Remarks to Members of the American Association of School Administrators.

Good afternoon, my fellow educators:

It is good to see you and I thank you very much for coming. I am sure that some of you may have thought that it was a little difficult for you to come through the northwest gate a few moments ago, but I want you to know that your difficulty in coming through that gate was nothing compared with the problem that I have getting out of it.

The only people who can come in when they want to, and leave when they want to, are our friends back there from the press. We have a freedom of information policy in this country and they utilize it on occasions.

All afternoon I have been planning to take them with me over to the NEA Building to sit in on your closing session, but Busby informed me that he doubted the wisdom of that because there had been some criticism of my walking too much. I see one or two of my friends back there under the parasol that look like they might be out of condition, anyway.

Frankly, I wanted to see you, while you are here, for several reasons. First, while my present contract has 3 years more to run, I learned way back in the early thirties from some of my old superintendents that it never hurts to keep up your professional contacts, just in case.

Secondly, I did not figure it would be necessary for me to speak very long. After all, I was told that there is not much left for me to say to you since you heard from my old friend Wayne Morse earlier in the day.

But mostly I did not want you to leave town until I had a chance to say thank you. Thank you for the support on what we are trying to do for American education in this land we love. Thank you for getting down to work on implementing the new educational legislation.

As I said when I signed the bill, I don't ever expect to sign my name to any law that is more important than the Education Act of 1965. What that measure finally means to your country will depend on you and your school board, and I appreciate the spirit in which you have been working during these last 2 days.

We do not feel that we have all the knowledge, and all the wisdom, and all the talent in this Nation here in Washington. We are relying more than in many a year on the genius and the talent that exists in every State, and in every city in America.

I told my own Cabinet only yesterday that we must keep in close and constant touch with our Governors, and with our mayors, and with our college presidents, and with our superintendents, and with our school people every day of every week of every year.

Our responsibilities, I think, are shared responsibilities in this democratic system. We mean for all of our programs to express first the principle of partnership at all levels and, therefore, we expect you to provide leadership in that partnership.

We are a very fortunate people in America, although all of us have a little martyr in us and we develop the martyr complex mighty easily.

Our Nation is very strong. Our system is functioning as it has never worked before. We are enjoying the longest period of uninterrupted prosperity since the Nation was founded. These are good times for us here in America, and every American ought to be justly proud.

The people that work in our manufacturing industries are making more per week than they ever made before. The profits for the first quarter of this year for the corporations of this country are the highest in history. They run at the rate of 36 1/2 billion after taxes.

But our strength, and our wealth, and our success must never lead us to forget for a moment that when America was born an early patriot said: "The cause of America is the cause of all mankind."

They told me when I started teaching public speaking to always wait, from the time I'd say something, for a second until it communicates out. It takes time for sound to travel to a given distance. It also takes some time for it to soak in.

But I want to repeat what I said: The cause of America is the cause of all mankind. What affects you here today affects every one of 3 billion people, and your cause is their cause and their cause is yours.

Our Nation was born and brought into being to honor and to serve certain specific ideals--about the worth and the dignity of individual man, about the rights with which he is endowed by his Creator. So we must serve and honor those ideals in everything we do. And we try so hard to do it here in this place of leadership. That is America's purpose today, at home, and every other place in the world. That is the point I want to emphasize.

We have a Great Society in this country. We are striving every day to make that Great Society greater--health, and education, and beautification, and civil liberties, and civil rights--and we are making progress as we have never made before. But our idealism and our compassion and our aspiration for bettering the life of man on this earth do not, and must not, stop at the water's edge.

The Great Society that you hear about so much--and according to recent reports, so often--is not an exclusive club for Americans only. The work we do at home is work that we want to help others do, as I said yesterday, all around the world, without regard to culture, or continent, or creeds.

I met in that room--[ indicating ]--the other day with the President of Upper Volta, and he told me this story--and it should be exciting to each of you people who have dedicated your life not to making a lot of money but to training a lot of people and making life better for all of us.

He said to me that even if at times they might not see things just as we did, that there would never be any great differences because the women in their homes would never let them fail to have a high and warm regard for America. I thanked him, and inquired, and he said in that little country of a very few million that they lost one out of every three children that were born. They died because of measles, one out of three-one out of every three!

And we came there with a machine that could vaccinate them as they walked through the line and just shake their arm a little and it did not bother them. (The Navy invented it.) And that we furnished the vaccine and we vaccinated 750,000 children-not the American children, not even Western Hemisphere children, not the children of our tradition, of our color, of our race or our religion, but children, human beings, and we had not lost a single one of those 750,000 children. We have wiped out that disease.

Yesterday I talked briefly about the people of Viet-Nam. They have lost 12,000 people since I have been President. Twelve thousand South Vietnamese have been killed. The average age there is only 35. The average per capita income per year is less than $100. They live off of less than $8 a month. Through all that, with all of that, and with those handicaps and with all this disease, we have gone in there and we have doubled their rice production, we have doubled their pig production, and we have multiplied the children going to school five times--from 300,000 to 1,500,000.

You don't read about any of those things. It is awfully hard to get them to print it, too. They require us to have a briefing officer to tell them that so many planes left at a certain time to drop so many bombs that weighed so many pounds. If we don't tell them, why, they subpoena us up to the Hill-freedom of information.

But we are doing a lot besides firing bullets and dropping bombs, and it gives us so much more satisfaction.

We do not want--Americans do not want to live in a world where force is supreme. We do not want to live in a world where war, and aggression, and terror ever have mastery over man.

We want to live in a world where we can reason together. We want to live in a world where man's reason, and not his unreason, governs the destiny of all peoples.

The Biblical prophets have enjoined and admonished us for hundreds of years not to use our swords but to use our reason.

That is why we act as we do to protect freedom, to preserve peace, to provide an opportunity for mankind's better nature to prevail. I can tell you that, particularly the last few days and weeks, the way is neither easy nor short.

We have strength and we mean to use it to make certain that the flame of reason and decency shall not be snuffed out by either aggression or subversion. The great force building a better world--the greatest force in building a better world is you--education. We are committed to education in America and we are committed today as we have never been committed before. The progress we have made in the last year is unbelievable. But we are also committed to it not just here at home, we are committed to education throughout the world.

We work night and day to help men conquer old hatreds and old prejudices with new hope. We work night and day to help men remove old fears with new faith, and to bring old conflicts to an end--in new cooperation.

You are a very vital part of that work, and your daily labors are going to determine really what position of leadership we occupy here at home and the leaders that we produce in other places in the world.

So I want to congratulate you. I want to thank you for the job you are doing. I want to say to you as I said to my Cabinet when we met yesterday, I asked each of them to go back and look through their departments-that represents almost 4 million people--and try to find for me some persons of compassion and dedication and qualification that deserve, on their merit, an opportunity to do more than they are doing today.

I have a man that is really the mayor a good part of the time of the city of Washington, the Capital of the Nation. He was a clerk over here at $1,200 a year in the Interior Department for a long time. He is a Negro man, and he saw others come and be promoted and passed by, and he stood there and watched them march along, but he never lost patience. He was persevering enough and justice finally prevailed.

This is not a stag government. We are bringing outstanding women of ability and dedication and we are sending them overseas, and we are putting them in the little Cabinet, and we are giving them positions of leadership and direction. This is not a government of one religion or one race or one region. My Foreign Service ambassadors-- we have appointed about 53, and 50 of them have come from the ranks of people trained there.

This is a government where we reward people on the basis of merit in their career. I want you to look at the folks you come in contact with.

I came to this town fresh from the schoolroom. I was making $260 a month as a teacher. I had been a teacher in college. I taught government in college but I didn't have all the independence I wanted there so I became a superintendent of a grade school--Mexican grade school. And I was principal of a high school, and then I was a department head, and I know the steps that all of you have taken.

I want you to look out there: the superintendents can only go and find the talented and those that are deserving and those that need a little lift to move up. Bob McNamara, the great Secretary of Defense, was a lieutenant colonel just a few years ago and no one ever knew him over in the War Department. The Secretary of State was a lieutenant colonel, out in the Middle East during the last war. The Attorney General was just a drafting lawyer a few months ago. The Secretary of Commerce was brought in--he used to work over here with Vannevar Bush and in the WPB. The Secretary of the Treasury first worked for the TVA.

Well, I just want to point those things out because I want you to help me reward people, find married people, bring them in, give them a chance to serve humanity.

I am thinking of a story here and I am going to quit now. I almost lost an opportunity to serve humanity once. The superintendent intervened.

I was rooming with a high school coach and I was running this grade school. And the superintendent of the whole system called me in and called the coach in with me and he said, "I noticed you fellows leaving the cafeteria yesterday and it looked like the building was on fire, the smoke was just flowing, the wind was blowing, and it concerned me. I am not sure that is a good example to set for the children that you are leading and directing. If you could just keep those cheroots in your pocket until you get home in the evening or do your smoking before you come to the cafeteria, or the grade school, or the high school in the morning, it would please me. I just hope you will do it."

So we went away growling (as folks do when they get suggestions they don't like) and the coach said to me, "Well, it's none of his business what I do in my personal life." He said, "I wasn't on the school campus, I was on the way down the public street from the school building to the place where I eat lunch, and I don't think he has any right to tell me what I can do, do you ?"

At that time I was just making $125 a month and I said, "Well, I don't know whether he has a right to or not but he has already done it, and as far as I am concerned I am going to keep my Camels in my inside pocket when I see him in the vicinity."

So 2 or 3 days later we started out there again and the coach fired up, started smoking-almost in defiance. I walked along and I made it clear the superintendent saw that I had nothing in my mouth, and the smoke was blowing. So he called us back in.

He said, "Did I see you smoking? Don't you remember what I told you Tuesday? This is just Friday. Didn't I tell you I didn't want to see you smoking around this campus where the children could see you?" I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "Didn't I see you smoking today?" I said, "No, sir." "Well, I beg your pardon, I thought I did."

He turned to the coach and said, "Didn't I see you smoking?" He said, "Yes, sir, I was smoking." He said, "Didn't I tell you you shouldn't do that? Why do you continue?" He said, "Well, I feel this way about it, Mr. Superintendent, this is my personal life and I think I have a right to live it like I want to. I don't intend to quit smoking."

The superintendent smiled and looked like a very reasonable man, and I waited for the thing to drop. He said, "You do have a right to live as you want to. The same system that gives you that right also gives me a right, and I have a right to employ the man that I want to coach these children, and I have already a new man in mind to replace you."

So we must bear in mind constantly that we do have rights, but other peoples have rights too, and they are looking to us to exercise our rights in leading people, in providing leadership not only in the schools and the Nation, but internationally, because we are the wealthiest and we are the most powerful, and we have more to be thankful for. And I hope you won't ever forget it.

I especially appreciate your coming here because I feel that I have a rapport with you and they won't let me get out of the gate so I am glad they let you in.