Remarks During a Visit to the President Ford Committee Headquarters

Thank you very much, Bo, and thank all of you. I have had an opportunity to nicer many of you, and I hope that before I leave I will have an opportunity, to shake hands and meet the ones that I haven't known before.

First, let me thank Bo and all of you for the fine job you have been doing. I think we have got a fine, in fact, a great chairman of the President Ford Committee in Bo Callaway. I don't want to start mentioning the names of all the other great people, but I consider you all an outstanding, excellent team in every respect, and I appreciate it very much.

The thing that I have noticed--and I meet with Bo weekly---is the steady growth from a small base to, I think, an organization that is going to be very effective.

I like the integrity of the organization, I like the teamwork of the organization. You work together and you are working for a cause that I know you believe in. It is a cause that I think is in the best interest of the United States. It is a cause that will be proven to be right both at home and abroad.

We have gone through a tough 12 months or more. I could enumerate the difficulties that have faced us as a nation and myself as a President and this administration. We haven't lost our cool. We have done what is right. And the net result is good today--not as good as we want it, not as good as it is going to be.

As I look down the path in preparation for the State of the Union Message and look back to where we were a year ago, we have made great strides forward. But the most important thing is the hope that we can convey to the older generation, the middle generation that is doing the work in the factories and the fields and in the gas stations and the like, the group that is in college, and the younger group that is just getting started in the educational process. We can and will offer hope to all segments of our society--the poor, the rich, the handicapped. We will do a job that will make everybody proud to be an American and proud of America.

In the political arena in which we are operating, we can talk about the headway we have made and the expectations that are down the road, but we know from past experience that a good organization such as you have here, that you are all a part of, will make a meaningful difference, whether it is in New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Florida or any one of the other States where we either have a primary or whether we have a convention.

This is a group that I am proud of. I know you will do the job. And I pledge to each and every one of you that we will work in the administration, if necessary, 24 hours a day to have a program that you can go out and sell that is in the best interests of 215 million Americans.

I notice that there are a few who were in New Hampshire or maybe Massachusetts or Florida, and we are glad they are out there in the field working, but what you do here in this facility under Bo's leadership is meaningful to us, to all of you, and to the country as a whole.

Let me thank you again for the opportunity to see so many of you, meet so many of you, and to express my appreciation for your efforts on behalf of the administration, myself, as well as the country.

Thank you very much.