Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Remarks at a Reception for the White House Fellows

May 06, 1968

I perhaps should have waited until you at least had time to participate in the refreshments, but I know it will be refreshing when I have gone.

Since I must go to the Senate, I think I will just start now and interrupt your meeting.

First, I want to welcome the members of the Cabinet and the President's Commission on White House Fellows, the new Fellows and the old Fellows, and all my friends.

I am happy to have this second chance to meet with the White House Fellows and their ladies. You were kind enough to invite me to come last Saturday. I was sorry I could not be there.

My own disappointment was considerable. Your invitation was most attractive to a man in my position--a short timer in Washington. It could have been my last chance to make the scene at Dupont Circle on a Saturday night.

I had another very personal reason for wanting to join you. As a man considering a new career, I think it is wise to keep up my contacts, especially with important people. At least I think you are important people. You have been handpicked for very high honors, and I think for very high office. You are very privileged young people.

You found room at the top for 3 years. Today another year begins for you.

Nineteen new White House Fellows are here as the fourth class of important and privileged young Americans.

So I am very proud and happy that I can join with Mrs. Johnson to ask you to come here, to congratulate you, and to welcome you to Washington.

There are 68 of you now. That is one for each year of this century.

I would like to think that there is some special significance to that coincidence.

I want to believe that you are the men and women who will complete the great unfinished agenda of America for this century, so that we may launch the third century of our continuing American adventure with even higher goals and I hope with an even greater purpose.

The next century is crowding in on us in this room right now.

It is pressing us with a rush of change-the new challenges that are flung by science and technology; by population increases; by 40 percent of the people in the world who can't spell "dog"; 40 percent of the people in the world who can't write "cat"; by the unexplored oceans and untamed weather; by poverty and injustice in our own land; by giant cities that need rebuilding; by our schools, our farms, our hospitals, and our corporations that need to change to keep up with that challenge; by all the unexpecteds and the unknowns, including the greatest of all-how to understand other people and how to learn to live together in this world without war.

So that is your agenda, and that is your life. It will be your job and your privilege to work on that agenda while you are here in Washington.

I hope all of you take it as your job--your particular responsibility to repay that privilege when you leave Washington by continuing to work as private citizens on your public agenda, working in your law firms, in your executive suites, on your campuses, on your city governments, and in your hometowns.

I am going to try, as one of my last orders, to see that you do that.

I am going to ask a committee of the 68 White House Fellows, whom I will take great care in selecting, to work with me and some of the members of my Cabinet, with some of those who have worked in my administration, in the Kennedy administration, in the Truman administration, and the Roosevelt administration, to make a study of the Presidency, to see how we can improve it, how we can strengthen it.
It won't be exactly another Hoover Commission on the entire Government, but it will be on the Presidency, itself, which is a rather important office.

In the years to come we need to improve it, strengthen it, and do whatever we can to make it stronger.

In addition to that, I am going to amend the Executive order that created the selection committee, of which the most distinguished and honored Mr. Douglas Dillon is Chairman, to provide for an increase in membership.

In President Roosevelt's day that would have been known as packing the court.

But I hope I can make that change without being charged with any ulterior motives.

I would like for some of you 68 Fellows who have come, who have seen, and who have not forgotten, to sit around with some of these old timers who really constitute this generation gap.

I would like for you to sit with them-the Johnny Oakes's of the New York Times, the John Macy's of the Civil Service Commission, Judge Hastie.

I would like for you to talk with them as members of the board, as their equals on the board, and as fellow members. Then I would like for you to go throughout the country and work with these panels so that the next group selected can even be an improvement on the group that you make up.

I look upon you as the future. You can make it or you can break it by committing yourself, or by copping out: by going home after 1 year at the top, or by sliding back into the comfortable routine of a cynical private life, by being too busy, or too timid, or too awed to apply what you have learned here by staying involved, or by remaining committed.

I think you are going to learn a great deal in this town.

But it is a part of your privilege that you will come to know a basic truth. That truth is how much government can do and how much government cannot do.

If you grasp this, if you keep your eyes open and your wits sharp, you will learn the magnificent promise and the exciting truth of your own lives.

You will learn how very much you can do for your own future, and particularly for the future of your country; how very much we need you, your commitment, and your involvement.

And we need it now, because the future is now.

In the last century, a great English statesman looked ahead and declared, "You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side."

Well, was Gladstone really right? Some people wonder.

Is time really on our side today, or is our century already so different, and are we already so beset and so divided by all of our problems that even time is working against us?

There are some, I think, who might answer yes, by their criticism or their cynicism.

There are others who agree by their obstruction or their silence.

There are a few who surrender reason to passion and hope to frustration, who fear that they have no place in the future; or that the future, itself, is overwhelmed by the vast complexity and variety of modern life.

I understand that some of you in the White House Fellows Association have been asking yourself some of these questions.

You want to know if time is on our side, if you really have a relevant role to play; if, in fact, our problems might not have made your Association and your purposes obsolete even before you get organized and get going.

Well, I am pleased that you are concerned. That is the first evidence that we are making progress. That is the first step to commitment and, I think, to success.

I would like to try and take you just one step further in the few moments I have with you by suggesting some answers and also by suggesting some actions for you as individuals, and to your Association.

Let me first make clear my own commitment.

This Nation is not going to retreat before the future. This administration has acted for 4 long years now to meet the challenges of the day and to set the stage for new triumphs of tomorrow.

We have believed that time is on our side, and we have tried to work every minute to make the most of our time at the top.

I promise you here and now this afternoon, that in the time left to us we will put every last ounce of energy and strength, every last second of the day, to strong, to timely, and, I pray, to wise and to enduring purpose.

That is my personal commitment. That is my responsibility as your President.

It is the only legacy that I am concerned to leave to my successor--a Nation that has grown in achievement, a people that are richer in fulfillment, an America that is united and strong in unfearing pursuit of the greater achievement and fulfillment that the future offers us.

Now let me ask you a question: What is your responsibility? What legacy do you want to leave to your children?

I hope that you will not tell them that you gave up on your world because you couldn't roll up your sleeves, as Rex Tugwell once said, and remake it overnight.

I hope you will be able to tell them, and I hope you will be able to show them, that you found the road of life was hard; you observed that it was steep and slow, but that you made it to the mountaintop. And as you went along, you took your country with you.

You are standing on one peak of life's experience right this minute. You are young and you are privileged Americans. You are bright. Most of you are healthy, happy, and I hope, well off.

Now, how do you think you got that way? How did that happen? Some of you had to fight for the privileged position that you have this afternoon.

But all through your years, all through the life of this Nation, other Americans were fighting to raise you up. They were fighting to try to protect you. They were fighting to try to better your life; to improve your system of government; to give you new advantages and better educational opportunities; to make you what you are, because they refused to retreat before the future that has now come true for you, for those of you who are very gifted and young, and, I think by being both, you are quite fortunate.

One of the men who fought for you, and who was fighting for you when I was a young man and first came to this town, was a close and dear friend. His name was Henry Stimson. He was a wise man with a warm place in his heart for young people.

He left a legacy for the future: "Let them learn," he said, "from our adventures. Let them charge us with our failures. And let them do better in their turn. But let them not turn aside from what they have to do, nor think that criticism ever excuses or substitutes for inaction. Let them have hope and virtue and let them believe in mankind and its future, for there is good as well as evil. And the man who tries to work for the good, believing in its eventual victory, while he may suffer setback and sometimes even disaster, will never know defeat. The only deadly sin that I know--the only deadly sin that I know--is cynicism."

Isn't that the truth for your time, too? Isn't that the answer that you are looking for?

It is not very difficult to "poor mouth." It is so comfortable and convenient sometimes to knock your own system.

It is hard to remember, sometimes, that this is really a great and a going concern, that our Nation is the envy of the world, and that there are citizens all over the world who would just give anything to trade places for it.

We can remember that without ever being satisfied with what we have or what we are.

It is difficult to put things in perspective. It is difficult to remember the giant strides that have been brought to us, despite our many problems--to the miracles of life that we have taken so much for granted, despite our plagues and our persecutions, despite our wars, despite the many calamities that we have envisioned from time to time--and I have endured and lived through a goodly number of them--man has persevered.

In the face of natural disasters, great tumults, setbacks and sins, generation after generation of Americans and our fellows on this planet have been blessed with fortune after fortune.

Through all the years, all the errors and all the dangers, reform and improvement have been the password to man's increasingly better and brighter future.

Man has been many things through all the centuries of his existence, but he has been wonderfully and mainly distinguished by one characteristic of his human nature: Man has always been, and I hope always will be, the great experimenter.

That is what you are. You are, after all, one of my first experiments.

The White House Fellows and the White House Fellows Association are really an experiment in democracy. You have succeeded beyond many of our original hopes.

So, I ask you now, as individuals and as an association, to commit yourself, to dedicate yourself, to organize yourself, for the greater successes that you can bring to this Nation.

You are relevant. No one can make your experiment irrelevant but yourselves.

No one can make democracy obsolete but the citizens of democracy who don't care.

Ever since we began our great experiment originally in democratic government, there have been those who wondered--sometimes in curiosity and a great many times in despair-whether this experiment would ever work.

A century ago there were many who thought we had reached a dead end. Abraham Lincoln had to remind those cynics and those skeptics that the American experiment, for all its failings, was plainly still the last best hope on earth.

Thirty-five years ago the doubters thought that we were up a blind alley. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to rally a people. He had to prove the vitality of a system by urging our people not to be paralyzed by their doubts.

One of the most stirring speeches I have ever heard in this town was when he stood there on that bleak, windy March day and took the oath of office.

He said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And how true that is this moment. Just a few years ago, some of these people were saying that we had reached a deadlock of democracy, but we moved on, we moved away, and, I am proud to say, we moved up.

Again and again in the American experience, it is the pessimists who have proven to be the false prophets. It is the optimists whose courage and faith have carried us on.

That is your inheritance. That is why you are here in the White House this afternoon.

So it is your turn, now, to pick up and carry on. For every complaint about our society and about our progress, you and I can point to a new program. We can point to a new landmark act of the Congress. We can point to a new public or new private initiative; or a new partnership of business and government, of church and community, of university and corporation, of American with American.
That is your America.

It is a growing and going concern. It is not slack and it is not soft. But it is creative and it is challenging both to the muscle and to the mind.

It is a land of limitless opportunity and great promise for all young people. There is no more promise anywhere on this earth.

For every lament about the alienation of our young, you and I can point to millions of active, committed, and involved young men and women who really deeply believe in the American experiment, who are willing to work for its improvement, who want to broaden and deepen its successes, so that every American--every single one of us-may know the full blessings of democracy.

Well, it is a big job. It is a most difficult and hard job. But there are enough of you now in the fourth year of this program to roll up your sleeves and do something about it.

Your association is new, but you can begin small. Plant an acre, put down a seed. You live and you work for all of America. You can see yourselves as the Johnny Appleseeds of a new America.

When you leave Washington, you can the ones to go out and plant the ideas and plow the furrows that point to the future; that can awaken and unite our Americans in a new community of splendor with high, noble purposes.

You are relevant. We do care about you. You are needed.

You are a national association, and I am convinced that you have a national role to play in helping to master the human problems that concern you and concern me.

Let me suggest something to you: You might want to organize by regional committees. Our new Alliance of Businessmen has done just that, to solve a great and urgent problem, under the leadership of Mr. Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company, and Mr. Paul Austin of Coca Cola. They are out, going down the streets and the highways, finding jobs for people who can't find jobs for themselves--the hard-core unemployed.

In just a few weeks now, the businessmen have demonstrated that they are winning that battle. In less than 3 months since they first met here in the White House they have secured pledges for 111,000 new jobs for hard-core unemployed and disadvantaged youth.

That is quite different from what it was when I came into this town, when they had the midget on Mr. Morgan's knee, and when the President was talking to businessmen in terms of economic royalists.

Some of you are business executives. Some of you have the power and the opportunity to work as partners with this National Alliance of Businessmen, to help those who can't help themselves.

You will find many other partners who are ready and eager to cooperate with your Association on a great variety of social problems--churches, law firms, universities, unions, farmers, the people of America who are working harder than ever to try to solve the problems of America.

Your regional committees could divide this Nation into four quarters. You could set a target list of problems and opportunities for each region.

The first target that I had when I came to this town as a young man was to participate with a group of brain trusters, of which I did not include myself. We wrote the report on economic conditions in the South. It was in the early 1930's. That report spread all across the land and people started working on the recommendations.

We haven't completed all of them yet.

One of the first ones to come out of it was the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour. Women were working in our section for 6 cents an hour.

I remember--well, I remember a lot of things about that report.

You could, I think, set a time limit for results. I think you could set that time limit with that target here today. It could be your next meeting a year from now.

Then you could come back here with a new scorecard. You could come back to the President and tell the President that you have worked with the National Alliance of Businessmen, that you have worked with Mr. Gardner in his Urban Coalition, that you have worked on the campuses and the city halls, in the churches, and you have many other partners.

You could come back here prepared to hold up your scorecard and say: "Mr. President, like the National Alliance of Businessmen, we have helped x number of unemployed find a job. We have helped x number of businessmen to involve themselves in the problems of the cities. We have helped x number of young Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, American Indians, or underprivileged, get into a classroom for the first time. We have gone out ourselves into x number of slums and we have worked with x number of mayors and local officials to try to get rid of those slums. We have tried to build new homes instead of burn old ones. We have used our management and our talents to help x number of small businessmen improve their lot and get ahead. We have served as a bridge between x number of city halls and universities, between x numbers of universities and community leaders, between the campus and the street corner, between the executive suite and the ghetto store, and between the police station and the church, the factory, the supermarket, the farm, the tenement, and the apartment house."

A year from now, I hope that a committee from your Association will be able to come to this house, to this room, and say to your President, "Mr. President, it was a privilege to work 12 months for my country at the top."

A tour of duty in Vietnam is just 13 months, as you know.

"We have tried to repay our country. We have remained committed and dedicated. We have done our best, singly and together, to bring all of our people closer in the work of building--building one united, one progressive--yes, one peaceful America."

You should not need any greater challenge than that. I hope you don't need any more encouragement than that.

But if you do, I am sure you will find that encouragement in association with your other White House Fellows. Some of them are so good that I have never let them leave the White House. Some of them are so good that I am taking them to Texas with me.

I am sure that if you do need some more encouragement, you too can find it in the leadership of the distinguished American who has agreed to serve as Mr. Dillon's replacement.

I want to pay a word of tribute to Mr. Dillon. I first knew him as a lieutenant in the Navy in this town. I don't know what he did before he put on that Navy uniform several decades ago, but I know what he has done since.

He has served every day, doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people, trying to better humanity. I think this final job he has done as Chairman of the White House Fellows is not one of the minor undertakings he has had, and it is not one of the smaller contributions of the many that he and his wife have made to this country.

I want to salute and to thank Mr. Dillon for his understanding.

He is more fortunate than some of us in his health, his brains, and his pocketbook, but he has been willing to spend them all on trying to make this a better nation.

The man who succeeds him I know will have a lot to shoot at, but he will do his best. He is the Chairman of the President's Commission.

I am proud and happy to announce that Judge William Hastie of the Third U.S. district Court of Appeals will carry on for out former and our very able Chairman.

Mrs. Johnson and I, finally, are very pleased to congratulate all of you, and to wish you good fortune, and to tell you that it has been our good fortune to know those who have come before. We hope we will have a chance to meet those of you as you come afterwards.

Note: The President spoke at 4:43 p.m. in the State Dining Room at the White House. During his remarks he referred to, among others, John Oakes, editorial page editor of the New York Times, and John W. Macy, Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, both initial members of the Commission on White House Fellows, Rexford G. Tugwell, Under Secretary of Agriculture from 1934 to 1937 and Governor of Puerto Rico from 1941 to 1946, Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State from 1929 to 1933 and Secretary of War from 1940 to 1945, C. Douglas Dillon, former Secretary of the Treasury and outgoing Chairman of the President's Commission on White House Fellows, and John W. Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Announcements of the selection of the 1968-1969 White House Fellows and of the designation of Judge William H. Hastie as the new Chairman of the President's Commission on White House Fellows, made on May 6, 1968, are printed in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (vol. 4, pp. 757, 758). On the same day the President signed Executive Order 11410 "Amending Executive Order No. 11183, establishing the President's Commission on White House Fellowships," which related to the designation of future chairmen (4 Weekly Comp. Pres. Docs., p. 758; 33 F.R. 6911; 3 CFR, 1968 Comp., p. 113).

The program, designed to give outstanding young Americans top-level experience with the workings of the Federal Government, was established on October 3, 1964 (see 1963-64 volume, this series, Book II, Item 622).

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks at a Reception for the White House Fellows Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237598

Filed Under

Categories

Attributes

Location

Washington, DC

Simple Search of Our Archives