
Remarks to the First Graduating Class at the Foreign Service Institute's Vietnam Training Center.
Ambassador Allen, most distinguished graduates, ladies and gentlemen:
Today those of you who have gathered here at the White House set out as warriors for peace. I asked you to come here because I want all the people of America to know of your particular mission.
You must expect that your efforts will go largely unreported. Your progress is going to be harder to see and harder to measure.
But the victories you win are the ones on which peace will be built in Vietnam.
Let no one misread our purpose: Peace is our goal.
Let no one mistake our resolve: Peace will be won.
It will be peace with honor. It will be a peace in which the people of South Vietnam will be free to live the lives they choose to live.
Peace will come because brave men--and free men--are preventing aggressors from taking a neighbor's land by force.
Peace will come because men like you are willing to help the people of South Vietnam forge a free nation. It will come because those beleaguered people themselves--after a century of colonialism and a generation of war--have not broken before the enemy's terror.
There is a deep and a quiet courage among millions of simple people in Vietnam. It goes largely unreported--the stories of the farmers, the stories of the teachers in the schools, the stories of the students and the mothers and the fathers and the families who sacrifice and struggle go unnoticed in the anguish of war.
But when the enemy unleashed his savage attack over the Tet holidays, he thought that he would crack the will of the Vietnamese people.
But he was wrong.
He did not crack the will of the students in the high school in Quang Nam. Instead, they turned out in a body to volunteer for the emergency work of reconstruction.
He did not crack the will of the citizens of the Hang Xang District in Saigon, who fought the Vietcong with sticks, or the nurses near Baria, who hid a Korean medical team while the enemy occupied their hospital for more than 30 hours.
Stories like these were repeated up and down this ravaged land. We did not read about them. The enemy attack is what got the headlines.
But in Vietnam there were heroes by the hundreds that dark week--who were unseen and unsung. And their actions spoke for a free people who are determined to find their own way into their own future.
Their will did not, as expected, break under the fire. Neither shall ours break under frustration. Peace will come to Vietnam. The terror of an invading enemy will be turned back. The work of reconstruction will go on. And a nation will rise, strong and free.
I think that each of you standing here on the White House steps today will be proud to say that you were there--that you were a part of helping a struggling people come into their own, participate in self-determination, and become a part of liberty and freedom in the world.
I think you will be proud to say that you were there because you will be the builders of the peace. I am honored to greet you this morning.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 11:42 a.m. in the Rose Garden at the White House to a graduating class of 16 young men from the State Department, the United States Information Agency, and the Agency for International Development, who had completed the one-year course prior to assignment in Vietnam. In his opening words the President referred to former Ambassador George V. Allen, Director of the Foreign Service Institute.
Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks to the First Graduating Class at the Foreign Service Institute's Vietnam Training Center. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238222