Dear Professor Billington:
As the Board of Foreign Scholarships marks the close of its 25th year, I congratulate you and your fellow Board members, past and present, for your diligence and resourcefulness in promoting scholarly exchanges between the United States and other countries of the world.
The educational exchange program has a proud record of achievement in its first quarter century. In all, more than 100,000 students, teachers and scholars from 110 countries have participated in this program, including over 36,000 Americans. Its contribution to mutual understanding, and ultimately to world peace, is incalculable.
Looking ahead, I would like to commend the Board for the forward-looking initiatives in its program for the Seventies and especially for the Lincoln Lectureships, which are being inaugurated today. Please convey my deep appreciation to the four distinguished scholars who will launch this significant new lecture series-Professors Franklin, Samuelson and Townes, and Mr. Updike. The Lincoln Lectureships typify this country's willingness to share with the rest of the world the finest in American scholarship and intellectual achievement. And I am pleased to know that eminent foreign lecturers, in turn, will give Americans the benefit of their talents and thought.
I also take this opportunity to commend the wisdom and foresight of the exchange program's many Congressional founders and supporters. Their backing, over the years, has enabled this program to play an increasingly significant role in our relations with other countries and cultures.
The Board and the program it supervises have my very best wishes for every success in meeting the new challenges of the next quarter century.
Sincerely,
RICHARD NIXON
[James H. Billington, D. Phil., Professor of History, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 18540]
Note: The letter was dated August 1, 1972, and released August 2.
Dr. Billington was Chairman of the Board of Foreign Scholarships.
The four scholars chosen to lecture abroad in the Lincoln Lectureships series were John Hope Franklin, professor of history, University of Chicago; Paul A. Samuelson, Nobel prizewinning professor of economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Charles H. Townes, Nobel prize-winning professor of physics, University of California at Berkeley; and John H. Updike, novelist and poet, Ipswich, Mass.
Richard Nixon, Letter Congratulating the Board of Foreign Scholarships on its 25th Anniversary. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/254698