Remarks to the Presidential Scholars.

YESTERDAY Major McDivitt and Major White came down from their momentous maneuvers in space and they will be visiting with us later this week.

Today, though, we have the very great pleasure of greeting other outstanding young Americans--you who are the Presidential Scholars of 1965.

You and the astronauts have hardly been sharing the same experiences, but you have shown one fundamental quality in common-you have done your task, and you have done it superbly. You have achieved excellence and I congratulate each of you.

We are delighted to greet the parents of the scholars this afternoon. For having gone through the experience of graduating our second daughter last week, Mrs. Johnson and I feel it might be in order to give parents medals, too.

We do understand your feelings of pride and relief as parents. All of you have such a special reason for a glow of satisfaction in these young Americans that you have raised.

In the year 2000, most of you scholars will be no older than I am today. If you fulfill your promise you will be the leaders in all the various enterprises of American life, whether as a scientist, a businessman, a scholar, a doctor, or a mother or a housewife.

Intricate and subtle problems will daily confront you. And it is your responsibility to bring to the solution of these problems a set of values drawn from the long wisdom of the democratic process. Those values are many--honor and integrity, a love for justice, an unremitting enmity for oppression, an abiding faith in man himself, a decent respect for yourself and for your own potential.

All of these, and many more, are qualities essential for the fulfillment of the gifted talents that each of you possess. But there is still another value that I regard as very nearly supreme--that of believing that every man created in the image of God has something to say to his time, and has the right to be heard by his contemporaries without prejudice or without misconception.

All your lives, and in these times. now, much has been heard about national power and its uses. Yours is a strong Nation, strong in its arms and more powerful in its heart and in its soul, and that is the only power which shall really prevail.

All through history, nations have built power to put down among their own peoples, and other peoples, the precious and the fragile things of the spirit and the soul-such as the love of liberty, the love of justice.

And it is for such a world that we work today. Not to conquer, not to subjugate, but rather to liberate the human spirit and allow it to grow and flourish in a climate of universal and in a climate of lasting understanding.

Emerson told us long ago that the true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

So, here in America we are appreciating this more than ever before. We have bigness. We have strength. We have wealth. But we are concerned, and we must remain even more concerned, with the kind of man and the kind of woman that America turns out.

I am looking out there today upon this group of outstanding young Americans, and I am sure all Americans are grateful for the promise that each of you represent. The life of your land is in good hands as its destiny passes, as it will, into your hands.

I believe passionately that your future is light and not darkness; decency and not depravity. Every hour of every day that is mine is devoted to doing what we know to do to assure that kind of future for you.

You and your generation have much to say to mankind and much to say about mankind's future.

So, to each of you today, and to the parents who have played such a part in your life, I want to say congratulations. We are glad you are here. We hope you have many happy and prosperous, comforting years ahead.

And God bless each of you.