The law cannot save those who deny it but neither can the law serve any who do not use it. The history of injustice and inequality is a history of di… - Lyndon B. Johnson

In the world, America stands for — and works for — the right of all men to govern themselves through free, uninhibited elections. An ink bottle broken against an American Embassy, a fire set in an American library, an insult committed against our American flag, anywhere in the world, does far less injury to our country and our cause than the discriminatory denial of the right of any American citizen at home to vote on the basis of race or color.

In 1965 alone we had 300 private talks for peace in Vietnam, with friends and adversaries throughout the world. Since Christmas your government has labored again, with imagination and endurance, to remove any barrier to peaceful settlement. For 20 days now we and our Vietnamese allies have dropped no bombs in North Vietnam. Able and experienced spokesmen have visited, in behalf of America, more than 40 countries. We have talked to more than a hundred governments, all 113 that we have relations with, and some that we don't. We have talked to the United Nations and we have called upon all of its members to make any contribution that they can toward helping obtain peace. In public statements and in private communications, to adversaries and to friends, in Rome and Warsaw, in Paris and Tokyo, in Africa and throughout this hemisphere, America has made her position abundantly clear. We seek neither territory nor bases, economic domination or military alliance in Vietnam. We fight for the principle of self-determination—that the people of South Vietnam should be able to choose their own course, choose it in free elections without violence, without terror, and without fear. The people of all Vietnam should make a free decision on the great question of reunification. This is all we want for South Vietnam. It is all the people of South Vietnam want. And if there is a single nation on this earth that desires less than this for its own people, then let its voice be heard. We have also made it clear—from Hanoi to New York—that there are no arbitrary limits to our search for peace. We stand by the Geneva Agreements of 1954 and 1962. We will meet at any conference table, we will discuss any proposals—four points or 14 or 40—and we will consider the views of any group. We will work for a cease-fire now or once discussions have begun. We will respond if others reduce their use of force, and we will withdraw our soldiers once South Vietnam is securely guaranteed the right to shape its own future. We have said all this, and we have asked—and hoped—and we have waited for a response. So far we have received no response to prove either success or failure.

So long as I am President, I intend to honor the mandate of the Constitution that I am sworn to uphold. I intend to see that this Government, as the servant of this great people, "provides for the general welfare." Welfare is an old and honored work of our system. One of the first acts of the first Congress, under President Washington, was to provide pensions for invalid soldiers. Under John Adams what was to become the Public Health Service was established. President Abraham Lincoln proposed the first assistance for widows and children. President Theodore Roosevelt called the first White House Conference on Care of Dependent Children. It was President William Howard Taft who first established the Children's Bureau. These were works of compassion, triumphs of justice. But there are factions today which condemn social justice as the work of those that were bent on centralizing power in Washington. They forget their history, and they betray their ignorance of the American people.