State of the Union AddressesKennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald)
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State of the Union Addresses
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
I turn now to a prospect of great promise: our Hemispheric relations. The
Alliance for Progress is being rapidly transformed from proposal to
program. Last month in Latin America I saw for myself the quickening of
hope, the revival of confidence, the new trust in our country--among
workers and farmers as well as diplomats. We have pledged our help in
speeding their economic, educational, and social progress. The Latin
American Republics have in turn pledged a new and strenuous effort of
self-help and self-reform.
To support this historic undertaking, I am proposing--under the authority
contained in the bills of the last session of the Congress--a special
long-term Alliance for Progress fund of $3 billion. Combined with our Food
for Peace, Export-Import Bank, and other resources, this will provide more
than $1 billion a year in new support for the Alliance. In addition, we
have increased twelve-fold our Spanish and Portuguese language broadcasting
in Latin America, and improved Hemispheric trade and defense. And while
the blight of communism has been increasingly exposed and isolated in the
Americas, liberty has scored a gain. The people of the Dominican Republic,
with our firm encouragement and help, and those of our sister Republics of
this Hemisphere, are safely passing through the treacherous course from
dictatorship through disorder towards democracy.
VIII. THE NEW AND DEVELOPING NATIONS
Our efforts to help other new or developing nations, and to strengthen
their stand for freedom, have also made progress. A newly unified Agency
for International Development is reorienting our foreign assistance to
emphasize long-term development loans instead of grants, more economic aid
instead of military, individual plans to meet the individual needs of the
nations, and new standards on what they must do to marshal their own
resources.
A newly conceived Peace Corps is winning friends and helping people in
fourteen countries--supplying trained and dedicated young men and women, to
give these new nations a hand in building a society, and a glimpse of the
best that is in our country. If there is a problem here, it is that we
cannot supply the spontaneous and mounting demand.
A newly-expanded Food for Peace Program is feeding the hungry of many
lands with the abundance of our productive farms--providing lunches for
children in school, wages for economic development, relief for the victims
of flood and famine, and a better diet for millions whose daily bread is
their chief concern.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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