Remarks to the American Field Service Students on the Eve of Their Departure From the United States.

Mr. Howe, our dear friend, Lindy Boggs, Mrs. Johnson, Luci, my young friends, ladies and gentlemen:

We are very proud to welcome you here to the White House today. This is the house of all of the American people.

You have made this a very memorable year and a happy year for the families with whom you have lived in the United States. I hope this year will live as a happy memory for all of you, too. You leave behind understanding of yourselves and the countries you have so well represented. I trust that is what you take away with you, as well as understanding of our people and our country.

We have no dogma, no doctrine, no discipline to impart to you. I hope none have tried to persuade you otherwise. We want you only to take with you a new vision and a new confidence in what you can be yourself and what you can help others to be in your own land.

While you have been here I am sure you have seen things that you don't like, things that you would like to change. If you have, then you can know that you have seen America as Americans themselves see it.

For we are a people who wake up every morning determined to go out and change what we may think is wrong, change what we believe should and could be better.

For all of our nearly 200 years as a Nation, America has been drawing her energy and her vitality and dynamic progress from this devotion to changing the conditions of man. If there is one secret to America's strength and success, I think it is the respect that we foster and try always to protect for the right of citizens to criticize what deserves criticism and to change what really needs changing.

I hope that you find that same spirit present in your own lands, for I think it is the spirit that is vital to the progress of all people in this dynamic and exciting century in which we are privileged to live.

The American people and their elected leaders are peaceful in their purposes always, but never forget of us, when you return to your homes, that we mean to win the wars that we have declared: the wars against poverty, the wars against ignorance, the wars against disease, the wars against discrimination and bias and bigotry.

We are fighting those wars in the development of our Great Society program, and already we have taken more legislative action in this session than one could expect almost in a century--certainly in a decade.

So, whatever your country, you may always know that we in the United States stand ready to work with you in these same endeavors so that some day all mankind may stand taller and may stand straighter in a world of peace, and a world of justice, and a world of equality among men.

In your time here you have come to know Americans as a people who are open and unguarded and, I hope, unafraid. We are not a formal people. We are not a people governed by tradition or custom. We are not a people so much concerned with the way things are done as by the results that we achieve. Since the frontier really opened we have been this way.

We have been concerned more with how our children shall live than with emulating how our fathers and our grandfathers lived. So this spirit of America, I think, is present in our policies and our purposes toward other peoples of other lands as we meet here this afternoon.

Some people believe that it is better if the peoples of the world hold each other at arms length and deal with each other in the most formal way. They sometimes ridicule informality. They like to believe that this prevents friction and misunderstanding and even the disillusionment that may come when people see each other's shortcomings.

That is the way people used to deal with each other back in the days of the clipper ships and the coach and the horse and buggy days. But I don't believe, and I am sure most Americans don't believe, this kind of relationship is what we want in the 20th century.

We really want all mankind to live together with purpose to accomplish the great things that are within the reach of us all. We believe that people must respect one another, respect each other's rights, respect each other's ways, respect their just dreams, and respect their honorable aspirations.

But we want such respect to be that of a lively and an affectionate family--open, frank, trusting, rather than the stiff, chilly, and even suspicious formality dictated by the protocol of ancient principalities.

So, in this America--this lively, stirring, exciting America of today--our hearts, as well as our homes, are open to you, open to you always.

We have been enriched by having you here this year. We hope that you will return many times through the many years ahead for you. And we hope that wherever you go you will work always, as we work, to try to change, to try to improve the life of mankind on this earth, and, most of all, to try to win peace for all peoples.

Thank you very much.