Remarks Delivered by Telephone to the Regional Democratic Conference in Charleston, West Virginia.

Thank you, Governor Hulett Smith, Chairman Bailey, distinguished Democrats:

I want to talk to you this morning about the future of the Democratic Party.

Contrary to what you may have heard, I have much more than just a passing interest in this subject.

I hope you won't think that I'm being premature in bringing up this subject this morning. We really haven't had our primaries. We haven't had our convention. So there's really no way of guessing who the Democratic candidate is going to be.

But I do want to say this: I fully intend to support him.

I believe we already have several volunteers for next year's ticket. In general, I like to stay out of these internal party matters. But there's one aspirant--a very well-known liberal from Minnesota--a well-known liberal from Minnesota--about whom I am going to say a few words this morning.

Despite the few differences that we have had over the years, we have both always tried to do what we believed best for our country. And I have always considered him to be a friend, to be a loyal Democrat, and to be a great statesman.

I am only sorry--I'm deeply sorry--that Hubert Humphrey could not have been with us this morning.

The Vice President has been going around the country lately, keeping his finger on the political pulse. And I don't mind telling you that some of his reports make pretty grim reading.

Just the other day he showed me a letter to a newspaper editor. This particular critic had something to say about 7 years of Democratic administration. He wrote that the Democratic Party "has deluded the American people, demoralized American democracy, discouraged American business, and disorganized American industry."

He said that 7 years of a Democratic administration had "deluded the American people into believing that a government is ... an inexhaustible giver-out of jobs, doles, and pensions."

Doesn't that sound familiar? I doubt if there has ever been a Democratic administration that didn't get that kind of criticism. The letter I just read you, the letter that the Vice President was showing me, in fact, was written on June 17, 1940-not about Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, but about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

There are always people in this country-and they are loud and vocal people--who fear progress more than they fear anything else in the world.

They confuse decency with dole.

They confuse welfare with waste.

They confuse responsibility with radicalism.

And always, always, they try to confuse the American people.

Fortunately, there are more Democrats than Republicans in the United States. Fortunately, most Americans would rather look ahead; most Americans are more concerned about where we are going than where we have been.

As Emerson said, America has always had a party of hope, and a party of memory.

I am a Democrat because, in our time, the Democrats have been the party of hope.

Many of those hopes have been realized.

Nobody knows better than you that many of those hopes are being realized now-today--for the first time. It was more than 4 years ago that the Democratic Party and a Democratic administration pledged to transform the fabric of a vast poverty-ridden area of America.

And it was more than 2 years ago, with the Appalachian Regional Development Act, 1965, that we joined the Appalachian States and the Federal Government together in a great program to brighten the lives of more than 18 million people.

We recognized that poverty cannot be confined by borders. Mines closed down in one community can signal distress many miles away. Farms that lie fallow because there is no market for their products can put men out of work in another county.

In 2 years, through this partnership for economic progress and development, changes have come to the landscape of Appalachia:

--new schools and libraries, hospitals and nursing homes,

--airports and highways opened this landlocked region to commerce,

--strip mines were reclaimed to restore the land as a productive base for the future,

--plants to purify the rivers and streams.

With this physical change, new hope has come to the people of this region. For construction means jobs, and schools bring learning, and hospitals provide health care where little--or none--ever existed before.

We renewed our national commitment to help the poor who live in the towns and who reside in the hollows of America, where the promise has dimmed and where life is bleak. We reiterated and reaffirmed our pledge to harness the talents and efforts of government at its best--cooperative government--all that government is really about, bettering humanity.

We have engaged in a pursuit of new solutions on how to better humanity, how to help people.

The agenda for defeating poverty is already crowded with unfinished work.

But we have begun. We have claimed no great victories. We have claimed only that the time of inaction is past and behind us.

Now I know, and you know, that there are many voices in this land which tell us that we must return to stagnation because of the war in Vietnam. But I also remember, and you remember, that most of those very same voices were crying for stagnation when there was no war of any kind in Vietnam.

The noise of cannons in Vietnam has not made them deaf to the cries of the poor or the pleas of the sick. They have always been deaf to cries like that. It is not really the war that bothers them all the time. What bothers them is the idea of social progress.

There are others who are deaf to the cries of help from people in distant lands. There are those who say that we cannot defend freedom in the world at the same time that we achieve social justice here at home

We can--and don't you believe them when they say we can't. We can and we are going to and we must do both.

As President Kennedy wrote in a speech intended for delivery the night of his death:

"We in this country, in this generation, are--by destiny rather than choice--the watchmen on the walls of world freedom."

And I would add to this that by destiny and choice the Democratic Party guards our heritage of social responsibility, and is the watchman against indifference--which is isolationism in its domestic form.

To both groups--to those who would turn their backs on the problems at home, and to those who want to quit, cut and run, and abandon the fight for freedom in Southeast Asia--I would like this morning to repeat a very simple message. It is a message that has been on the record for more than 20 years. I hope it will soon be delivered to those who never seem to have heard it.

It was in his last inaugural address that Franklin Roosevelt counseled the Nation in these words that I am going to repeat:

"Today, in this year of war, 1945, we have learned lessons--at a fearful cost--and we shall profit by them. We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away .... "

It has been said many times that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Well, we do not intend to repeat it. The Democratic Party does not intend to repeat it.

I believe that when the American people understand this message, and it is a part of your job to get with it and to get it to them-they are going to respond, as they have always responded, with both the compassion and the courage that history demands from the citizens of the richest, most powerful nation to be found on this earth.

So, it is your task and nay task to make sure, that as men sit in the wings and plan and deliberate to divide, to conquer, and to defeat the great movement that is bettering humanity in America--it is our task to make sure that the American people--the p-e-e-p-l-e--really realize how the road forks--and which turn and which fork they must take.

I wish I could be there with you this morning. I envy you. I want so much to do the job that you are doing.

I will be seeing you.