Remarks to the Faculty and Students of Johns Hopkins University

My fellow Americans, Dr. Eisenhower, members of the faculty, student body:

I am delighted to have had this invitation and I am so happy that circumstances allowed me to be here this morning.

I have known your distinguished president for many years, since I was a young man, as he said. I am indebted to him for many things, for this invitation, for his wise counsel through the years, for his willingness to always serve his country and for this laudatory introduction.

I might say it seems to me it is one of the best introductions I ever had, probably the best introduction I ever had except upon one other occasion when I was speaking down in the hills of Tennessee and the Governor was supposed to introduce me. He did not get there and I had to introduce myself.

This is my second visit this week to a great university. Just a few days ago I was up at Brown in Rhode Island.

I regard it as wise for the flame of learning to be applied occasionally to the seats of power.

There is no spirit of partisanship in what I am going to say to you today. Because I have come over here this morning to talk to you about the goals of our country and what Americans should do about them.

Americans today are no longer willing to settle for the average. This generation is committed to strive for the best. On our campuses--and in all our country--there is a determination to seek and to reach for and to obtain the goals of excellence.

As we raise our sights toward the goals of excellence in private affairs, we should and we just simply must do the same in public affairs.

The goals of our public life must be the highest goals of our national life.

We must seek excellence from our Government at every level.

We must demand excellence from our politics.

My life work has been public service. Whatever trust has come to me, I have tried to do my best. For I believe with the ancient Greeks that the end of politics must be the good of man.

If our American politics is to serve the good of man, I believe that the performance of American Government can and must be improved--and the standards of American politics can and must be raised and elevated.

This age of knowledge deserves, and demands, the politics of understanding.

Instinct and intuition are not enough to rely upon in directing our national destiny. Intellect must be respected--intelligence must be trusted. In public affairs, the average performance and the average performer simply are no longer good enough for our country.

This age of reason deserves, and demands, the politics of restraint.

There are many moments in our national life when the leaders of your country and their followers are given the opportunity to discard prudence and restraint.

I have been in this office only 10 months. Early in my tenure a bearded gentleman, Mr. Castro, cut off our water supply at one of our great defense bases--Guantanamo. There was great provocation and our people were properly and duly alarmed. Cries went up from every corner of the land with many suggested remedies. Some proposed an invasion. Others suggested sending the Marines in. There were some who would have treated it quite lightly.

But after adequate deliberation, after reasoning with all of the trained minds who had been equipped to cope with problems of this kind, we decided that it was the better part of wisdom to send one admiral in to cut the water off rather than to send a battalion of Marines in to turn it on.

We determined to make that base self-sufficient and today we manufacture and furnish our own water there. We released almost 2,000 employees and said to Mr. Castro that "if we cannot depend on our contracts for the water supply, we cannot depend on our contract for the employees, so we will send our own people to man our own base."

The other day our ships were fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin. Acting upon orders, they defended themselves and destroyed the enemy to the extent that it was possible very promptly.

Forthwith we considered what judgments we should make and what actions should follow. And after due consideration, with full reports from all involved, we selected the nest that harbored these boats, eliminated the areas that involved huge civilian populations, and made prompt and adequate response, destroying substantially that PT fleet and the nest that had harbored them.

So, I use these illustrations to show you that it could have been easy in one wave to wipe out women and children and to drop bombs on North Viet-Nam and on China because these nests were located within 35 miles of the Chinese border.

But government must be restrained in the pursuit as well as the use of power itself. And government must be moderate in the belief of its own infallibility.

This age of hope deserves--and I think demands--the politics of vision.

We are possessed of great power in America--power to destroy all human life or to make human life sublime. Our politics must serve our faith rather than fostering our fears.

We have in our power at this moment the ability to destroy 300 times as many human lives as were lost in the entire many years of World War II.

So the purpose of our politics must be to make man's extinction improbable, and man's fulfillment inevitable.

There are those who talk about the power of the Presidency, and the Presidency has great and awesome responsibilities.

No man can serve in that office or be familiar with its responsibilities without being conscious of his obligation to all humankind.

I sat through 37 conferences involving the Cuban missile crisis--beginning when the sun came up in the morning and frequently lasting into the daylight hours of the next day. While there were frightening and dreadful moments, I think I can truthfully report to you that I was never prouder of the President or the Presidency, because the coolest man at that table was the then Commander in Chief of the American Forces, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

When I kissed my wife and daughters goodby in the morning I never really knew whether I would see them that night or not.

So I tell you that to point up the fact that this age of peril deserves and demands the politics of unity.

Sitting around that table was a distinguished Secretary of State, a Democrat from Georgia. Across, next to the President on the other side, was a distinguished Secretary of Defense, a Republican from Michigan. At the end of the table was the distinguished Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. John McCone, a Republican from California.

There were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of the Army, Navy, and the Air Force of this country, and the long list of dedicated career servants of the State Department and the Defense Department.

You couldn't tell from anyone's comment what their religion was or what their party was, and you could not even observe from their accent where they came from. Because the essence of our American system, the very foundation on which we stand, is unity--not the unity of States alone but the much greater unity of all of our people.

The guiding genius of democracy has been our great ability in times of crisis and peril for all Americans to unite. Our politics-and our politicians--must constantly seek to widen our common agreement, and not to inflame our mutual mistrusts.

Of course, these goals are high but the attainment of them is not hopeless.

Our modern means of communications have opened up a new era of our democracy. The promise is great and we must fulfill it. Our public affairs must be pursued not as the source of passing public entertainment but as the servant of lasting public enlightenment.

Our politics, and the performance of the public realm, should have, and must have, only one purpose and that purpose is to elevate our national life, not to exhaust it.

I hope you agree with me that Americans' goals of excellence need not, and must not, end at the water's edge. For it is in the realm of our relations with other nations that we have proved already the capacity of our system for excellence.

Over the lifetime of the youngest here today, men and nations of the North Atlantic have done together what none have ever done before.

We have formed together--across the sea--an alliance of purpose between the strongest associations of free men in all the world.

America's part in this achievement has been possible because no mean spirit was ever permitted to override the noble spirit of unity and of united purpose.

President Truman, as Commander in Chief and leader of this Nation, had the strength of a towering Republican Senator standing by his side, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan.

President Kennedy had the support of Henry Cabot Lodge. When the Nation was led by President Dwight David Eisenhower, he had the support--and not the opposition--of the Democratic Party in the Congress of the United States.

I trust I may be pardoned by the president of this great university and the student body for this personal reference, but after the election of 1952, there had been kind of a hurricane across the country--and a great leader and a popular hero had dismantled the Democratic Party. I was selected for some reason or other to try to pick up the pieces and to try to pull together the loyal opposition.

A great party leader who belonged to the other party, the then majority party-and he was then the majority leader--Mr. Taft, had enunciated his viewpoint of the responsibilities of the opposition party, because he had been the leader of the opposition in the Congress for a good many years.

He said, "It is the duty of the opposition to oppose," meaning that it was the responsibility of the loyal opposition to point out the imperfections and the weaknesses and to attempt to prevail over the majority.

When I became leader that morning in the Senate caucus room, I said to my colleagues, "I reject that philosophy and that doctrine in toto. I do not believe it is the duty of the opposition to oppose. I conceive it to be my responsibility as the leader of the loyal opposition to support the President of the United States every single time I can in good conscience--and I am going to resolve any doubts in behalf of the chosen leader of this country."

Well, as an illustration of what happened, I served as Democratic leader for 8 years. I frequently found myself on the front row defending the foreign policy of the President of the United States, and the minority leader on the back row opposing the President of the United States.

As an illustration, during the year 1960, the Democratic leaders supported the Republican President 96 percent of the time by record roll call. The present Republican leader of the Republican Party supported the President 24 percent of the time.

But I believe that I speak for you when I say that we believe in parties and we have allegiance to them and their principles, but we believe in our country first. As I said one time, in describing my own political philosophy, "I am proud to be a free man first and an American second, a public servant third, and a Democrat fourth, in that order."

I have found that it gives me a clear conscience, it gives me greater satisfaction, and it has met with a reasonable modicum of success to do what you think is best for your country--and your country will do what is best for you.

So the truth is clear. Excellence is far too precious in our society to exclude it from our national endeavors on the basis of party alone.

In the North Atlantic and in Latin America and around the world, our Nation is going to continue to need the excellence that can be contributed by men of talent and patriotism and experience regardless of their political affiliation--men like your own great president, Milton Eisenhower. America must not deny to its armies or its armadas its greatest talents because of their region, their religion, or their party--and they must never be denied service to their country because of the standards of small partisanship.

When we line them up at the reception centers to fit them for their uniforms, we don't say, "What is your church? What is your political affiliation? What section of the country do you live in and who was your grandpa?" We say, "Give him size 42." And as we go on to that battlefield and over the top or onto the cliff or under the sea or in the air, we judge him only by his capacity and his patriotism and his dedication to his country.

As I speak to you this morning let me say this to you: The day before yesterday I met with the new Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a great citizen of Italy. We talked about our Atlantic partnership, the 15 great nations that make up that partnership. We talked about its remarkable achievements. We talked about its unlimited promise. We talked about our own preparation and our own strength.

It gave me great pride to fly out to the Strategic Air Command at Omaha, Nebr., and let him see with his own eyes how we, by a pressing of a button--in a flash of a second-could notify our men around the world and could get immediate response.

So we planned parts of the future. We talked about the opportunity to advance and to promote mankind. This is work that just must go on. For our Atlantic partnership is coming to a new and to a much greater time.

We must mobilize the vast strength of our communities to defend freedom, not only in Europe but to defend freedom wherever it is attacked.

We must never forget for a moment that we are one of the youngest nations in all the world with one of the oldest governments in existence. We must never forget how much our ancestors that came ahead of us prized freedom--how much we sought it for ourselves and how much we appreciated those who contributed to our achieving it. Remembering that, we must always be willing to take our position and stand up and be counted when there is a choice between freedom and slavery.

So we must together continue to meet the vast challenge of the underdeveloped world. We are the world's great arsenal of industry and ideas and we just cannot allow a separation between rich nations and poor nations--or white nations and colored nations.

Finally, we must bring the countries of Eastern Europe much closer to the Western Community. This we can do and this we are doing by building bridges to these people-bridges of help, of counsel, of leadership, of trade, of ideas, of visitors, and of humanitarian aid.

Our great American hero, General George Catlett Marshall, recognized--and we firmly believe--that permanent peace requires European civilization to develop within its historic boundaries. This is our aim, and this is the real road to freedom for those who live today behind the Iron Curtain.

In the times ahead, our political community must not merely speak of excellence in other sectors. It must offer examples of excellence from within itself.

I believe that example should begin in our work within the alliance on which the hopes for freedom stand.

You have many hopes. You have many dreams. You have great vision. You have ambitions. But the most important thing in your thoughts today should be the most important subject in the world to all peoples of more than 120 nations.

And what is that most important of all things in this nuclear age? That most important thing is our relations with other nations, our ability to exist and to survive and to get along and reason together. That most important thing, in short, is a 5-letter word--peace--"peace on earth, good will toward men."

Your Nation must always be prepared to have its leader go anywhere, talk to anyone, make any plan that can honorably be made to achieve understanding. The day and the time and the era for government by ultimatum was yesterday and is gone forever.

We cannot pride ourselves on a period when outlaws roam the range and a man's chief claim to fame is his ability to destroy his fellow man and his willingness to follow that pursuit.

No, we had better get back to the Good Book and "love thy neighbor as thyself." We had better go back to the old Golden Rule and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

There are moments when we become discouraged, and some become hysterical, and we feel, what is the use? But if we apply a little patience, if we put ourselves in the other fellow's position, if we assume what we would think if we were in his place and if he were in our's, somehow, someway good American judgment will prevail and we may be able to avert and avoid catastrophic consequences.

I was extremely irritated one time by a man who saw things differently and had a different philosophy. After negotiating with him for 3 days, my impulsiveness-that is a word I don't use very often these days--got the best of me and I finally said to him somewhat with anger in my voice, that "so far as I am concerned, I have tried to work out an understanding agreement with you and you won't do anything. You just sit there looking like a Methodist deacon and won't agree to anything. As far as I am concerned you can take a running jump and go to .... "

I got great applause from my audience. All approved what I said except one old man who was a general counsel, a lawyer for my group of rural electric cooperatives. I walked over and asked his judgment on how he liked my speech. He said, "Come into my office. I would like to talk to you." I said, "Oh, oh!"

I went in and he said, "You are a young man and you are going to get a good deal more experience as you go through life. But," he said, "you want my judgment and I will give it to you. The first thing you ought to learn is that to tell a man to go to hell and to make him go are two different propositions."

So we just can't mash a button and tell them all to go there, because they don't want to go. It is hot down there. They enjoy it here. They have their own views of religion, region, philosophy, and so forth.

Now, most of the troubles which are on my desk--you hear them referred to as a crisis a week. That is a most generous estimate; it's much worse than that. It's a crisis an hour.

I don't know what has happened since I have been on this platform but I will have more problems when I get back than I had when I left, I can assure you of that. Most of them come as a result of ancient disagreements between lands with which we have had nothing to do. It may be the Greeks and the Turks in Cyprus. It may be some folks on the continent of Africa. It may be many problems out in Asia.

Last night I read a letter written 10 years ago by President Eisenhower to the President of Viet-Nam in which he said, "If you want to help yourself, we will give you advice and support." And we are still giving them advice and support. Sometimes some of our folks think it is not enough, sometimes they think it is not good, sometimes the results are not satisfying. But for 10 long years we have been trying to help those people help themselves, and while we have not achieved total victory, it is pretty difficult to get everything you want when you want it.

We have had laudable purposes. We have had the highest motives. We have done our best and there is not a person in this country of either party who wouldn't like to see a satisfactory solution of that Asian difficulty.

So, we must realize that as leaders of the world, as people who have more to eat and more to wear, better homes to live in, finer cars to drive, more of the luxuries, the highest standard of living of any people in all the world--we make more in a week than most people in other nations make in a year--those responsibilities also carry obligations, because the human beings of the world are not going to always endure the lot that is theirs today.

The ancient enemies of mankind--disease, intolerance, illiteracy, and ignorance--are not always going to prevail. There is going to be a revolution. There is going to be a rising up and a throwing off of these chains and, as a great leader once said, "We must constantly remember that we only have 190 million people of the 3 billion in the world, and half of those people have incomes of less than $20 a month. If a peaceful improvement is not possible, if a peaceful revolution is not possible, a violent adjustment is inevitable."

I talked to a friend of mine the other day. The last country that we lost to communism was Cuba in 1959. Now, for a period of almost 6 years, we have resisted on many fronts with, I think, considerable success. So we do not all need to have a martyr complex and be apologizing for the woes of Uncle Sam and all of his failures.

A friend of mine came in and talked to me about the great ranch that he owned. He is a friend of Dr. Eisenhower's. He is the head of the King Ranch in Texas. His name is Bob Kleberg. His brother brought me to Washington as a congressional secretary in 1931, in Mr. Hoover's administration. He was talking to me about this big ranch that he once owned in Cuba.

You are going to hear a lot of stories of that kind over the world unless we realize that these ancient enemies of mankind are not going to prevail in the world.

People are going to have food for their children and clothes for their backs, a roof over their heads, and an education for their souls.

We must in someway, somehow lead the way, and with your help we shall.

Now, I did not come here today to ask you your religion, or to ask you how you spell your name, or to ask you what region you live in, or where your ancestors came from. I thought we settled most all of those things in our Bill of Rights.

I did not come to ask your vote--although candor and frankness would compel me to say that I am not totally uninterested in what is going to happen in November.

I came here for one purpose and that was to say to you, come what may, if the good Lord is willing, I am going to be your President until January 20th at least.

I was confronted with a situation 10 months ago in a matter of moments when I had to act and I had to stand up and be counted and go ahead. I couldn't run under the table. I did the very best I could with the talents that the good Lord gave me and with the limited experience and training I had.

I don't believe I have ever met a man in public life that campaigned on a platform of doing what is wrong. They all try to do what is right. Sometimes they don't know what is right and they make mistakes, but I have tried my dead level best, and I think there has never been a period of history in the 200 years of our existence, almost, when the people have done more to try to hold up and prop up and help their President than you have. If I am weak and if I falter, and if I fall and stumble, you are weak and you falter, and America stumbles.

So, from Independence, the next morning, came Harry Truman. From Gettysburg came Dwight Eisenhower. From New York came Bob Anderson, the former Secretary of the Treasury. From way across the West came leaders of Republican and Democratic administrations.

The president's brother sat down--a General of the Armies--President of the United States--and took a lead pencil and a yellow tablet, without even a stenographer, and wrote for 2 hours on things that I should not do and should do as he had observed it from 8 years of experience and from almost half a century in the public service, not because he wanted to see a great Democrat develop and make a great campaign but because he wanted to see the leader of the Nation succeed.

Eighty-five heads of state came from all over the world.

So, this morning, I came here in that spirit to speak to all of you--Republicans and Democrats, and whatnot--and as I rode over with Senator Brewster, of whom I am very fond and who serves us with great distinction in the United States Senate, I said to him, "It stimulates me to have a chance to go out there and look these young people in the eye and to salute them and to ask them to give me their help, give me their hand, give me their prayers, because I need them so much in the days ahead."

If we were in another setting, on another occasion, I might even ask you to give me something else.

Thank you very much.