Remarks at the Airport, McCook, Nebraska

Governor Crosby, distinguished guests, my fellow citizens:

First, permit me to thank each of you for the honor you have paid me in coming out today, to give me a chance to bring a word of greeting, and to meet you face to face.

I spent a long time in the Army, and we had textbooks that told why a commander should go around and visit the people who were doing the actual fighting--this was to inspire the troops. I soon found that for my part I seemed to be different. I went around, all right, but it was because they inspired me. Having met--and meeting--young Americans on the battlefields, I could go back to my own job with much greater dedication, much greater belief, and conviction that I could execute it.

I know of nothing--particularly for one who has to spend a great deal of his time in Washington in an official position--that can take the place of going out and trying again to meet Americans that are making a living and paying taxes, rather than just taking it unto themselves to spend the taxes.

While it is true today that my party and I are here on a special kind of fact-gathering trip, always in any kind of trip it is that need we feel, to get out again and to see Americans in their own homes, and in their own cities, making this country what it is.

Now today we are visiting a number of water conservation projects-reclamation projects--to see if we can get a little firsthand practical education in our phase of helping in this great and necessary development of the western country, indeed of all our country.

Now, we have not come with any idea that in Washington reside all the brains that can determine what should be done in these areas. Indeed, we don't believe that Washington should have the right to interfere too specifically with the lives of any of us, or to lay down the rules and regulations as to how everything should be done in the development of this country.

On the contrary, we believe that the people who are farming the land and using the water, who are developing our natural resources, know a little more about it than the people that just are passing laws concerning it.

So we come out here--legislators, administrative officers, and executives--to find out what do the people believe, what do they think?

And one phase of that thinking is not just alone the use of water, the development of the water power and the irrigating water; it is this: what is the proper relationship between the local farmer, between the local area, the State, and the Federal Government--the proper relationship not only in the provision of, let us say, from Washington, the broad national survey, so that everything fits together, but how do we get together to finance these things, and do things so that each does his proper share, and so that every part of the United States may have the proper use of its own resources, and the proper control over them--responsibility for them?

Where the Federal Government has a function, we want to do it adequately and promptly. We want to help. But we don't want to be bosses. That I should like to make clear, and I should like for you to remember it.

Indeed, I think I might remark in passing that those people who believe that a group of men can be gathered together in Washington-and remember, that's all Government is, just a group of men that you select to perform particular jobs--a group of men, sitting in Washington, to run the affairs of this country in its details better than can the people who are actually doing the work, then we have gone a long, long way away from the kind of country that was given to us by our Founding Fathers, and the kind that we hope to pass on.

Washington is there to help coordinate, to help in every kind of thing that, as Lincoln put it: to help in those things which people cannot do for themselves, or cannot so well do for themselves. And nothing else. And when they go beyond that, somebody out there among you ought to be slapping us down.

I believe that in the course of this 1,500-mile trip today we will have gained a lot of things, not only what I have mentioned before, the opportunity to see you face to face, to get some idea of the way you are feeling, through your people, your representatives sitting on the platform here, what they tell me as we travel from station to station, but the actual study of land, of rivers, and the seeing of the reservoirs and the canyons-where they want to put them--the rivers and the lands they want to irrigate. All that is very helpful, and I assure you that is what we will be taking back.

All this will be done, not with any thought that the Government of the United States is taking care of you. It is merely that the Federal Government is doing its part in trying to be your good partner. We want to be no more. And that I assure you.

Now, we still have a day ahead of us. In fact, we are not going to land there but I am going to fly over my own State of Kansas. I was rather amused by Governor Crosby talking about this being a hot day. He ought to have been raised down in Smoky Hill; we have some heat down there. But anyway, I am going to get to go down around there before my party and I land back in Denver.

With me are representatives of the Agriculture Department, Interior Department, with especially the Reclamation Bureau and the local engineers of the services, local officials of the States, and so on. It is a most informative thing.

Thank you again for coming out. Each of you has done me a very great honor, and I am very proud of it.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.