Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ambassador Goldberg, distinguished Members of the leadership of the Congress, distinguished Governors and mayors… - Lyndon B. Johnson

I am consulting with the Congress now on proposals for savings in our national budget--in nondefense, non-Vietnam, in other items all across the board. If I can get the help of the Congress--and it is their will---we shall make reductions in that budget. They will postpone many needed actions that all of us would like to see taken in another time. All travel outside the Western Hemisphere by Government officials and by all private citizens which is not absolutely essential to you should, in the interest of your country, be postponed. I have already called for savings and cuts in expenditures and investments abroad by private corporations. We are going to intensify this program. We have spent the weekend in an attempt to deal with the very troublesome gold problem. We have said that we are no longer going to be a party to encouraging the gold gambler or the gold speculator. Most of all, I ask your help, and I come here to plead for your patriotic support, for our men, our sons, who are bearing the terrible burden of battle in Vietnam. We seek not the victory of conquest, but we do seek the triumph of justice--the right of neighbors to be left alone; the right to determine for themselves what kind of a government to have. We seek that right and we will--make no mistake about it--win. I am deeply aware of the yearning throughout this country, in every home of this land and throughout the Western world, for peace in the world. I believe all peoples want peace. I know that our peoples want peace, because we are a peace-loving nation. There is none among you who desires peace more than your own President and your own Vice President. We hope to achieve an honorable peace and a just peace at the negotiating table. But wanting peace, praying for peace, and desiring peace, as Chamberlain found out, doesn't always give you peace. If the enemy continues to insist, as he does now--when he refuses to sit down and accept the fair proposition we made, that we would stop our bombing if he would sit down and talk promptly and productively-if he continues to insist, as he does now, that the outcome must be determined on the battlefield, then we will win peace on the battlefield by supporting our men who are doing that job there now. We have a constitutional system. A majority of Americans have the right to select the leaders of their own choosing. That is all we are asking for in South Vietnam.

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.

Well, I want you to know more about your Government. And I want your Government to know more about you. These men on this row are part of this country--very vital and very important parts of this country. But a few weeks ago and maybe a few weeks from now they will be back occupying some of the chairs that you now occupy.