Address at the Ground-breaking Ceremonies for the Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas

Governor Docking, Mr. Fairless, Senator Darby, and Friends:

I am glad indeed to come again to Abilene. Whenever I return here, I invariably sense, in these surroundings, an atmosphere of simplicity and peace.

This is not because Abilene is any less involved in the turbulent affairs of our interdependent world than are all other places my duties take me. Rather, it is because each homecoming causes my mind to go back, nostalgically, to the conditions I knew as a boy. We did not then know the term "world tension"; life was peaceful, serene, and happy!

It was here that my parents spent most of their lives and my brothers and I grew to adulthood. The years of our youth preceded the exacting interdependence of the world as we know it today.

Even more than the memory of those tranquil years, it was the abiding truths we learned at home that prompted my brothers and me some years ago to give our parents' home to a Foundation, organized initially by citizens of this town. Later, as you know, the Foundation brought into being the beautiful museum we see across the street. Their action and ours were not taken with any intention of glorifying a name, but an idea--an idea that visits by individuals to this simple home and this museum might serve to remind us all of some of the concepts that underlie the American way.

Our parents, like most American parents of the period, were concerned primarily with the cardinal features of their religious philosophy-beliefs which shaped their own lives and their guidance of their children. Love of God, fairness in human relations, independence and responsibility, concern for the welfare of others, and conviction that each free individual could through his own efforts achieve a full life--these were all included in an idea which was as much a part of our home as the food we ate and the clothes we wore.

These concepts are foremost in my thinking now as I help break ground for this additional structure, a library.

In this library will be placed initially most of the written records of my military and Presidential service. As time passes, other documents pertaining to American development in this same period may gradually be added. One important addition already committed comprises many of the papers of John Foster Dulles during the years he was Secretary of State. All of these documents will, I hope, help to deepen understanding and demonstrate the application of the concepts that were basic to life in Abilene 50 years ago. In spite of the revolutionary changes that have come to us during the half century, I believe these fundamentals are as valid for today as they were then.

The generosity of the American people in providing the beautiful structure that will rise on this land is highly gratifying to me. No gesture could touch me more deeply than centering this meaningful enterprise in the heartland of America and having it bear my name. I feel a deep sense of obligation to my personal friends, and to all others who are cooperating in this enterprise, even though I realize that their participation is motivated by concern for the perpetuation of ideas, rather than the records of any individual.

Now we have no illusions that a mere study by research workers of the letters, messages, memoranda, and books deposited by many individuals here will miraculously endow their readers with wisdom.

Factual information must be energized by the force of reason, understanding, and interpretation. To the true historian, trends are more important than the recorded deeds of any period. A study of events of the past half century shows that the compelling forces have been at work, causing trends which will carry into decades ahead with persistent momentum.

We need not dwell on the disappearance of physical earth-bound frontiers and the opening of frontiers of outer space; or on the shattering of blissful self-sufficiency and the growth of exacting interdependence; or on the development of power so awesome that nations now have no logical alternative to replace coercion with honest negotiation and cooperation. These and other great changes are obvious, but whether they will lead us to disaster or to an era of hope and accomplishment will depend on the degree of understanding and wisdom we apply in solving a vast array of problems.

Because upon our powerful Nation the mantle of free world leadership has fallen, our responsibility in the search for solutions is inescapable. And, since in our country the basic social power is in the hands of all the people, each citizen bears directly a part of the responsibility for right action. Each of you here today must help make the fateful decisions of the future. Study of the past and the present will help to assure that these decisions are made wisely.

Think for a moment of the type of decision you will be forced to make in the light of just one obvious trend in the world scene.

When you of my age were youngsters, William Allen White was disturbed by the fact that Kansas was losing population. What would he say today about the rapid growth of Kansas and the swelling population of the Nation?

What would be his reaction to present estimates that while our country's population is increasing to two hundred seventy-five million in the next 30 years, the world's population will be nearly five billion people?

Many peoples of the world, once dominated and submissive, are now and will continue to be involved in a great ferment, explosive in its potential. Everywhere, knowledge and ideas, spread by modern communications, are routing centuries of ignorance and superstition. Peoples now know that poverty and suppression are neither universal nor are they inevitable.

Increasingly and insistently, they are demanding the elimination of the human indignities of starvation, ill health, and peonage. They want independence, individual freedom, and responsible government.

These increasingly numerous peoples of tomorrow's world will multiply those wants--and they will have at their disposal both more constructive and more destructive capacity than the world has known before.

Now how do you believe this capacity will be used? What decisions will you make in this regard?

These are sobering questions. They deserve your most earnest consideration.

For if the growing power of free men is wisely and skillfully applied toward the common aspirations of humanity, then a world of peace and plenty becomes a high probability. But if power is used recklessly, or is employed in the pursuit of false, selfish goals, then civilization will risk its own destruction.

You know that the free nations of the world have the capacity and can develop the will to overcome together the powerful, perplexing forces which for thousands of years have yielded hate, distrust, poverty.

Humanity's upward climb involves complex economic, educational, and political problems, all of which cry for wisdom as we seek solutions, as we search for world understanding.

I cite one homely example.

A common miracle is the telephone. You can speak into it and, with the speed of light, your words will be carried around the world. Yet, even this technological triumph encounters serious impediments to true, free communication among populations. Most people in the world do not have access to a telephone. This is an economic problem. Among those who do, you would not be able to understand many because of language barriers--an educational problem. And even if these difficulties were surmounted, almost a third of the world's peoples would be forbidden to talk with you--a political problem.

Obviously a program for peaceful progress calls for intelligent economic, educational, and political cooperation: economic cooperation which promises that peoples everywhere may, by concerted effort, conquer hunger and disease, and lift their levels of living; educational cooperation to develop that genuine human understanding on which all other cooperative activity must be based; and political cooperation, not only to settle disputes which continuously arise in an imperfect world, but also to build the social structures that encourage man in his striving for a better life.

Now, any reasonable person will recognize that no one nation, even with the legendary strength of an Atlas, could long support the world on its shoulders.

Each nation will progress only if its own people and leaders recognize that the major responsibility for improvement is theirs. Even if every other nation were as generous as the United States has been in recent years, this would still be so.

But this does not imply that we or any other fortunate people may be indifferent to the welfare of others. We cannot today live--either in domestic or international life--with the long-obsolete picture of the factory owner living on a hilltop in isolated riches and splendor, wholly indifferent to the aspirations and just demands of the oppressed multitudes in the plains below.

Clearly one objective of American foreign policy is and must be to help build a world economy in which each nation finds it possible to earn its own keep and to pay its own way, and do so in a manner which brings meaning and fulfillment to the lives of its citizens. Such a policy is crucial to our own prosperity and security; it is vital to the cause of a just and lasting peace.

I believe, and I trust you believe, that every free nation should have this policy. I further believe--and hope you agree--that the free nations of the world, motivated by both humanitarianism and self-interest, should cooperate voluntarily in a long-range program aimed at helping the presently less privileged peoples work step by step toward a better life.

Every nation should contribute to the common enterprise in whatever way it can. No nation should be deemed incapable of contributing in some fashion to the worldwide goal.

The ingredients of this assistance must be technical services, private and public loans, dependable, mutually helpful trade relationships, grants in emergency situations, security help in transition years, and, above all, continuing efforts to build true understanding among nations and peoples, without which all else will fail.

Foreign capital helped our own country make spectacular progress during the first three-quarters of the 19th century--capital which over a 40-year period we repaid with interest. So, too, can private and public capital, under the right conditions, now assist the less-developed nations make sound progress toward the achievement of their goals. Those "right conditions" must include both an honorable and responsible attitude within the nations needing the capital and intelligent trade relations among all free nations.

No other aspiration dominates my own being so much as this: that the nations of East and West will find dependable, self-guaranteeing methods to reduce the vast and essentially wasteful expenditures for armaments, so that part of the savings may be used in a comprehensive and effective effort for world improvement.

As the less developed nations succeed in establishing viable economies and raising their living standards, our own economy will soar to new heights and our technology will be challenged as never before. Burdensome surpluses--even those of wheat--will disappear. Indeed, the world may then be threatened with very real deficits--of food, energy, minerals. Enlarged demand throughout the world will have to be met by new methods, and more effective use of resources everywhere.

The world must learn to work together--or finally it will not work at all.

This is not a problem for the distant future. Within the lifetime of many of you here today, the global population will be five billion. You must now help determine how such a vast humanity may, in freedom, achieve stupendous increases in economic output, and increase the sum of human happiness on this earth.

The task ahead is not for the faint-hearted.

But does anyone of Central Kansas need to be told that our parents and grandparents who first worked this black soil were not faint-hearted? They had faith--faith in the religious concepts that dominated their beings, faith in the virtue and success of their own labor, faith in their neighbors and in the inexhaustible potential of free men.

If they were here today, they would, I'm sure, wonder whether we possess for our time, as they did for theirs, a comprehension of the concepts and basic principles which, universally applied, can lead mankind toward a world community of free nations, characterized by peace and justice.

Our forefathers who pioneered this land were concerned initially with individual family welfare. Soon, however, they developed allegiance to larger communities--the State and Nation--and in doing so they did not diminish their devotion to family or local community; indeed, they strengthened it. If they saw the world as it is today, they would be the first to realize that peoples everywhere must now achieve an allegiance to the wider, free-world community, and doing so they will thereby strengthen, make more meaningful, their devotion to family, to State, and Nation.

When this library is filled with documents, and scholars come here to probe into some of the facts of the past half century, I hope that they, as we today, are concerned primarily with the ideals, principles, and trends that provide guides to a free, rich, peaceful future in which all peoples can achieve ever-rising levels of human well-being.

Those who have so generously made possible the construction of this library do not seek reward or acclaim. Yet, I profoundly believe that they will feel deep gratification in the knowledge that thus they may have helped in some small measure to assure the Nation's eternal adherence to these simple ideals and principles as free men shape historic trends toward noble goals.

May God grant that this may be so.

Thank you very much.