With strains of "Dixie" reverberating from the organ and an enthusiastic crowd on its feet cheering, Senator Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.) took the platform at John Hancock Hall yesterday to say that "we can win the cold war" if we have the will to win.

Thurmond spoke on "Muzzling the Military," in a program sponsored by the American Institute, a patriotic anti-Communist organization. Outside the hall, on Stuart and Berkeley Streets, members of the NAACP, CORE, and the Massachusetts American Veterans' Committee protested the Senator's views on civil rights, the cold war, and military censorship in a 75-man picket line.

In his speech Thurmond charged that official Administration censors had deleted passages of military officers' speeches "in order to blunt, confuse and pervert the words of those who would inform the public just what the cold war is about."

The issue in the present controversy is not civilian control of the military, he said, but suppression of information about communism. "It is our foreign policies with which incisive statements (of military men) about communism conflict, and because of the conflict must be censored," Thurmond asserted.

He criticized the idea of State Department officials that the Soviet system can evolve and that peaceful co-existence is possible. "As an American," Thurmond declared, "I believe in winning." The audience of about 250 rose and applauded.

Explaining the need to let military men speak out, Thurmond said, "I am convinced that the American public, when informed, makes a mighty sound judgement--even if it won't believe that the leopard will change his spots."

Criticizes Kennedy

Thurmond also criticized President Kennedy for invoking executive privileges--which he termed of "dubious" legal justification--to withhold the names of individual censors who made changes in speeches.

The picketing before the speech was orderly and without incident. Most of the demonstrators were adults; a few women carried babies in their arms. They carried signs ranging from "Misguided patriots weaken America" to "Hey Strom, how do you do with the Negro vote?"

There were few passersby on the chilly Sunday afternoon, and they took little notice of the picketing. However, many of these who attended the speech reacted strongly to the presence of the demonstrators.

One woman said of the pickets that "each and every one of them is aiding and abetting the cause of international communism." Another woman knocked one of the mimeographed statements out of the hands of a startled picket, and muttered angrily, "Is that the Red stuff? Phooey on you."