[Released December 23, 1966. Dated December 19, 1966]
Dear Mr. Congressman:
Your letter of December 16 with its encouraging report on the improved quality of mail service to and from our service men and women in Vietnam comes at a time when they and their families and friends are most anxious to be in close communication.
No official report could be as heartening as your personal account of your offer to relay a message from a young soldier in Vietnam to his parents and your telephone call to them immediately upon your return-to find that his letter had already reached them.
It is encouraging to me, and I know it is to the Postmaster General and the Secretary of Defense, that the mail to and from Viet-Nam is moving rapidly. I am grateful for your personal observations that efforts to give the very best mail service to members of the Armed Forces in Vietnam are effective.
Sincerely,
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
[The Honorable Thaddeus Dulski, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.]
Note: The President's letter was released at Austin, Texas, together with Representative Dulski's letter of December 16 (2 Weekly Comp. Pres. Docs., p. 1819).
Representative Thaddeus J. Dulski of New York, who visited Vietnam on November 23-25 in the course of a tour of Southeast Asia, had sponsored a bill to liberalize mailing privileges for servicemen and other Federal personnel abroad. The bill was signed by the President on November 2 together with three other measures relating to the welfare
of servicemen and their families (see Item 571).
On December 7 the Secretary of Defense and the Postmaster General reported in a memorandum to the President on measures taken by their departments to speed the dispatch of mail to and from servicemen in Vietnam. The memorandum is printed in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (vol. 2, p. 1780).
Lyndon B. Johnson, Letter to Representative Dulski on Mail Service to Vietnam. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238225