Remarks to Delegates to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association Youth Conference.

Mr. Clyde Ellis, delegates to the REA Conference:

We want to welcome you here to the White House this morning and tell you how happy we always are when you come to see us.

We have a very distinguished visitor with us this morning who, I know, will enjoy you--and I think you would want to know. He is the young and brilliant leader of the Australian Labor Party.

Among all the nations in the world, there are few for whom we have more respect or affection than Australia. They have been our friends. They are our allies. We have great respect and friendship for them.

Mr. Whitlam is the new leader of the Labor Party in Australia. At the moment, the Labor Party is the opposition party. It is like the Republican Party in this country, although they don't have the same views on questions. It is the other party.

It provides constructive leadership for the viewpoint of the people who make up that great party.

The Prime Minister, Mr. Holt, will visit us later at our ranch. He will partake of our REA water and electricity at Johnson City this weekend.

Mr. Whitlam is here with us today. I want to present him to you as our friend and the great leader of a great people.

Mr. Whitlam, would you like to say a word?

MR. WHITLAM. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen:

This is a very great honor for me to have the opportunity to speak with the leader of the greatest country in the world--and to speak to many of the young people from all over this great country--young people drawn here by the invitation and the inspiration of a man who derives so much of his own strength from the land.

For a generation, he has tried to see that everybody in this country had access to the things which you represent in the title of your organization.

I thank him very much for giving me the opportunity to see you, to observe at first hand the great response that you give him, the rapport there is between the leader of your country and the young people of it-particularly from those rural areas which he has done so much to advance.

Thank you, Mr. President, very much for meeting the rising generation of your country.

THE PRESIDENT. I want to thank Mr. Ellis for making reference to the idea--now a program that you are a part of--that I first broached at the national REA convention in Chicago when I was a much younger man.

I have always felt that the future of our land would be largely determined by the quality of our people. I have felt if we were to develop the quality of people that we wanted, we had to give increasing attention to our young people.

When I was a Member of the Congress many years ago, I suggested to the REA leaders of America at their annual convention in Chicago that they have this conference of young people once a year--that they bring them here where they can see their Government in action, meet their President, Vice President, Congressmen, and Senators.

As a consequence, you are here. We are, today, bearing the fruits of that suggestion-that action that Clyde Ellis and his organization put into practice.

Last night, we had the Presidential Scholars on the balcony there and in the White House. A few days before, we had the White House Fellows. We had the young scientists and various groups. Almost every week I meet with a group of young people who are going to be leading this Nation tomorrow.

A great President who preceded me in this office, Harry Truman, was serving in the White House when most of you were born. In his last annual message to the Congress, President Truman had this to say to the Congress, and--through the Congress--to the people:

"The Nation's business is never finished." And, really, it never is.

New dreams must replace our old dreams; new horizons must open up; new challenges arise to test us--to test our spirit and our resolve.

I said the other day that the period we are going through in our national life today is a "period of testing." It is bringing out the nervousness that is in us. It is bringing out the excitement, the emotion, that is in us.

Yes, this is a time of testing--testing of our spirit and of our resolve. It is a time of testing of our commitment to a society where all men are equal; where people can live and prosper in peace.

When I first came to this city--36 years ago--I was a little bit older than you. That first visit was one of the most enduring memories that I possess.

The visions, the ideals, the restless hopes of great leaders are a part of the spirit of this city.

When I came here, the bonus marchers were going down Pennsylvania Avenue. Just a few months later, I stood--as one of many thousands on the Capitol grounds--to hear that great President say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Now you are coming into your responsibility. You are facing the challenges that were greater than those that we faced in that dark period of the depression.

In your lifetime--the days ahead of you-you are going to have to completely rebuild this country. You are going to have to clean up the ghettos, you are going to have to tear out the slums, rebuild the cities and the factories.

You are going to have to remake the hospitals--add to them--because we don't have enough to meet our needs.

You are going to have to reconstruct modern schools with better lighting.

By the end of this century, we may very well have doubled in numbers.

Now I want to talk to you about something that is particularly your own. There are about five things that command most of my attention.

First is peace in the world.

Then we have to be concerned with populations in the world.

Next, we have to be concerned with food production in the world, education, conservation, and health.

Those are the big things that occupy our attention. I want to talk to you about our farms for a moment--about our farm production--about how it is going to be necessary to double our food production.

Now that is the kind of challenge that we are going to face up to--that is what we are going to have to meet.

We can't just maintain our present standards because that's not going to be enough. Status quo has never been good for America-or for anywhere else. If it had been good, Clyde Ellis knows--as we served in Congress-the farms would still be dark.

We wouldn't have any running water, any inside bathrooms, or any electric light bulbs.

We would still be using the old coal oil can with the potato on its snout.

You don't remember that, but I do. We filled a lot of lamps that way when I was coming up.

So we haven't been satisfied with the status quo. We have been busy turning on lights all over this country ever since that day, 34 years ago, when that great President said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

That statement is true today.

The thing we have to fear most in America is fear. There are a lot of people who just make a full-time job of being afraid.

Now we have been turning on lights in this country since that statement of that great leader. But there are other lights to turn on. There are other expanding forces of our society that we must build and we must produce. And we must do both faster.

Some of our Nation and much of the world still lives in the grim darkness of poverty. Penetrating that darkness is the urgent task of this generation. It threatens our health. It threatens our survival as a society and a civilization.

The real ancient enemies of you and me are disease, illiteracy, and ignorance. We have got to fight those enemies and we have got to conquer them.

That is what we are doing with our poverty program. Six million people have been lifted out of the despondence of poverty.

Last year we increased the minimum wage in this country for 31 million and for the first time we brought 7 million additional people up to a better standard of living.

If you could take back home today one conviction, I would hope it would be this: that your Nation's ability, your country's ability, to meet its challenges is going to depend largely on you and on your willingness to serve.

Have you ever seen Uncle Sam with that red, white, and blue hat on, pointing his finger and saying, "I want you to buy bonds"? Well, I am pointing my finger to you today and saying I want you to serve your country.

I am not talking about the draft. I am not talking about enlisting in the service. We are very proud of the men who do that, too. But I am telling you today I want you to enter public service, to prepare yourselves for the school board, or as a local community leader, a county commissioner, a county official, the State legislature, a district attorney, a Member of Congress. I hope that out there today is some person who will be occupying this platform someday.

You have the greatest system of government in the world, and you have the greatest country in the world, if you only know it and if you only are determined to develop it, to expand it, to make it grow, and to preserve the good things that we have.

This Nation's business is never finished, Harry S. Truman said before you were born. But he went on to say this, too: "Underneath, the great issues remain the same-prosperity, welfare, human rights, effective democracy, and above all, peace."

Yesterday in the Rose Garden, the President appointed the great-grandson of a slave to the Supreme Court of the United States. That man is one of a half dozen who have argued the most cases before that great court.

)rust a short time ago the President appointed the first Negro in history to the Cabinet. Tomorrow the son that didn't have lights when he was born, will have opportunity, just as the Supreme Court Justice had, just as the Cabinet officer had--opportunity to make his own life, to develop his own talents, to provide leadership for his own country. And some of you, I hope, someday can be here as President of this country or in the Cabinet of this land.

As President Truman said, "Underneath, the great issues remain the same .... " What are they?

Prosperity--we are blessed with a reasonable amount of that now.

Welfare--the education, the health and welfare of our citizens.

Human rights--we have made greater strides in 3 years than we have made in 300 years.

Effective democracy--yes, every citizen has an opportunity and an obligation to participate in it.

And, above all else in the world, peace. Now, you young people can bring us closer to resolving all of these issues. Your own children will be able to say that what are only dreams today have become living realities tomorrow.

Most of the things that I am proudest of that I have done in 36 years of public service were the most unpopular things I did at the time I did them.

I remember the first REA line I tried to build. The power company came in and over a weekend they built a parallel line that put me out of business. They called it "the spite line." Mr. Ellis was a Congressman then. He remembers all about that.

Then we built the dams on the river and we got one of them up. Just before we closed it to hold the river, they had a big flood and they said it was a Johnson, manmade flood. They tried me in the newspapers and in the investigating committees, on the stump.

There was a lot of criticism because we made a flood. I don't know how we ever made it, but that is what they alleged.

Today that river is peaceful. Those dams are there. That electricity runs all over that land. And that controversy is gone.

So get yourself into some of the controversies of the day.

Mrs. Johnson said this week in New England that I had been a protester all my life. And I have been--protesting the status quo, protesting illiteracy, protesting poverty, pro, testing ignorance, protesting inadequate treatment of all of our citizens on equal opportunity for all of our people. And by protesting, we have done something about these things.

We have some protesters today; we have some dissenters today.

Most of them are good for us.

I want you to become one. I want you to make this a better world tomorrow than you found it when you discovered America.

You may not remember all about when you discovered it, but remember when you first learned of it.

I want you to write yourself a platform for leaving this a better world than you found it.

My high school motto of my high school graduating class of six--at Johnson City, Texas, population 600--was "Give to the world the best you have, and the best will come back to you."

If you people from the farms, sons and daughters of the people who make up the great basic industry, agriculture--if you will get excited about public service--if you will "give to the world the best you have, then the best will come back to you."

We are so glad you could come here and visit with us. We hope you enjoy Washington; we hope you have a lot of fun. Keep your "cool" in the daytime. You are on your own in the evening.

Dr. Billy Graham is over here to give me a little leadership.

Dr. Graham, come on over here and meet some of these folks.

In some of our most trying periods, Dr. Graham comes here and gives us counsel and strength. This morning, he was here in Washington to talk about our poverty program. He is having lunch with a group of our leaders in the Nation's Government.

He is very familiar with a lot of our human problems. He is not only a voice that is listened to in this country, but one that is respected throughout the world.

If he would say a word, unaccustomed as he is to speaking, I would like him to do so. Dr. Billy Graham.

DR. GRAHAM. I was coming down on an elevator some time ago. A man got on board and said, "I hear Billy Graham is on here."

The friend of mine pointed in my direction and said, "Yes, there he is."

He looked me up and down for about 10 seconds and said, "My, what an anticlimax."

But I think in this period of history-when the President has all the pressures upon him--every one of us ought to vow today, whatever our religious backgrounds, that we are going to pray every day for our President that God would give him strength and wisdom at this hour in the history of the world.

God bless you, and thank you.