Remarks at the President's Birthday Dinner in Boston.

Congressman McCormack, your Eminence, Governor Volpe, Mr. Mayor, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

I first of all want to express my appreciation to our distinguished Majority Leader, Congressman McCormack. He and I and the leadership of the House and Senate have breakfast every Tuesday morning and what he does with me he did with President Truman and he did before that with President Roosevelt. So Congressman McCormack has been identified with the great decisions which this country has made in the Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties, and now the Sixties, and he has been a source of strength, and I appreciate the support in the past and tonight. I want to state how gratified I am that his Eminence is with us tonight. He married us, he christened my daughter, he inaugurated me, he's prayed over me and I hope he'll continue to do so. Thank you.

And we all pray for Governor Volpe, that now that he's seen how pleasant it is to be a Democrat, he will come over with us. I want to express my thanks to Pat Lynch, our distinguished Chairman, who undertook this great responsibility of running this dinner. To Judge Melen, to the Mayor of Boston for his generous reception tonight, to the members of Congress from our State and Senator Smith, and also to our friends from other states of New England, Senator Pastore, my friend and valued colleague, Ed Muskie, who is with us from Maine, Governor Notre from Rhode Island, Governor Dempsey from Connecticut. Actually, I must say that I had something to do with making Governor Dempsey the Governor of Connecticut. When we brought Abe Ribicoff down to Washington we did two good things. And also, we don't have any Democratic Governors in New Hampshire and Vermont, but we have Representatives and we appreciate their being here.

Most of all, I want to thank all of you. I have been informed that with this dinner I am now responsible as the leader of the Democratic Party for a debt of only one million dollars. Now, did anybody ever get a birthday present like that? One million dollars. I don't know--they spent it like they were sure we were going to win. But I'm most grateful to you. This has been a series of shocks which you've endured on my behalf, in '52, in '58, the primaries, the election, and I'm sure you're wondering when it's all going to be over. But the great thing is, of course, it never ends. We'll get this paid off and then we'll start all over again. I'm indebted to you all. This is a tremendous dinner. It is the greatest possible help to us. And I want you to know that I am--even though we have many things in our mind, this is on our mind, and it's on John Bailey's mind and I'm greatly in your debt tonight. Thank you.

I want to also thank Mr. Frost for saying an Irish poem over us. He spoke very highly of Harvard, but I do think it appropriate to reveal that on the morning after the Inaugural when he came to the White House, he said, "You're something of Irish and I suppose something of Harvard. My advice to you as President is to be Irish." So we're going to do the best we can.

I leave tomorrow night on a trip to France. The United States is, as President de Gaulle has said, the daughter of Europe, and in a special way we have the most intimate relations with France. Paul Revere, who's regarded as a good Yankee, was of French descent. Benjamin Franklin spent 7 years in France and played a leading role in bringing France to our assistance in a moment of need and emerged from France in 1783 bearing the treaty with the British which proclaimed us a sovereign and independent nation. Americans in the 19th Century went back to Europe, this time on peaceful missions, and particularly to France, and gained from France some of its great understanding of the past and its view of the future. And twice in this century Americans have gone to France, this time not on a peaceful mission, but on behalf of the new world in its efforts to redress the balance of the old, in 1917 and again in 1944. I go to France on this occasion not in order to invoke old memories, even though those memories are important, but to look to the future, of the close relationship which must exist between France and the United States if the cause of Freedom in the Atlantic community is to be preserved. And I go to pay a visit to a distinguished captain of the West, General de Gaulle, who has been involved for more than 20 years in a struggle to protect the integrity of Western Europe; and therefore I go with the good wishes of all of our citizens of our country as we Pay a visit to an old friend.

I go also to Vienna, and I know there are some Americans who wonder why I take that journey. I am only 44, but I have lived in my 44 years through three wars, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean War. No one can study the origins of any of those three struggles without realizing the serious miscalculations, the serious misapprehensions, about the possible actions of the other side which existed in the minds of the adversaries which helped bring about all those wars. The War of 1914, where the Austrians gave an ultimatum to Serbia and the Russians then mobilized and the French then in alliance with Russia then mobilized and then the Germans mobilized, and then when the Germans saw the French and the Russians mobilizing attacked through Belgium which brought the British in. One week before the British never would have dreamed they would be at war and I doubt that the French would. No one would have dreamed that two years later the United States would be involved in a war on the continent. In 1939 and 1940, after the loss of Austria and Czechoslovakia, finally the British guaranteed Poland, but there is certainly some evidence that Hitler never believed that the British would come to the assistance of Poland, and he never believed that the United States would again become involved in a great struggle on the plains of Europe. Certainly in the War of 1950 in Korea, the North Koreans never imagined that the United States would come to the assistance, by war-like means, of the Republic of South Korea, and we on our part did not imagine that the Chinese Communists would intervene as we approached to the north of North Korea.

Now we live in 1961, where freedom is in battle all around the globe, where the United States has intimate alliances with more than 40 countries, and where the communists in their meeting in Moscow and in the speech of the Chairman of the Communist Party, in his speech of January 6th, enunciated the Doctrine of the Wars of Liberation, where the possibility of escalation is always with us. I see value in talking to those with whom we're allied, but I also think it valuable at a time when both sides possess weapons of mutual destruction and annihilation--I think it's also valuable that there should be understanding and communication and a firm realization of what we believe.

So I go to see Mr. Khrushchev in Vienna. I go as the leader of the greatest revolutionary country on earth. I know that there is in some areas of the world, and even in some parts of the United States an image of us as a fixed society. Bernard DeVoto once said New England is a finished place, and some people may think that of the United States. That is not my view. When John Quincy Adams went to call on the British Governor, before the Revolution, about the problem of the British here in this state, they had an amiable conversation until finally Adams mentioned the word "revolution," and then he wrote in his diary "It was then I saw his knees tremble." Now, our knees do not tremble at the word "revolution." We believe in it. We believe in the progress of mankind. We believe in freedom, and we intend to be associated with it in the days to come,

So I come back to this old city, to express my thanks to all of you who are my oldest friends, beginning with Dr. Good, to express my appreciation for your confidence and support tonight, on past occasions, and I hope in the future, and I carry with me a message which is written on one of our statues by a distinguished and vigorous New Englander, William Lloyd Garrison, "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."

Thank you.