Remarks to Congressional Medal of Honor Winners

Gentlemen:

It is truly a privilege to have this opportunity of greeting you this morning. This I feel very deeply. And if you people have the time to spare, as I finish expressing a thought or two that I would like to, I should like to stand over here in the corner, and as each of you goes by, shake hands with you. I think the Vice President would also like to stand with me to do that. I think a personal greeting to each of you would be something that would help me along over a lot of rough spots as they occur in my life that is so different than that which so many of you were living a few years back--in the war days.

Each of you--and of course as a body collectively--occupies a very special place in the admiration and in the affections and respect of America. You have offered on the field of battle the very most that can be offered in defense of those ideals and those principles on which America stands.

That in your case you were fortunate enough to be able to be here today seems sometimes unusual. One cannot read the Citations of the Medal of Honor men without saying, "Well, the man did not come through." Some of you did, thank God.

Because you have been such great fighters, I am quite certain that all of you feel a great compulsion to be a fighter for peace. The cornerstone for fighting for peace and winning the peace is the strength of America--first of all, its spiritual strength, its determination to stand before the world as an exemplar of those ideals and principles of human dignity and freedom and liberty in which we so deeply believe.

Our economic strength is a rock that buttresses the free world and sustains it from getting overrun by atheistic communism.

Our military strength, costly though it may be, is one of the rocks today on which we must rest our hope for peace. No weakness must be allowed to appear in the American shield, whether it be spiritual, whether it be economic, or whether it be military.

The military forces are tremendously expensive. The tremendous amounts of money that we are now putting into them is represented in the costs of everything that every citizen of America does. We bear these sacrifices gladly. At the same time, no dollar must be wasted, because if we waste a dollar, we will be weakening by that much one of the other cornerstones of our defense--say, the economic strength. So we must have in our military forces real unification of purpose, real unification of organization and of direction.

That great reform is, I believe, on the threshold of accomplishment. There is already a bill reported out by the House Committee that with certain specific and important exceptions will be most satisfactory. There are three exceptions on which I hope each of you will find it within his power and within his desire to help. We need a clean-cut bill that makes it possible to have a security that is not only sound and strong but also leaves the country solvent.

Now, gentlemen, anyone who has been through the adventure of war with men such as you could find in his heart today many things that he would like to say over and above anything I have so feebly tried to express.

I think the best thing that I can do, on behalf of the United States, on behalf of the people, and of myself personally and officially, is to say Thank You--and thank a merciful Providence that you are all here.

And now, with your permission, I should like to stand over here with the Vice President to greet each of you as you leave the grounds.

Thank you.