Special Message to the Congress on U.S. Participation in the United Nations.

To the Congress of the United States:

Pursuant to the provisions of the United Nations Participation Act, I transmit herewith the eighteenth annual report covering United States participation in the United Nations during 1963.

This report describes in detail the day-today, month-to-month work of the United Nations system of agencies on behalf of peace and security, economic and social development, the trust territories, human rights and legal and constitutional developments. It also reports on administrative and financial matters.

The 18th General Assembly was concerned with many of the most urgent problems of our times: peace and disarmament, national independence and human rights, and international cooperation along a broad spectrum of human endeavor.

As in other years and with other institutions, the U.N. record for 1963 was an amalgam of progress and problems as the Organization sought to cope with many of the world's most basic and difficult issues. This report is a factual accounting of what was accomplished on the United Nations agenda for mankind--and of its unfinished business.

In transmitting this report to the Congress I should like to add two observations which go beyond the scope of the objective record of U.N. activities during the year.

First, the extraordinary importance which this Government attaches to the United Nations was underscored by the fact that two Presidents of the United States addressed the same Assembly.

On September 20, President Kennedy went to the rostrum of the General Assembly to tell the delegates of more than a hundred countries that:

"... the badge of responsibility in the modern world is a willingness to seek peaceful

solutions.

"... if either of our countries [the United States and the Soviet Union] is to be fully secure, we need a much better weapon than the H-bomb--a weapon better than ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines-and that better weapon is peaceful cooperation."

When tragedy struck two months later, the General Assembly convened a special plenary meeting in honor of President Kennedy. Speaker after speaker rose to pay solemn tribute to the great qualities of my predecessor--and above all to the U.S. commitment to the United Nations which he both symbolized and strengthened.

When Ambassador Stevenson expressed the gratitude of our people to all the peoples who shared our grief, he also assured the delegates, on my behalf, that "... there will be no Johnson policy toward the United Nations, any more than there was a Kennedy policy. There was--and is--only a United States policy."

By this time the work of the United Nations for 1963 was drawing rapidly to a close. Christmas was approaching. My own schedule was crowded by the extraordinary pressures of the first weeks in office.

Yet I asked to go to the United Nations in the closing days of its work to address the General Assembly. I wanted to demonstrate to the world that neither tragedy nor transition could cause this country's support for the United Nations to waver. I wanted to confirm personally that international cooperation lies at the heart of U.S. foreign policy regardless of who sits in the office of President and regardless of what party label he wears.

I told the assembled delegates at that moment:

"The greatest of human problems, and the greatest of our common tasks, is to keep the peace and save the future .... If there is one commitment more than any other that I would like to leave with you today, it is my unswerving commitment to the keeping and to the strengthening of the peace."

"Now, on the world scale the time has come, as it came to America 30 years ago, for a new era of hope--hope and progress for that one-third of mankind that is still beset by hunger, poverty, and disease."

"... And more than ever we support the United Nations as the best instrument yet devised to promote the peace of the world and to promote the well-being of mankind."

Second, the work of the United Nations reflected the often harsh and sometimes hopeful political and economic realities of the world in which it operates, and thus demonstrated once again its relevance to contemporary international affairs.

We see this relevance in the stepped-up activities of the Security Council over the past months, particularly in the peacekeeping field.

We see it in the dialogue on trade and economic policies now beginning between developed and developing countries.

We see it in the Assembly debates over the final steps in the process of decolonization.

We see it in the universal relief and overwhelming acceptance which greeted Assembly resolutions endorsing the limited nuclear test ban agreement, the new communications link between Moscow and Washington, the expressed intent of the United States and the Soviet Union not to place weapons of mass destruction in outer space, and renewed efforts by the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Committee to seek agreement "with energy and determination."

We see it in the Assembly resolution setting forth certain legal principles to govern the use of outer space--and in calls for continuing cooperation in scientific exploration, weather forecasting, and communications in outer space.

And we see it, finally, in the peacekeeping efforts which continued in the Congo and along the armistice lines between Israel and the United Arab Republic. In these efforts, as more recently in Cyprus, the members of the United Nations reaffirmed their commitment to the increasingly vital task of helping to keep the peace--a task of growing importance to this nation and to the world.

In short, the General Assembly was a faithful mirror of political reality, which is another way of saying that it was useful because it dealt in an intensely practical way with current human events.

I take this occasion to remind the Congress of these points because they are not all recorded in the following report, and because they illustrate how closely we associate our future hopes for world peace and progress with the fortunes of the United Nations.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON