Remarks to the Delegates to the American Legion National Convention.

Commander James, distinguished Legionnaires, ladies of the Auxiliary:

It is a great privilege to welcome you to your Capital.

This year you have come 60,000 strong, representing posts in every State and in 16 countries abroad. You have come to discuss questions of the greatest significance to our country.

Your fellow countrymen--and particularly your comrade from Memorial Highway Post 352 of Blanco County, Texas--will listen very closely to what you say here and what you do here.

You will be discussing matters of concern to every veteran and his family; the laws that some of you wrote years ago, and that now form the foundation of a great medical, educational, and pension system--the administration of those laws--and the improvement that time and experience have suggested.

But your interests range far beyond laws for veterans alone--vital as those are. Because you have served our country's flag, because you have left your homes and families in time of danger, you seek the common dream of those who have risked the hell of war. That dream is peace among all the nations of this earth.

It is about that dream that I have come here to speak to you this afternoon--of peace that is won by the patriot's courage, that is maintained by his vigilance, that is strengthened by his imagination, and that is ennobled by his compassion.

I know that in some quarters today patriotism is regarded with puzzlement or disdain.

There are plentiful reasons for this. Many people feel a deep sense of rootlessness in the swirling currents of modern life. They are strangers to their neighbors and their community, and so they feel estranged from their country.

To others, patriotism too often means patrioteering. It means concealing a world of error and wrong judgment beneath the flag. It means a narrow, provincial view of the world, at a time when mankind should rise above its ancient instincts.

Now let us say what we mean by the word--as simply as we know how.

Love of country. Not the love that can only be celebrated within the vault of selfishness. Not the love that scorns the devotion of other men for their countries, that demands slavish homage from those beyond our shores.

We mean that love of peace, of comradeship and shared experience, of all the suffering and joy that really go to make up a people's history. We mean that confident love that does not require for its security that other men yield to our vision of man's destiny. We mean that courageous love that sees in the oppression of other peoples a challenge to itself--and that reaches out to meet that challenge.

Inspired by that love, then a nation is strong enough for any task. Bereft of it, all the laws it hastens to adopt may really be of no avail. The great Edmund Burke, speaking for the people of America in the English House of Commons, asked this of his colleagues:

"Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land-Tax Act which raises your revenue? That it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply, which gives you your army? Or that it is the mutiny bill which inspired it with bravery and discipline? No! Surely, no. It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake that they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber."

These words of Edmund Burke are useful for any nation to ponder in time of peace. I think they are quite indispensable in time of conflict. They tell us where our ultimate strength really lies: not in laws, not even in industrial power, not in weapons of technology, but in the love of our people for America.

Thousands of miles from this hall, your successors in the uniform of our country are at this moment fighting with the courage that flows from that love.

They are the best trained, the best equipped, the best supported army that America has ever put on any field of battle. Their morale is as high as their firepower is great. They have encountered an enemy whose tactics are unlike those a modern American army has ever faced before. And they are beating him in engagement after engagement, day after day.

Make no mistake about the character of this war. Our adversaries have done us at least one great service: They have described this war for what it is--in unmistakable terms. It is meant to be the opening salvo in a series of bombardments--or, as they are called in Peking, "wars of liberation."

And if it succeeds in South Vietnam, then, as Marshal Lin Piao says, "The people in other parts of the world will see . . . that what the Vietnamese people can do, they can do, too."

It may be that this is only rhetoric. It may be that this is only the grandiose propaganda of one whose country has not fared so wall in other continents this year. But as the Economist of London wrote only last week, "Until and unless there is solid evidence that China does not intend to do what Lin Piao says it wants to do, or cannot do it, the only safe assumption for the Americans or anybody else to make is that the Chinese mean every word they say. That," says the Economist, "is where any sober Asia policy starts from."

The bravery of young American patriots on the battlefield, the steadfast determination of our people at home, will--in time-bring an end to this trial of aggression.

And if valor alone were required, there would be no cause for concern for the future. Each generation of Americans in turn has demonstrated that courage is deeply ingrained in the American character.

But the years that lie ahead of us call for our imagination and compassion, as well as they call for our courage.

And even the most narrowly self-interested must see that this is so. Unless we have the imagination to understand what is happening in the world, we may very well find ourselves--together with all of our friends among the highly developed nations--facing a series of explosive crises, in which our military involvement is urgently at issue.

Here are the raw data with which we must work:

By 1970 over one-half of the world's population will live in the southern half of the globe. Yet they will command only a sixth of the world's total goods and services.

In 40 nations, the annual per capita income is rising by 1 percent a year, or less. By the end of the century, if this rate continues, their per capita income will have risen to $170 a year. Our per capita income here in America will then be approaching not $170 a year, but $5,000 per year.

Then let's ask ourselves this morning: What does this mean for peace in the world? What are the consequences when there is awakened in men the hungry desire for a better life, and there is really no way open to them to fulfill that desire?

Well, one measure of what it means is the incidence of violence, the number of upheavals that stagger the civil order. Recently our very able Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, gave us an accounting of these:

In 8 years there have been more than 160 such outbreaks. Only 15 have involved military conflict between two nations. None have involved a formally declared war.

But as you must see, the tempo of violence in the world is increasing. In 1958 there were 34 significant conflicts. In 1965 there were not 34; there were 58.

Where did they occur? Thirty-two took place among the very poorest nations where per capita incomes are now less than $100 per year.

So I submit the lesson could not be made clearer. The poor nations are on a road that is mined with potential turmoil. Poverty--and the hatred of poverty--can detonate those mines. The ranging search and quest for bread may bring on the reality of chaos.

We know that our adversary sees in this situation a very fertile field for exploitation. We know that it is not in the interest of freedom--our own freedom and that of the poorer nations--that our adversary should succeed.

Indeed, we know now that so interwoven is our destiny with the world's destiny, so intricate are the bonds between us and every continent, that our responsibilities would be just as real in the absence of a Communist threat. For every schoolboy senses--what some statesmen may not yet comprehend-that responsibility is the price of power and influence.

Throughout the world--in spite of the threat or actuality of violence--there are some shining beacons of hope.

In Asia alone, country after country has now exceeded its predictions of economic growth. Institutions such as the Asian Development Bank are coming into being. Japan has begun to pour her productive genius and resources into assisting her sister nations of Asia.

Cooperation among the Asians can become the means for liberating hundreds of millions of people--not the least, the people of North and South Vietnam.

Our assistance to these nations, our involvement in their affairs, will be no greater than they choose to have it.

Where we can help, we will. If our assistance is needed for development, for the work of teaching and healing and building, then that assistance will be forthcoming.

If our might is needed to help them defend themselves from aggression supported from without, it will be there. And it will remain there, and persevere, so long as it is required--and not a day longer.

For those thousands of you here today who have borne arms for our country know that an armistice can end the fighting without ending the war. Only when we root out the very causes of war--the poverty of man's body, the privation of his spirit, the imprisonment of his liberties--will there be a final surrender of violence itself.

That is our aim in Asia--as it has been our aim twice this century in Europe. The vast sums that we spend today to stop aggression when the aggression is ended-as I stated in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University--when the aggression is ended it will become the means of reconciliation and reconstruction.

What we are spending with bullets and bombs could be spent on books and health.

This commitment, in my view, is wholly consistent with that genuine patriotism that places love of country foremost in world affairs. I acknowledge that its dimensions are far wider than those that filled the hearts of our soldiers at Valley Forge, or even on the Marne, or even at the Normandy beaches. But it is a branch of the same tree.

It has grown, because our responsibilities in the world have grown. It has grown, because our understanding has grown. And it has grown, because events in the world have compelled it to grow.

Almost a century ago another Englishman, Thomas Huxley, visited our country. Here is what he said to us--and I would like to share it with you today in the hope that you would reflect upon it in the days to come:

"To an Englishman landing upon your shores for the first time, traveling for hundreds of miles through strings of great and well ordered cities, seeing your enormous actual, and almost infinite potential wealth in all commodities, and in the energy and ability which turn wealth to account, there is something sublime in the vista of the future.

"Do not suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly understood by 'national pride.' I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

"The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all of these things? What is to be the end to which these are to be the means?

"Truly America has a great future before her; great in toil, in care, and in responsibility; great in true glory if she be guided in wisdom and righteousness; great in shame if she fail."

My friends, my fellow Americans, you have demonstrated in many places at many hours that you love your country. So let us not fail her promise for all mankind.

Thank you and goodby.