Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

Remarks to the Delegates of Girls Nation.

August 01, 1957

WELL, I MUST SAY, if the Girls Nation is organizing a government, there's going to be more glamor in it than any I ever heard about before.

Your President tells me that you have been here since Sunday, and so probably you know a lot more about Washington than I do, in some of its aspects, at least.

I can't help complimenting you on the opportunity that is yours to come here and by actually making contact with the different functions of government, getting a better understanding of what this enormous thing is that we call the American government. It has an influence on your lives. It will have influence on your lives as long as you live--on everybody else around you. The more you know about it the better will be your ability to deal with it, to work with it, to make certain that it does what it should and doesn't interfere with you where it shouldn't.

So I think that everything that we can do to learn more about this is to the betterment of our country and to the betterment of ourselves. When you learn this by actual intimate contact, in seeing these different departments work, then I think indeed do you have a privilege and an opportunity that is given to only a few of us in this country.

So I congratulate the American Legion on their choices for this year's delegates and I certainly congratulate you girls on the opportunity that is yours. When you go home, you will carry with you my very best wishes and the thought, I hope, that I wish I could have had more time to sit with you and "chin" with you about some of the things you have seen this last week, and which I know will last with you a long time.

Goodbye and good luck.

Note: The President spoke in the Rose Garden.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks to the Delegates of Girls Nation. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/233420

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