Remarks Upon Receiving Report of the President's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke.

Dr. DeBakey, ladies and gentlemen:

A day here in the White House can take on many different tones. Today is a day of electric possibilities.

Year after year the health of the American people is threatened by three relentless enemies: heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Together, these three diseases are responsible for seven in every ten deaths.

Nine months ago your President named this Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke. The instructions to this Commission were quite demanding: find out, with rigorous precision, just what the situation is. Tell us, with candor and imagination, just what we can do to improve it and to improve it rapidly.

Today, it is a very high honor and great privilege to receive the results of your study.

Dr. DeBakey has been kind enough to review it briefly with me in my office before I came here to the Cabinet Room.

On behalf of all of the American people, I want to express a deep sense of appreciation to the members of the Commission and particularly to the members of the Commission's staff. You have performed what I consider is a critically important public service and you have done it superbly.

Today, I call upon all our people--our doctors and our laymen, our citizens in and out of the Government, our people organized on the Federal, State, and local levels--yes, even the members of the press who are here this morning--to ponder the materials that we have had presented to us and to consider with a full sense of urgency the recommendations that this distinguished group of Americans has made.

Above all, I urge the American people to heed the conclusions of this Commission. Speaking from your great knowledge, you Commission members tell us the profoundly stirring fact: we stand at the threshold of a historic breakthrough. Heart disease, cancer, and stroke can be conquered--not in a millennium, not in a century, but in the next few onrushing decades.

If I remember correctly, Dr. DeBakey told me that these diseases cost us now $30 billion, and he also told me that he even thought during my lifetime that the progress we make would be startling and staggering and highly satisfactory.

During the recent decade, we Americans have found our way to many striking areas of agreement in public affairs. But a consensus can produce varied results. Consensus can become a comfortable cushion on which a nation simply goes to sleep. Consensus can also be an active, dynamic, rolling credo. Consensus can be a springboard, providing a takeoff for resolute action toward generally agreed upon goals.

So, I want to compliment and I want to congratulate you ladies and gentlemen who have rendered this faithful service to your country. I want to thank you for your dedicated labors and thank you for summoning us to put the American consensus to work in the most basic of all efforts--the preservation of life itself.

In the days ahead, we are going to ask the Congress and we are going to ask the country to lend us a hand in helping us to fight the ancient enemies of mankind--disease, poverty, and ignorance.

We are going to try to make education available to more of our people and have a better educational system in this country.

We are going to try to extend a helping hand to those whose economic lot has not been as good as our own and try to improve conditions where we will minimize poverty in this country.

We are going to not just establish a Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke to recommend steps to reduce the incidence of these diseases; we are going to reduce them.

Two months after I spoke to the Congress, in February 1964, the Commission first convened here at the White House. I observed in the introductory statement on the first page of this report the President said at that time: "Unless we can do better, two-thirds of all Americans now living will suffer or will die from cancer, from heart disease, or stroke"--two-thirds of all Americans. "I expect you to do something about it." We said that to the Commission on that day.

They have done something about it, and with these guideposts and with these goals, we will begin this year in the Congress and in the country to make a concerted drive on these three enemies to the health of twothirds of all Americans.

I am so proud that the men and women who represent the great in our country were willing to give their time, their talent, and their money to this effort, and I know that in their lifetime great satisfaction will come to each of them for knowing in their heart that they have saved millions of lives.

Thank you very much.