Remarks at the 16th Annual Washington Conference of the Advertising Council.

Mr. Gray and members of the Advertising Council:

I was reminded this morning that this is the eighth straight year I have had the honor of meeting this body. For me at least, this is a record with respect to any publicly constituted body. I feel privileged that again I can welcome you to the Capital City for your deliberations.

For 18 years you have been stimulating the Nation's conscience in areas where the voluntary work of great numbers of people has been necessary in order to promote worthwhile causes. I know you have been in such fields as conservation, organized charities, safety, prevention of accidents, and more recently in giving your efforts to the job of pointing out to our people the need for self-discipline, if we are to avoid debasement of our currency and prevent inflation.

Now I understand that you are taking under study what we should be trying to do in developing our most precious national asset: the intellectual capacity and skills of our people.

This is indeed a problem that needs study, analysis, and action. It is one, again, where I believe our efforts should be far more upon the voluntary side than on the governmental and directed side--certainly in any centralized government.

Quality rather than quantity is necessary. Yet we don't want to think of the production of any elite, intellectual corps. Just as we have to have in the military, for example, the brilliant brain to devise a new weapon, we also have to have better intelligence and better training to use it.

We need a betterment of all education in all levels. If we are going to meet the requirements of a constantly increasing complexity in our lives--governmental, political, industrial, and individual lives--we must take this matter very seriously indeed.

Our Government, private institutions and foundations, universities and schools have got to find the stimuli that will bring out for us the best. The worldwide contest in which we are engaged admits of no room for error or neglect or complacency.

Not long ago, I had a letter--as a matter of fact, two or three days ago--from a teacher who wrote to me about her experiences. She has 12 students--mentally retarded children about 12 to 13 years old and with an average IQ of below 50. She told me she had been trying every way she could to get these youngsters interested in anything--particularly interested in anything going on in the world at the moment. She found that she could interest the children by taking the news of the day of one of my recent trips. She was able to talk to the children about the need for peace, and the effort of trips such as this to promote peace, to put America better in the minds of children like themselves in different countries. Her children began daily to show a better comprehension of what was going on around them. And indeed, each one of them wrote to me a letter--three or four lines, it's true--but this thought came through: they didn't want war, they wanted peace; and complimenting me, they said they were thinking I was doing something about it, and that was why they wanted to thank me.

Now at the other end of the scale, I saw a piece in the paper about a little girl prodigy in a fight for her possession. From this end of the scale to the one clear down to the mentally retarded, we have a job to do, and I repeat: the more we can do it by voluntary action, the better it will be done.

I can't leave here before I refer again to the problem that I think for 8 straight years I have told this body is still the most important in our country. That is to get before the American public in widespread fashion the essentials of the issues that face us. It is not enough, I think, in this modern time, for a successful democracy just to place its trust in an individual or in a group of individuals. They must have enough information and comprehension of the great issues between ourselves and our opponents in the international world--the issues that determine internally whether we are going to be a sound, going economy, whether we are going ourselves to protect all the priceless values for which this Nation was established to protect, whether we are going to further them and try to live by them and vitalize them, so that our people can understand. This is truly the great problem that always is before our country.

It is not enough, then, to give our faith to slogans, even to individuals. We must think of our own comprehension. And I think no other body has done more in this regard in trying to inform America across the board of these things than has the Advertising Council.

So, as I try to express feebly many thanks for your work of the past 18 years, I must say to you that no one could be more convinced of the need for this kind of work that you are now doing than I am.

I think if we look always to the future and if we are going to experience that kind of progress in our country that we know is best for all of us-the workman, the employer, the professional man, the teacher, the student, the children, the old--the kind of work that is done to bring the facts of these great issues before our people is not only praiseworthy, but absolutely vital.

There's an old military statement which says, "You can do nothing positive except from a firm base." This means, if you were going to do anything positively in the field, you must have some place on which you can depend which is firmly established. You must have a base to depend on for your replacements, for your repairs, for your hospitalization, and so on. In the same way, if America is to do anything positive in the world, and lead the nations more surely and straightly down the road toward peace, we ourselves must be that firm base.

Since public opinion is the only force that has any validity in democracy it must be an informed public opinion. So not only do we think, therefore, of our country as an individualistic entity by itself, we think of it with a great mission in the world. We think of it from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest, but because also we are part of the great brotherhood of man. We must be informed. We must get a public opinion that supports those programs that intelligent, informed people believe are good for our Nation, good for promoting our ability to lead the world to that great objective that has been the goal of mankind certainly since the days of the Delphic League in Greece: a durable peace, with justice and in freedom.

So I find now, as some 8 years ago I was doing things for the first time, I am doing them now for the final time. As President, I will not again have the privilege of greeting you. I again assure you it has been a very great privilege to have these contacts with a body in which I find so many of my intimate friends, and alongside them others at least that I respect and admire, even if I do not have the privilege of their personal acquaintanceship and friendship.

So thank you again, and good luck--and keep going, that's all I can say.