Message to the Congress Transmitting Annual Report on the International Educational and Cultural Exchange Program.

To the Congress of the United States:

I am pleased to transmit the Annual Report on the International Educational and Cultural Exchange Program conducted during fiscal year 1966 under the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961 (Public Law 87-256, the Fulbright-Hays Act).

This report covers a period which saw the completion of two decades of international educational exchange and the laying of new foundations for its future. The groundwork done this year led eventually to the passage of the International Education Act of 1966, a milestone in our efforts to improve our citizens' knowledge of their world.

Today the United States looks ahead confidently to its relations with the rest of the world. It is a view in which there are great hopes and many hazards. Were our goals no more than materialistic, if we sought no more than power and material abundance, if we gained no more than scientific breakthroughs and military superiorities, ours might soon become a nation spiritually deprived and psychologically estranged from much of the world around us.

But it is to people, not things--to the warmth and generosity of the American people, not to material things, that we turn in order to break the barriers of misunderstanding that forever threaten to divide us from our fellow men. The international exchange of students, teachers, scholars and leading specialists is one of the nation's most effective means for dispelling ignorance, prejudice and international suspicion.

The educational and cultural exchange program is a relatively small but highly effective instrument in international relations. It enlists the participation of talented individuals who constitute a creative and influential minority in society. Henry Adams said in his Education, "The difference is slight to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand."

The program is not a "crash" one, but is designed, like education itself, to plant and cultivate the seed of understanding, which, having germinated and taken root, quietly flourishes.

Too often today men are tempted to think, in Emerson's phrase, that "things are in the saddle." Educational and cultural exchange reminds us that it is not on things--not on machinery and gadgetry--but on the minds and hearts of men that the human fate depends. Our educational and cultural exchange programs are person oriented. They are our American testimonial to the belief that, though mountains cannot meet, people always can.

I commend this report to the thoughtful attention of the Congress.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

The White House

August 14, 1967