Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Recorded Remarks for the 25th Anniversary of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service.

December 18, 1966

FOR 25 years Armed Forces Radio has been a voice from home. A generation of Americans in uniform has heard and has welcomed Armed Forces Radio.

To those whom duty has taken to other lands, it carries the news, the pulse, and the excitement of life at home. It echoes the sound of America.

Americans have heard it on African deserts, in Normandy hedgerows, on Pacific beaches, in the bleak hills of Korea, in the cold outposts of the Arctic, and in the perilous rice paddies of Vietnam.

When Armed Forces Radio first broadcast after Pearl Harbor, none knew that it would still be heard 25 years later. Few could foresee that American men would still be needed to defend freedom's frontiers.

Now America is older and perhaps wiser. Now America knows that the fight for freedom is the job of each generation. History has cast our country as the leader of the free world and you, by your valor and vigilance and courage, are proving America worthy to lead.

Home is much in your thoughts, I know, this Christmas season. To the fighting man home is the personal reward that comes with peace.

It was your father's dream in another war and his father's dream in still another. Always our objective is peace. Always, the objective is to come home again. Home with the battle won. Home with peace and freedom secure.

But until we achieve the world peace that we seek, each of us must settle for another peace, for peace within ourselves. This is the satisfaction that comes to a man, or comes to a nation, when he knows he is doing his job, when he is doing his very best at a noble, if a difficult, task.

This satisfaction should be already yours. Your task is often very lonely. Oceans separate many of you from your home and from your friends and from your loved ones. The sense of separation is made deeper by the memories of this season of the year.

Through the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, America tries to tell her men of home. As your President, I salute this service on its silver anniversary. America is proud of it and proud, also, of the brave and gallant men that it serves.

So be assured that you are in America's heart, for it is you that are fighting her battle--and a grateful Nation thanks, appreciates, remembers, and prays for all of you.

Note: The President's remarks were recorded at 11:47 a.m. on December 15, 1966, in the Cabinet Room at the White House for release after December 18. They were not made public in the form of a White House press release. As printed above, this item follows the text provided by the White House Press Office.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Recorded Remarks for the 25th Anniversary of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238250

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