Telephone Remarks to the Delegates to the AFL-CIO Convention

President Meany, delegates to the convention, my friends in the AFL-CIO:

I had planned to say that I would be following your deliberations with interest, but it occurred to me that there has been enough interest for one week already.

As you meet in San Francisco this week, you will be looking back over 2 years since your last convention. They have been the years, too, of my responsibilities as your President.

These years started from tragedy. Nothing will ever erase that terrible day from our memory.

But working together as a united people, we have moved down the road to increased progress for all Americans.

Our economy is surging. December marks the 58th consecutive month of economic prosperity. That is the longest period of uninterrupted expansion in America's peacetime history:

--Three and one-half million more people are at work.

--Unemployment, down by a million, is at its lowest ebb in 8 years.

--Business profits, after taxes, have increased by $11 billion.

--Total personal income for all Americans has increased by $69 billion.

--The average take-home pay of a factory worker with three dependents has risen to a record high of $98 a week.

--The number of people on payrolls in November of this year increased almost 2 1/2 million--4 percent--over November 1964. That includes a phenomenal 800,000 increase in manufacturing alone.

That is our record of prosperity. I believe that we can maintain it. The increased knowledge, skills, and spirit of cooperation among management, labor, and Government justify full confidence in our ability to open even wider the doors of opportunity to all of our fellow Americans.

No challenge cries out for greater cooperation than the need to preserve the stability of prices and costs. Here the battle to keep our economy growing in a healthy way must be constantly waged.

You in labor have a very special stake. No one suffers more--or suffers sooner-- than the workingman when rising prices erode the amount of goods and services that he can buy with each paycheck.

We must--and I believe we can--avoid the kind of price-wage spiral in which labor blames business for rising prices and steps up its wage claims to counter them, while business blames labor's wage demands for rising costs which require prices to go up.

From 1955 to 1960, this 5-year period, the income that a factory worker with three dependents had to spend in 1 week rose 15 percent. But the prices that he had to pay also rose--and they cut his 5-year gain to 4 percent.

From 1960 to October of this year, 1965, his spendable income rose 22 percent. And because the rise in prices was much more moderate, his real gain was a hefty 14 percent.

I believe that you want to do your part. In the last 2 years the labor cost per unit of output has remained relatively stable. By acting responsibly you have secured wage gains that mean real gains in purchasing power.

Future progress will depend on future responsibility. I am confident that we will continue on the dynamic but balanced pace that has led us this far in 58 months.

But economic progress is only one measure of the distance that we have traveled these past 2 years. Statistics can describe past trends, can analyze present developments, and can predict future possibilities.

But they cannot tell us about the soul of man.

The quality of our life must become as much a national issue as the quantity of our goods. Human progress is much more than a summary of our economic transactions. It is a matter of how well we live.

It is not just a question of "How much do we make?" or "How much do we spend?" It also asks: "What is the purpose of it all?"

We have pledged every American child the right to all the education that he can take. Will he use it to enlarge the meaning of his life and the good of us all ?

We have pledged every American the fight to full protection under law--the right to full citizenship--the right to exercise that citizenship at the polls. Will we welcome him now for what he is--an equal citizen, blessed with the same promise, afflicted with the same frailty, as all of his fellow humans? Will we now turn to the great work of reconciliation--forgiving past wrongs, healing old wounds, forging a new fellowship of Americans ?

We have pledged our elderly the right to the best treatment that medical science can provide. We have pledged every American family the fight to a decent home. And we have pledged our poor the right to opportunity.

But the right to something is not to realize it. A beginning has been made, but what will the outcome be ?

Will the men of medicine, casting aside old superstitions and groundless fears of a nonexistent adversary, help to fulfill the bright promise of Medicare for 19 million Americans?

Will those to whom the Constitution gives the power of the purse provide the money for a new way of using an old principle-private enterprise--to solve our housing needs?

Will the poor find not only freedom from charity but the liberty of spirit and purpose no power can ever really again shackle ?

These are not questions that legislation can answer. This Congress passed more legislation than any other Congress this century; 85 percent of our 1964 platform was translated into law.

And more is to come. Some business, already on the agenda, must be cleaned up soon after Congress returns.

I recommended to the Congress last year, and will urge on it further, basic improvements in the unemployment insurance program and in our minimum wage law. With your help, we will pass them both.

I recommended to the Congress last year, and we will urge on it further this year, the repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act. With your help, we will pass it.

But legislation deals with the means and not the ends of our existence. And it is the ends and the moral purposes to which we give ourselves as a people that we are really concerned with at this season. No amount of economic progress can bury the inescapable fact that it is not how much we have but why we have it, and for what we use it, that determine the kind of society we live in and the kind of people we become.

WHY WE ARE IN VIET-NAM

Every day someone asks: "Why are we in Viet-Nam?"

And every day I want to answer: Not for economic reasons; we are spending our treasure, not reproducing it, out there.

And not for reasons of selfish pride; the lives of our sons are too great a price for national vanity.

Not for reasons of empire; our own sense of others' rights and the harsh judgments of history on the conquerors do not speak well of either the morality or the logic of imperial ambitions.

We are there because for all of our shortcomings, for all of our failings as a Nation and a people, we remain fixed on the pursuit of freedom as a deep and moral obligation that will not let us go.

I know it does not always seem that way. Political uncertainties often obscure our underlying purpose. Our own failures as men--politicians and generals, diplomats and reporters--cause us to question the wisdom of our course.

And nothing, perhaps, appears so contradictory to the cause that we serve as the use of force to advance it. Not even the absence of alternatives to the use of force to meet aggression lessens our distaste for it.

Only when petition and persuasion failed was the shot fired that was heard around the world. Not until appeals to commonsense brought forth the cannon's roar at Fort Sumter did Lincoln, with heavy heart, reply in kind. And not until reason perished in the aggressor's path did we turn--first in 1916 and again in 1941--to force as the ally of freedom.

I know it is said by a few: "But Viet-Nam is different. Our stake there hardly justifies one boy's life."

Well, Viet-Nam is different. The aggressor has chosen a different terrain, a different people, and a different kind of war to satisfy his appetite. But his goal is the same-someone else's freedom.

To defend that freedom--to permit its roots to deepen and grow without fear of external suppression--is our purpose in South Viet-Nam. Unchecked aggression against free and helpless people would be a very grave threat to our own freedom here in America and would be an offense to our own conscience.

In the past few days I have reviewed with my top counselors the situation in Viet-Nam. We are carefully studying how we can best continue to turn back that aggression. We are all determined to do all that is necessary.

At the same time, we are equally determined that every prospect for peace be exhausted before other hard steps are taken. Only this week we reviewed our efforts for peace in some detail. Our efforts to communicate our desire to talk about peace were met with silence from some and met with shrill propaganda from others. On the crucial questions of readiness to meet without conditions, the response in Hanoi--and still more in Peking--remains completely negative.

Let us hope, however, that even at this hour reason might prevail in the minds of other men who hold the key to peace.

All over the world, in every capital where we are represented, America's Ambassadors are waiting for some word that those men, too, want peace and are willing to talk about it. I have given the Secretary of State special instructions to make sure that no one is uncertain about our purpose.

Our devotion to freedom is unyielding. So, too, is our hope for peace. Those who insist on testing either will find us earnest in both.

Thank you.