Thank you very much Frank Kiehne, Monsignor O’Donnell, Dr. Schmorer, Mayor Shirk, Congressman George Rhodes, our toastmaster this evening, Mr. Palmer, and members of the YMCA, ladies and other distinguished guests at the speakers table, visitors from abroad and friends. I must say, as Frank went through that introduction I got a little bit more and more nervous as he went along for fear of what he might have found out. I never quite recovered from an incident that occurred to me outside of Chicago about seven or eight years ago when I was speaking to the League of Women Voters. The lady on that occasion took the trouble to investigate and find out what I liked and what I did not like to do. She found out that I liked to play tennis a great deal and at the height of her presentation she introduced me as one of Chicago’s best known racketeers.
After I left Chicago and went down to Washington I thought maybe I would get away from difficulties of that type but I found out there were new difficulties. For example, I was having a little difficulty gaining support for this new war against poverty that the President is interested in and I was surprised to find that my brother-in-law, Senator Kennedy, was a little cool to the subject. I couldn’t quite figure it out but then when I assured him, I found out finally, when I assured him that Senators would be exempted from service in the Youth Corps.
This new job of Presidential Assistant, it has given me a new sort of lease on life; I’ve got a lot more prestige. I didn’t realize how little I had before until I got this job. But after I got it -- about two or three week-ends afterwards the phone rang and another brother-in-law of mine, the Attorney General, said, “Sarge, this weekend you can play in the backfield. There are problems down there though, I’ll tell you because you never know what you’ll get next. For example, I didn’t know anything about this poverty operation and I was over in Asia, as a matter of fact, visiting some of the countries mentioned here this evening. Nepal for one. I got back, was given this job and I felt pretty much like that paratrooper that you may have heard about. He was making his first jump and he had gotten all the-instructions and- the fellow said, “Don’t worry George, there’s nothing really to worry about, you’ve got that one chute that opens automatically but if it shouldn’t open up why just pull that, cord and pull up on the emergency chute and when you land there’s going to be a station-wagon down there to take you back to the barracks for a wonderful steak and potatoes dinner - free. You’ll have a fine time.” So the fellow jumped and the first chute didn’t open automatically and he pulled the rip cord on the other one and it didn’t open either and he looked down and said, “You know, I bet that station wagon doesn’t show up, either. I feel a little bit that way sometimes when I’m running the Peace Corps and the Poverty Program. I’m a little worried about that station wagon showing up too.
But I do have some reasons for optimism that I would like to share with you. One may surprise some of you but it doesn’t surprise me now that I’ve been in Washington for awhile. One of the reasons for my optimism is the United States Congress. I’ll never forget the way Congress reacted during the period when the Peace Corps was subjected to scathing criticism and ridicule. It was called the Kiddie Corps and other epitaphs like that and all the experts were very skeptical about the Peace Corps. But the Congress -- despite the fact that they don’t like to create new agencies because that means more jobs, more payroll, more taxes and nobody likes taxes. An agency, new agencies in Washington don’t seem to fade away very rapidly -- the Government gets bigger and bigger -- so Congress doesn’t like that but they did start the Peace Corps with the great example of faith in the vitality of the American people. I’ve always been indebted -- deeply indebted -- to the Congressmen who on the occasion back in September 1961 had the courage and the vision to support the Peace Corps and vote for it. Your own Congressman here, George Rhodes, was one of those who took a leadership position at that time and I am very happy to be here in the center of his Congressional district and to pay him the tribute for the courage he had and conviction which he expressed by supporting the Peace Corps. Another thing which has always endeared me is the Mental Retardation Program. The Kennedy Foundation has been interested for a ling time in the problems of the mentally retarded people, especially people. Just last year, for the first time in history, the United States Government appropriated money for the national program to try and combat that condition among our people. And once again George Rhodes was one of the leaders in instituting this new program of Federal assistance to persons who are working to combat mental retardation. So, I’m a little happy about the prospect of our new program for combating poverty. I think when the chips are down, the United States Congress will support this program. I’m also pleased that the contribution which our states are making to the success of the Peace Corps. Reading itself has produced four. I’m hoping that having signed few autographs here earlier this evening I’ll get a few extra ones before I leave town. Applications for the Peace Core are increasing. I remember at the beginning people said, it would be a flash in the pan, that once the initiative, enthusiasm and novelty wears off nobody will volunteer anymore.
But in the first year, 1961, we got 12,000 applications. Last year, 1963, we had 38,000. And this year at the rate we are going we’ll get 60,000 new applications to the Peace Corps. I think these are reasons for being optimistic and as I have thought about the Peace Corps and also about the War on Poverty with which, of course, I am intimately connected today, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 4 or 5 characteristics of both of these problems, truly American characteristics that they both have which explain better than anything else why they have become successful in the case of the Peace Corps and why in the case of the Poverty War I think we will achieve success. The first item which I know will not surprise all of you who are very much interested in the why is the fact that the Peace Corps is truly a voluntary agency.
Now that is surprising in government. You know when you fill out an application to get into the Peace Corps its a very long, and complicated application. Its almost like an income tax form, only worse and when you sign it on the bottom I think most Americans figure when they sign an application its going down the Government in Washington but after that all is lost, you’re hooked! But that’s not true in the Peace Corps. Its a completely voluntary association and people if they don’t want to stay in it don’t have to stay in it. Its an association of free men and women, skilled in diverse ways, ready to serve overseas for little or no pay at the request of our country and at the invitation of a foreign country. We’ve got all sorts of people in the Peace Corps, all ages.
In Pakistan, just in January I had a wonderful dinner with some Peace Corps Volunteers there in Lahore -- one of whom was 77 years old, seated at the same table was a boy of 19, receiving the same pay, doing the same work there, both of them very happy in that work. We’ve got lawyers in the Peace Corps, we have geologists, architects, university professors, PhDs, MDs (medical doctors), over 350 registered nurses serving all around the world voluntarily. Now the Poverty Program is similarly a volunteer program. There’s no compulsion in it whatsoever. Under it we hope to make money available to local communities like Reading or to encourage volunteers from Reading to go and help in places where there is a great deal of poverty if there’s not much here. But nothing is forced upon anybody. We hope to encourage local community action by the community itself. It creates its own plan to combat poverty as it exists where they are. We are offering chances for jobs, part-time jobs to the young Americans who perhaps could not go on with their schooling unless they were able to get financial assistance through part time world. We are offering opportunities to poor farmers to get out of poverty in the rural area an opportunity for them to be self sufficient and to little businessmen. I mean, very little businessmen to get into free private enterprise systems. Men who don’t have the collateral for example to get a regular commercial bank loan. Therefore, in both of these programs I said something very typical to the Y in that its voluntary -- not compulsion.
Another aspect of both of these programs which I think is significant is that the fact that they both depend greatly on private initiative. For example, you have to have initiative to get into the Peace Corps. First of all you have to be interested in it. You have to fill out that application form I talked about just a minute ago. You have to take a test. You’ve got to get letters of reference, then you go to a training place, or training camp or university for three months. It’s pretty hard. You’ve got to be fairly bright, you’ve got to learn a foreign language perhaps and you have to stick to it, and once stay in at any time as said a moment ago once you get it, you stay in but you can quit at any time. For example we had one classic case of a man who went through all that process I just described when the airplane arrived at the airport in Central America he got off the plane, took one look around the airport and didn’t like it, got on the plane and came right back to the United States.
Well now, we don’t encourage that but it does illustrate the truth that you can quit, no matter how long you’ve been over or how short a time you’ve been over. And to be successful in the Peace Corps once you are in there do you have to have a little of that old Yankee private initiative or Yankee ingenuity because we don’t give a great deal of supervision to people in the Peace Corps. We try to choose the kind of person who can operate on their own, without a great deal of supervision. So you see the case about the five girls hitchhiking across the Saraha I don’t know whether you read very much about that here but it was something of a surprise to me one morning to pick up the papers in Washington and find the picture of these girls who just hitchhiked across the Sarah Desert - five Peace Corps Volunteers. We have a Peace Corps Representative incidentally in Nepal who climbed Mt. Everest last year, one of the first Americans to go over Mt. Everest, the first man incidentally go up one side and down the other. A traverse they call it. It’s true he lost nine toes in the process but that’s given him a new slogan, he goes around lecturing under the title he has a toe and will travel.
Excuse me, I’m sorry. We’ve been very much gratified to work with private agencies in the Peace Corps, with the Y, the 4-H Foundation, with the International Association abroad, CARE, in fact 30 percent of our programs today, 30 percent of them are directly connected with private agencies, private US agencies working overseas. For example, we have a contract with the Y to supply people in the Y program in Caracas, Venezuela. They are trained up here under a system which is satisfactory to the Y, the YMCA national headquarters. They then down to Caracas and they go right into the YMCA work there in Caracas. For example, we sent at a time when there was only six workers in the Y, six full-time workers in the Y in Caracas, we sent 24 additional workers to go to work in the YMCA Caracas. The result of which was about four or five additional YMCA centers were opened up in the slums of Caracas, they’re operating today. They’re operated by Peace Corps Volunteers. This is just one example of Peace Corps -- the kind of cooperation which we have with private voluntary agencies here in our own country. But again I say it is an example of a kind the initiative, private initiative working with the private sector which is typical of the Peace Corps. I feel this also true about the poverty program.
As I said just a minute ago in that program we intend to rely heavily on mobile initiative without compulsion on local plans to the improvement of education, housing, social services in places where there is a heavy concentration of poor people. The system there, or theory there is just as is it is with the Peace Corps. In the PC we say to a foreign country “You don’t have to have the PC, we’re not trying to force it on anybody, if you don’t want it, don’t invite us. In the poverty program we take the same approach. We say to a community, if you don’t want the program which is suggested under this legislation, don’t buy it. You don’t have to have it, nobody is going to force it on anybody. Another feature of both of these programs which I think is of some interest, it is to me anyway, is that there inexpensive. work for rather a tough man, Joseph P. Kennedy. My father-in-law was a pretty successful businessman and he didn’t like to waste his money. I’ve got a pretty good training there and although the lights do burn late at the Peace Corps building in Washington I want you to know I have permission from President Johnson on that. We have tried to keep our eye on the cost of the Peace Corps. For example, when we first started, we predicted that it would cost nine thousand dollars per annum to maintain a Peace Corps abroad, including all costs, all costs of administration travel, health, transportation, etc, etc. Any costs you can think of, even the postage stamp was included in that figure. After two years of operation, the figure came out to be 9,079 dollars, and frankly I couldn’t believe it but I was very grateful for it because it was a very nice thing to be able to report to the Congress which is cost conscious. That we had actually hit the cost almost on the nose. Just this last year we were able to go back to Congress and say that that cost 18 now going down. With the cost of a Peace Corps Volunteer next year will only be the past year, only 9,000 dollars. In a little while, in about two months, I will go back to Congress and tell then that next year the cost of a volunteer will only be 7600 dollars. And we rather like that fine law of bureaucracy and of government and as the thing gets bigger and as the program gets bigger the costs go down. That doesn’t happen all the time I don’t believe by Congressman who down in Wash rather pleased about that.
One of the reasons for that, of course, is that we have gotten rid of a whole lot of things that people didn’t think were really necessary for Americans abroad. We don’t have/for example, any private automobiles. We’ve got jeeps and some trucks but we don’t have any private automobiles, no television, no PX privileges, no duty-free cigarettes, no duty-free liquor, and lots of other things in the past seem to purposes of services abroad. And we have submitted all of our figures, all of our costs figures to the missionary group, the National Council of Churches, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Catholic Welfare Conference and asked them if they saw any fat in our budget. And so far, to be truthful about it, we haven’t got a suggestion from them or businessmen about how we could cut the cost of this program. Well that pleases me,
I think it indicates that Americans are willing to join a program even though it is not a glossy program, a program with a lot of chrome so to speak. On the outside I said one time on the radio program or a television program it was like a Volkswagen, it was, it always looked the same, very simple in construction, but we were improving it internally all the time. I didn’t realize what a good allegory that was until just as I came off the program the phone rang, and the local Volkswagen dealer in Washington said, “Mr. Shriver, I just saw you on the television, you’ve got a Volkswagen free of charge.” It was just at that moment I wish I had mentioned Cadillac. But I’ve enjoyed having that Volkswagen with me the biggest one we could one of those, I think they call them Minibusses, and we had painted on the side of it I don’t know if some of you received a lot of HM mail from Congress, but frequently or something like Congressman put on a bulletin that in parenthesis not printed at the tax-payers expense for instance you’ve probably seen something like that frequently maybe, will but we have the side of this, on both sides and on the back of this Volkswagen we have Peace Corps in big letters and then under it we have parentheses (not acquired at the tax-payers expense). Well the truth of the matter is, that I think that the poverty program will be a low cost program. It’s going to be low cost primarily because its economically sound.
For example, Public Welfare United States costs an average of less than five billion dollars per annum and probably another billion can be added to that for extra costs of police fire protection and so on which are connected with these issues. Now if we could for example raise the average annual income of the families in poverty in the United States today by just one thousand dollars we would add 14 billion dollars a year to our national output. We would reduce the cost of public welfare by not less that 15 to 20 percent, and the same- time l we would be creating a consumers market and I hope you businessmen would be interested in this, we would be creating a consumers market an additional consumers market equal to the total consumer purchasing power of Oregon, Oklahoma, and Colorado combined. Just by raising the income per annum to the poverty families in the United States one thousand dollars a year. It’s also an inexpensive program because of the returns which all of us can look forward to getting from it. For example, it’s now been proven that somebody who graduates from high school in the course of their life time will earn 60 thousand dollars more and therefore spend a substantial of that for consumers products, 60 thousand more than a person who has only a grade school education. Well now if we can just give part time work for example to people at the cost J of maybe $500 a year work not just a grant work, and we spend two thousand dollars that way for four years of high school we will get back a net profit of 58 thousand dollars. I mean all of us, not the Federal Government, not you specifically or me but the nation as a whole will have that additional purchasing power. In addition to that, it means that that person will be adding that much more not only in taxes but as I said a moment ago, in purchasing power. We have a provision in there which a lot of people got excited about whereby we said we would give a grant, coupled with a loan to poor families a grant of $15 hundred dollars when it would be should in the opinion experts that the grant would get the person on their feet and out of the poverty group. And there was a hullabaloo about that because everybody said it was a straight hand-out.
Well, I happen to come from Illinois these days and I looked up the cost of public welfare in Illinois for a family of four. Which is a typical farm family which we would perhaps give a grant of $1,500 to. Well if we could give to that farm family a grant to keep them on the farm productively, staying on the farm we would spend $1,500 as a grant. If that farm family on the other hand did not stay on the farm and went to Chicago my state we would spend $1,500 in public assistance for that family in six months, that’s what public assistance costs in Illinois today for somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 a month. And at the end of six months you wouldn’t have anything to show for it. At the end of the grant that I’m talking about for the poor farmer you’d have a economically viable, although not rich, but economically viable family unit.
Another thing that impresses me about both of these programs is in a sense that they both stand for freedom and equality and for opportunity. The fact that we call it the poverty rogram the economic opportunity program. For example, let me illustrate what I mean about the Peace Corps. In the first place the Peace Corps goes only where it’s asked, as I said a minute ago. We do what we are asked to do, we live under local laws, speaking the local languages, eating the local food, living in the local housing serving under local foreign officials. And as I say we go only on invitation. We have complete racial equality in the Peace Corps. Everybody gets into it, and stays in it solely on a basis of merit. There’s no religious qualification, no racial qualification, and overseas we have espoused a culture of equality so that we do not go over to propagandize about Western culture or about a specific religion or about any ideals about politics or race. It has been an inspiration to me to see that something like 12 percent of all the Peace Corps Volunteers are members of American minority groups. That’s a much higher percentage than the minority groups ham have in our nation in terms of people who have gone through higher education. We should have therefore expected much less from the minority groups in our country than 12 percent. They have come forward as out Volunteers therefore out to their numbers and they are serving with distinction all over the world.
There are some fabulous cases I think that show something about Peace Corps Volunteers. We sent a group to Togo and in Togo the official language is French but the Togolese are very close to their neighbors who speak English, and they want to learn English in Togo so we sent about 20 teachers out there; and they hadn’t been there very long when they had a coup. The President was killed and a new Gronewski President came in, President Knouknitze was his name. I thought that was an unusual name for Togo, but nevertheless that is his name and he was interested in learning English and he came to the Peace Corps to see if we had any instructors that could detail to teach him English. We were overwhelmed by the request but we studied the people we sent and we detailed a girl 26-year-old American girl, to give lessons to the President. She was an American Negro girl, a school teacher. And over the course, the last 6 to 10 months this girl has been going to the Presidential Palace giving language instruction to the President of that country. We’ve been so successful that other Volunteers are teaching English to others members of the Cabinet in Togo. We never went to Togo to do this work but the confidence of the volunteers when challenged and given the opportunity and because of the way they behave, because there is equality within the organization, because they do stand for freedom, they got the invitation from the President and they are doing excellent work there. I’ll never forget another thing at the beginning, we were told that in some countries in South America which were very old fashioned I’d say, very strong if you will, oriented in Roman Catholicism that it would be very dangerous to send Protestants. As a matter of fact, I was told by people who were experts that if we sent Protestants to certain villages in Latin America that they would be run out of town. Well we just didn’t know enough to believe that and so we sent groups to Latin America country, completely selected on basis of merit, Protestants, Catholics, Jewish people probably some Agnostics maybe a Atheist or two here and there. They went out into these villages and we’ve never had an incident which reflected any type of religious animosity on the part of the Colombians, not one. In cases or places where the Catholic priest is in many of those villages the only person who really unifies the village, in those places our Volunteers have been welcomed in by Catholic priests and have been put to work trying to help with villagers just as he has been helping with them. We were told another thing a very distinguished Senator said, and it’s in the Congressional Record, that if we insisted on bringing in people on an non-discriminating basis, that no Moslem country would invite the PC because they would know in advance that Jewish people would be possible be among the group that came into their country -- and because there was such animosity against the Jews the PC would never get into a Moslem country.
Well, again we didn’t know enough, we just said that the way it was and if they wanted to invited us we’d come. Today, right tonight as we’re sitting here, the Peace Corps is operating in four countries, all of them members of the Moslem league. I’ve been in those countries myself. There are Jewish people in one group, there is a Jewish Orthodox couple, a married couple, and they live and they work in a completely Moslem environment w/o any problems whatsoever. This I think illustrates why the Peace Corps stands for freedom, equality and opportunity and why it has been well received abroad because they go abroad no to preach some sort of dogma or politics or economics or religion but to serve mankind. Just the way the Y tries to do. Now the poverty program, believe it or not I think stands for the same things here at home, I believe that dictatorships abroad, dictatorships of the right or of the left breed on hopelessness or deprivation or poor economic conditions or the lack of personal dignity that the people feel:. And so the man on a horse can come along and bring on a drastic revolution and establish himself as a dictator saying that he’s going to change all those things. Well here at home there are people that have a sense of hopelessness that they can’t get into the affluent society which I was going to say that most of us are enjoying the benefits of. They feel deprived that they aren’t able to participate in American life and in a sense they feel a deep sense of lack of personal dignity. The Poverty Program, the War Against Poverty is designed to try and help them to get out of this spirit of hopelessness or the conditions of deprivation so they can join all the rest of us in the burgeoning and growing and magnificent society that in this count. This has important aspects even abroad the Poverty Program does here at home. For example it was only about a month ago that an official of the Israeli Government came to visit me in my office in Washington to talk about the PC. The said to me how do you think the Poverty Program is coming along? I said, “Well it’s just getting started, why do you ask”? He said, “Well I think it’s very significant for your country” I said, “Why?” He said, “When the Peace Corps first got started and during the course of its progress, I can remember on several occasions having conversations with the Soviet Ambassador in Israel and this Ambassador continually said to me that if the Americans were really sincere about democracy and their desire to make democracy work, they would be trying to do it at home rather than sending the PC abroad. That the PC was a sham, there was a false front, that it was a phony, that it really didn’t really represent what we believed in here in the United States -- that we were genuinely insincere because we were not doing the same things at home.
You’d be surprised I believe to know how many people abroad believe that type of thinking. How often what we do here at home is to them a much clearer indication what we’re really like than what we do abroad. that the PC itself is hampered in its work. Your sons, daughters who were just mentioned here a little While ago, are hampered in their work by racial incidents for example here at home. It’s exceptionally difficult if not impossible to ask a question, let’s say you’re asked in Ghana at the time of the Mississippi riots which are all headlines all over the world you’re asked a question, well how can America really stand for democracy and equality of all people when you don’t give equality to the Negro people in your country? That’s exceptionally difficulty if not impossible question to answer. The best answer most of our Volunteers give is the way they themselves live. The way they live with Negro, American children in the PC, the way they conduct themselves with the Negroes in Africa or with people whose skin is not white in Asia. The example they set is the best thing they can do. Therefore the poverty program here at home demonstrates to people abroad much more so than you can possible imagine of what our country is really like and what we stand for. Another thing about both of these programs I think is worthy of your consideration is that they are non-partisan. In a sense they are not political programs, it’s true at the beginning of the Peace Corps we had some partisan political controversy connected with it but after a year or so of our operation, most of that began to disappear and many leading Republicans both in the Senate and House endorsed the Peace Corps unequivocally. It was said that our agency was almost unique in Washington because we were the only ones that had the combined simultaneously support of Hubert H. Humphrey and Barry Goldwater. I don’t know whether that’s really true that we’re the only ones that do but it is typical of the PC Program that it has gained great acceptance on both sides of the aisle as the phrase goes. And I think that the same thing is in store with the poverty program. I think so that like the Peace Corps it is a program based on the thinking of the best people in our country. There has been a distinguished group of businessmen for example, come to Washington and give their time in the formulation of the Poverty Program. Just to give you an idea of who I’m talking about the Vice Chairman of American Telephone and Telegraph, the President of Campbell Soup, the Chairman of Olin Mathieson Chemical, the chairman of the Board of Corning Glass, the Chairman of the Board of Southern Co., the largest public utility holding company in the south, the president of IBM, the Chairman of the Board of Linton Industry and many others and in fact three of them testified today eloquently on behalf of the poverty program.
I hope that your papers publish some of things they said because their testimony moved people in the House ever more than any testimony I’ve seen there. Several reporters called me up this afternoon before I came here and said it was the most stirring testimony they had ever seen, giving on a issue or bill pending before the House. We’ve had farmers comes down, The National Grange, The Farmers’ Union, it’s true that the Farmers’ Bureau opposes the plan, but I was very much gratified when the Manager of the National Grange, Hershel Newman, who is a lifelong Republican, agreed to go over and testify for the Poverty Bill. We’ve had Labor Leaders, George Meany, Walter Ruther, Philip Randolph testified for he Bill. We’ve had Educators Economists testify for the Bill and work on it. So it is not a partisan enterprise.
It is an effort at any rate to produce a program which is constructed in the national interest. And both of these programs are patriotic not in a nationalistic sense of patriotism but in a sense to service to your country and service to your fellowman. Again, it seems that we are very close to the principles of the Y when we talk about service to ones country and service to your fellowman. Nobody is in the PC for the money they can get out of it, you all know the maximum they can get is $75 a month and they don’t get that until they come home. We computed that and figured it was about $.11 an hour for the work done. You can’t get many Doctors, MDs PhDs or LLBs to work in the USA for $75 -- 11 cent a hour. It’s not for money, they don’t do it to promulgate a particular religion, they don’t do it for political advantage, they don’t do it because it’s a great asset to their career. They do it first of all because its a way in which they can serve their fellowman, it’s a way in which they can do something for peace.
I think that the poverty program is also patriotic in this sense. Personally, I don’t think our country can afford to have 20 percent of its people for whom the American dream has become the American nightmare. We can’t afford, no matter who is president or which party is in power, to have one-fifth of our nation who don’t see themselves participating at all in the tremendous advances that have been taking place in our country. Our national unity must be founded on shared opportunity. Now I’ve told you something about What the poverty program is and something about the Peace Corps doing, let me say briefly what we’re not. First of all, neither of these programs are a political gimmick. I’ve never been associated with a political gimmick n my life and I don’t intend to start now, I don’t really have to, there’s nothing in it for me and I’m not interested in it. The Peace Corps for example is not a propaganda gimmick as it has been sometimes been said in some countries. Neither of these programs is a hand-out program. The poverty program is not handing out anything to anybody except the opportunity to get out of poverty. The Peace Corps is not giving away anything. Sometimes the Foreign Aid Program is described as a “give-away” program. We’re not giving away anything. The only thing being given away in the Peace Corps is the labor and the love for the people that are in it, and they’re giving that and that’s theirs.
It’s not ours, or yours, it’s theirs and they give it. Neither one of these programs is presented to the American people as quick and easy solution to a problem. We don’t think we’re going to end poverty in one year with the poverty program and we don’t think that the Peace Corps is going to bring instant peace. And finally might say it’s not a Czar’s program. Some people said that this program, the poverty program is going to establish a Czar. And that I was going to be the Czar.
Well, frankly I have no ambition to be a Czar. I know what happened to the Czars. So I’m really here in my capacity as a Sergeant. A Recruiting Sergeant perhaps. To recruit your help in the war against poverty and the struggle for peace. I’m not embarrassed to ask your help because these program are 100 percent American-style programs founded on our traditional way of doing things and getting results. They’re practical, and in many ways they depend on private initiative and private voluntary agencies like the Y, they depend on local initiative, and local enterprise, they’re personal, people do things themselves they’re patriotic, and philosophically they are in tuned with our highest ideals. The United States of America was not just founded so that more people can get rich. It was founded for ideals. The ideals of equality, all men created equal. To the ideals of liberty, for religious and political freedom of individual men. It’s those ideals that have made the United States probably unique in the contemporary world and certainly unusual in the history of man. And this spirit of our country and of these two programs which I talked to you about is best summed up or at least exceptionally well summed up by a famous artist; a famous musician in Latin America, who was a great patriot, a great lover of mankind; Pavlo Kasos, the famous, cellist, Pavlo Kasos is now 84 years of age. He came to a conference that the Peace Corps ran in Puerto Rico about two years ago. This old man had been in New York City all day long recording a symphony with the NY Philharmonic and he got on the airplane at the end of day and flew 4 ½ hours from NY to San Juan, and then he drove one hour out into the country and then he came to dinner. This is at 84. At the end of the dinner he was quite tired so rather than ask him to stand up like this at the podium we put the microphone in front of him and among other things he said this about the PC but its true about the poverty program and I think its true about our country. He said, “This is new and it is also very old, we have in a sense come full circle, we have come from the tyranny of the enormous, discordant machine back to a realization that the beginning and the end we are men. That man was important, not the machine that is man who accounts for growth not just dollars or factors and above all that is man who is the object of all of our efforts.
Thank you very much.......
