Remarks Upon Arrival at the Greater Cincinnati Airport

Governor Breathitt, Senator Young, Congressman Chelf, my old friend Brent Spence, Chairman Paxton, my good friends of Kentucky and Ohio:

If I can just make a few more visits to this State this year, I am going to be eligible to call Kentucky my home. It is wonderful to be with you. Sometime when I can stay longer, I am going to write myself an invitation and come back and spend an afternoon here in Covington.

Today we are mixing bluegrass and buckeyes. I hope the results will be a winner on November 3d for the Democratic ticket. Of course, I wouldn't want to make any recommendations, but I will offer this impartial, objective statement: that the people of this district could not make a wiser choice than to keep in the Congress my good friend Frank Chelf, and keep in the Senate my good friend Steve Young.

You have a tradition of sending some of your finest citizens to Washington to serve the Nation. I have known and served with many of them, but none have ever stood higher in my estimation than Brent Spence.

If your neighboring State of Ohio is the mother of Presidents, Kentucky is the father of great Governors. We had many of them together a week ago, and they demonstrated a great trait of Kentucky Democrats--the ability to unite. But one of the finest Governors of the land is your Governor now, my friend Ed Breathitt.

These are sobering hours in the history of the world. But there is no business anywhere that is more serious than the election of the leadership of the strongest nation on earth.

I had not intended to speak very long. At these airports you usually have a problem of people standing, the problem of planes flying, and the problem of not talking too often, too much, or if you do, you won't be able to talk at all. But I think I will tell you of a somewhat exciting day that I had this morning.

I was up at 6:30 and I read about 15 newspapers and all the reports that had come in overnight, and the morning cables. Then I went to my office, and we planted two trees on the White House lawn. It is customary for Presidents to plant trees when they live there, and we planted two trees that are oaks, that are grown both in the Atlantic seaboard and in my own section of the country. They grow tall and they grow straight, and they provide a good shade.

Then I visited for about an hour with the Soviet Ambassador, and he told me of the problems that exist in their country today, and the new government that has just taken over from Premier Khrushchev. One man runs the government and one runs the party. He assured me of the friendship of their people for our people and he wanted to make it clear that he was instructed by the new government to inform our Government that there had been and there would be no change in their foreign policy and their attitude toward us and their hope that we could, together, find some way to peace in the world, some way to reduce our armaments, and some way to relieve the tensions.

When I finished talking with the Soviet Ambassador, I met with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, and the Under Secretary of State, and we talked about the problems in southeast Asia, and our forces in Viet-Nam. We talked about the implications of the new government in the Soviet Union and why they had decided to change. We took all of the reports we had received and evaluated them. The Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State stayed on later, and the Security Council will meet tomorrow to further go into those problems.

We received complete confirmation that the Chinese had detonated a nuclear weapon today--at 3 a.m. our time this morning. It is a crude weapon, but it means another nation can contaminate the atmosphere, and it means in due time that they no doubt will have other weapons and will probably develop the capacity to deliver them. It is really a sad day for the Chinese people, because with all their hunger and their many untilled needs, they have to take their resources and put them into nuclear weapons.

I then went over and met with the leading educators from all over the country, and we signed one of the most comprehensive education bills in the history of this country. We talked about the great increased need of educated minds in our country, and how many people were unemployed because they had no specific training, and how in this space age, when the Soviet Union was sending three men into space, and when the Chinese nation has developed the nuclear bomb, how important it is for every child in this land to have all the education that he is capable of taking.

We finished with that meeting and I made a statement to a group of civic leaders of the Nation, and swore in Mr. Sargent Shriver, who is inaugurating a billion dollar program to drive out poverty in our land. The people that oppose it say it is not enough to do any good. The people that oppose it say it is too much to spend on people. So either way you go, you get criticized.

But as I was standing there getting ready to swear in Mr. Shriver, I thought of my experience as a young Congressman. We had women working in my district that made 7 cents an hour--in 1937. They tried to support their family on 56 cents a day. We introduced, in accordance with the President's recommendation, a minimum wage-maximum hour law. That law provided that the minimum pay per hour would be 25 cents an hour. It would be unlawful to pay anyone less than a quarter an hour.

There were only three men from my section of the country that signed a petition to force that caucus, and all three of us were told that we were ruining our political careers. That was in 1938--25 cents an hour. We were told that we would hurt labor, and we would hurt ourselves. The other two men that signed that petition with me and brought that question to a vote were defeated in the next July primary because they had sought to vote for a bill that paid 25 cents an hour. Now, think how far we have come since 1938.

It was about that same period that our great leader, President Roosevelt, who bore awesome responsibilities, concluded that we ought to try to do something about the poor people. He said a third of our Nation, one out of every three, was ill clad, ill fed, and ill housed. He looked forward to the day when he could reduce that percentage, and he did reduce it. That was 30 years ago.

In 30 years we have reduced it from onethird to one-fifth, from 33 percent to 20 percent. But there is still 20 percent of our people, I out of every 5 families, that live below the poverty line. Children born into those families grow up, become adults, unable to find a job, ill equipped, ill trained, and they become taxeaters instead of taxpayers. So we decided if President Roosevelt and his successors could reduce it from one-third to one-fifth, that maybe we could reduce it to one-tenth.

One hundred years ago, Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in this country. It is almost unbelievable that we held people in bondage and we had our fellow human beings as slaves. But we did, 100 years ago.

And 100 years from now, I think your children are going to look back on the day when I swore in Sargent Shriver and say, "It is almost unbelievable that 20 percent of our people lived in poverty." Because just as Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, we are going to abolish poverty in this country.

We want peace in our world. That is our number one objective. We want to learn to live with other nations. We want to be able to exist in a land where we don't have to worry about a nervous thumb moving up toward pushing that button that will wipe out 300 million lives. We don't want to sit there and listen to that "hot line" ring and the call coming from Moscow, and what they are going to say on the other end of the line.

We went through the terrifying and frightening experience of the Cuban missile crisis, when two men looked at each other eyeball to eyeball and finally Mr. Khrushchev had to pick up his missiles and take them home.

We want responsibility in foreign affairs like we have had for 20 years since World War II. Our friends in Western Europe have largely recovered. We are standing by our friends in Asia. We are making great progress in the Western Hemisphere.

Many nations have thrown off the yoke of colonialism and there is more freedom in the world today than there was 20 years ago. In all the new nations that have been born, I know you must take great pride in the fact that not one single one of them has embraced communism. The last nation that we lost to communism was Cuba in 1959.

We had a change of governments today in Great Britain. It fell my lot and my duty to call the Prime Minister of Great Britain and to welcome him for a visit and to talk to him about the problems that he will encounter and that will mutually confront our allies. So that is something about my day. The Prime Minister, I guess, went out to take his siesta and have his tea, and I came to Corington and Cincinnati and Dayton.

In addition to peace in the world, we very much hope for prosperity among our people. In the last week, I have seen more than 2 million people. Almost that many have scratched my hand. But it is a real invigorating experience, and it is a wonderful sight to look into the eyes of your bosses, the people that employ you, the folks you work for, the men and women who trust you, the ones who have faith in you and have faith in their country and have hopes for their future and their posterity. It is an exciting experience to be a leader in a democratic land. You want your people to be happy.

I have seen so many smiling, happy faces that the most dreadful thing that could happen to me would be to see a war come on or to see a depression come on. So today I gave instructions to my economic advisers to make a new study of how we could keep this prosperity going after next spring.

I may not need that study myself, as somebody else may be using it, but I think you have to think ahead, and I think you have to be optimistic for the future. I think you have to plan. I don't think you can just sit back and take things for granted.

I want to see the day when every man and woman who wants to work will have a job. I want to see the day when heart disease, cancer, and strokes will be banished and everyone can live to the ripe, old age of 100, and we are going in that direction.

I want to see the day when there will be a classroom for every child and there will be a qualified, well-paid teacher to man that classroom in this country.

The average manufacturing wage now is $104 a week, and we have 72½ million people working. There are less people that have lost time through strikes this year than at any time in our postwar history.

We had problems with the railroad strike for 4 1/2 years, we had those differences. But with the help of the good Lord, the leaders of both the railroads and the workers, we settled it. We had problems with the auto strike, but we have gotten most of those working out all right. We are losing only fourteen one-hundredths of 1 percent of the hours at work. Not 1 percent, not a half of 1 percent, but fourteen one-hundredths of 1 percent.

So we are proud of what has developed along that line. We have given back our taxpayers $12 billion that would have otherwise gone into the Treasury, so they could make new capital investments to provide more jobs, so they could have more take-home money. And, generally speaking, I think our folks on the average are doing well. We want to keep it that way. We think that the man that you select to lead this country and the kind of government you select will have something to do with not only peace in the world, but prosperity at home.

I have not come here today to say anything about any other choices or about my opponents. I have never felt that the voter cared very much about what one man thought about the fellow that was trying to get his job.

I have been in this business for a long time. My first campaign was for Al Smith when I was 20 years old. I am considerably older now, but for more than 30 years I have been going among the people and I have often observed that mudslinging and muckraking, and personal denunciations lost candidates more votes than it gained them.

So I have not come here for the purpose of telling you that Senator Humphrey and myself are the only two men in this country that are capable of leading these people. You people would do all right with just almost anybody leading you, because we have good citizens, and we have a good Nation, and we can weather these storms.

Look at what happened when our leader was stricken and fell, on the tragic day in November. Our people united. They pulled together--business, labor, women, farmers, groups all over the country--and we presented a united front to the world. We have gone forward. He left 51 bills behind him, and last Friday night I sat at my desk and I looked at the inventory and we had passed every one of those 51 bills in the United States Senate.

If you feel that we are worthy of it, if you think that we have the experience, if you think we have the head and the heart and the heels that these responsibilities require, we most earnestly solicit your support on November 3d.