Remarks at Battery Park, Burlington, Vermont

Governor Hoff, Mrs. Hoff:

For the last 2 days we have visited in this wonderful part of our country. We started out yesterday in Buffalo. We talked about our problems of pollution and how we can have clean water and pure water, and clean air and fresh air.

Then we moved down to Syracuse. We talked about the future of our cities and the people that will make up a large part of the population of this, the greatest Nation in the world.

Last evening we went to Ellenville, New York. We talked about the health of our citizens, and the soundness of their bodies, and the education of their minds, and what a job was ahead of us in building their health, and not only taking care of Medicare but taking care of all the health problems of this great United States.

This morning we visited with the young people at the University of Rhode Island. We talked about not only our rights as American citizens, but our responsibilities as American citizens.

Today in company with a great group, including the Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. McIntyre, we had lunch in New Hampshire and discussed our problems throughout the world with particular emphasis in Vietnam.

Now I am privileged to come here. The real reason I am in New England was because the other night we were out on the President's boat with a group of ambassadors from many nations. And I was sitting there talking to the senior Senator from Vermont. I was recalling some of his many good works and how he had helped me when I visited Canada and tried to form a bridge and a good relationship with our neighbor in this hemisphere, and how he had gone to Mexico with me when we had problems there and helped me to solve them.

Senator Aiken reminded me that in a few days he was coming to Vermont to dedicate a project--the first project to be announced and to be constructed under the Aiken-Poage bill, a rural water project. And he reminded me that one of the first things I did as President was to make a decision involving water for Vermont.

So I said to Senator Aiken, "If we can go to Canada together and go to Mexico together, I would just like to go up to Vermont with you." And here we are.

I count it a great honor that Senator Prouty and Mrs. Prouty would come here and extend the hand of hospitality to me, and that Congressman Stafford would accompany us on this trip and point out many interesting facts that will be helpful to me.

I am particularly grateful to Mayor Cain for his warm words and his greetings to us; and to Lieutenant Governor Jack Daley; and to your Attorney General, John Connarn; and to Secretary of State Harry Cooley; and to State Treasurer Peter Hincks.

I cannot help but point out the fact--although presumably this is a nonpolitical trip, Senator Aiken, and it is made at your invitation, and they know we belong to the same party, or do we--I think I should observe to both Senator Aiken and Senator Prouty that this beautiful State of Vermont is partially administered, at least, by a good many Democratic officials whose names I have just called.

But we are here today not as Republicans or not as Democrats, we are here as Americans. And I am so pleased that Governor John Volpe of Massachusetts is with us. We have just come from the great State of New Hampshire, where we had one of our warmest welcomes and most pleasant visits. And we have with us here in Vermont Governor King of New Hampshire.

From here we go to the great State of Maine. We have with us this afternoon the chairman of the Governors' Conference, Governor John Reed of the State of Maine. Mrs. Johnson and I had the pleasure of having Governor Reed and a number of his fellow Governors visit us in our home at the ranch last year after a trip he made to Southeast Asia. I am glad we are going to have a chance to visit in his State with him, and with Senator Smith and some of the distinguished public servants in that State. A little later this evening Senator Muskie and Mrs. Muskie are joining us there.

And I want to present the very able Senator from New Hampshire, and Mrs. McIntyre.

We have with us Representative Hathaway of Maine, and Mrs. Hathaway; and Representative Stanley Tupper of Maine.

I want to present a young lady whom I have known for many years in the House and Senate and one of my very dearest friends, Senator Margaret Smith of Maine.

We left out our dear friend Senator Pell of the State of Rhode Island. He has just been our host.

One of my first acts 2 1/2 years ago was to approve funds to reimburse the National Guard for hauling water from Lake Champlain to the farms of Vermont. I will probably never have to sign another law like that one because last October I took real pride in signing a law known as the Aiken-Poage act.

We have just returned, a few moments ago, from flying over the area in Addison County that will have been served by the first water system to ever be developed under that bill. It has been an exciting experience to see in person what I have heard your distinguished Senator, George Aiken, talk about so long. But I don't want you to think that I came up here just to stop George Aiken from buttonholing me every time he sees me and asking me how much we are going to fund in the waterworks. I have seen it today. I like what I have seen because I believe that we must not stand by and watch our rural communities wither and die for lack of water.

The Tri-County Water System is your answer, and it is ours, to the needs of rural people who live in rural America. They deserve and they will have a full life and all the help that we can give them.

This means not only good water systems like this one, but it means a far-ranging program of conservation to save our countryside. And I predict that someday the Rural Water Act will be as well known as the Rural Electrification Act, and it will bring as many blessings to the countryside as rural electrification has brought to our rural people since it was first created by Executive order back in the year of 1935.

Thirty years ago, when I first came to the Congress, we started to build an America where men and women and children could earn enough to own a car and to enjoy a vacation and to travel where they pleased. I do not think that we should apologize here this afternoon for the fact that many Americans are enjoying precisely that kind of a vacation this summer.

We do not need to apologize that the number of campers and boaters and travelers is gaining every day in this country. For this is good news to those of us who have worked to make this possible. But as more Americans are able to enjoy the great outdoors, we must work even harder to preserve something for them to enjoy.

As I look out over Lake Champlain, I recall that only yesterday I visited another lake that aroused an entirely different reaction in me. That emotion was disappointment yesterday, for Lake Erie is polluted. It has become a casualty of heedless progress in this country.

Lake Erie is not alone either. As I flew to New England I saw other areas that have been stained. I saw smog hanging over our cities, and our rivers where they have been abandoned by man and abandoned by fish alike. There were rusting skeletons of discarded automobiles that littered our countryside. I saw cities that housed within their limits the slums of filth and of neglect.

And each year in America, as Mrs. Johnson likes to remind me almost every day, about 1 million acres of virgin land turns beneath the blade of a bulldozer. Highways, and shopping centers, and housing developments, and airports replace our trees and our beautiful streams and our lovely woods where we as young boys once dreamed our dreams.

These are manmade projects to build a better life for America, it is true. But too often they spread ugliness and they spread blight farther and farther across our beautiful country.

This is why, when I assumed office, I said I wanted most of all to be a peace President and to be a conservation President. Thanks to Mrs. Johnson--and thanks to the imagination, and the efforts, and the stimulation, and the inspiration of leaders like your own great Governor Phil Hoff--I have become a beautification President as well.

I have had help and I have had a lot of it. I have had the help of two of the greatest Congresses in the history of this Nation. Working together, through these Congresses, we have given the American people 48 major conservation bills in less than 2 1/2 years that I have been President.

We have set aside 145 miles of warm, sandy seashore for Americans to enjoy--not Republican seashore, not Democratic seashore, American seashore--by working together, by uniting, by putting our country before our party.

We have set aside 550,000--more than a half a million--acres added to our national park system.

We have passed the most far-reaching anti-water and -air pollution measures that have ever been considered by a legislative body.

We have constructed dams to protect our citizens from the ravages of floods--and behind those dams we have built lakes and recreation areas for boating, and for camping, and for fishing, and for swimming.

We have established a land and water conservation fund to help our States, and our counties, and our towns acquire their own recreation areas.

We have promised our motorists that their major highways will be free of unsightly billboards and will be screened from ugly junkyards.

We have passed a Wilderness Act that in the years to come will set aside more than 9 million acres of land to be maintained in their primeval condition.

Because of these efforts, it is my pleasure to make an important announcement to this wonderful audience here this afternoon. This announcement, I think, is long overdue. For the first time, America is winning the battle of conservation. Every year now, we are saving more land than we are losing.

Last year a million acres still went to new expanding urban developments, but we saved almost a million and a quarter acres of land, too. And this year, as another million acres go to urban development, we will be setting aside 1,700,000 acres in addition in local, in State, and in public areas.

A few generations ago, when the public was getting interested in conservation, Uncle Joe Cannon, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, issued one of his many ultimatums. He said: "Not one cent for scenery." And Uncle Joe meant what he said.

Well, this generation has repealed "Cannon's Law." And we have just begun to fight.

We are going to have plenty for scenery before it is over with.

These are memorable years in conservation, and they are important to every area of this Nation.

But they are very especially important to your beloved New England. The great accomplishments of Theodore Roosevelt, that great outdoors President, and Gifford Pinchot centered on the West, and for many years Americans thought of conservation as an exclusive western program.

Well, no longer is that the case. Our foremost achievements today seem to be in the densely populated sections of the Nation like the Northeast. Your cities and counties and States will acquire nearly 350,000 acres of public recreation land this year. They will acquire about 140,000 acres in the Pacific Southwest.

We are winning our fight for conservation and I think we are winning it where it counts most--where it is most accessible to most of the people.

As I look out this afternoon across Lake Champlain from this inspiring Battery Park height, from the same Battery Park originally sponsored by my good friend George Aiken, I have no trouble imagining what Rudyard Kipling felt when he called the sunset view here one of the two finest on earth. I have always held, and I am sure you have, too, a very deep respect and reverence for the truly inspiring beauty of this land of ours.

People are sailing and they are fishing and they are enjoying themselves even now on that lake. Many of you will picnic somewhere in the natural splendor of this beautiful State today before you go home tonight. All this is as it should be, and I wish I could join you. This comes naturally to many Americans, for we are a people whose national character was forged in the out of doors among just this kind of God-given splendor.

I want to pledge to you this afternoon that as long as I have a responsibility for leadership in this country, we are going to retain that splendor in America.

And now, one final word. I told you when I came to this section of the country that my trip was conceived on a boat at the suggestion of Senator Aiken. And I couldn't come all the way to Vermont without throwing four or five extra States in.

So we talked about pollution, and the problems of the cities, and Medicare, and Vietnam, and conservation, and beautification, and agriculture, and rural water systems. All of these are problems of our country. We have problems just like the peoples of the world have problems.

But along with those problems, we also have many successes. And the successes are shown out here in front of us this afternoon--the successes that I see in the countenances of these young people; the successes that I see in the wrinkles of the brows of their parents, the people who have lived here, who have worked here, who have set an example for all of America to emulate.

And I just wish that every man, and woman, and child that is privileged to be an American citizen and proud to call themselves American, could come here and see Lake Champlain, and see Battery Park, and see the kind of people that live in New England.

Yes, we have problems, but we have successes, too. We have so much to be thankful for, so much to be grateful for. And if some of us have to spend our days on problems or have to spend our days listening to those who have their complaints about problems, and hearing the martyrs and so forth, we at least should take a little time out in the evening, as the sun is setting and as we gather around the family table, to count our blessings and to thank the Good Lord that we are privileged to be Americans; that we are privileged to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave; that we are privileged to live in the country where each individual has the highest per capita income of any individual in the world, where each individual has the maximum of liberty and freedom, where his constitutional rights are protected, where we have the best housing, and the best food, and the best clothes, and the best recreation, and the best conservation.

Sure, we don't have all those things that we want. We must do better. We must have objectives, we must have goals. We must move forward. But when you look at our problems and those of the Soviet Union, when you look at our problems and those of Red China, when you look at our problems and those of Castro's Cuba, you have so much to be thankful for.

I just wish that everyone had enough money and enough time to come to New England to see your beauty, to see your open spaces, to see your beautiful hills, and mountains, and lakes, and your scenery, and your trees.

I predict that somehow, some way, the message is going to get around the country of what you have up here. And then you are going to be confronted with another problem--and that is how to get some of us back home!

Thank you very much.