Mr. President, Mrs. Ceausescu, ladies and gentlemen:
Mrs. Ford, our son Jack, and I are highly honored and greatly pleased to visit Romania. We are especially pleased to be in this unique land so rich in history, with such a great natural beauty and such a proud and independent people.
As you may recall, Mr. President, I met with a splendid group of young Romanians in the White House several months ago.1 I found them to be excellent and outstanding ambassadors of friendship between our two countries.
Mr. President, let us assure coming generations a more normal, relaxed, and peaceful world. We must find ways to increase real and direct cooperation among all peoples.
Among the principles we both cherish is the right of every nation to independence and sovereignty. We believe that every nation has the right to its own peaceful existence without being threatened by force, and we believe that all states are equal under law regardless of size, system, or level of development.
Principles such as these are included in the document we signed in Helsinki. We have both worked hard, Mr. President, and we must continue to devote our efforts to making all of these principles a reality in international life in this spirit. I look forward to our discussions on the international problems that concern us both.
Our bilateral relations are good, Mr. President. I am very pleased that our Congress has approved the U.S.-Romanian trade agreement. This creates new opportunities, particularly in the mutually beneficial commercial and economic field. I am confident that we can continue to improve our relations in many, many other areas as well.
Mr. President, I know that our discussions will be very productive during my stay in your country. As during your visit to Washington in June, our goal will be to seek closer cooperation between Romania and the United States. I look forward to our talks that we will have in the hours ahead.
On behalf of the American people, I bring to you and your family, and the Romanian people, warm, warm greetings and the very best wishes for peace and prosperity.
1 On March 24, 1975, the President met at the White House with a choral group from Romania. The group's visit to the United States was sponsored by the Friendship Ambassadors touristic and cultural exchange program.
Note: The President spoke at approximately 4:30 p.m. at Otopeni Airport in response to remarks of welcome by Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu.
President Ceausescu spoke in Romanian. His remarks were translated by an interpreter as follows:
Dear Mr. President of the United States of American, dear Mrs. Ford, ladies and gentlemen, dear comrades, and friends:
It is with great joy that I and my wife, all of us, have you as our guests, and address to you, Mr. President, and Mrs. Elizabeth Ford, as well as to your associates, our warm greetings and to extend to you our traditional bidding of welcome on the soil of the Socialist Republic of Romania.
I wish to make a particular note with satisfaction of the outward course taken by the Romanian-American relations of the fact that in the last few years, the economic exchanges have gone up strongly, that technical-scientific cooperation has been intensified, as well as the cultural and other exchanges between our two countries.
The very fact of your visit to Romania is, in my opinion, an eloquent expression of these relations, of the desire evinced by the Romanian and the American peoples to work more and more closely together in the mutual interest, as well as in the interests of their course of understanding, cooperation, and peace among all nations.
You are coming to Romania just a day after the successful conclusion of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Thus, your visit is a wonderful part of the spirit which permeates the documents that we have signed together yesterday in Helsinki, and whereby we have asserted our common will on behalf of our peoples to develop cooperation on the principles of fully equal rights, respect for the independence, sovereignty of each nation, noninterference in internal affairs, and the renunciation of force and threat with the use of force in the settlement of problems between States.
As we have mentioned in the statement in Helsinki, in order to convey into real fact whatever we have agreed in the signed documents, sustained efforts are required in order to insure our peoples and the peoples of the world at large a better world and a world with more justice, in order to proceed in such a way as to insure that children and mankind in general will never know the disasters of war and would live in peace and friendship.
During your brief visit to this country, you will have an opportunity, Mr. President, to get to know the present-day interests and some of the achievements of the Romanian people on the way of building a new life of well-being and habit.
You will be able, sir, to understand better the desire of the people of Romania to cooperate with the American people and to work together with all the peoples of the world, irrespective of their social systems.
I should like your visit to mark a new, significant moment in the course of friendship and cooperation between our two countries and peoples.
With these thoughts in mind, I wish you to feel at home among the Romanian people, who greet you with esteemed friendship and its traditional hospitality.
Gerald R. Ford, Remarks on Arrival at Bucharest, Romania Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/256588
