Remarks at the Chicago Stadium

Governor Kerner, Mayor Daley, Senator Douglas, ladies and gentlemen:

Nobody in this world can put on a political parade and a political rally like that great executive Dick Daley of Chicago. He makes it so much fun being a Democrat that you don't see how anybody could be anything else. I think he is one of the greatest political leaders in all the world.

I have a few favors to ask of you tonight. A President works closely whenever he can with the State Governors, so please be sure that here in Illinois it is Otto Kerner. And no one helps me more to fight for the people of Illinois, the people of the United States, and all the people of the world, than your Senator, Paul Douglas, and Emily Douglas.

Please send us every single Democratic Congressman that you can. It will take a strong Democratic Congress to keep this country moving ahead.

When I say that I think, and so do you-and it makes us proud, but it makes us humble--of the man that we wish most of all were here with us tonight, that gallant leader, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

We are proud tonight to be Democrats. We are even prouder to be Americans.

And I want to talk tonight as an American to Americans, for that is the way the people will be voting next Tuesday.

The plain fact is that this election won't have settled all the things that it should have settled. This country will decide not to go back, but there will be differences left about how to go forward.

We will win this election. But we will know that the voters of this country have not written a blank check; that there are differences which remain, and those differences must be honored. And they will be honored.

But these things have been made clear: We have been settling for too little in this country. We are going to raise our sights. We are going to see that every American child has an equal chance at the fullest education that child can use. We have been educating most of our children. Now we are going to educate those who need it most.

We have declared war on poverty, and we mean all-out war. Abraham Lincoln, a product of Illinois, abolished slavery 100 years ago. And now the Democratic Party adopts as its program the abolishment of poverty in this land. Prosperity for four out of five is not enough.

Older age doesn't have to be a time of fear and want. Its difficulties are not voluntary, and we are not about to make the social security system voluntary. We will increase social security benefits. We will add hospital and nursing home care, Medicare, to its protection. We are going to make sense out of life's pattern, instead of letting age defeat so many of us.

We will mean what we say from here on about full employment. We will have a government that doesn't waste a penny doing what is foolish, but doesn't waste a minute doing what is wise.

The thing that all of us want most of all is a united policy for peace for all peoples. Republicans and Democrats are partisans at home--and better for it. But we are partners before the world, because our life depends upon it.

The one overriding obligation of a leader of this democracy is to find or to forge a united policy for peace. I mean that tonight, and I will mean it tomorrow just as I meant it in 1960.

There was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, then, and I was the Democratic leader in the Senate. On foreign policy matters I voted with that Republican President 96 percent of the time. And in this campaign now, we are against another man who was in that same Senate and who voted on those same issues against that same Republican President 76 percent of the time. So the Democrat voted with the President 96 percent of the time and the present Republican nominee voted against him 76 percent of the time.

I am proud to ask my Nation's trust in the continued building of its bipartisan foreign policy. But even here there must be no blank check. So I state my understanding: It is that Americans, almost as one, agree that to keep the peace we must be so strong of arm and arms that none anywhere can doubt that strength.

As your Commander in Chief I tell you tonight that our military might is greater than that of all the other nations of the world put together. You want it kept that way and so do I.

But you count strength alone not enough. And so do I. World peace depends upon reason, on restraint, on negotiation, and on responsibility.

We must move forward on many fronts.

We must continue to strengthen the United Nations.

We must strengthen and expand the Peace Corps.

We must build new bridges, new bridges to the friendly peoples of Eastern Europe.

We must, most of all, take this world out from under the shadow of a poisonous toadstool cloud.

We want our children to say that this was the generation that split the atom, and this was the generation that united all men in peace.

We are a powerful nation, but we are humble before our God. We believe that man has made his own problems, but that man can solve them.

The road to peace is long and hard, but the road to war is short and deadly. We choose the road to peace.

So we tonight, assembled here, pledge ourselves to democracy's greatest tradition, the New Freedom of Wilson, the New Deal of Roosevelt, the Fair Deal of Harry S. Truman, the New America and the New Frontier of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and after Tuesday, November 3d, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.

These are not campaign slogans. These are the beating pulse of the greatest political party in this country. They are the heart-beat of a Nation that is looking up at the stars and eager for tomorrow's dawn.