Almost 75 years ago, the junior Republican Senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, delivered a speech from her heart about a crisis then facing our country: a crisis not arising from a foreign adversary, but from within. A crisis that threatened the values and ideals at the base of the American democratic experiment. Her ‘Declaration of Conscience’ turned out to be one of the most important speeches of the 20th Century and defined Smith as a person of extraordinary courage and principle.Reflecting back on the speech, she later told me that she was so nervous about the speech—this was the height





























