
“That we seek the extension of individual liberties in other parts of the world does not mean that we crusade to recreate others in our own image.”
1950s
Nelson Rockefeller, Philanthropist
June 18, 1951
“The United States must, in cooperation with other free nations, undertake a new program of international economic development.”
Ronald Reagan, President of the Screen Actors Guild
July 16, 1951
“The biggest protection the Communist has is the American who loosely applies the Communist label to everything he dislikes and to everyone with whom he disagrees.”
Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois
September 11, 1952
“I am persuaded that forthright discussion of public questions is neither beneath the dignity of political candidates nor above the intelligence of the American people.”
Ed Sullivan, Host of “Toast of the Town”
February 3, 1954
“Television can never play the role of the parents. If parental discipline is lax and children are allowed to shirk their homework, there is nothing we in television can do about it.”
John F. Kennedy, US Senator from Massachusetts
April 13, 1956
“We fight to keep the world free from Communist imperialism, but in doing so we are hampered by being closely linked with Western imperialism."
1960s
Hubert Humphrey, US Senator from Minnesota
February 10, 1960
“It is high time that government ceased to be the mere policeman of our national economy.”
Barry Goldwater, US Senator from Arizona
September 22, 1960
“The most important single domestic problem is how to maintain a balanced budget and a stable value for the dollar.”
Robert F. Kennedy, US Attorney General
March 24, 1962
“It is not just the physical harm and financial loss that the criminal element inflicts on this nation...but what the racketeers and hoodlums are doing to our moral fiber.”
Richard Nixon, Author
April 24, 1962
“Good institutions are no guarantee of good government, but bad ones can impose an impenetrable barrier.”
Thurgood Marshall, Civil Rights Attorney
April 23, 1966
“We must seek the removal of all barriers in American life, whether racial, financial, or both.”
Eugene McCarthy, US Senator from Minnesota
August 23, 1967
“We felt [Congress] had good reasons for supervising the CIA, since it now had become a force in determining policy in the State Department, and since it had become an executive arm of the Administration in the conduct of foreign policy.”
1970s
Jerry Brown, Attorney
February 10, 1970
“The task before both old and young Americans is the same: to preserve the worthwhile traditions of our country while helping society to change for the better.”
Willie Brown, California State Assemblyman
September 21, 1971
“There are no policies, no strategies, no guidelines in which our allegedly self-governing people have had a role in formulating.”
Edmund Muskie, US Senator from Maine
June 16, 1972
“We cannot afford wasteful defense spending for weapons systems we do not need.”
Pat Brown, Chairman, California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance
October 2, 1973
“Many condemn growth and the technology it depends upon as being responsible for the complex of problems we now face: urban sprawl, overcrowding, and environmental pollution.”
Pete Wilson, Mayor of San Diego
January 29, 1974
“Most of what is wrong with government today can be cured by bringing to it management, crisis prevention, and credibility.”
Ray Bradbury, Author
February 20, 1979
“There is only one working revolution in the world and Americans have been in charge of it for the past 200 years.”
1980s
William Webster,Director, US Federal Bureau of Investigation
February 5, 1980
“We take every civil rights case seriously, no matter how unpopular or unsympathetic the major actors are.”
William H. Webster, Director, US Central Intelligence Agency
March 30, 1989
“It is ironic that at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union have agreed to eliminate a whole class of weapons with the INF Treaty, Third World nations are building up their own arsenals.”
Robert MacNeil, Executive Editor and Co-anchor, The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour
August 3, 1989
“The ways in which the media and the press are thought to be unfair are obvious to any aggrieved citizen subjected to scrutiny by the media.”
Shimon Peres, Vice-Premier of Israel
September 19, 1989
“We are endangering the lives of young people, and it is totally unnecessary. War leads nowhere in the Middle East.”
J. Danforth Quayle, Vice President of the United States
October 17, 1989
“Our future depends on our management of international challenges, like security, trade and democracy.”
William S. Sessions, Director, US Federal Bureau of Investigation
August 29, 1989
“Incidents of violent crime in this country have increased tremendously over the past 10 years.”
Kathleen Brown, Attorney
December 5, 1989
“I fear that elected officials over the last 10 or 15 years since Prop. 13 have been afraid to tell the public that they have to pay for what they get.”
1990s
Colin Powell, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff
March 23, 1990
“Superpower status imposes responsibilities on us. Our outlook must remain global and it must encompass the strong alliances that are critical to the future peace of the world.”
Ross Perot, Chairman, Perot Systems Corporation
November 15, 1990
“I am deeply concerned that the productive, hard-working, good citizens of this country are becoming disillusioned and cynical.”
Gore Vidal, Author and Commentator
January 15, 1991
“We lost the American republic 40 years ago and now live in a National Security State without representative government of any kind.”
Benazir Bhutto, National Assembly Opposition Leader, Pakistan
January 29, 1991
“On December 2, 1988, I became Prime Minister of Pakistan, the first woman to ever lead a Muslim nation.”
Margaret Thatcher, Baroness
March 27, 1993
“Let us forever learn that protectionism led to inefficiency and to a loss of and not an increase in jobs.”
Madeleine Albright, United Nations Permanent Representative
April 1, 1993
“Either we confront head-on the racial problems at home and the ethnic divisions abroad, or we will slide further into crises that will have no end.”
Henry Kissinger, Founder, Kissinger Associates
July 19, 1993
“We run the constant danger of oscillating between isolationism and overextension, of withdrawing from the world and believing we can solve every problem by ourselves on the basis of the American model.”
2000s
Sumner Redstone, Chairman, President & CEO of Viacom, Inc.
January 27, 2000
“When the options for leisure time are growing exponentially, you need an effective strategy to combat the fragmentation of audiences.”
George Tenet, Director, US Central Intelligence Agency
December 7, 2000
“Today, Americans must recognize that ours is a world without front lines, that the continental United States...is itself susceptible to attack.”
Warren Christopher, Senior Partner,
O’Melveny & Myers LLP
March 6, 2001
“What happened in Florida...that first weekend, the Bush administration tried to move into federal court to try to stop the hand count.”
Vicente Fox Quesada, President of Mexico
March 22, 2001
“We must close the gap between the average incomes of the United States and Canada and that of Mexico.”
Condoleezza Rice, US National Security Advisor
June 17, 2003
“Iraq’s transition from dictatorship to democracy is proving every bit as challenging as we had imagined.”
Russ Feingold, US Senator from Wisconsin
August 23, 2005
“National security is, in my judgment, the top priority of all Americans at this time.”
Chuck Hagel, US Senator from Nebraska
January 11, 2006
“In the end, it will be the Iraqi people that will have to make the difficult choices, essentially whether they want a unified Iraq.”
Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas
April 19, 2006
“First of all, there’s no doubt that the [Medicare] bill that’s in place right now was written by drug and insurance companies.”
Thanks to Town Hall Archivist Vejune Baltrusaitis for additional research
