Remarks to the President's Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped.

GENERAL MAAS has extended to me the privilege, ladies and gentlemen, of saying a few words of appreciation for the work that is being done by this grand Committee for the rehabilitation of people that we used to call disabled.

I am not going to stand long before you today. I just want to tell you that I have had a chance to read part of the essay by little Miss Kreidler, and I found a thought that appealed to me mightily. It was this: that the new approach to this problem that we call rehabilitation is not to say what is wrong with someone, but what you can do, or what is it that you can be trained to do, what are your capacities. Never mind the incapacities because, she very carefully points out, we all have them, and I suppose she will admit she has some herself.

The essay goes on to say, if you are not good at figures and can't keep your own checkbook straight, you shouldn't try to be an accountant, so that is your disability. But whatever it is that anyone can do best, the needs of society require that we discover those and develop them to the utmost, in order that that individual can render a service to society of which she or he is capable.

This seems to me to be such a positive and fine kind of approach to the whole problem that it puts it instantly into a realm or into a level where all of us can look at it in our own way, to the very best effect.

And the point is we don't need to work only for others--we, of course, are working for ourselves. We can try to find out what we can do, what our defects are, and avoid that kind of work. I could name a lot of them; that I could do right quickly.

And that, I think, is the lesson I have learned today. Aside from that, I bring to each of you thanks for your great interest in this kind of thing-because of what you are doing for others, for yourselves, and most of all, for our country.

Thank you very much.