Proclamation 4224—Father's Day, 1973

Each year, the third Sunday in June is set aside to honor the American father. In a complex and sometimes coldly impersonal age, Father's Day brings us back to basics.

A basic unit of our society is the family which a father helps to form and hold together. A basic force in our economic life is the work a father does to provide for his wife and children. One of the strongest leadership influences forming the character of our young people is the example a father sets for his sons and daughters. The very identity through which we know ourselves is rooted in surnames proudly inherited from our fathers and their fathers before them.

All of these things are part of what fatherhood means, yet the whole is also more than the sum of its parts. At its heart is the timeless impulse, commonplace yet wonderfully noble, that moves man to partnership with woman and both to the raising of children, children for whom they strive to build a home and a world a little better than what they themselves have known before.

It is the American father's glory that he works to make each day of the year his family's; it is our proper tribute to him, that we should join to make this one day his.

On this Father's Day we again have the opportunity to pay a justly deserved tribute to the counselors, providers, arbiters, and leaders who are our fathers.

Now, Therefore, I, Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America, in accordance with a joint resolution of the Congress approved April 24, 1972, do hereby request that June 17, 1973, be observed as Father's Day.

I invite the governments of the States and communities to observe Father's Day with appropriate ceremonies, and I urge all our people to offer public and private expressions on that day of the abiding love and gratitude which they bear for the fathers of America.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of June, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America, the one hundred ninety-seventh.

RICHARD NIXON