Remarks on the 82d Anniversary of the Birth of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Ladies and gentlemen:

I have called you together this afternoon to join with me in commemorating this day of January 30, 1964, as the 82d anniversary of the birth of a man who we were all privileged to work with and work for-Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

You and I share in common the fact that our experience in this house began during the years that he was the 32d President of the United States. In recent days, the story has been told and retold of my own long and close and cherished association with President Roosevelt. Memories of those associations have flooded my own thoughts on many occasions since last November. I can only be grateful that the intimate hours that I shared with him are proving now to be so valuable to me in shouldering the burden of this awesome and demanding office.

The place of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in our history and in the history of the human race grows steadily with time. few men in history have served freedom so effectively and so nobly as did he, both in our own land and around the world. His liberal compassion towards his fellowman, together with his conservative respect for the institutions of our economy and society, guided this Nation past the shoals of radicalism and reaction. He provided our ship of state with both the ballast to hold a steady and stable course, and the sail to move us forward progressively toward the broader horizons of human hope.

What we are as individuals and as nations is inevitably influenced by the sum of our experiences. In both pride and humility, I readily admit that my own course in life has been influenced by none so much as by this great man whom we all knew, whom we all loved, and whom today we all revere in our memories.

In recent weeks and months, as I have reviewed our needs at home and our challenges abroad, I have come to believe anew that our times today are even more challenging than the crisis years of the thirties or the forties with which President Roosevelt had to deal. We are not faced with depression. We hope and pray that the world will not be faced with a senseless threat to its peace. We have far better tools and talents for ending human want, but we must be busier than we are at perfecting our use of those tools and those talents. We have far more capacity for keeping peace and making it secure, but we must be more resolute in putting that capacity to use.

What we can do as world leaders for freedom depends tomorrow, as it did yesterday, on getting our affairs in order here at home. This we must do and this we are going to do. We must face at home the problems of opportunity, the problems of rights, the problems of well-being and welfare which exist now.

We cannot be content in the 1960's with the answers of the 1930's. There are those in our regions and in all our races who have been forgotten and passed over and passed by. We must remember them, or they will someday remind us of our oversight. The meek and the humble and the lowly share this life and this earth with us all. We must never forget them. President Roosevelt never did.

In our richness we must not forget the poor, and in our strength we must not forget the weak. In our comfort we must not forget the uncomfortable. We who have so much must use our resources and our strength and our knowledge to make opportunities universal for all men, even as we work to make freedom and peace universal for all nations.

Franklin Roosevelt passed to us a trust of compassion and conscience and courage always. And we must never lose that trust. With God's help, and by the labors of our own hand, let us move forward in new labors, in new efforts, in new enterprises, to keep faith with men everywhere who place their greatest faith on earth in us who are privileged to call ourselves Americans. Let us move forward as he would expect us to, bearing in mind that each day as I go about my labors here, as a result of a move last week, I have him sitting there watching us, and I hope approving the kind of administration that we are trying to build.

It is an administration of strength that will defend the security of this country and preserve it anywhere in the world at any time. It is an administration that is solvent, that will permit us to have the strength we need abroad and the strength we must have at home. It is an administration of compassion that practices the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you and putting yourself in the other fellow's place in order to be more readily appreciative of his position.

In these days when so many stand for nothing, and when so few can think of nothing except the past, and the fault-finders are among us in many spots, let us be affirmative, let us be positive, let us look forward with our chin up and our chest out, as he did, to a better day not just for our own, but for human beings everywhere. He would have it this way.

Thank you.