Remarks of Welcome at the White House to Chancellor Josef Klaus of Austria

Mr. Chancellor and Mrs. Klaus, Under Secretary Katzenbach, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

We welcome you to the beautiful Washington spring, Mr. Chancellor, at a time of turbulence and hope in our Nation.

As it is for us here in America, so it is around the world.

There is turbulence today in America-and in Eastern Europe--and in Southeast Asia--and there is hope, as well, in all of those places.

So our aim at this season is to sift the hope from the turbulence, so that hope may grow unfettered. As we go about that business, our hopes ride upon compassion, upon our sense of national purpose, and upon our feeling of responsibility in the time of challenge, and upon what an earlier era called "self-discipline." These times demand too:

--self-discipline between the races;

--self-discipline to persevere in the healing tasks of our Nation;

--self-discipline in the long and hard work of finding and seeking and bringing about a just and lasting peace.

In any society, men of good will and moderation are in the majority. The cynics-and there are always some of them--are in the minority. Those in the majority are the proportions that God set out when He made us all. It is the task and the test of democracy to assure that the moderate and good-willed majority prevails and has its way.

Mr. Chancellor, the experience of your nation tells us that it can. Austria was formed upon that democratic impulse for peace and for stability. A new society was forged from a four-power occupation force, in what was then the most turbulent area of the entire world.

You give us additional cause to believe that hope can coexist with turbulence and that freedom and order will, in time, prevail. We expect, this spring day in Washington, that this will happen in our country, in America, and that it will happen in Southeast Asia, and it will happen wherever men of good will earnestly seek and pursue peace and equity and justice for all. Mr. Chancellor, we are so glad that you could come here and honor us by your visit. We welcome you as a friend, sir, and we look forward with pleasurable anticipation to our exchanges together.

Thank you very much.