Remarks at a Reception for Members of the Foreign Policy Conference for Education Leaders.

Mr. Vice President, Secretary Rusk, distinguished educators, my friends:

Several times in the past years I have come over here to the State Department, fresh from a discussion of some serious international or domestic crisis, to address a group of educators. Each time I had the feeling that I was coming from a world of strife and tension to a world of serene tranquillity--from those who deal with a world of shouts and turmoil, to those who live in an atmosphere of order and tolerance.

How times do change.

I suppose I really ought to ask some of you for a battlefield report this evening.

I would be interested to know how the pacification program is really coming along--or how much progress you are making in reform--or how things are going in the outlying buildings, and whether you really still hold the central administration offices.

What is clear, even without a report, is that both American education and the country itself are undergoing a rapid process of change.

And change is almost never comfortable. Old values are challenged; new beliefs are pressed with a passionate certainty. Some grow impatient with the pace of change, and violently reject the system that it seeks to transform. Others just hold on tenaciously to the things as they are.

But in between, there is a vast legion of people who want a better America and who pray for a safer world and a more just society here at home, and peace between the nations.

They know that there must be sacrifices if these things are to be accomplished. They know that America has real obligations to its poor, and it must keep those obligations

--to its allies abroad, which it must honor;

--to human freedom itself, whose mightiest guardian we are.

For 20 years now this legion of thoughtful Americans has supported a great and a costly effort of responsibility in our world affairs. There have always been other choices available to us: isolationism, under various sophisticated names; at the other extreme, the quest for an end to all of our problems through a massive military "victory."

But for 20 years, they have rejected those extremes. They have sought to give the world a measure of stability, in which men and nations might seek prosperity and might seek understanding. They have given of their own treasure and skills to help their fellow man--in Europe first, and then in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

What they have done did not stop the violence in the world. But in an age of great nuclear danger, it did seem to help to give mankind two decades of relative peace-certainly relative to what it might have been.

When the struggle in Vietnam is over, this legion of thoughtful men and women will have to decide, anew, what America's role in the world should be.

I hope that you--all of you--will take an active part in making that decision--in helping to lay out the alternatives, the costs and the benefits of each course. I hope that you will review and examine the path that we have taken and judge, as best you can, what would have happened if we had taken another path.

In my judgment, from my viewpoint, from where I stand, we can be proud, very proud, of what we have done in this time of tumultuous change. I hope that you will make it possible for another President to say that, with the same conviction, two decades from tonight.

Thank you.