Remarks at a "Salute to President Johnson" Dinner in Cleveland

Mayor Locher, and your courageous and fighting United States Senator Young, whom the people of Ohio are going to return to the United States Senate not only to serve Ohio but to serve all the Nation and all the free world:

I am going to take a moment here before I start talking other matters to you to tell you that I first went to Washington in Mr. Hoover's administration. I have been there since 1931. I have worked with and for five different Presidents. I have served with more than 3,000 different men.

I cannot truthfully say tonight that I ever served with any man, Democrat or Republican or whatnot, that I thought went to Washington on a platform of doing what was wrong. They all thought they were doing the right thing. They all wanted to do the right thing. Their wives wanted them to do the right thing. Their families wanted them to do the right thing. But they didn't all see things alike.

Now, I don't know that my judgment is any better than the average fellow, but I do want you to have it and consider it, and reject it if you choose, or evaluate it if you will. It would please me a lot and would help me a great deal in my awesome responsibilities I bear.

I don't know of any man that I ever served with in the House or the Senate--and I have served 12 years in each body, and I was leader 2 years when Bob Taft was the Republican leader, I was his opposite; I was leader 8 years when President Eisenhower was the Republican President; I was the majority leader 6 years--but I don't think I ever served with any man in either House or Senate that in my heart I believed worked for the people, the average people of this country, more than Steve Young.

I am willing to recognize tradition and good families and good names, and I have great respect for the memory of the late Senator Taft, for his family. But if I have anything to say about it, I wish they would nominate those people for President or Vice President, or something else, but please don't let Ohio step in and take one of my trained, trusted helpers that is working with me every day.

I want to thank you people for lending to me Secretary and Mrs. Celebrezze. He carries a very heavy load with a smile, with intelligence, with loyalty, and is always there when you need him. You never have any doubt about his compassion for his fellow human kings.

I am glad that I am here with Congressman Mike Feighan. Mike and I have been friends for a long time. I want to put him on notice now, though, that Bill Miller and I have different views on immigration.

I realize that this is a melting pot, America is, and I never spend a lot of time checking up on how a man spells his name, because when I looked into my family tree I found out I had some Irish, some Scotch, some English, a little French, a good deal of German, and sometimes they get down in certain countries and they think "Yonnie Yohnson" has a little Swede in him.

Most of the people that have come here from all the various countries of the land have come here to help us build America. I want to see my administration and my Democratic Congress pass an immigration bill that will permit families to reunite and will give us an opportunity for some of the people to come in who can be taken in and meet with their families.

I made my recommendations to the Congress this year and the Congress didn't act on them. The first message that I send to the Congress next year, if I am President, is going to be that message, and in every message after that I am going to refer to it when I talk to the American people because I think we are entitled to have a decent and a fair immigration policy and at least have some action on it.

I am happy to be here with my old friend Charles Vanik, with whom I have worked closely in the Congress. It is good to be here with Bert Porter, State chairman, and I enjoyed seeing my longtime friend Bill Coleman again tonight. I have spent many pleasant years working with and for and under Mike DiSalle. And I salute Frank Celeste and all of my fellow Americans who are here.

I think it is important that the Democrats of Ohio get out and get to work. And every time they get ready to say something uncomplimentary about some other Democrat, remember what Mr. Rayburn said about the three most important words in the English language: "Just a minute." Just stop there and see if you hadn't just as soon fuss at a Republican as a Democrat.

Let's try to pull the Democratic Party in Ohio together. Let's get the maximum strength for all the people, because there are a lot of human beings in this State and in this Nation that are looking to us to be united.

If we are united, no force in the world can defeat Democrats in Ohio. But when we get divided and we get lazy, they come in. We all have to give a little bit, moderate our views some, temper our convictions, but we have two really important jobs to do between now and the next 25 days.

I would say first and foremost of that job is to reelect Steve Young as United States Senator. My friend, Congressman Ludd Ashley, is here, and I want to say a word about Congressmen in referring to Ludd. I think all of us ought to give him a hand, though.

The greatest service that Ohio voters can perform this year is to elect and to send to Washington the full ticket of Democratic congressional candidates. So let's work and pray and give and fight to make democracy live.

I have heard it said that the issues in this campaign were not emerging clearly. Well, they are now. The issue of our foreign affairs, of war and peace, is one issue, and it has to be bluntly stated, and I am going to be blunt: it is responsibility versus irresponsibility.

The issue of our domestic affairs is whether the whole course of American development up to this time is right or wrong. That is blunt, but it is responsibility versus irresponsibility in foreign affairs.

In domestic affairs it is whether we have been right or whether we have been wrong.

I am just going to visit with you like you were home folks and I am going to talk with you a few minutes about this domestic issue.

I don't know anyone who thinks that every decision we have made in the past years, all that time that I told you I had been in Washington, that we made as a people, I don't know anyone that thinks we have been right every time.

But I think I do know this: We have shared experiences together. We have shaped together in the past 30 years the firmest and the soundest and the most constructive program that the American people have ever formulated in all their history.

So the domestic issue is whether we are going to wipe out and throw away that program of 30 years under five Presidents. The argument to go back, to repeal the present and to veto the future--and you will remember that there is a voice in the land who says "I intend to repeal laws and not pass them"--well, I have been listening to these people talking about repealing laws, and all the bad laws we have passed. I have been listening to them for 30 years. But I haven't seen them repeal one single law in the 8 years Republicans had control under President Eisenhower.

But they tell us that that is their object, and what do they say they are against?

--They would abolish the graduated income tax.

--They would destroy the whole basis for social security by making it voluntary. At least that is what they would have done in New Hampshire. I don't know how many times it has been changed since then.

--They would sell the TVA. That may have been modified down to the TVA fertilizer now. They are dealing in fertilizer, but originally it was TVA.

--They would end all farm commodity programs.

--They would withdraw from our responsibilities in the United Nations.

--They would oppose the agreement of 105 nations to stop nuclear bomb tests.

Those are some of the things that they are against, that they want to do away with.

On the test ban treaty, I just want to say this: I doubt that there is anything that has happened during your lifetime that is as important to you and your children as the test ban treaty. We were poisoning the air that we breathe, and the milk that we drank, and we were affecting the lives of men who lived in the future, and we could have serious effect on babies that were yet unborn.

But we got 108 nations together, and we entered into a treaty, and most of the members of the United States Senate supported that treaty, men of both parties. All of them didn't. I am not going to call any names, because I said in the beginning of this campaign I am not going to advertise. But I am going to tell you tonight that within the next few days I am going to go on television and tell the American people what has happened in the last year.

The anniversary of that treaty is Saturday, the first anniversary. Every person in this room ought to go home tonight and thank the good Lord that John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave us the leadership that made that treaty possible. I think we must understand clearly what it is in terms of accomplishments and results that these individuals want to repeal. They have said their purpose is not to pass laws but to repeal them.

The proof of the policies they oppose has been in the living.

Let's see where we were a generation ago, the 30 years ago that I mentioned a moment ago, and let's see where we are tonight. Then let us decide whether we want to repeal what this generation has accomplished.

The average weekly pay of a factory worker 30 years ago was $20, $20 a week, and one out of every four workers had no job at all; 25 percent unemployment. Today that weekly average pay is $103.17. Money values have changed. The broader comparison is that the purchasing power of a week's labor of an American factory worker has more than doubled in this generation of democracy. In plain terms, we are living more than twice as well as we were living 30 years ago.

The net financial wealth of all Americans was about $150 billion 30 years ago, $150 billion. This year it is crossing the trillion dollar mark--not $150 billion, but $1,000 billion!

The percentage of people who own their own homes has increased during this period from 48 percent to 62 percent, and before you vote in November, you ought to satisfy your own heart that every man that you send to that Congress is the kind of man that would work and fight and vote for policies to make every family a homeowner in this country.

Thirty years ago 3 1/2 million American workers belonged to labor unions, 3 1/2 million 30 years ago. Tonight the number is 16 1/2 million.

There were 2.7 million small businesses then, and now there are 4.6 million.

A child born tonight can expect a life that is 9 years longer than a child born in 1934.

Now, aren't you proud of those things?

I am not trying to wave the flag and I am not trying to stir you up, and I am not trying to take all night to say these things, but I want to reason them out with you. These things just didn't happen. All of you worked together to bring them about, and we are not going to let anyone get them undone.

I am not responsible for these things, but I am proud to say that I have lived in this period and I have lived this history--along with many of you. It wasn't easy. The going was all uphill. And every argument made tonight to go back was made along the way on each of these measures.

When I first went to Congress in 1937, we had a measure that provided a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, and they said it was socialism, statism, communism, would wreck my political career, and would wreck labor unions. And I was one of three Congressmen from my section of the country that signed a petition to pass a 25-cent an hour minimum wage bill. I am not an old man now. And it didn't destroy me, and it didn't destroy the labor unions either, this wage and hour provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

One of the Members, I remember, got up on the floor of the House and called it "the road to economic hell." But when the motion was put, America voted aye. And the ayes still have it and are going to keep it.

Women in my State, mothers of children, were then working for 7 cents an hour in the pecan shelling plants, and they said we would wreck the economy if we made those employers pay them 25 cents an hour.

When we proposed legislation to help the farmers, one member of the opposition said, and I am going to quote him, "This is the beginning of the end of our kind of government." But when the motion was put, America voted aye. And the ayes still have it and are going to keep it.

When the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was proposed, you remember how we found things in this country. Banks were closing, they were just popping like firecrackers, like popcorn, all over the country. You couldn't drive down the street without seeing people lined up trying to get there before they closed.

When we came in and said we were going to have a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one member of the opposition got up and he sounded like some voices I hear today. I heard one of them on television talking about me before I came over here tonight. And he said it would "completely destroy the entire banking system of this Nation." But when the motion was put, America voted aye. And the ayes still have it, and we are going to keep it.

When we proposed the Social Security Act, one member of the opposition called it a "cruel hoax." Tonight, 20 million people, 1 out of every 10, live in decency and dignity with their monthly social security check. And we are not about to make it voluntary and abolish it. And when that social security bill came up for a vote, when the motion was put, America voted aye. And the ayes still have it, and the ayes are going to keep it.

Then there was the Wagner Act, establishing man's right, woman's right, to collective bargaining. We had the Supreme Court about to hold it unconstitutional. We had every charge that could be made made about it. But when the motion was put, the ayes voted and the ayes had it. And we got it and we are going to keep it.

And then there is the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the United States Housing Authority. Each time there were cries from the small band of nay-sayers, the status quo fellows, the fearful, the doubters. But when the motions were put, America voted aye, And the ayes still have it, and we are going to keep it.

I was in Congress in 1944 when education was made available to 9 million veterans through the GI bill of rights. And I thought when I voted for that bill what a wise founder of the Republic of Texas back before we were a State had to say about education, and every time I get an audience where they can't get out the door I repeat that statement. I want you to listen to it. This is what that wise man said, and it is just as true tonight as it was then:

"Education is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free men recognize, and the only ruler that free men desire."

And when the vote was put on educating 9 million veterans, the motion was put and the ayes had it. And we are going to keep it.

I was there when the Employment Act of 1946 was passed, the Full Employment Act, and I know the protests, for I heard them all. But America voted aye. The ayes still have it, and we are going to keep it, because we believe that every man and woman that is willing to work, who wants to work, has a right to work in America, and ought to have a job.

Then came these past 3½ years. They started from another period of stagnation. During the year before you voted John F. Kennedy into office, the year before, a million workers had lost their jobs, had to give them up. Real earnings had leveled out, so that in 4 years earnings for a manufacturing worker with a family of four had increased by less than $1 a week.

Well, I am proud to have been a part of a team, the Kennedy-Johnson team, that reawakened the American people in the passage of more legislation to help more people than had been passed in three decades.

I can't go into all of them. But after that tragic day when we lost our President, and a cruel assassin took him away from us, on a moment's notice I had to assume the awesome responsibilities of the Presidency and carry on as best I could. And I called on God and I called on you to help me.

I looked to see where we were in order to see where we could go. And I knew the eyes of the world were looking on America to see how our system would function and how the transition would take place, if at all. I knew the uncertainty that was in the hearts of 190 million people here who had seen their leader taken from them, and had seen what had happened in other countries with takeovers under such circumstances.

And when I returned to my little office in the Executive Office Building that night, and sent my wife home to our daughters, I evaluated the problems I had. And within the week 85 leaders from 85 countries--85 out of the total of 120 in the world-came to see me and to talk to me; and the leaders of business, the captains of industry, like one that I see out here tonight; the leaders of labor, the leaders of the farmers, the teachers, the preachers of all faiths.

President Truman packed up his little valise and started out from Independence, and President Eisenhower came down from Gettysburg, all to try to help in that transition period, to steady things. The stock market was fluttering. People were hesitant. They were unsure.

I looked at the legislation that we had pending. For almost a year we had a tax bill that hadn't been acted on. For almost 9 months we had a civil rights bill that hadn't been acted upon. We had three education bills that hadn't been accepted by both Houses. We had a mass transit bill that hadn't been acted upon. We had 51 major measures for your benefit, to serve you, that you need, programs that are good for America.

And they were there with President Kennedy's recommendations, but President Kennedy was gone.

The other night, I sat in the White House and about midnight I looked over the list of those 51 bills that had been pending there on that November night when I took over. I am proud to tell you that your Senators and your Congressmen and other Senators and other Congressmen that went along with me--we passed all 51 of them in the Senate. And we passed most of them in the House.

But Appalachia--we got the money for the commission when we got the enabling legislation, so we made some progress. And medical care went to conference, the Senate voted it in, and two Republicans and one Democrat were on the conference from the House and those three men would not agree to take the social security increase with medical care. So the Senate and the House would not agree. The Senate wouldn't give up medical, and the two Republicans, the Chairman of the Republican Policy Committee and another fellow named Curtis from out in St. Louis, and the Chairman of the Committee, the Honorable Wilbur Mills, from Arkansas--those three said, "We won't allow medical care." So we came to an impasse. But we are going to pass medical care.

We passed the Area Redevelopment Act, the Manpower Act, the Trade Expansion Act, new housing legislation, three education bills, and don't forget this, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

I remember some newspaper reporters said, "If you just pass two bills, if you can just get a bill where we can take all these fights out of the streets and put them in the courts, the civil rights bill," and you will remember we had the Birmingham episodes and all the serious problems, "if you can just take it out of the streets and put it in the courts." And it is now in the Supreme Court and we have had lots of difficulty with it, but we have tried to be patient and we have tried to be understanding. And we have had a good deal of integration of schools this year in some of the most difficult places in the United States--the State of Mississippi, and they have integrated their schools.

We have talked to the Governor day after day, and we have talked to their leaders there and they have handled the situation where the situation didn't get as bad as it did back in some of the earlier days before the passage of the act. But they said, "If you can pass the tax bill"--it had been tied up for a year--"and the civil rights bill," that would be enough, that would be a very successful Congress.

Well, we passed them and all these others that I have talked about. We passed the poverty bill, the Economic Opportunity Act. We closed down enough obsolete bases, and we saved enough in efficient, competitive bidding in the Defense Department to give us a billion dollars to put on our Economic Opportunity Act, our poverty act, so we can take the people that are at the bottom of the heap, the families that earn less than $3,000, and do something about the poverty situation.

President Roosevelt came in and he talked about the one-third that were ill clad, ill housed, and ill fed--and that was 30 years ago. President Johnson came in and he talked about the one-fifth that were ill clad, ill fed, and ill housed. But think, I am not thrilled but I am pleased that we have cut it from one-third to one-fifth; that we have reduced it from 33 to 20. What I am going to be so proud about is when we wipe out that 20 percent that are poverty stricken altogether. That is a long list, but this is a critical point.

Almost every one of these programs that I have had to list for you in this time tonight is under attack today and tonight and tomorrow in this 1964 election.

Our whole way of doing things is at issue.

I told you the foreign policy: responsibility versus irresponsibility. I told you the domestic issue: whether you want to do what we have been doing for 30 years or whether you want to wipe it out.

We have been driving uphill for 30 years, and now we are told not to just turn back but to drive over the precipice. America's answer is not just no to that opposition. It has just got to keep on driving ahead, for we have a lot further to go, and we are going under Democratic leadership.

I don't resent the ugly things that have been said or the personal things, or the mudslinging, or the name-calling, or the epithets that have been applied to me. Most people understand that when folks get desperate they are not always careful, cautious, prudent, and wise, and they do waste everybody's time by talking about these matters. But they are not going to--they may enjoy it and get their own blood pressure up and feel a peculiar sensation, but if they can just keep on talking, maybe we won't have to keep on traveling so much.

I am going to try to look at it as objectively as I can. I am going to try to really do what the Good Book advocates, "God, forgive them for they really know not what they do." I do get a little disappointed.

I was reading some of the columns that some of the candidates in this election had written after I took over as President. They were rather complimentary about me. They recommended me most highly, and just a few weeks later, after they got the smell of the election this year, and we got within 8 or 9 months of the election, they had a 180-degree
turn toward me.

It isn't even the attempt to strip our gears that is so bad. What I don't like is that they want to shift into reverse. It is dangerous business to throw her into reverse when this country is going faster than we have ever been going before.

I am not asking you to put your finger on the trigger; I am not asking you to put your thumb on the button. I am going to ask you one simple thing for your own good, and this decision you make in November ought to be in your interest and nobody else's.

Don't you vote for grandpa or brother-in-law or anything else. You vote for yourself. And you vote for the man and the program that you think is best for your country. I will follow that criterion, and I will abide by that judgment.

But I just want to ask you here, while we are visiting with each other and save me taking a poll, is there anyone here tonight that came out because their wife made them or their brother-in-law brought them, or something? Is there anybody here that really wants to throw things in reverse?

I regret one thing deeply, and that is this senseless argument about what has already been decided defeats what ought to be the purpose of this campaign. This campaign's purpose is to decide what our course is for the future.

The argument shouldn't be between the present and the past. The argument ought to be about the present and the future. This has been a generation of democracy. We look ahead, and we are looking ahead to a generation of greatness.

A great historian, Waiter Prescott Webb, who lived in my hometown, was a philosopher of the frontier. In most countries, he said, they think of the frontier as the edge, as the place where there are fences with gates to keep people out, or to keep them in.

Well, America's frontier is different. It lies inside our country, not at the edge. It lies inside each of us.

Each of us, in our own way, is the product of a frontier, and the builder of a frontier in their time. Our children will find frontiers of their own, and so will their children, if you don't close the gate on them. America, our beautiful America, is the land of the perpetual frontier.

Today's frontier is not new land, challenging man's endurance, challenging his plow. America's frontier is the vast, barely charted sea of knowledge. And as we cross it we will multiply our abundance and we will brighten our aspirations.

We must carry with us the old virtues that we have needed on every frontier: courage, faith in God, honesty, eagerness to work hard. But we must add a new indispensable: the ability to perceive, the ability to apply thought, to put in order what we have learned, to give wings to our hopes.

I have in mind for this country a Great Society, where every boy and girl has a right to all the education they can take; where every man and his wife have a right to hope for and an expectancy to get a home that they can call their own; where every man and woman who is willing to work can work; where we work fewer hours per day and fewer days per week; and we have a beautiful countryside--someday I hope to get rid of all these old secondhand autos out on the highway--to have a beautiful countryside with seashores and parks where the kiddies can go and play and enjoy the land of their fathers.

Oh, what I perceive for this Nation in the year 2000 is so exciting to me that I just hope the doctors hurry up and get busy and let me live that long.

I think I know something about the people of Ohio. I think they are good, patriotic Americans. Some of them are Republicans and some of them are Democrats and some of them are Independents. Nearly all of them are pretty independent. But I believe when the chips are down, whether it is when the draft calls them or Uncle Sam summons them, I believe that most of them do what they think is best for their country, regardless of their party, and that is what I want you to do.

I think most of you are Democrats here tonight, but I don't want you, as a Democrat, to ever oppose a Republican President just for the sake of opposition.

When I became Democratic leader, I said, "I reject Senator Taft's philosophy." He had said it was the duty of the opposition to oppose. I said, "I don't believe that a minute. I think it is the duty of the opposition to do what is right. And every single time President Eisenhower is right, a Republican President, I will look at his proposal, and if I can in good conscience support it, I will grab his flag and hold it up, and I will support him because he is the only President I have. And if he is wrong, and I can't in good conscience go with him, I am going to tell him so, in a low voice, quietly, and I am going to oppose him with decency and dignity. And he is going to know he has had a fight. But I am going to do it on principle without regard to personality. And he never need fear that I will criticize his wife or his children or his dog."

It is late and I must be on my way. I have to go to Louisville tonight. I have enjoyed visiting with you.

I just want to say this before we leave: We spent $10,000 the other day of money that we didn't have in the Democratic Party, and you people in Ohio don't send us as much as you ought to. But I know how you feel about sending money to Washington.

A little boy wrote a letter to the Postmaster General and said his daddy was dead and his momma had a house full of orphan children. He wrote the letter to God.

He said: "Dear God: Please send us some money. Send us a hundred dollars, God."

The Postmaster General didn't know what to do with the letter when it wound up on his desk. He felt sorry. He had been working for Prudential Life Insurance and had a little money he had saved, so he sat down and put a $20 bill in there and sent it back to the little boy.

In about 2 weeks he got a letter back from the little boy and it said: "Dear God: I appreciate your prompt reply to my letter, and it helped. But I need another $100." And he said, "Dear Lord, this time please don't route it through Washington because I had an 80 percent deduct."

We took a poll out here and that poll shows that as of now, last week, if the people here were voting, 65 percent of them would vote the Democratic Presidential-Vice Presidential ticket, 35 percent voting the Republican Presidential-Vice Presidential ticket. All that means is this: If they get their 35 percent to the polls, and most of them are going with blood in their eyes, because a good many of them, I have found, are pretty excitable people that feel pretty tense on some of these things, and we only get 34 percent of ours to the polls--and we will be awfully lucky if we get 70 percent of the people to the polls--then we have had it, and you have had it, too, and everything you have done for 30 years.

The eyes of the world are upon America because we are the leader of the world, and the most important thing in the world is not this election; the most important thing in the world is peace and good will toward men--that little five letter word, p-e-a-c-e.

You don't get peace by rattling your rockets. You don't get peace by threatening to drop your bombs. You must have strength, and you must always keep your guard up, but you must always have your hand out and be willing to go anywhere, talk to anybody, listen to anything they have to say, do anything that is honorable, in order to avoid pulling that trigger, mashing that button that will blow up the world.

You would expect my opponent to think well of himself, and I think well of him. You would expect me to think well of myself, and I don't think that you ought to be guided or guarded by what we say. I think what you have to decide in your own heart, in your own conscience, in your own home with your own prayers is--in this perilous hour in which we live, with these critical uncertainties confronting us, when we have a test ban treaty and we have a "hot line"--when you hear that phone ring, who do you want to answer it?

When they cut off our water in Guantanamo--a little bearded dictator called Castro impulsively and emotionally cut our water off--I got a lot of advice. I had just been in office a few days. I remember one of the advisers said, "Send in the Marines."

Well, we considered it carefully and we finally concluded that the incident was such that we ought .to preserve that base, where it would be sufficient in its own strength, and we oughtn't have to depend on anybody, so I called up an admiral and told him to go down there and turn that water off. Instead of sending the Marines in, I sent one little admiral to turn it off, and things have been going reasonably well at Guantanamo ever since.

You are going to have to decide who you want to have the civilian responsibility over the admirals and the generals, and the captains and the corporals in the world. You are going to have to decide which man's thumb you want there next to that button.

I sat for 37 days and nights with a man much younger than I was, and I thought much less experienced than I was. But he was my Commander in Chief during the Cuban missile crisis. I left home many mornings not knowing whether I would ever see my wife and my daughters that night again. I didn't know whether I would be back or whether they would be there, or whether any of us would be there. I am proud to say to you that the coolest man in town those 37 days was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

It is with some sadness that I observed some criticism when he wasn't here to defend himself of his conduct in that crisis. Because after those 37 days Mr. Khrushchev had to take his missiles and put them on his ships and put his tarpaulins over them and take them back home.

But both Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Khrushchev had been there eyeball to eyeball with their thumbs close to the button, and both of them had realized that if either touched that button, 300 million lives would be snuffed out in a matter of minutes. It was an experience for a man.

I was happy when I reduced some of our nuclear production that we have in great surplus, and I said, "I am not going to operate a nuclear WPA." When I reduced it, after I came in, I notified Mr. Khrushchev I was going to do it, and I gave him the hour and the day, and I said, "Here is what we are going to do because of these reasons. But if you really want peace in the world, you can do likewise and make some move along the same direction."

As I was rising from my chair to be introduced at the Associated Press in New York, at 2 o'clock, they brought a little yellow ticker paper that said Mr. Khrushchev was making a simultaneous announcement that he was reducing also.

Freedom is on the march in the world, and I don't think communism is ever going to defeat freedom. As I said earlier, I am going to keep all the strength that this Nation needs, and we have more than any nation in all the world, and more than all of them put together. I am going to keep it. But I am not going to destroy the world by throwing my weight around without achieving something for it. I am going to try to do as the Good Book says, the prophet Isaiah. I am going to say to all the leaders of the world, "Come now, let us reason together."

So that is the decision that you are going to have to make, whose hand do you want on the throttle, whom do you want to answer the phone? I am not going to recommend to you. I am just going to tell you my hopes. I need you. I have a lonely, frightening job, and I am doing my dead level best to do it right.

So I want to ask you for your hopes and for your help, and for your hand, and for your prayers, because I don't know a man in the world that needs them more than I do. Thank you.