Remarks to Students and Members of the Faculty of the Brazilian Escola Superior de Guerra

Gentlemen:

I want to express a very warm and somewhat damp welcome to all of you to the White House.

I was not able to visit your country because of reasons beyond my control and therefore this represents, in a sense, an opportunity for me to at least visit with Brazilians.

I hope, and I'm sure all of you do, as a result of your visit, if not before, I hope you know how strongly we in this country value our relations with Brazil and the other countries of the hemisphere. Nature has tied us together. In a sense we are all the objects or the subjects of a most extraordinary historic experience, and we are, it seems to me, bound together essentially today in the preservation of the freedom of our hemisphere.

This is a matter of the first and greatest priority to the people of this country, and it has been the most substantial source of satisfaction to me that this view of the necessity for working together in the defense of freedom has been so universal among our sister republics in the last days.

I want to emphasize what I think is our common view: that we in this hemisphere are not merely against something; we are strongly for something, and that is the opportunity to provide, through freedom, a better life for our people. So that as long as we are free, as long as we are able to maintain that freedom, we have to use that freedom, and use it to provide internally a more equitable and more fruitful life for the people in all the hemisphere. That is our object--the object of the people of Brazil and the object of the people of the United States.

So I'm very proud to have you here. We are most indebted to Brazil. It was a great ally of ours in World War II. It has been a source of strength to us in recent days. I'm hopeful that Brazil and the United States will continue to walk together, we hope in peace, to walk together in any case in providing at a very crucial moment in the history of the world for the defense of freedom in our hemisphere, and by so doing, the defense of freedom around the world.

Mrs. Kennedy and I look forward to seeing all of you gentlemen in Brazil on some sunny day soon.

Thank you.