Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Remarks to Students Participating in the U.S. Senate Youth Program.

January 28, 1966

MY YOUNG FRIENDS, I am delighted to welcome you here to the East Room this morning.

Nothing that I do during the year gives me greater pleasure than welcoming you young folks to the White House.

As some of you doubtless will remember, I began my life as a schoolteacher. For more than 35 years now, I have been in some branch of the Federal Government. So all of my adult life has been mainly concerned with two things: youth and public service.

You are here today because you are young people with a very special interest in government. Seeing you here is a very rewarding and very stimulating experience for me because, first, it renews my hope and my faith in the future of my country to know that we have young people like you that have an interest in that future.

The philosopher Rousseau said: "As soon as the public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their person, the State is not far from its fall."

Your own presence here today--the interest that you have already demonstrated in government--reassures me that our country is in no danger.

As I said to the student delegates who visited me here last year, the thing that I have wanted most to do when I left public office would be to try to inspire and to promote young people's interest in government. So I am very pleased and I am grateful to the fine organization--the William Randolph Hearst Foundation--which makes it possible each year for us to get together.

Seldom, if ever, in our country's interest has, I think, public service been of greater importance. For never have any people of any nation ever faced such awesome, but challenging, opportunities.

Thirty years ago, when I was not much older than some of you are now, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that his generation of Americans had "a rendezvous with destiny."

Well, I say to you today, that your generation has a rendezvous with tomorrow. You are the first generation which has grown up in the atomic age. The atomic age is a very dangerous age, and I think we know the dangers. It has taken all of our efforts, and all of the Lord's help, to hold mankind back from the brink of disaster. But so far we have succeeded. And I have abiding faith that we will not only continue to hold back-but that we will return someday to the bright uplands of peace.

But while there is great danger, there is also great promise--greater than man has ever known. The world of the seventies-and beyond--can be the beginning of the golden age of civilization.

It can be a world where every child has enough to eat, a world where every man can hold up his head with dignity.

It can be a world where every mother watches her children grow into strong, healthy men and women, free from disease and pain.

It can be a world where every family has a decent home and enjoys a decent way of life.

It can be a world where a man and his family can enjoy beautiful paintings and beautiful music, and read what he chooses, and fill his own library with the books that he loves.

And most of all, it can be--and it just must be--a world where wars are abandoned forever.

At this very moment many of your brave young brothers, not much older than yourselves, are locked in bitter combat in the rice paddies of Vietnam. They are there because a few fanatical leaders still belong to the cult of force. Those leaders talk much about building a rich and peaceful Vietnam, but it seems to me that they practice the opposite. They are pursuing the old cynical strategy of rule or ruin. We cannot, and we must not, let that strategy succeed.

Peace can be restored in Vietnam, restored whenever the Vietcong, and their mentors to the north, are finally convinced that violence is of no avail. We have told them, we have told them time and time again, that we prefer words to bullets, that we would much rather negotiate and talk than fight. We believe that the days when men's problems can be solved on a battlefield are really gone forever, and it is the deepest wish of this Nation that others will some day join us in the only goal which, to us, really makes any sense-the goal of making this planet a safe and a fit place for the human race to live.

In a world of peace there will be challenge enough and work enough in the fight to raise the quality of human life all over this earth. Many of the critical decisions which must create the world of tomorrow are going to be made right here in Washington, and some of them made right here in this room. And I hope that some of you will be here to help as we try to make this the kind of a world that I have described, and the kind of world that I believe all of our young people want it to be.

I believe there is no greater calling and no greater challenge to any young person today than public service, serving the public of your country. The hours are long. The work is hard. The pay is often small. But there are other rewards and other satisfactions. And the greatest reward is the knowledge that you are personally contributing something to shaping the destiny of your fellow human beings throughout the world.

Your generation is especially challenged, and especially blessed. You live in a rare period of human history. The effects of what you do now in your lifetime will be looked back upon by future ages as events which changed the course of history and which remade the world.

My generation is doing its best. We have made progress. We have moved down the road. We have achieved results. We are going ahead. Our life today, I think it is reasonable to say, is better than it was yesterday, and by the end of this century I think it is going to be still better. But how much better the world will be and how soon we achieve the victory we seek, will someday depend entirely upon you.

It is a source of profound confidence to see that so many of you are already preparing yourselves to take up the torch.

I thank you so much for coming this morning, and I hope that nothing I may have said will discourage you from the undertaking in which you have indicated such an interest.

Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 12:05 p.m. in the East Room at the White House. The students, two from each State and from the District of Columbia, were in Washington in connection with the United States Senate Youth Program. The program, established in 1962 by Senate Resolution 324, provides selected officers of public and private school student bodies with a week's internship in the U.S. Senate and in the Federal Government generally. It operates under a grant approved each year by the trustees of the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks to Students Participating in the U.S. Senate Youth Program. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238310

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