This year we must continue to improve the quality of American life. Let us fulfill and improve the great health and education programs of last year, … - Lyndon B. Johnson

So I say today: the times are good. Our prospects are bright. Your Nation's strength is great. The promise before us all is bright. But one fact stands out above all the rest. What we have, what you have accumulated, what all American families hope to accumulate can be lost if we do not continue on the course of perfecting our unity. Our prosperity today is not a one-time phenomenon. This is a solid, stable, steady prosperity--achieved by the confidence and the certainty of a climate that's free of doubt and division and bitter contention. Our dollar is strong because the world has new confidence in our responsibility. Our consumer market is strong because Americans at home have confidence in our future course. Our enterprise system is functioning successfully because we have been doing here in Washington many of the things so long needed to lift off burdens of the past. Taxes have been cut. Spending has been curbed. Earnest and honest efforts have been made to put to work in Government today's new tools and new concepts to produce more efficient management of your public business.

The first area of this increasing strength is our ability to deter atomic destruction. In the past 3 years we have increased our nuclear power on alert 2½ times, and our nuclear superiority will continue to grow until we reach agreement on arms control. We have now more than 1,000 fully armed ICBM's and Polaris missiles ready for retaliation. The Soviet Union has far fewer, and none ready to be launched beneath the seas. We have more than 1,100 strategic bombers, many of which are equipped with air-to-surface and decoy missiles to help them reach almost any target. The Soviet Union, we estimate, could with difficulty send less than one-third of this number over targets in the United States. Against such force the combined destructive power of every battle ever fought by man is like a firecracker thrown against the sun.

The fifth and most important principle of our foreign policy is support of national independence—the right of each people to govern themselves—and to shape their own institutions. For a peaceful world order will be possible only when each country walks the way that it has chosen to walk for itself. We follow this principle by encouraging the end of colonial rule. We follow this principle, abroad as well as at home, by continued hostility to the rule of the many by the few—or the oppression of one race by another. We follow this principle by building bridges to Eastern Europe. And I will ask the Congress for authority to remove the special tariff restrictions which are a barrier to increasing trade between the East and the West. The insistent urge toward national independence is the strongest force of today's world in which we live. In Africa and Asia and Latin America it is shattering the designs of those who would subdue others to their ideas or their will. It is eroding the unity of what was once a Stalinist empire. In recent months a number of nations have east out those who would subject them to the ambitions of mainland China. History is on the side of freedom and is on the side of societies shaped from the genius of each people. History does not favor a single system or belief—unless force is used to make it so. That is why it has been necessary for us to defend this basic principle of our policy, to defend it in Berlin, in Korea, in Cuba—and tonight in Vietnam.