Speech Transcript:

 I will be brief, for our time is necessarily short and our agenda is
already long.

Last year's congressional session was the longest in peacetime
history. With that foundation, let us work together to make this
year's session the best in the Nation's history.

Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more
for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined; as the
session which enacted the most far-reaching tax cut of our time; as
the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and
unemployment in these United States; as the session which finally
recognized the health needs of all our older citizens; as the session
which reformed our tangled transportation and transit policies; as the
session which achieved the most effective, efficient foreign aid
program ever; and as the session which helped to build more homes,
more schools, more libraries, and more hospitals than any single
session of Congress in the history of our Republic.

All this and more can and must be done. It can be done by this
summer, and it can be done without any increase in spending. In fact,
under the budget that I shall shortly submit, it can be done with an
actual reduction in Federal expenditures and Federal employment.

We have in 1964 a unique opportunity and obligation to prove the
success of our system; to disprove those cynics and critics at home
and abroad who question our purpose and our competence.

If we fail, if we fritter and fumble away our opportunity in
needless, senseless quarrels between Democrats and Republicans, or
between the House and the Senate, or between the South and North, or
between the Congress and the administration, then history will
rightfully judge us harshly. But if we succeed, if we can achieve
these goals by forging in this country a greater sense of union,
then, and only then, can we take full satisfaction in the State of
the Union.

Here in the Congress you can demonstrate effective legislative
leadership by discharging the public business with clarity and
dispatch, voting each important proposal up, or voting it down, but
at least bringing it to a fair and a final vote.

Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy-not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are
right.

In his memory today, I especially ask all members of my own political
faith, in this election year, to put your country ahead of your party,
and to always debate principles; never debate personalities.

For my part, I pledge a progressive administration which is
efficient, and honest and frugal. The budget to be submitted to the
Congress shortly is in full accord with this pledge.

It will cut our deficit in half-from $10 billion to $4,900 million.
It will be, in proportion to our national output, the smallest budget
since 1951.

It will call for a substantial reduction in Federal employment, a
feat accomplished only once before in the last 10 years. While
maintaining the full strength of our combat defenses, it will call
for the lowest number of civilian personnel in the Department of
Defense since 1950.

It will call for total expenditures of $97,900 million-compared to
$98,400 million for the current year, a reduction of more than $500
million. It will call for new obligational authority of $103,800
million-a reduction of more than $4 billion below last year's request
of $107,900 million.

But it is not a standstill budget, for America cannot afford to stand
still. Our population is growing. Our economy is more complex. Our
people's needs are expanding.

But by closing down obsolete installations, by curtailing less urgent
programs, by cutting back where cutting back seems to be wise, by
insisting on a dollar's worth for a dollar spent, I am able to
recommend in this reduced budget the most Federal support in history
for education, for health, for retraining the unemployed, and for
helping the economically and the physically handicapped.

This budget, and this year's legislative program, are designed to
help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes-his
hopes for a fair chance to make good; his hopes for fair play from
the law; his hopes for a full-time job on full-time pay; his hopes
for a decent home for his family in a decent community; his hopes for
a good school for his children with good teachers; and his hopes for
security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age.

Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope-some
because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all
too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair
with opportunity.

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war
on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join
with me in that effort.

It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy
will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest
Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One
thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can
return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.

Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national
organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also
be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported
and directed by State and local efforts.

For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It
must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public
office, from the courthouse to the White House.

The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach
to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too
small to even meet their basic needs.

Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools,
and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better
job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans,
escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other
citizens help to carry them.

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but
the symptom. The cause may lie deeper-in our failure to give our
fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a
lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and
housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring
up their children.

But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue
poverty, pursue it wherever it exists-in city slums and small towns,
in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian
Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as
well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.

Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it
and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation,
however, is going to suffice.

We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas
of Appalachia.

We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment
program.

We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless,
hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.

We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food
stamp program.

We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically
handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those
abroad.

We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a
high-level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to
invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that
they are a boon and not a bane to humanity.

We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2
million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing
power.

We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our
education program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and
counseling in our hardest hit areas.

We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and
nursing homes under the Hill-Burton Act, and train more nurses to
staff them.

We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by
every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no
more than $1 a month during the employee's working career to protect
him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the
Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated
illness.

We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program,
give more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more
housing for our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal
in our free enterprise system a decent home for every American
family.

We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities
as well as low-cost transportation between them.

Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the
private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every
area of this land.

These programs are obviously not for the poor or the underprivileged
alone. Every American will benefit by the extension of social
security to cover the hospital costs of their aged parents. Every
American community will benefit from the construction or
modernization of schools, libraries, hospitals, and nursing homes,
from the training of more nurses and from the improvement of urban
renewal in public transit. And every individual American taxpayer and
every corporate taxpayer will benefit from the earliest possible
passage of the pending tax bill from both the new investment it will
bring and the new jobs that it will create.

That tax bill has been thoroughly discussed for a year. Now we need
action. The new budget clearly allows it. Our taxpayers surely
deserve it. Our economy strongly demands it. And every month of delay
dilutes its benefits in 1964 for consumption, for investment, and for
employment.

For until the bill is signed, its investment incentives cannot be
deemed certain, and the withholding rate cannot be reduced- and the
most damaging and devastating thing you can do to any businessman in
America is to keep him in doubt and to keep him guessing on what our
tax policy is. And I say that we should now reduce to 14 percent
instead of 15 percent our withholding rate.

I therefore urge the Congress to take final action on this bill by
the first of February, if at all possible. For however proud we may
be of the unprecedented progress of our free enterprise economy over
the last 3 years, we should not and we cannot permit it to pause.

In 1963, for the first time in history, we crossed the 70 million job
mark, but we will soon need more than 75 million jobs. In 1963 our
gross national product reached the $600 billion level-$100 billion
higher than when we took office. But it easily could and it should be
still $30 billion higher today than it is.

Wages and profits and family income are also at their highest levels
in history-but I would remind you that 4 million workers and 13
percent of our industrial capacity are still idle today.

We need a tax cut now to keep this country moving.

For our goal is not merely to spread the work. Our goal is to create
more jobs. I believe the enactment of a 35-hour week would sharply
increase costs, would invite inflation, would impair our ability to
compete, and merely share instead of creating employment. But I am
equally opposed to the 45- or 50-hour week in those industries where
consistently excessive use of overtime causes increased
unemployment.

So, therefore, I recommend legislation authorizing the creation of a
tripartite industry committee to determine on an industry-by-industry
basis as to where a higher penalty rate for overtime would increase
job openings without unduly increasing costs, and authorizing the
establishment of such higher rates.

Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear:
all of these increased opportunities-in employment, in education, in
housing, and in every field-must be open to Americans of every color.
As far as the writ of Federal law will run, we must abolish not some,
but all racial discrimination. For this is not merely an economic
issue, or a social, political, or international issue. It is a moral
issue, and it must be met by the passage this session of the bill now
pending in the House.

All members of the public should have equal access to facilities open
to the public. All members of the public should be equally eligible
for Federal benefits that are financed by the public. All members of
the public should have an equal chance to vote for public officials
and to send their children to good public schools and to contribute
their talents to the public good.

Today, Americans of all races stand side by side in Berlin and in
Viet Nam. They died side by side in Korea. Surely they can work and
eat and travel side by side in their own country.

We must also lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against
those who seek entry into our country, particularly those who have
much needed skills and those joining their families.

In establishing preferences, a nation that was built by the
immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission: "What
can you do for our country?" But we should not be asking: "In what
country were you born?"

For our ultimate goal is a world without war, a world made safe for
diversity, in which all men, goods, and ideas can freely move across
every border and every boundary.

We must advance toward this goal in 1964 in at least 10 different
ways, not as partisans, but as patriots.

First, we must maintain-and our reduced defense budget will
maintain-that margin of military safety and superiority obtained
through 3 years of steadily increasing both the quality and the
quantity of our strategic, our conventional, and our antiguerrilla
forces. In 1964 we will be better prepared than ever before to defend
the cause of freedom, whether it is threatened by outright aggression
or by the infiltration practiced by those in Hanoi and Havana, who
ship arms and men across international borders to foment
insurrection. And we must continue to use that strength as John
Kennedy used it in the Cuban crisis and for the test ban treaty-to
demonstrate both the futility of nuclear war and the possibilities of
lasting peace.

Second, we must take new steps-and we shall make new proposals at
Geneva-toward the control and the eventual abolition of arms. Even in
the absence of agreement, we must not stockpile arms beyond our needs
or seek an excess of military power that could be provocative as well
as wasteful.

It is in this spirit that in this fiscal year we are cutting back our
production of enriched uranium by 25 percent. We are shutting down
four plutonium piles. We are closing many nonessential military
installations. And it is in this spirit that we today call on our
adversaries to do the same.

Third, we must make increased use of our food as an instrument of
peace-making it available by sale or trade or loan or donation-to
hungry people in all nations which tell us of their needs and accept
proper conditions of distribution.

Fourth, we must assure our pre-eminence in the peaceful exploration
of outer space, focusing on an expedition to the moon in this
decade-in cooperation with other powers if possible, alone if
necessary.

Fifth, we must expand world trade. Having recognized in the Act of
1962 that we must buy as well as sell, we now expect our trading
partners to recognize that we must sell as well as buy. We are
willing to give them competitive access to our market, asking only
that they do the same for us.

Sixth, we must continue, through such measures as the interest
equalization tax, as well as the cooperation of other nations, our
recent progress toward balancing our international accounts.

This administration must and will preserve the present gold value of
the dollar.

Seventh, we must become better neighbors with the free states of the
Americas, working with the councils of the OAS, with a stronger
Alliance for Progress, and with all the men and women of this
hemisphere who really believe in liberty and justice for all.

Eighth, we must strengthen the ability of free nations everywhere to
develop their independence and raise their standard of living, and
thereby frustrate those who prey on poverty and chaos. To do this,
the rich must help the poor-and we must do our part. We must achieve
a more rigorous administration of our development assistance, with
larger roles for private investors, for other industrialized nations,
and for international agencies and for the recipient nations
themselves.

Ninth, we must strengthen our Atlantic and Pacific partnerships,
maintain our alliances and make the United Nations a more effective
instrument for national independence and international order.

Tenth, and finally, we must develop with our allies new means of
bridging the gap between the East and the West, facing danger boldly
wherever danger exists, but being equally bold in our search for new
agreements which can enlarge the hopes of all, while violating the
interests of none.

In short, I would say to the Congress that we must be constantly
prepared for the worst, and constantly acting for the best. We must
be strong enough to win any war, and we must be wise enough to
prevent one.

We shall neither act as aggressors nor tolerate acts of aggression.
We intend to bury no one, and we do not intend to be buried.

We can fight, if we must, as we have fought before, but we pray that
we will never have to fight again.

My good friends and my fellow Americans: In these last 7 sorrowful
weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, and
nothing is so degrading as hate.

John Kennedy was a victim of hate, but he was also a great builder of
faith-faith in our fellow Americans, whatever their creed or their
color or their station in life; faith in the future of man, whatever
his divisions and differences.

This faith was echoed in all parts of the world. On every continent
and in every land to which Mrs. Johnson and I traveled, we found
faith and hope and love toward this land of America and toward our
people.

So I ask you now in the Congress and in the country to join with me
in expressing and fulfilling that faith in working for a nation, a
nation that is free from want and a world that is free from hate-a
world of peace and justice, and freedom and abundance, for our time
and for all time to come.