Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Remarks to the Members of the President' s Council on Aging.

February 16, 1965

Mr. Secretary Celebrezze and other Government officials, ladies and gentlemen:

Mr. Secretary, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to meet with this distinguished and constructive group who have lent their talents to helping us contribute a solution to bring happiness and improvement in health and comfort to some of the finest citizens of our land.

I am somewhat envious of the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, really for two reasons. I never quite understand it but he has as his responsibility one of the most satisfying assignments that any man in the world today could have, and that is the improvement of mind and body and the leadership for programs that cover a wide variety of age groups, but which mean much to the happiness of most of the individuals in this country.

He has successfully presented to the Congress the boldest education program that any committee in the Congress has ever given serious consideration to. He has presented it with confidence and with judgment and with competence to the point where it is concluding its hearings already in the first month in both the House and the Senate.

He and some of his rather outstanding associates, Miss Winston, Mr. Cohen, and others, have presented to the Congress a medical care program the like of which our country has never seen before. He and some of his associates have presented a new improvement in our health research and our health facilities that will completely revolutionize our living. And he has done all this in his own quiet and unassuming effective way with a bunch of little feists barking at his heels but never with a moment of irritation--and with rather substantial results.

So I would like to have your job because you must go home satisfied at night that you have done a lot for humanity that day. I'd like to have your record of being able to work with the Congress as you have. Now I realize there are some tough days ahead and I don't want your hat to get too big for you because we have our problems in all the committees.

But I think it is phenomenal that during the month of January you should have made the advances on medical care, on education, on health facilities, on improvement of your personnel as you have done and I am glad to recognize it here this morning. I want to congratulate the members of this Council on Aging and I want to commend them on the high calibre of this fine report.

I have observed that it is organized and presented in such a way that I would hope that most Americans would have a chance to view it. I think our Government has done much in recent years to meet the problems of the aged.

When I came to Washington we were doing nothing. Social security was not even talked about. Old age assistance was not prevalent and it took the combined efforts of President Roosevelt and Huey Long and a good many others to dramatize the situation where we could really have the Government do anything for the aged. Up to that time most of our elections had been run on the basis whether you were wet or dry, prohibitionist or anti-prohibitionist, clan or anti-clan, or whether you were for the local bridge or against the local bridge. I went through all those as a boy. I never heard of social security until I was 21 years old. All I heard was whether you were wet or dry, whether for the courthouse group or against them.

I am glad that we have reached a point now where we can discuss issues and discuss problems and try to not only discuss them but do something about them.

We have before the Congress some 17 messages and we are going to have some more and they will represent the best thinking in this Government and we hope they will command the best action in the other branch.

We must not assume that we have arrived at a resting point. Medical science and our rising health standards, as we all know, have greatly lengthened the span of life that we'll all live. And now our big assignment is to improve the quality of that life while we do live.

We have a great deal to learn and we have a great deal more to do. There are three items on our agenda this morning.

First, I am directing the Council on Aging to continue its study of the implications of aging for our Nation's economic and social policy. Specifically we want to know more about retraining and developing new skills for older workers. We want to know more about providing retirement income through private and public pension programs. We want to know more about the cost of living in comfort and dignity during old age. We want to know more about the use of leisure time before and after retirement. We want to know more about the role of education in later years. It is not just confined to those under 21.

I hope this council of constructive leaders will continue to spend some of their time studying and researching and thinking about these .problems.

Second, I want to call on all Americans to get behind and help us and support prompt enactment of a comprehensive program of hospital care for the aged through social security. We are in the sight of the promised land. We just have two more big mountains to go over. I hope we don't get hung up on them like Bill Douglas did out in New Mexico.

We think 'people of all ages should be prepared to meet the high cost of illness in their old age and we all know that they are not. There is not a man or woman in this room that doesn't have an uncle or aunt, cousin, or mama or papa that needs this protection. There is no reason why we should continue year after year to talk about it. There is time to do something about it.

President Kennedy and I went into most of the 50 States in 1960 talking about it. I listened to the recordings of my appearances throughout this Nation in 1960 and the deafening applause, if there ever was any deafening applause to anything I said, always came when I talked about a program to provide medical care under social security for the aged. So make no mistake about it. The people are ahead of us in this field. They want this program. They will support this program. They are going to have this program. The question now is just its timing.

Third, I am going to designate the month of May 1965 as Senior Citizens Month. It is a time dedicated to community action on behalf of older Americans. There are now 18 million men and women that are 65 and over in the United States. Every 20 seconds another American joins their ranks. Their hopes and their problems are shared by us all. It is up to us to help them solve them. What we do for them today will enrich our own lives tomorrow and I think will enrich the lives of our children in the decades to come.

I know of nothing more necessary or desirable. I know nothing more rewarding or satisfying than to be able to participate in the transformation of the dreams that we have had for our fathers and our mothers and our aging into realities. And I think before the leaves turn brown in the fall and before we go back to counsel and consult and exchange views with our constituencies, I hope we can have a book like this filled with achievements and accomplishments. And we can have, as we say in our country, the coonskins on the wall instead of just a lot of conversation about them. And if we do, no group will be more responsible than those of you that are assembled here this morning.

Now finally, I think I have outlined some of my hopes for tomorrow and this land must never be content, this land must never reach the point where we have arrived. This land must always be a land with vision and with hope, and with struggle, and be willing to work and move and fight to improve and to better and to, we hope, ultimately achieve excellence. And when we do, we will find that progress will have moved on and there is still a part of the road to go.

So thank you for coming here. You will have not only the blessings of this administration but you will have the very active understanding and cooperation of this virile young Vice President, and he will be here on the job working with you every minute of the day--north, south, east, and west. I see where he has been down in Georgia this weekend facing the elements and getting heated up for the days ahead. He even burned his overcoat, I think, and if he is not out of the country attending some funeral he will be here working for you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:15 p.m. in the Cabinet Room at the White House following the presentation of the annual report of the President's Council on Aging by Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze, Chairman of the Council. During his remarks he referred to HEW's Commissioner of Welfare, Ellen Winston, member of the executive committee of the President's Council on Aging, and to Wilbur J. Cohen, Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare for Legislation. He also referred to William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, who had been trapped by deep snowdrifts for 4 hours the previous night while hiking on the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico.

Senior Citizens Month, 1965, was proclaimed by the President on April 10, 1965 (Proc. 3653; 30 F.R. 5417, 3 CFR, 1965 Supp.).

The 1964 report of the President's Council on Aging is entitled "Action for Older Americans" (Government Printing Office, 71 pp.).

The text of Secretary Celebrezze's presentation remarks was also released.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks to the Members of the President' s Council on Aging. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238691

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