United States Presidential Candidates 1964

"[Former President] Lyndon Johnson in many respects was a very, very good president. Domestically he brought forth some major pieces of legislation. He chose not to run in ’68 because of opposition to his views on Vietnam, and I worry very much that President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war."

"Kennedy promised. Johnson delivered."

"It was LBJ who pushed through the civil rights bills in 1957, 1964 and 1965 that finally gave African Americans the same rights (at least on paper) as white America. On the other hand, there can be no question that Johnson was a racist who looked down on people of color as inferior."

"Johnson was a man of his time, and bore those flaws as surely as he sought to lead the country past them. For two decades in Congress he was a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation."

"As one of our interviewers... says... once you kill a sitting president in high noon in Dealey Plaza and blow his head off, you're not going to go back to normal... After Kennedy was killed, and nobody asked... what was Kennedy's real policy on Vietnam? Well... he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He was very clear about it, and that's what people get confused. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, who took over the office went right to war quickly. He went to a far more aggressive posture of Vietnam, which resulted in more-- It was a lie, another lie, and that war was a disaster... Unfortunately, the same forces that made that war happen continued in our life, and they controlled us and pushed us into another war and another war and another war... we propagandize an enemy, make him far bigger than he is, and I don't know what we're fighting."

"He was a vice president of a charismatic president adored by liberals. He had a long record in the Senate, with a history of savvy deal-making that was seen as an asset to a less experienced younger president, a newcomer to Washington. And as he ran for the presidency in his own right, he was distrusted by a left newly ascendant in their party. That distrust was born of a record on race that seemed anachronistic to a younger generation. That description of Lyndon Johnson could easily be used for Joe Biden. And in that symmetry is a lesson for liberals. Because as president, Johnson would have the most effective progressive record on race and class of any Democratic president in the past 80 years. The foundational principles of modern liberalism — civil rights and greater economic equality — took further strides during Johnson’s presidency than any since the New Deal."

"Johnson was a candidate characterized as moderate who defeated an extreme Republican and thereby created a large scale governing mandate to pass popular, large scale structural changes to redress inequality and racism. There are lessons here for today’s liberals. It is to concentrate on and work toward the margin victory. A moderate president with strong margins in the House and Senate can achieve many more liberal goals than a liberal without the Senate. We live in a time of extreme polarization, so a Johnson-like landslide may not be possible. But if there’s an event that can scramble that kind of polarization, it is a global pandemic that an incumbent president badly mismanages."

"Johnson, who is unable to put his own house in order - give reality to democracy in America and give black people their basic rights as American citizens - sees this unjust, unnecessary genocide as an affair of honour."

"Our 36th and 46th presidents share a number of key things in common. Lyndon Johnson and Joe Biden both got elected to Congress before the age of 30, achieved great prominence in the Senate, and became vice presidents to charismatic, younger leaders who represented generational change. They also rose to become president, promulgating ambitious domestic agendas and leading a divided nation through turbulent times. Johnson and Biden might also share something else in common; there has been wide speculation that Biden might step down from the presidency after a single term, becoming the first incumbent president to opt not to run for re-election since Johnson announced that he would not be a candidate 55 years ago today."

"Johnson’s reasons for not running in 1968 were principally rooted to his health. He had suffered a nearly fatal heart attack in 1955, at age 46, and was acutely aware that his father and paternal grandfather had both died of heart attacks at age 62. (As it stood, Johnson died of a heart attack at 64, four years and two days after leaving the presidency). He was also conscious of the crises the country had endured when Roosevelt died unexpectedly of a stroke in 1945 and when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in 1919 that had left him largely incapacitated. Of course, there was also the issue of the Vietnam War, which dogged Johnson’s presidency and polarized the country as he steadily escalated U.S. involvement. Johnson saw not running for re-election as an overture to the North Vietnamese to agree to peace talks, which until then, had eluded him. And surely he knew that his campaign for re-election would further divide America. As Lady Bird Johnson said of his decision, “I saluted him for being clearheaded enough to see that he wasn’t the man at that particular time who could unite the country.” It’s different for Biden who is in good health and can’t be expected to unite an America whose divisions are largely intractable. But he, as much as anyone, can ensure that America remains sound and true to our most basic ideals during a pivotal time. Johnson chose not to run in 1968 “with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day.” Biden should run for re-election for the same reasons."

"Lyndon Johnson had fallen into popular disfavor by the time Nixon succeeded him in the White House; but in succeeding Kennedy, winning a landslide over Goldwater, and pushing through Congress not only Kennedy's remaining initiatives but his own Great Society program, Johnson had been by late 1965 perhaps literally more powerful than any of his predecessors. The Tonkin Gulf resolution he maneuvered through Congress left him and for a while Nixon virtually a free hand in Indochina; and in waging one of the biggest wars in American history without Congressional declaration, Johnson notably expanded the already extensive "war powers" of the presidency."

"Johnson ran as the peace candidate in 1964, promising to get us out of Vietnam or at least to stop any escalation of American involvement there. The opposite happened. Johnson promised that Medicare would be efficiently run and financially self-sustaining. The opposite happened. Johnson said that his Great Society programs would usher in a new kind of America, one in which government-directed investments in anti-poverty campaigns and educational projects would not only lift up the poor but would, by helping them to maximize their own economic value, lift the entire country, too. The opposite, or something close to it, happened there, too. Johnson, who in Congress had opposed not only a great deal of civil-rights legislation but even anti-lynching bills, would in 1964 reinvent himself as a civil-rights champion. It is pleasant to think that, in whatever afterlife he finds himself in, he is both amused and pleased to see himself politically reincarnated as a black man."

"The key difference is that while Johnson may have been a rotten S.O.B., he knew what he was doing, more or less. He didn’t fumble into Vietnam in 1965 — he lied about his intentions in 1964. He was sufficiently intelligent, and sufficiently a man of the Senate, to understand that the particulars of legislative architecture were going to be the deciding factor in the success or the failure of his programs. He knew that they would have to be revisited over the years. He was a deeply weird man — and a monster — but he was also a resident of the real world. Barack Obama? Less so."

"On 28 April 1965, 20,000 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic on the orders of President Johnson to prevent the creation of “a second Cuba”."

"Nixon’s law-and-order message wasn’t just about urban riots. It was a repudiation of the governing party for its alleged part in the general unraveling of peace, prosperity and order. The late 1960s brought mounting inflation and racial unrest, campus uprisings, a sharp spike in crime, an emerging sexual revolution and court-mandated expansion of personal liberties—all set against the backdrop of a controversial war in Vietnam that the government seemed unable to win or exit. The incumbent president, Lyndon B. Johnson, and by extension, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had presided over the very social unraveling that many voters were eager to reverse. This was Nixon’s opening—his appeal to swing voters, especially. Now, as in 1968, the violence of the past several days has revealed a broader pattern of social and political dissolution. Unemployment stands at 14.7 percent. Over 100,000 Americans lie dead of Covid, with no end in sight to the pandemic. Americans are bitterly divided by race, ethnicity and partisan affiliation. A foreign nation, Russia, has all but declared asymmetrical warfare against the United States. What the journalist Walter Lippmann said in 1968—“the world has never been more disorderly within memory of living man”—might credibly be said today. One key difference: Today, the candidate demanding “law and order” is the one who couldn’t preserve it. Like Johnson before him, Trump’s is the party in power—the party that has failed to provide peace, prosperity and social order. Republicans control the executive branch, the Senate and the Supreme Court. They alone own the chaos, rancor and instability that many voters have come to abhor and dread. Trump campaigns like Richard Nixon and George Wallace, but in reality, he is Lyndon B. Johnson: a man who has lost control of the machine."

"Unlike Johnson, Trump has proved stubbornly indifferent to the responsibilities of governing. He shuns expertise, science, data or any of the other assets a typical president avails himself of. He has little in the way of achievement that he can point to. He thrives on division, where LBJ sought to make America a more inclusive place for people of color, the poor and the left behind. In this regard, the two men are night and day, both in how they’ve executed the job and the moral bearing they brought to it. But if Trump walks like Nixon and talks like Wallace, he looks a lot like Lyndon B. Johnson, a president who by 1968 seemed unable to put the country back together. If what today’s Middle Americans (or, in Nixon’s words, “forgotten Americans”) want is an end to the violence, drama and discord, this week’s unrest may ultimately benefit the one candidate who has built his brand on a basis of empathy, shared sacrifice and loss and a sunny belief in a better tomorrow. 2020 could be Joe Biden’s year."

"The political result of this turmoil is exactly what LBJ feared the most: the election of Republican Richard Nixon, who, though moderate by modern standards, sets into motion the conservative revolution that would greatly weaken the will to grow domestic policy and place Great Society programs under continual threat. Key portions of several programs, such as the Voting Rights Act, would not survive. Schenkkan reminds us that Richard Nixon was the Donald Trump of his times when, during an Oval Office meeting with LBJ, he promises to make America great again."

"As Democrats try to figure out what to do with President Trump, they might want to head over to the Arena Theater to get a good reminder of what happens when parties don’t take the right step to nurture their political strength. Policies are only as good or strong as the governing coalition that holds power. If a party hands control of power to the opposing party—as was the case with Obama and LBJ—the consequences could be devastating. Democrats are living through this nightmare for a second time with no end in sight."

"The record of the first session of the 89th Congress stood as a lesson in Presidential leadership surpassing even the strong showing made by Mr. Johnson in 1964, The President seized the momentum provided by his landslide victory in the 1964 election and the large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to get much of his program off to an early start; then he sustained the pace, sending up new messages and programs throughout the first half of the year to keep Congressional mills turning. Republican alternative programs got short shrift and even less public attention."

"Congressional Quarterly 1965: Vol 21 Table of Contents, P.65-67 An assessment of Johnson's leadership ability during the 89th Congress, which passed a significant amount of liberal legislation."

"I'm going to have to bring up the nigger bill again."

"This Nation will keep its commitments from South Viet-Nam to West Berlin. We will be unceasing in the search for peace; resourceful in our pursuit of areas of agreement even with those with whom we differ; and generous and loyal to those who join with us in common cause. In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint. We must be prepared at one and the same time for both the confrontation of power and the limitation of power. We must be ready to defend the national interest and to negotiate the common interest. This is the path that we shall continue to pursue. Those who test our courage will find it strong, and those who seek our friendship will find it honorable. We will demonstrate anew that the strong can be just in the use of strength; and the just can be strong in the defense of justice."

"We will serve all the Nation, not one section or one sector, or one group, but all Americans. These are the United States-a united people with a united purpose. Our American unity does not depend upon unanimity. We have differences; but now, as in the past, we can derive from those differences strength, not weakness, wisdom, not despair. Both as a people and a government, we can unite upon a program, a program which is wise and just, enlightened and constructive."

"For 32 years Capitol Hill has been my home. I have shared many moments of pride with you, pride in the ability of the Congress of the United States to act, to meet any crisis, to distill from our differences strong programs of national action. An assassin's bullet has thrust upon me the awesome burden of the Presidency. I am here today to say I need your help; I cannot bear this burden alone. I need the help of all Americans, and all America. This Nation has experienced a profound shock, and in this critical moment, it is our duty, yours and mine, as the Government of the United States, to do away with uncertainty and doubt and delay, and to show that we are capable of decisive action; that from the brutal loss of our leader we will derive not weakness, but strength; that we can and will act and act now."

"From this chamber of representative government, let all the world know and none misunderstand that I rededicate this Government to the unswerving support of the United Nations, to the honorable and determined execution of our commitments to our allies, to the maintenance of military strength second to none, to the defense of the strength and the stability of the dollar, to the expansion of our foreign trade, to the reinforcement of our programs of mutual assistance and cooperation in Asia and Africa, and to our Alliance for Progress in this hemisphere."

"On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished "in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But," he said, "let us begin." Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue."

"This is our challenge--not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us. Our most immediate tasks are here on this Hill. First, no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law. I urge you again, as I did in 1957 and again in 1960, to enact a civil rights law so that we can move forward to eliminate from this Nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color. There could be no greater source of strength to this Nation both at home and abroad."

"As one who has long served in both Houses of the Congress, I firmly believe in the independence and the integrity of the legislative branch. And I promise you that I shall always respect this. It is deep in the marrow of my bones. With equal firmness, I believe in the capacity and I believe in the ability of the Congress, despite the divisions of opinions which characterize our Nation, to act--to act wisely, to act vigorously, to act speedily when the need arises. The need is here. The need is now. I ask your help."

"We meet in grief, but let us also meet in renewed dedication and renewed vigor. Let us meet in action, in tolerance, and in mutual understanding. John Kennedy's death commands what his life conveyed-that America must move forward. The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation's bloodstream."

"I will be brief, for our time is necessarily short and our agenda is already long. Last year's congressional session was the longest in peacetime history. With that foundation, let us work together to make this year's session the best in the Nation's history. Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined; as the session which enacted the most far-reaching tax cut of our time; as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States; as the session which finally recognized the health needs of all our older citizens; as the session which reformed our tangled transportation and transit policies; as the session which achieved the most effective, efficient foreign aid program ever; and as the session which helped to build more homes, more schools, more libraries, and more hospitals than any single session of Congress in the history of our Republic. All this and more can and must be done. It can be done by this summer, and it can be done without any increase in spending. In fact, under the budget that I shall shortly submit, it can be done with an actual reduction in Federal expenditures and Federal employment."

"We have in 1964 a unique opportunity and obligation--to prove the success of our system; to disprove those cynics and critics at home and abroad who question our purpose and our competence. If we fail, if we fritter and fumble away our opportunity in needless, senseless quarrels between Democrats and Republicans, or between the House and the Senate, or between the South and North, or between the Congress and the administration, then history will rightfully judge us harshly. But if we succeed, if we can achieve these goals by forging in this country a greater sense of union, then, and only then, can we take full satisfaction in the State of the Union."

"Here in the Congress you can demonstrate effective legislative leadership by discharging the public business with clarity and dispatch, voting each important proposal up, or voting it down, but at least bringing it to a fair and a final vote. Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy--not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right. In his memory today, I especially ask all members of my own political faith, in this election year, to put your country ahead of your party, and to always debate principles; never debate personalities."

"For my part, I pledge a progressive administration which is efficient, and honest and frugal. The budget to be submitted to the Congress shortly is in full accord with this pledge. It will cut our deficit in half--from $10 billion to $4,900 million. It will be, in proportion to our national output, the smallest budget since 1951. It will call for a substantial reduction in Federal employment, a feat accomplished only once before in the last 10 years. While maintaining the full strength of our combat defenses, it will call for the lowest number of civilian personnel in the Department of Defense since 1950. It will call for total expenditures of $97,900 million--compared to $98,400 million for the current year, a reduction of more than $500 million. It will call for new obligational authority of $103,800 million--a reduction of more than $4 billion below last year's request of $107,900 million. But it is not a standstill budget, for America cannot afford to stand still. Our population is growing. Our economy is more complex. Our people's needs are expanding. But by closing down obsolete installations, by curtailing less urgent programs, by cutting back where cutting back seems to be wise, by insisting on a dollar's worth for a dollar spent, I am able to recommend in this reduced budget the most Federal support in history for education, for health, for retraining the unemployed, and for helping the economically and the physically handicapped. This budget, and this year's legislative program, are designed to help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes--his hopes for a fair chance to make good; his hopes for fair play from the law; his hopes for a full-time job on full-time pay; his hopes for a decent home for his family in a decent community; his hopes for a good school for his children with good teachers; and his hopes for security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age."

"Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope--some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime. Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts. For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House. The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs."

"Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas."

"Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice. We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia. We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program. We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects. We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program. We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad. We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity. We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2 million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power. We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and counseling in our hardest hit areas. We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and nursing homes under the Hill-Burton Act, and train more nurses to staff them. We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1 a month during the employee's working career to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated illness. We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program, give more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more housing for our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal in our free enterprise system a decent home for every American family. We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well as low-cost transportation between them. Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land."

"These programs are obviously not for the poor or the underprivileged alone. Every American will benefit by the extension of social security to cover the hospital costs of their aged parents. Every American community will benefit from the construction or modernization of schools, libraries, hospitals, and nursing homes, from the training of more nurses and from the improvement of urban renewal in public transit. And every individual American taxpayer and every corporate taxpayer will benefit from the earliest possible passage of the pending tax bill from both the new investment it will bring and the new jobs that it will create."

"That tax bill has been thoroughly discussed for a year. Now we need action. The new budget clearly allows it. Our taxpayers surely deserve it. Our economy strongly demands it. And every month of delay dilutes its benefits in 1964 for consumption, for investment, and for employment. For until the bill is signed, its investment incentives cannot be deemed certain, and the withholding rate cannot be reduced-and the most damaging and devastating thing you can do to any businessman in America is to keep him in doubt and to keep him guessing on what our tax policy is. And I say that we should now reduce to 14 percent instead of 15 percent our withholding rate. I therefore urge the Congress to take final action on this bill by the first of February, if at all possible. For however proud we may be of the unprecedented progress of our free enterprise economy over the last 3 years, we should not and we cannot permit it to pause. In 1963, for the first time in history, we crossed the 70 million job mark, but we will soon need more than 75 million jobs. In 1963 our gross national product reached the $600 billion level--$100 billion higher than when we took office. But it easily could and it should be still $30 billion higher today than it is. Wages and profits and family income are also at their highest levels in history--but I would remind you that 4 million workers and 13 percent of our industrial capacity are still idle today. We need a tax cut now to keep this country moving."

"For our goal is not merely to spread the work. Our goal is to create more jobs. I believe the enactment of a 35-hour week would sharply increase costs, would invite inflation, would impair our ability to compete, and merely share instead of creating employment. But I am equally opposed to the 45- or 50-hour week in those industries where consistently excessive use of overtime causes increased unemployment. So, therefore, I recommend legislation authorizing the creation of a tripartite industry committee to determine on an industry-by-industry basis as to where a higher penalty rate for overtime would increase job openings without unduly increasing costs, and authorizing the establishment of such higher rates."

"Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear: All of these increased opportunities--in employment, in education, in housing, and in every field-must be open to Americans of every color. As far as the writ of Federal law will run, we must abolish not some, but all racial discrimination. For this is not merely an economic issue, or a social, political, or international issue. It is a moral issue, and it must be met by the passage this session of the bill now pending in the House. All members of the public should have equal access to facilities open to the public. All members of the public should be equally eligible for Federal benefits that are financed by the public. All members of the public should have an equal chance to vote for public officials and to send their children to good public schools and to contribute their talents to the public good. Today, Americans of all races stand side by side in Berlin and in Viet Nam. They died side by side in Korea. Surely they can work and eat and travel side by side in their own country."

"We must also lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against those who seek entry into our country, particularly those who have much needed skills and those joining their families. In establishing preferences, a nation that was built by the immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission: "What can you do for our country?" But we should not be asking: "In what country were you born?""

"For our ultimate goal is a world without war, a world made safe for diversity, in which all men, goods, and ideas can freely move across every border and every boundary. We must advance toward this goal in 1964 in at least 10 different ways, not as partisans, but as patriots. First, we must maintain--and our reduced defense budget will maintain--that margin of military safety and superiority obtained through 3 years of steadily increasing both the quality and the quantity of our strategic, our conventional, and our antiguerilla forces. In 1964 we will be better prepared than ever before to defend the cause of freedom, whether it is threatened by outright aggression or by the infiltration practiced by those in Hanoi and Havana, who ship arms and men across international borders to foment insurrection. And we must continue to use that strength as John Kennedy used it in the Cuban crisis and for the test ban treaty--to demonstrate both the futility of nuclear war and the possibilities of lasting peace."

"Second, we must take new steps--and we shall make new proposals at Geneva--toward the control and the eventual abolition of arms. Even in the absence of agreement, we must not stockpile arms beyond our needs or seek an excess of military power that could be provocative as well as wasteful. It is in this spirit that in this fiscal year we are cutting back our production of enriched uranium by 25 percent. We are shutting down four plutonium piles. We are closing many nonessential military installations. And it is in this spirit that we today call on our adversaries to do the same."

"Third, we must make increased use of our food as an instrument of peace--making it available by sale or trade or loan or donation-to hungry people in all nations which tell us of their needs and accept proper conditions of distribution. Fourth, we must assure our pre-eminence in the peaceful exploration of outer space, focusing on an expedition to the moon in this decade--in cooperation with other powers if possible, alone if necessary. Fifth, we must expand world trade. Having recognized in the Act of 1962 that we must buy as well as sell, we now expect our trading partners to recognize that we must sell as well as buy. We are willing to give them competitive access to our market, asking only that they do the same for us."

"Sixth, we must continue, through such measures as the interest equalization tax, as well as the cooperation of other nations, our recent progress toward balancing our international accounts. This administration must and will preserve the present gold value of the dollar. Seventh, we must become better neighbors with the free states of the Americas, working with the councils of the OAS, with a stronger Alliance for Progress, and with all the men and women of this hemisphere who really believe in liberty and justice for all. Eighth, we must strengthen the ability of free nations everywhere to develop their independence and raise their standard of living, and thereby frustrate those who prey on poverty and chaos. To do this, the rich must help the poor--and we must do our part. We must achieve a more rigorous administration of our development assistance, with larger roles for private investors, for other industrialized nations, and for international agencies and for the recipient nations themselves. Ninth, we must strengthen our Atlantic and Pacific partnerships, maintain our alliances and make the United Nations a more effective instrument for national independence and international order. Tenth, and finally, we must develop with our allies new means of bridging the gap between the East and the West, facing danger boldly wherever danger exists, but being equally bold in our search for new agreements which can enlarge the hopes of all, while violating the interests of none."

"In short, I would say to the Congress that we must be constantly prepared for the worst, and constantly acting for the best. We must be strong enough to win any war, and we must be wise enough to prevent one. We shall neither act as aggressors nor tolerate acts of aggression. We intend to bury no one, and we do not intend to be buried. We can fight, if we must, as we have fought before, but we pray that we will never have to fight again. My good friends and my fellow Americans: In these last 7 sorrowful weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, and nothing is so degrading as hate. John Kennedy was a victim of hate, but he was also a great builder of faith--faith in our fellow Americans, whatever their creed or their color or their station in life; faith in the future of man, whatever his divisions and differences. This faith was echoed in all parts of the world. On every continent and in every land to which Mrs. Johnson and I traveled, we found faith and hope and love toward this land of America and toward our people. So I ask you now in the Congress and in the country to join with me in expressing and fulfilling that faith in working for a nation, a nation that is free from want and a world that is free from hate--a world of peace and justice, and freedom and abundance, for our time and for all time to come."

"It is a welcome privilege to be in your city and on your campus here at St. Louis University. for many years your city has been widely known for baseball, basketball, the Busch family, and I am a fan of all three. But those who know St. Louis well and know it affectionately as I have for many years, since I wore my first set of Buster Brown shoes, know that the strength of this city comes from its colleges and its churches, and the courageous civic leadership of its citizens. I have little patience with those who dismiss this great region of mid-America as an intellectual desert. Those who say that don't know mid-America, don't know the Midwest and don't know St. Louis, and won't last very long in the company of Senator Symington and Senator Long!"

"This city and this campus and the other centers of higher learning are now and will continue to be in the forefront of our Nation's leadership in this new age of science and technology. President Kennedy told us, and I most strongly agree, that our progress as a Nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource. This is the most fundamental truth of our system and our society and of every success that we have achieved or hope to achieve."

"This is not always clearly seen. It is true today as when Thomas Jefferson first said it, that people generally have more feeling for canals and the roads than they do for education. But I hold the hope that Jefferson held, that we can advance them with equal pace. In our cities and in our counties, and in all of our country, there is a very great and urgent need for public works. But today more than any time in our history, America's most urgent work is educating its people, educating all the people, all the time, wherever they may have been born or wherever they may have chosen to live."

"In the two hundred years since St. Louis was born we have done many things in this land men have not done before. But the greatest of these has been the accomplishment of learning to live together, learning to live together in freedom and fulfillment, all religions, all races, all heritages, German and Irish, Italian and English, french-yes, even Texans. We have done much, but our work on this earth is not yet done; we walk a long road and we carry a precious trust. We are not looking for, we shall never look for, the short cuts. We shall never resort to battleship diplomacy or rely upon the umbrella of appeasement. We will be resolute but we will never be reckless. We will be restrained in the face of provocation because we know America's strength. We will never be reluctant in the face of peril because we trust that strength of America."