Remarks at a Reception for Leaders of Veterans Organizations.

FIRST I want to ask your understanding for my being late. I have been late most of my life. But I seem to be--as age advances and the Prime Minister has come to town-a little later than usual.

I am sorry that I couldn't be here with you when the reception began.

For all last year and this year we have been hoping that we could get together. Bill Driver has talked to us a number of times about it--also the veterans committees in the House and Senate--to have a little reception here in honor of the veterans organizations who provide the leadership for the veterans of this country.

There are 26 million men and women who have served this Nation, who have protected it--and who are protecting it this hour.

Last weekend I saw thousands of them. General Wheeler asked me to try to come to see the Marines on the Marine anniversary. I ate so much Marine cake I don't get on the scales any more.

But I have had my problems with the Marines as some of you have observed from the newspapers.

All my life being an old Navy man--and seeing Senator Yarborough here an old Army man--we just have to put up with these Marines because every time you hear from them they say, "The Marines have landed and everything is in good shape."

So I told them on my visit that is just exactly what happened to me right here in the White House. The Marines landed and everything is in good shape and we are going to have a wedding here in a few days.

While we are working on this one over here in the Mansion for my daughter, one of them was messing around over here in my office and married my secretary.

But I went out to see these fighting young men and women who represent the very best in America.

We first went to Fort Benning, Georgia. I have never been more inspired than when I saw the men who were taking their parachute jumps there, and when I saw them out practicing guerrilla warfare.

Then we went to El Toro and Camp Pendleton for the Marines.

Then we went out on the Enterprise carrier and spent the night with 5,000 men and saw them take 100 planes off in the afternoon and night and bring them in. The Enterprise, you know, has been on Yankee Station out in Vietnam and will be back out there again in January.

Then we went to the Air Force where our fighter and bomber pilots were just coming from Vietnam--men with over 100 missions.

Then we wound up in Yorktown with the Coast Guard.

So we covered them all.

I had dinner in the Captain's cabin with enlisted men. They were looking down at the admirals who were sitting at the other end of the line. The fact that one of them was from Comfort, Texas, was purely coincidental.

But I don't need to tell you that these young men and women and their fighting comrades in Vietnam represent the very best that this country produced.

If there is one thing I learned from talking to all the generals, admirals, enlisted men, and the others, it is that we are giving them a quality product of manhood and womanhood today that they have never received before.

That is no compliment to you and me, Ralph. But they are better than we were.

Every man there told me they were better than we were. That, we are very proud of.

I know you veterans are very proud of it because we are going to need our best for the tough, demanding, unfinished business that is ahead. We have plenty of it.

I want to get down to business very quickly because I have an idea and I want to make a sale. I want to promote you. I want to get you in here to roll up your sleeves and start doing something for these veterans, as you have been all of these years.

Last year, 600,000 veterans returned to civilian life. Next year, it will be 800,000. Every month we are mustering out about 70,000 veterans--every month, 70,000.

Eric Hoffer, our longshoreman friend from out there in California, calls these veterans the "seed of the future." You city boys may not know what that means, but we farmers do.

They are a very great, tremendous, natural resource--and national resource. We ought to realize that and recognize it. Their energies, their ambitions, and their efforts are going to determine what kind of a country we live in and the kind my grandson lives in.

I want to plant this seed. I want to put it down where it will do the most good in the most fertile soil. I want it to grow. I want a harvest of educated children in this country because education is the guardian genius of democracy. If you don't want totalitarianism, if you don't want dictatorship, if you don't want communism, you just pour the education to them. That is what we are doing.

I talked to the leaders of the land-grant colleges this morning. I am talking about our elementary school problems tomorrow, but I am talking to you now about educated children. My own roots have been in the classroom. That is where the action is; that is where the future is. When I leave here, that is directly where I am going--to the classroom because nowhere is the challenge of tomorrow greater than it is in our schools and particularly in our elementary schools.

Nowhere is it more real or more urgent than in the ghetto schools.

I doubt that any of you here live in a ghetto. But you ought to live in one long enough to understand what it is about--and have a little compassion--to decide to do something about it.

If we don't, it is going to wreck our Nation. The children in these ghettos need the teaching most and they get it least.

If you were a teacher, would you like to be a college professor, or would you like to be a high school teacher? Yes, in that order. And an elementary school teacher? Yes. Elementary school teacher in a ghetto? That is the last place you want to be.

So that all the good ones are pulled out of there. We have to put somebody back there who wants to do something about cleaning up those ghettos and doing something about those poor children--the ones who need it most. That is what I want to talk to you about right now.

These are the children who can't recognize the picture of a teddy bear. This is a serious situation when we are living in a world where 4 out of 10 children, and 4 out of 10 adults, and 4 out of 10 people cannot read "cat" and cannot spell "dog."

Then we talk about how proud we are of the 20th century. They are A-plus students when it comes to recognizing a rat because they have had more experience with rats than they have had with teddy bears, or a garbage can, or a knife, or a beer bottle.

They can't tell you about colors because their lives are so drab. Why? Because too often there is no one in the house to ever teach them, no one to read to them, no one to give them any kind of good example, no one to give them loving discipline.

We have two wonderful daughters. I think the thing that is helping them more than any other thing is every morning when they wake up, every night when they go to bed, and every time their mother sees them in the daytime she always says, "Remember, mother has got confidence in you and mama cares. You are loved. You are loved." She says that to the two daughters all the time.

But these poor ghetto children don't have that, because their mother is gone and their father--they don't have one sometimes because he is not there.

Our figures show that between now and 1975 2 1/2 million teachers will enter or reenter elementary school teaching. We will only need 2.2 million.

But here is the problem: Our high schools will have more than they need and our grade schools will not have what they need: 6,000 less than they will need every year between 1970 and 1975. But it is even worse than that.

The schools that are going to suffer are the schools where the children need the teachers the most--the ghetto schools, the forgotten rural schools, the little border town schools, the Indian reservation schools.

The richer schools can pay higher salaries, they can offer better working conditions-they can hire the teachers.

But the poor schools just cannot. Too often they get the dregs and the leftovers. They need the best teachers the most. They get the worst ones.

Here is the job that I want you to do for me. Here is the new battleground where I think our veterans belong. I want them not only to protect our freedom abroad--I want them to protect our freedom and our liberty right here in our cities.

I want to find veterans who want to teach. I want to give them the chance to teach these neglected children. They are teaching in Vietnam now.

One of the things that I am most proud of is the compassion that our soldiers, particularly our Marines right up in the DMZ, are showing for poor children--their health problems, their education problems. They fight all day and go at night to school to teach them. That is where I got this idea.

Four and a half million veterans have been discharged since Korea. In that 4 1/2 million only 100,000 of them are teaching--67,000 veterans are discharged every month and only 1,500 teach.

So I want to encourage many more veterans to teach. All you veteran service officers from all of the States were invited here. Your representatives are here tonight. I got my picture made with you. Are you listening? I want to talk to you right now.

I want to encourage more veterans to teach. If they don't know how to teach now, I want to, with some of my Senators' and Congressmen's help, help them be taught how to teach themselves--and we want to teach them how to teach.

These men and women have something rare, something unusual, and I think something wonderful to offer if they have served in our uniform. They can bring to the ghetto classrooms what few others can. They can bring there whatever children need--example, experience, integrity, honor, courage, faith, hope, and love of country demonstrated by being there when they needed you.

There are too many children who do not have a father or brother in the house. The men of Vietnam can show them what a man can be and what a real man is like--and what a man should be.

I don't know anyone in the world who can show it better than the men who have worn the uniform in Vietnam or other places and come out.

So who knows what the challenge to democracy is better than they do? Many of our veterans are no strangers to the agonies of the ghetto. They know the suspicion and hostility of the ghetto. They fought for their own freedom in the ghetto. Some of them came out of there.

Then they went to fight for a nation's freedom in Vietnam. Now they can come home to continue the fight as teachers to win freedom for others who need them desperately.

One month after I came into office I said: "Why can't we lower the IQ requirement, the mental requirements, and why can't we lower the physical requirements so we can get out and at least take some of these boys who might not be good soldiers or good fighters, but teach them to get up early in the morning, to get a cold shower, shave, and be on time--give them some discipline and training--and they might learn to mow a lawn."

I sold Mr. McNamara on the plan. Then I got Senator Russell down and went hunting with him--and got him to agree to take 12,000. Now we have 100,000. They have already enlisted 49,000 who have an average of fifth grade reading ability.

We are bringing them out of these places and putting them in there. You know the proudest thing I heard on this trip was one old, seasoned, crusty general came up to tell McNamara the story of the program.

We said, "What about these at the bottom of the heap who we brought in, that we are trying to train?"

He said, "I got the shock of my life. We have 47 of them who are going to officer's schools."

That shows you. I want to get some of these men who have come back from fighting for their country, trained to be teachers-we don't know what we will call them; we will call them the Veterans Teachers or something--to come and go into these ghettos over the country; go there, stay with them, and live with them, and teach them so we can save those children, those cities, our country.

Therefore tonight I am requesting and appointing the Veterans Administrator, William Driver--there has never been a better Government employee. He is like the rest of us--he has out-married himself.

But I am asking Bill Driver to work closely with Secretary Gardner, Commissioner Howe, and to keep in contact with the House Veterans Committee, members of both parties, and the Senate Labor and Welfare Committee, and Finance, who handle veterans legislation--work closely with them--because I want them to develop a plan to enlist the returning veterans in this challenging new assignment.

I want to invite your thoughts on it. I want your organizations to give us any suggestions you can about it. I talked to Mr. McNamara about it during my lunch hour today when Mr. Bunker was sitting there.

I said: "This is what I am going to suggest tonight if I can get there. I don't want somebody undercutting me tomorrow. How do you feel about it? Is it a good idea or isn't it?"

He approves it wholeheartedly.

So we will go out before these men are discharged and, with the help of the veterans organizations, we will say to these men: "You not only have protected our freedom wherever that flag has gone, you followed it and you brought it back without a stain on it. You can protect our citizens and our future right here at home by taking this job. If you are not qualified to do it now, we will qualify you to do it. We will give you training that is necessary and you get out there and give these children the kind of teaching they are entitled to in the richest nation in the world--that is going to have a gross national product of $850 billion next year."

I think you care about the veterans. I think you care about the country. I don't think I am presumptuous in assuming that.

If you do care about the veterans, and you do care about the country, here is a chance to do something for both of them.

You always have to pay for your supper. You have paid by listening.

Thank you very much.