Remarks at a Reception for Members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors

Ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate your coming here today. The reason I wanted you in the Rose Garden is simply because if we had gone inside the White House Lady Bird would have insisted that I turn on all the lights.

I want you to know Lady Bird.

[At this point Mrs. Johnson welcomed the newspaper editors and their wives, after which Lynda Bird Johnson spoke briefly. The President then resumed speaking.]

Luci, my teenager, will be coming along a little later. She is being interviewed by a magazine at the moment. I want you to know her, too.

We are going in shortly to the White House, so you can pick up your candies in a box over there.

We had a preacher back home who dropped his notes just as he was leaving his church one time, and his dog jumped at them and tore them up. When the preacher went into the pulpit, he apologized to his congregation and said, "I am very sorry, today I have no sermon. I will just have to speak as the Lord directs. But I will try to do better next Sunday."

I don't have a speech today. I just intend to do as George Reedy directed at the press conference this morning--to speak as the Lord directs. I thought I might talk to you about this job which fate has thrust upon me,

I am the President of the United States, the only President you will have, God willing, until January of next year. One of the hardest tasks that a President faces is to keep the time scale of his decisions always in mind and to try to be the President of all the people.

He is not simply responsible to an immediate electorate, either. He knows over the long stretch of time how great can be the repercussions of all that he does or that he fails to do, and over that span of time the President always has to think of America as a continuing community.

He has to try to see how his decisions will affect not only today's citizens, but their children and their children's children unto the third and the fourth generation. He has to try to peer into the future, and he has to prepare for that future.

If the policies he advocates lack this dimension of depth and this dimension of staying power, he may gain this or that advantage in the short term, but he can set the country on a false course and profit today at the expense of all the world tomorrow. So it is this solemn and this most difficult responsibility, and it is always hard to interpret confidently the future patterns of the world.

There are always critics around imploring the President to stick to the facts and not to go crystal-gazing. Some of them tell me to try to keep my feet on the ground, if not my head in the sand.

But this is the point: The facts include today, the overwhelming, built-in, irresistible forces of change that have been unleashed by modern science and technology. And the very facts dissolve and regroup as we look into them.

To make no predictions is to be sure to be wrong. Whatever else is or is not that certain in our dynamic world, there is one thing that is very sure: Tomorrow will be drastically different from today. Yet it is in all of these tomorrows that we and our children and our children's children are going to be forced to live. We have to try to see that pattern and we have to try to prepare for it.

The President of this country, more than any other single man in the world, must grapple with the course of events and the directions of history. What he must try to do, try to do always, is to build for tomorrow in the immediacy of today.

For if we can, the President, and the Congress, and you leaders of the communities throughout the Nation, will have made their mark in history. Somehow we must ignite a fire in the breast of this land, a flaming spirit of adventure that soars beyond the ordinary and the contented, and really demands greatness from our society, and demands achievement from our Government.

We intend to seek justice because that is what the Nation needs. We intend to create hope because that is what the Nation needs. We intend to build opportunity because that is what the Nation deserves. And we intend to pursue peace relentlessly because that is what the world demands.

These are the simple aims of our purpose. These are the forward thrusts of our objective. But to start on this adventure, we must begin and we ought to begin today. Justice is a universal beginning for a great society. Justice is undone and untended in too many in our land.

Our Nation will live in tormented ease until the civil rights bill now being considered is written into the book of law. The question is no longer, "Shall it be passed?" The question is "When, when, when will it be passed ?"

We cannot deny to a group of our own people, our own American citizens, the essential elements of human dignity which a majority of our citizens claim for ourselves. Civil rights are not a luxury to be accorded the many. They are an obligation under our Constitution that is owed to all, for the bill before the Senate is only the validation of our moral, national commitment.

I want to repeat here today again, again, and again for the record what I said at Gettysburg last year: One hundred years ago Lincoln freed the Negro of his chains, but he did not free his country of its bigotry, for until education is blind to color, until employment is unaware of race, emancipation will be a proclamation, but it will not be a fact.

We are trying to preserve our national resource of humanity, also. Some call it, and choose to refer to it, as a war on poverty. Well, it is a war, and poverty is the enemy. But the real objective is the preservation of our most precious asset--over 9 million American families at the bottom of the heap. It is not a program of giveaway. It is not a program of doles. It is a program that is concerned with skills and opportunities, with giving the tools for the job of growth, in making taxpayers out of taxeaters. We are investing in opportunity and giving them the skills to seize it.

For the first time in America's history, poverty is on the run and it is no longer inevitable and its elimination is no longer impossible, because it is right. We are fighting this war because it is wise. We are committed to winning it, and our strategy is to reach deep to the core and to the cause of the poverty and, having confronted it, then destroy it.

In every aspect of this program, the cooperation of national, State, and local governments is the passkey to action and the channel-way for success. The Nation shall be the beneficiary, because by raising the average productivity of the 11 million poverty-stricken wage earners by only $1000 a year, we would add $15 billion to the Nation's annual output.

Forty-nine percent--a hideously high figure--49 percent, one out of every two young men that are Americans who are examined for the draft, are found lacking physically, mentally, and morally. It is a senseless act of shameless neglect to ignore this intrusion on our satisfaction as a Nation.

But even as we try to invest our youth with the excitement of new opportunity, we are equally determined that elderly citizens are not barred from dignity, are not vacant of hope. There must come from the Congress soon legislation for medical assistance for senior citizens.

There is hardly a home in America today where a son, or a daughter, or a relative does not brood over the possible avalanche of medical expenses for their mothers and their fathers, or their uncles or their cousins, or their aunts. The dread of an impossible expense burden burns deep in the consciousness of practically every American home.

Is it a wild, unreasonable proposal to ask that out of the average earnings of workers that are now more than $100 per week for over 7? million that they put $1 a month into Social Security, their employers do the same, making $2 a month? The Government contributes nothing. Is it asking too much for this bountiful country to prepare a law so that older folks can face illness when it inevitably comes and face it without the chili foreboding of an empty purse or an inadequate insurance policy?

Under this plan, citizens know they did it for themselves without a Government hand out. Because it is just and because it is right and because it is part of the good society to construct prudent programs, with vision, based on common sense and common decency, this bill is high on the agenda of our American purpose.

To build good government, the first and most urgent need is good people. The pay bill soon to be debated in the Congress reaches into the very essence of urgency if this Government means to retain excellence and quality.

On my desk tonight there are now dozens of resignations from some of the most brilliant and able men in the Government. They have run out their financial string. Each year they have gone into debt and each month now compounds their financial agony. They must quit to find higher incomes in private industry, and this Government suffers the harsh and irretrievable loss. To deny this pay bill is to invite mediocrity.

We cannot do the great things that this great Nation must do to develop a great society unless we, as a Nation, have the men to do them. Congressmen, Members of the House and of the Senate, deserve twice what they get. Career officers, appointed officials, all deserve more money for jobs which too often demand long hours and ceaseless work. Don't make them steal or quit or go along borrowing when they are doing the job for you.

There is also in the Congress the legislation to adjust our immigration laws. The quota system is outworn. We want skilled people who can do jobs that need to be done, and we do want families reunited.

These are but a portion of our catalogue of aspirations, for in the months and the years ahead, there will be new challenges and greater difficulties. Now we must attend to the duties that demand our attention. Right now, as you know, in the room across the hall, we are engaged in intensive collective bargaining sessions day and night in which we are trying to help railroad labor and railroad management solve their problems themselves in accordance with our free enterprise system.

A strike would cost us the loss of 7 million jobs in a very short time. A strike would cost us a downturn in our gross national product of 10 to 15 percent. A strike would cost us great dangers in health throughout the Nation. A strike would almost paralyze our entire system.

The tempo of that bargaining that is taking place has stepped up considerably, and I believe this is a tribute to the free enterprise system. Sometimes I feel the free enterprise system is something like the weather--everybody likes to talk about it, and write about it, and we don't do enough about it.

We have here in this case an opportunity and a responsibility to do something about it. That opportunity and that responsibility can be discharged, if we cooperate in helping the people on both sides, and not attempting to handcuff them by taking an extreme position which will provoke reactions that would break down the collective bargaining processes.

No group in all this Nation has a greater investment and responsibility than you, the leading editors of this Nation. The wounds of this Nation must be healed. The breaches in this Nation must be closed. And from this unity of this Nation must come the wisdom and the courage to reach beyond the commonplace.

The world is no longer the world that your fathers and mine once knew. Once it was dominated by the balance of power. Today, it is diffused and emergent. But though most of the world struggles fitfully to assert its own initiative, the people of the world look to this land for inspiration. Two-thirds of the teeming masses of humanity, most of them in their tender years under 40, are decreeing that they are not going to take it without food to sustain their body and a roof over their head.

And from our science and our technology, from our compassion and from our tolerance, from our unity and from our heritage, we stand uniquely on the threshold of a high adventure of leadership by example and by precept. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord." From our Jewish and Christian heritage, we draw the image of the God of all mankind, who will judge his children not by their prayers and by their pretensions, but by their mercy to the poor and their understanding of the weak.

We cannot cancel that strain and then claim to speak as a Christian society. To visit the widow and the fatherless in their affliction is still pure religion and undefiled. I tremble for this Nation. I tremble for our people if at the time of our greatest prosperity we turn our back on the moral obligations of our deepest faith. If the face we turn to this aspiring, laboring world is a face of indifference and contempt, it will rightly rise up and strike us down.

Believe me, God is not mocked. We reap as we sow. Our God is still a jealous God, jealous of his righteousness, jealous of his mercy, jealous for the last of the little ones who went unfed while the rich sat down to eat and rose up to play. And unless my administration profits the present and provides the foundation for a better life for all humanity, not just now but for generations to come, I shall have failed.

If there is judgment in history, it rests on us, according to our generosity or our disdain. These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God's children can live or to go into the dark. for today as we meet here in this beautiful rose garden under the shadows of atomic power it is not rhetoric but it is truth to say that we must either love each other or we must die.

It has been wonderful to have you leaders of our country and the great molders of our thought to come here and give me this opportunity to tell you what is in my heart.

Now I hope before darkness descends upon us, literally, this evening, if Luci has come, I want her to meet you.

[At this point Luci Baines Johnson spoke briefly. The President then resumed speaking.]

Now, Mrs. Johnson wants you, if you will, to come in the house and see some of the rooms and we want to see as many of you as we personally can.

Thank you very much.