Remarks in Atlantic City at a Dinner of the New Jersey State Democratic Committee

Governor Hughes, my good friends, your fellow Governors Peabody and Carvel and my old friend, Bob Meyner, and my nominator, Dave Lawrence:

One of the privileges of speaking at a Democratic dinner is to be able to tell everyone in the hall how much you remember the times when you were where they are and somebody else is where you are. I want each person who is here tonight to know how grateful John Bailey, Margaret Price, and Lady Bird and I are for the sacrifice that you made, first, to pay $too to come here and, second, to come here and endure us all. This is what makes the Democratic Party the greatest living American party.

I am happy to have seen my old friend, Mayor John Kenny, David Wilentz, and Thelma Sharp, all of whom I knew back when.

I remember one time when Mr. Rayburn was asked why he thought his delegation was the best delegation in Congress and the most influential. He said, "We have a very simple formula in our State."

I was reminded of that formula tonight when your brilliant young Senator Pete Williams was presenting the guests and I heard him introduce the congressional delegation from New Jersey.

Mr. Rayburn's formula was this: "We pick 'em young, we pick 'em honest, we send 'em there, and we keep 'em there."

So, while you do not need any outside advice, you did invite me to come down here, and one of the prerogatives of a speaker is to give advice. I want to say to the great State of New Jersey: you picked them young, you picked them honest, you sent them there--now keep them there.

No one supports our program or helps us more than Pete Williams in the Senate and Pete Rodino in the House. Sometimes I think I have to help New Jersey more than New Jersey helps me, but when the roll is called, you always find New Jersey standing up there where they ought to be.

So, I want to thank you good people for sending Frank Thompson, Charles Joelson, Joe Minish, and Neil Gallagher--incidentally, I got in a little lobbying with Neil this afternoon on the helicopter, and I will have to check him next week, but I think he is going to be all right, from our conversation; he is one of our most valuable members of the foreign Affairs Committee--and Congressmen Dominick Daniels and ward Patten.

Now I know that these men have already earned your affection and your support which you will continue to give them, so their problems are going to be minor.

But the other prerogative a Speaker has is to ask you to send us some more help, and we need all the help we can get to fight those Republicans.

We need William Prochacci.

We need Thomas McGrath.

We need James Howard.

We need Eugene Friedman.

We need Richard Traynor.

We need Edward Ihnen.

We need Henry Helstoski.

We need Paul Krebs.

We ask all of you to get out between now and November and do everything you can to send them to Washington.

We meet in an historic hall tonight. In this very spot will be chosen an American leader for 1965, a 'person who symbolizes the American dream. I am sad that it becomes my duty to announce to this audience tonight that that person will not be me. It will be Miss America of 1965!

I don't want to be partisan. I don't want to be political. I am President. I haven't had much political experience, but I am President of all the people, Democrats and Republicans. Therefore, I just want to say that I hope that whatever candidate of whatever party is chosen in this hall will be successful next November.

I am proud to be a member of a party that may have turned off the lights in the White House--but has turned on the lights of hope all across America.

The past 3½ years have been a time of promises that were kept, pledges that were fulfilled, projects that were begun.

In the campaign of 1960 we were led by a valiant and visionary leader, a man who has tragically passed from our presence but will never pass from our hearts--John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts, of America, of the free world.

In 1960 he came to Jersey City and pledged, "This country is about to begin a great march forward."

America is on the march, and I am happy to say that the people of New Jersey are marching with us.

The last 6 months have been busy days on that march. We have passed 10 appropriation bills. We have passed three of the best education bills ever passed by any Congress. We have passed the largest tax cut in peacetime history, and we have passed through the House the strongest civil rights bill in a hundred years.

We have turned back the spiral of spending. We have reduced the budget deficit from $10 billion to $4.5 billion--or cut it in half.

We have successfully settled a 5-year-old railroad strike which threatened to disrupt the economy of the entire Nation.

And in my spare time I visited 13 States in the last 13 days.

We are just now completing the first peacetime administration in a hundred years that has not had a setback or a recession. We are carrying forward the strongest economic expansion in peacetime that has ever been carried on in the history of America.

Now if prosperity and if having jobs at good wages mean anything to you, don't you forget that, come next November. If you want more of the same and even better, then send us Pete Williams, Pete Rodino, and all the members of the delegation, plus those candidates whose names I called, to help us get that job done.

We have made the largest tax cut in American history. The withholding rate has gone from 18 percent down to 14 percent, and we are leaving in the pants pockets of our men and in the purses of our ladies $25 million every day that formerly went to Washington before we passed this bill. The cut will add $116 million to Governor Hughes' State and local revenues. It will create 80,000 more jobs for American workers, a good many of whom are in the State of New Jersey.

There were those in 1960 who said that America was tired and worn out, and that it couldn't do any better, that we were doing well enough with the status quo. They thought we had lost our vitality, that our economy had reached its peak. But the record--and Al Smith used to say, "Let's look at the record"--the record of the past 3 1/2 years has shown the skeptics and the doubters, the weak of will and the faint of heart, that the victories of our future are limited only by the vision of our present.

So, tonight, here in the great State of New Jersey, led by that courageous, fighting Governor Dick Hughes, I pledge you and I promise you that we will attack, head on, three of the most troubling enemies of humanity--the enemies of idleness and ignorance and the infirmities of age.

I am here to report, proudly, those enemies are under attack. They are failing back, and if we do not waver, they will be defeated.

Let's take first the enemy of idleness.

In Clifton, N.J., we promised "to make sure that those who want to work can find a job." Since the day that promise was made employment has risen, until last month it reached the highest seasonally adjusted figure in American history--more than 70 million people working at jobs, jobs in manufacturing that, for the first time, averaged more than $100 per week per person.

Our tax cut will create more than 2 million jobs. Our new training programs are giving hundreds of thousands new skills for new tasks.

All this we have done, and more. But we will not be satisfied until every man knows the dignity of work and every man understands the rewards of labor. There will be time for rest and praise only when we have scourged the plight of poverty from every part of the country, from the valleys of Appalachia where I have been all week, and the factory towns of New Jersey.

This is what we are going to do:

We have declared all-out war in America on poverty, and the poor are going to be helped.

We are going to bring new hope to those who have been forgotten in our rush toward prosperity. An aroused Nation--an aroused Democratic Party--will no longer let these citizens be neglected or ignored. We are providing training and education for men without skills and women without jobs. We will extend the minimum wage to helpless and unprotected workers in laundries, restaurants, and hotels.

We have cut taxes. And because we have done that, we will create millions of new jobs. And our country will continue to grow.

The second enemy is ignorance.

In Newark, N.J., we promised to bring new help to our Nation's schools. For, as H. G. Wells once wrote, "Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe."

We are now at the crossroads, the turning point between a civilization of unmatched wisdom and excellence, or the catastrophe of millions of young minds deprived of the fullness of knowledge.

It is not just a coincidence that New Jersey ranks sixth in unemployment and tenth in those without an eighth-grade education. Ignorance breeds joblessness, while opportunity to learn creates opportunity to work.

As long as we have poor classrooms, as long as we have untrained teachers, as long as there are little children who fail to finish school, as long as there are young people who cannot afford to go to college--so long will we fall short of being a really, truly great society.

Five months ago I signed the historic Education facilities Act. This bill will build college classrooms for hundreds of thousands of students, construct community colleges and technical institutes, improve graduate schools and college libraries.

Next year New Jersey schools alone will receive more than $6 million for classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. But, as Governor Meyner and the other Governors on the platform tonight, and Dick Hughes--all know, the crisis of our schools is just beginning.

On the horizon are problems so huge that only a national effort of vast dimension can meet them. Between 1960 and 1970 there will be 5 million more children in elementary schools, 5 million more children in high school, more than 3 million more children in college--13 million more in elementary, high school, and college--and unless we act now, our educational system will crack under this pressure. We have proposed to help States and communities with funds for teachers' salaries, with emergency classroom construction, with projects to improve the quality of what is taught.

Every community has the right to run its schools as it sees fit, and nothing in our program interferes with that right. But the States, short on new revenue, burdened by new demands, laden with new taxes, need help, and they ought to get it if we are to save 13 million young people.

So take it from me tonight that this administration is determined to give knowledge to your children, and men of learning to your country.

The third enemy is infirmity of the aged. In New Brunswick, N.J., we promised an administration which "would not veto" medical care for the aged, but would "encourage it." We are fighting to pass a medical assistance bill. And we are fighting for it now. And we need some more Democratic votes, and please send them from the. State of New Jersey next November.

Nearly half the aged couples in this country have incomes of less than $200 a month. Half of those living alone have incomes of less than $80 per month. The old get sick more often, and the old stay in the hospital twice as long. When sickness strikes it wipes out their savings that they have carefully put away over a lifetime in an attempt to ease the twilight days. It often goes untreated and uncared for.

What can a Nation say to these people? Can it say, "Yes, you have given a lifetime of toil. You have helped make America great. You have produced the sons that fought and won our wars, but we no longer need you and your troubles are your own concern"?

Well, that is not the answer the Johnson administration is going to give those people. We are going to fight for medical care for the aged as long as we have breath in our bodies, until it is passed. We are going to put the energy of the Nation at the service of the most noble of God's duties--the care of the sick and the helpless.

We are proud of the promises that we have kept, and we are proud of the conquests we have won. But we do not intend to tell the American people that they "never had it so good." We will never lull them into false satisfaction or restful apathy.

For I am here to tell you tonight, as your leader, that there are many miles to be traveled and many battles to be fought before we have built a great society. It was a son of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, who said, "My clients are the children; my clients are the next generation."

Well, I am here to tell you those are my clients, too. Well do I know that they have neither voice nor vote. They do not read or even write the editorials, and they do not run our campaigns. The America they inherit will be the America that you and I build for them.

So I have come to New Jersey tonight to ask you to join with me in the fight for an America that we will be proud for them to inherit.

I want your help in passing the program now before the Congress. You need that program. The Nation needs that program, and I have come to ask you:

Will you help us pass the civil rights bill?

Will you help us pass the war on poverty bill that Frank Thompson's committee is going to report out, I hope, next week ?

Will you help us pass the medical care for the aged under social security?

Will you help us pass aid for Appalachia?

Will you help us pass a pay raise bill for our postal clerks and our postmen and our best employees in the Government?

Will you help us pass the housing bill? If you will help me with this one, I won't have to talk to Pete Rodino three times a week.

Will you help us pass an immigration bill ?

Will you help us pass extended coverage for minimum wage so the laundry worker and the restaurant worker and the hotel worker can have the same protection that you have ?

Will you help us pass measures aiding education every chance we get to take care of those 13 million youngsters I told you about a moment ago ?

Well, if you will, I want you to call upon your neighbors, your family, your uncles, and your cousins and your aunts. I want you to talk to those of every race, of every creed, and of every color, and I want you to get their support and bring them all under the big tent with us.

I want you to call upon your Congressmen and your candidates for Congress to get behind these programs "All the Way With LBJ." I don't want to be suggestive, but I might remind you that if we don't pass these programs between now and when we meet here in convention, then we may very well be working on them between the convention and Christmas.

You didn't send us to Washington to procrastinate and to pussyfoot and to delay, and the day when you hear the promises of the professional politician and you never get the results is gone. We are going to fight to get this job done.

So let us resolve here tonight, let us resolve to stand together for these great programs. Let us resolve that the Democratic Party will be the party that worked for the people and the party that stood for the people, and the party that delivered for the people, the party that cared about the people and their future, the party that built the great society that made America the envy of the rest of the world.

If you will do your part, we will continue to lead the world.