Remarks at the Democratic National Congressional Committee Dinner

It is a very great privilege for me to be invited here tonight. I appreciate it most highly. I want to say that your chairman of the committee, who carried on the campaign for the organization, did a remarkable job, and I will say also that Bill Boyle was extremely cooperative with them. I think I know something about it.

You know, I wear a lot of hats. First, I am President and chief executive of the greatest Republic in the world, and I wish I could fill that job as it ought to be filled.

Then I am the head of the Democratic Party, as long as I am President. And your chairman, Bill Boyle, and Clint Anderson over in the Senate, are the organization which makes it possible for Democrats to come into the Congress.

Then I have another duty. I am the social chief of state. I have to entertain all the visiting firemen, give them dinners, listen to their wants, just the same as I have to listen to the wants of Congressmen and Senators, and have to say no sometimes and make them like it--which is really a job.

And, I have got another job, which is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.

And never a day goes by that in all four of those classifications I don't have to act. And there's a sign on my desk which says, "The Buck Stops Here."

But, to tell you the truth, I enjoy the associations that I have. Sometimes I have to make terrible decisions. I try to make those decisions after prayerful consideration, and always hope that those decisions, in the long run, will be the correct ones.

If they are not, I am not ashamed to say that we will change that decision and see if we can't find the right answer. That is as important in a public official as it is to try to do the job correctly. If he is human, he will make mistakes. If a man doesn't make mistakes, he doesn't do a thing, anyway. The man who does things is bound to make a few mistakes.

Yesterday I had a most pleasant duty to perform. I helped the Speaker of the House celebrate his "coming-of-age" as the longest termed Speaker that the House of Representatives ever had.¹ Don't let him tell you that he is 87 years old, because he's not. I know he is just as young as any of you.

It was a pleasure to present him with a gavel from wood that was put into the reconstruction of the White House in 1817, after the British burned it. We had to take all that out of the White House, and we have now an inside of the White House that is-unless they drop an atomic bomb on it-going to stand there for the next thousand years, I hope--and I am sure it will, for it will be the symbol of liberty that it will stand for.

Now, last night I was invited to a dinner with the Texas delegation. Sam Rayburn gave the dinner. And I don't think I ever saw so large a number of good-looking wives of Congressmen and Senators as were at that dinner. And you should have seen Sam strut his stuff!

He had two Kentuckians and a Missourian there, to help him celebrate. And the two Kentuckians had served in the Congress-one of the Kentuckians had served in the Senate. And they were reminiscing how they came to the House of Representatives-that is, the two Kentuckians and the Speaker-and it seems that one of those "amateur" Congressmen long ago is now the Chief Justice of the United States, and the third one is sitting right there--the Speaker.

What I am trying to bring home to you gentlemen who have just come into this great organization--the greatest legislative body in the world today and in the history of the world--is that you never can tell what is going to happen to you.

And I want to tell you gentlemen who are veterans here that you had better be nice to these young fellows, because you never can tell what will happen to them. I told a bunch of bankers the other night that Josh Billings had a saying that I think is apropos of the treatment of new Members of Congress. He said that it is always well to be nice to your poor relations, because they might suddenly become rich some day, and it would be hard to explain, if you hadn't been nice to them.

So you had better be nice to these young Congressmen. One of them may be Speaker some day, one of them may be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court--maybe Vice President.

I was an "amateur" Senator once. And I was, at the bankers dinner, bringing home the fact that there had been a couple of Senators and two or three people outside the Senate who had been extremely nice to the junior Senator from Missouri when he didn't know anybody, and he was standing by that pillar that you were talking about, Sam. And well, I don't know, the junior Senator from Missouri didn't become suddenly rich, but he became suddenly very popular after the election of 1948.

I hope that all you young men who are coming in now will remember that it is work that counts. You may believe, sometimes, that you are not accomplishing much. You may think that you are only one out of 435. I remember I thought I was one out of 96, and a mighty small one out of that 96. But hard work and application to the job for which you came here, and the fact that you belong to the great party of the United States, will someday reward you. You can't help but come to it, because there are so few people who like to work. Nearly everybody wants somebody else to do the job. I am speaking from experience, because I worked like a dog in the Senate, and look at the trouble it got me into!

You don't have to take that advice--and I would advise you not to, if you are going to try to get these four jobs that I hold-I would divide any one of them up, if I could, but I can't pass those jobs around.

There is one thing about this job, it has no future to it.

Every young man wants something to look forward to.

Again, I can't say to you how much I appreciate the privilege of being here tonight, and finding out what an orator John McCormack is, and what a great adviser Sam Rayburn is, and what a great chairman I have in the Democratic Committee.

I tell you--I have learned a lot of things here tonight! I didn't know George Allen ever did any work, but I find out he has been working. I hope that when the next occasion for this meeting comes about, that there will be so many new Democrats in the House of Representatives that this room won't hold them.