Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

Remarks to the American Field Service Students.

July 18, 1957

THANK YOU very much. I think if there's anyone in this crowd that doesn't have a camera, we ought to take up a collection to do something about it. I don't think we would have to put in much money.

Since 1948 I have had the privilege, I think every year except one when I was in Europe, of greeting representative bodies of foreign students--young people brought over by the American Field Service. The finest thing about the whole event is that each year the group seems to be growing larger.

I don't know of anything more worth while today than for young people of our several countries to visit each other. And you have had the opportunity of visiting us truly because you have come to our homes and you have stayed here long enough to decide for yourselves whether most of us wear tails and horns or whether we are on the average sort of good people that want to live and work productively just like any other decent people do.

So I think that you have had not only an opportunity of very great value, but I believe when you go home you have a certain responsibility to make known, as widely as you can, what are your impressions of another country in which you have been privileged to live for this time.

I speak rather feelingly on this matter. I think I have spent some 13 years of my life in different foreign countries. I have never yet come back from one of them that I didn't feel I had learned a lot, and I am quite certain that that feeling is shared by every one of you here this morning.

I would hope that the groups that come after you will constantly grow in size, that this will finally become not a matter of 764--I admire the Director for his ability to remember numbers--but that it would be seven thousand and even more. And that we in turn will find ways of sending our young people to your countries, to learn about you, to bring back to us better understanding of your cultures, your histories, your traditions, your hopes, your aspirations, your religions, so that we can be a little wiser, a little more more understanding, in the dealings we have with all the world.

So, when I say from my heart it is a privilege to welcome you here to the Nation's Capital, I mean it just as sincerely as I possibly can. I hope that you will have a good time in the Capital and that you will go back home with the finest of memories of this country, and that possibly some of these days I can meet at least a few of you again and talk over in detail the experiences you have had here and the subsequent usefulness you found in this trip.

God bless you. Good luck to you. Goodbye.

Note: The President spoke at the White House at 11:00 a. m.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks to the American Field Service Students. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/233363

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