Editing 77-24-A4 (section)

=== Transcript ===
Visa, visa, who gets the visa? The visa to enter the United States as a visitor, apparently very few of our friends. I'll be right back.

Recently I commented on some strange decisions by our State Department with regard to who could and could not get a visa to enter the United States. A black leader of the guerrillas terrorizing Rhodesia gets a visa, but two black leaders of major tribes in Rhodesia who were opposed to a communist takeover are refused. It's hard not to be paranoid when there seems to be a leniency toward those who lean toward the Soviet Bloc.

Now we add an even stranger case than the ones I mentioned in earlier broadcasts. Wilfred Burchette is an Australian journalist and certainly that would be no reason to keep him out of our country. He has authored a book about the Vietnam War which I'm sure he'll be promoting as he crisscrosses our country on a speaking tour, and even though his book tells why we were wrong and the communists were right, that shouldn't keep him out or prevent his speaking to student groups, which he'll be doing. But there are other facets to Mr. Burchette which do call for at least a raised eyebrow.

He was charged with trying to force American prisoners of war in the Korean conflict to confess that they had used germ warfare. In the Vietnamese War, it was reported that he was a leading propagandist for North Vietnam. Later he sued an Australian publisher for libel over such charges. Several American and British prisoners of war went to Australia and testified on behalf of the publisher. The court found in favor of the publisher and ordered Burchette to pay $100,000 in costs.

There's more. A defector from the Soviet Union, a former KGB agent, Yuri Kratkov, told a U.S. Senate internal security Subcommittee that Burchette was employed by the KGB, that he served as a spy and a propagandist. An earlier trip to this country was hastily cancelled according to press reports when it became known the Senate Subcommittee intended to subpoena him for questioning. Now, maybe the State Department will claim the visa was granted to avoid the problems created by Senator Mcgovern's amendment to the department's appropriation bill. The amendment declares that in order to refuse a visa, the State Department must get approval from the Speaker of the House and the Chairman of the Senate committee on Foreign Relations.

This hasn't kept them from refusing visas to such applicants as the Panamanian exile to Sweden who wanted to join his American wife and children. You'll remember him as the man who burned himself to death in front of the American Embassy in Stockholm. Now you may say Communist or no Communist, Berchette has the right to express his views and our students have a right to hear them. Well I agree completely, so long as our students get to hear all kinds of views and those expressing the views identify themselves and don't pretend to be something else.

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.


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