Remarks in Madison Square Garden at a Rally of the Liberal Party of New York

Mr. Chairman, Governor Stevenson, General Kennedy, George Meany, Mayor Wagner, Phillip Randolph, Reverend Harrington, Dr. Costello, my fellow Americans:

I am proud to come once again before the Liberal Party of New York. In 1960 you received me with warmth and friendship. Your loyalty and your support since that hour have never wavered.

I am happy to say to you tonight that this President counts as his great friends Tim Costello, David Dubinsky, Alex Rose, and every patriotic member of the Liberal Party. I am glad, too, to be here tonight with my old friend Bob Kennedy by my side.

I have said everywhere I have spoken in New York, yesterday and today, that the need in Washington is great for more Democratic Congressmen and a Democratic Senator from the State of New York.

Bob Kennedy's wide experience in fighting crime, his demonstrated knowledge in the field of education, housing and slum clearance, national defense, will make him one of the most valuable members of the entire Senate, and the people of New York and the Nation will be the gainers. So let the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party join hands and hearts in sending to our Nation's Capital men of vision and compassion, fighting liberals who care about people.

There are those who say that the old battles are over, that the old causes are won, that the old issues are dead. They say that we no longer need the American who cares. Well, don't you believe them. The American people don't believe them and the President of the United States doesn't believe them, either.

We are still carrying on the fight to assure every American of every race and belief equal opportunity in our abundant land. And that battle isn't over yet, but together we will win it.

A hundred years ago, Abraham Lincoln led the movement in this country to abolish slavery. A hundred years ago he signed the Emancipation Proclamation--and emancipation was a proclamation. But it is not a fact and there is still much work for us to do.

As the then President led the movement to abolish slavery, the present President, with your hands and with your hearts and with your support, is going to lead the movement to abolish poverty in this country.

We are still trying to live up to the duty of a just and compassionate country, to assure a decent life for its elderly, to hold out a helping hand to the sick and the hungry, the depressed and the unemployed. And that battle isn't over yet, either, but we will win it.

I have some information for you if you are listening and interested. We are not going to kill social security or we are not going to make it voluntary. We are not going to sell TVA. We are not going to sell any other river in America. In fact, we are not even going to turn over the White House to them.

Tonight America has to face a whole new set of problems. I have summed up this challenge in my call for the Great Society.

The Great Society is not a slogan. It is an idea.

The Great Society is not something brand new. It is a dream as old as our civilization. The difference is, for the first time in man's history we really have the resources to make it possible, to make the Great Society a reality.

The Great Society is not some vague, dreamlike Utopia. The Great Society is a very clear and very definite objective, a very definite goal. It will be met by specific programs, directed at concrete problems, carried out by dedicated and determined men.

We recognize that our abundance must be extended to all of our people. But that is not the Great Society. That is simply the base on which we will build it.

We build our strength and we keep the peace. But that is not the Great Society. It is the shield behind which we build.

We did not establish freedom and we did not work for two centuries simply to pile up more money in our bank accounts, more goods in our homes, and more power in our arsenals.

We built this Nation for the people of this Nation and we will not now permit our people to be overwhelmed by our growth and our progress, wailed in by our cities and our signs.

Our brave men did not die in battle--our pioneers did not risk their lives and fortunes--so that their descendants could sit in expensive apartments with washing machines and television sets without a place to walk and touch nature, breathing poisoned air beside polluted rivers, unable to send their children to a decent school or even to a decent playground.

We cannot, we must not, and we will not sacrifice natural beauty and the sense of community, the creations of art and the joy of thought, in the rush to become bigger and stronger and more wealthy.

We will not permit ourselves to be mastered and stifled by machines and buildings and highways.

We want to grow and build and invent, but we want progress to be the servant of man and not have man become the victim of progress.

Well, that is the Great Society--concern for the quality of the life of each person in America.

Nowhere is that concern more urgent than in the American city. By 1975 we will have to shelter and sustain a new urban population equal to the entire 1960 metropolitan population of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, and Johnson City, Tex.

We will have to build at least 2 million new homes a year compared with the current rate of just a little over a million. We will have to rebuild the 7 million homes that tonight do not have running water or even decent plumbing.

We will need schools for 60 million children. We will need welfare and health facilities for 27 million people over the age of 60. We will need transportation facilities for the daily movement of 200 million people in 80 million or 90 million cars.

We will have to improve the health and the beauty of our cities. Our air and our water are being contaminated. Open spaces and parks are disappearing. Careless highways and unplanned buildings are destroying the trees and the fields which are part of our American heritage. You can't drive out of the city limits without being confronted on both sides of the road with a bunch of old, ugly, junked automobiles. And if you take away the gift of nature, you erode the finest values of the heart and mind.

More important, we want to create a sense of community, a sense of closeness to our neighbors. It is isolation and ruthlessness which help create anxiety and unrest.

We will have to help our new urban immigrants, those coming from rural America. We will have to help them adjust to the strains of urban life. By 1980 three-fourths of all Americans will be urban people. The newcomers need to learn social skills as well as trade skills.

We need to develop the regional cooperation which can give the maximum of local choice. We do not want our cities to settle into a drab uniformity, directed from a single center. Each area must be free to choose its own path of development, whether it is to join cities together or to build entire new metropolitan areas. This means experimentation with new forms of regional direction. It means developing a new set of relationships between the Federal Government and the American city.

I intend to work with your local officials and to present a series of proposals designed to help meet the challenge of urban America. These proposals will discard a piecemeal approach to individual problems and deal with the total needs of a metropolitan area.

These proposals will build on the cooperation of Government with industry, the same sort of cooperation that has built our national defense, the same sort of cooperation that has allowed us to explore the stars.

These proposals will call for design and form as well as size and numbers. They will preserve nature and they will create open spaces.

These proposals will look forward to the development of our human resources among our young and our old, our women and our suburban young people. In this way we can strike at the roots of aimlessness and of lost purpose.

The proposal will look to science and technology to help us master our problems. For housing to have a research program equal to that of most growth industries, it would have to expand its research 10 times. Yet housing is one of our most pressing needs.

These proposals will not involve the Federal Government alone. The work of our cities will require the cooperation of the State and the city, and of business and of labor, and of private institutions and of private individuals.

We must not only seek peace in the world. In order to have peace in the world, we must have peace at home, and we must try to get these groups working together.

The Federalism of the future, creative Federalism, is not just the relationship between States and Washington, but among all the institutions and Government units whose influence and problems cut across traditional jurisdictions.

The work of the American city is a challenge that is worthy of the finest traditions of American liberalism. We are never going back in the direction of the past. We are going to go, go forward. We are going to make our cities a place where men cannot only live, but where they can live the good life. We have so much to be thankful for. We have so much yet to achieve.

This has been a stimulating and exciting experience for me to be here in the great State of New York. In Buffalo and in Rochester, and all through Brooklyn, until the moon came up this evening, we saw smiling people, we saw happy faces, we saw people dedicated to democracy and the American way of life. Now and then we saw a sourpuss with a sign with a picture on it that we recognized, and I think that they were in the proper proportion all day long.

Tonight we have over 72 million people employed. Tonight they are working in manufacturing industries at an average weekly wage of about $104.

We are taking from the obsolete, archaic operations of the Federal Government funds and personnel, and closing down installations that are not usable, and we are not operating the Defense Department as another WPA. And we are taking those funds and putting them in health, education and retraining, and our poverty program.

In the month of July we had 25,000 less employees working for the Federal Government than we had July a year ago. We spent $676 million less in July and August of this year than we estimated to the Congress we would spend. We are going to get a dollar's worth of value for every dollar we spend.

We do not believe that because you are prudent you can't be progressive. We do believe definitely that we should take the leadership in health research so the days of strokes and cancer and heart disease will be like polio, a thing of the past.

We do think that we ought to strengthen and improve our social security system, and we do think that we ought to have medical care under social security, and we are going to have it.

We think that every boy and girl born under that flag has a right to all the education that he or she can take. And it will be our goal to see that there is a classroom there waiting for them with a competent, wellpaid teacher to man it.

We believe in the protection and the development of our countryside, and opening of new national parks and recreation areas, because we are going to work less hours per day and less days per week.

We believe in fair and generous profits to the investor of his capital. We believe in due recompense, even a good bonus, to the manager of that capital.

We believe in collective bargaining and a fair wage for the man that produces this wealth and utilizes these resources. I want them all to do well, because, as the President of the biggest company in this country, I get 52 percent of what is left of all they make, so we believe in encouraging people and not harassing them. We believe in incentive.

We believe that in this struggle between communism and democracy, it is not their superior numbers that will dominate the world; it is not even their superior resources in many fields. If it were, we would be fighting a losing battle. But the thing that is going to save us is our system of government, because free men can out-think and free men can out-work, and free men can out-produce slaves.

But peace at home will be of little value if an impulsive thumb moves up toward the button that can destroy 300 million people in a matter of moments. Peace at home and prosperity among our people will get us nowhere if we have a government by ultimatum, and we bluff about our bombs, and we rattle our rockets around until we get into a destructive war.

I sat with President Kennedy in the Security Council along with his distinguished brother, here this evening, and the wise and beloved Ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Stevenson. And we discussed with the admirals and their braid and the generals with their stars, and the diplomats with their great foreign service experience, what we could do about those missiles that were almost operational 90 miles from our shores.

I never knew any morning when I left my wife and daughters whether I would see them that night again or not. But I am proud to say to you that you helped America to select a man who presided over those meetings, and during all that frightening crisis he had the steadiest thumb-the steadiest thumb--the greatest heart and the coolest mind in that room.

You will see from your morning paper, or you will learn from your evening radio, that changes and uncertainties in this big world in which we live give great weight to our own need for a stable and sure and steady course, on the basis of a tested bipartisan policy.

President Truman had Arthur Vandenberg by his side when he stopped the Communists in Greece and Turkey.

I supported President Eisenhower in a bipartisan foreign policy in the Formosa Strait.

Everett Dirksen stood up and supported President Kennedy in our test ban treaty.

You can abandon this bipartisan foreign policy and let it go down the drain, and follow a dangerous adventure that leads to evils we know not of if you want to, but I don't think you are going to.

There is a seething in Africa and Asia tonight. Where our friends are strongest in Western Europe we are happy, but today there is an indication that there is a change in the Soviet Union.

The announcement that Chairman Khrushchev has been replaced may or may not be a sign of deeper turmoil or may be a sign of changes in policies to come. But for ourselves, the need is clear: that we should keep steady on our goals--that peace is the mission of the American people, and we are not about to be deterred. We will be firm, but we will be restrained. We can meet any test, but our quest is always for peace.

Our purposes and our principles are the purposes and principles of peace and freedom, as I set them forth at length only last night.¹ The text appeared in the Times this morning and I hope that each of you could read it.

The turmoil around the world will only increase the steadfastness of the American people. We must keep our eyes and our vision on the stars, but our feet--both of them--on the ground. We do not want to bury anyone anywhere, and we do not intend to be buried ourselves.

We do not know how many wars the United Nations has helped us avert, but you can't count them on both hands. We do know that the trials and tribulations and the patience that is required is much easier to 1 Item 662. give than to expend human lives. We do not intend to abolish the United Nations. Peace is our purpose; prosperity is our goal.

I said 11 months ago, after that tragic day when our beloved leader had fallen and had been taken from us that I had no time to prepare or to deliberate. In a moment I had to assume terrifying responsibilities and awesome responsibilities. I said with God's help and your prayers, I would do the best I could.

I have tried to appeal to all Americans, not on the basis of their race or their religion or how they spell their name, or what region they lived in, or whether they were capitalists, businessmen, managers, or laborers, but most of them have come and tried to unite our Nation in this trying hour.

In the last few weeks there has been a little unsettlement here and there. Some people have gotten a little upset about some things. I read in the paper from day to day where I am called everything but a good milk cow. But I get some comfort out of looking back and seeing what they said about the Father of our Country and what they said about Jackson, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

But last Friday night I looked--in my office behind those black gates that had the keys turned in them where no one can enter--I looked at a long list that President Kennedy had left me, 51 major measures: the civil rights bill, the tax bill, the library bill, three education bills, the farm bill, the wilderness bill--bills too numerous to mention. And of those 51 that he in his vision felt were essential to good government and to the people of this country, we had passed all 51 of them through the United States Senate.

Now, we didn't get Appalachia through the House. We got it through the committee and on the calendar, but some of our Republican friends got in a hurry and just wanted to go home and we couldn't get the bill up. We didn't get medical care past the House, but for the first time in history we passed it through the Senate and we are going to pass it in the House.

You people of the Liberal Party are people of vision and faith and hope. You are not people of fear or people of doubt. You have something that we need. We need your support, we need your dreams, we need your hand, we need your help, we need your heart to help us send more progressive Congressmen and Senators like Bob Kennedy to Washington.

With equal opportunity to all, with special privilege to none--with equal opportunity to all and special privilege to none--we will get this program passed if God is willing and you will help.

There is not even 3 weeks left. You wouldn't hesitate to give your life to defend your country. Yet your country is never going to need you more than on the November election day.

So please--please take the time from now until then to talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors and to try to excite and arouse their interest to the point where they will help you do what is best for your country.

You go and vote and select the men that in your judgment are best calculated to help you do what ought to be done for America. And if you do your duty as citizens and you do what is best for America, you will do what is best for yourselves.

Thank you and good night.