State of the Union AddressesJohnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines)
History
State of the Union Addresses
Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
I will also propose the International Health Act of 1966 to strike at
disease by a new effort to bring modern skills and knowledge to the
uncared-for, those suffering in the world, and by trying to wipe out
smallpox and malaria and control yellow fever over most of the world during
this next decade; to help countries trying to control population growth, by
increasing our research--and we will earmark funds to help their efforts.
In the next year, from our foreign aid sources, we propose to dedicate $1
billion to these efforts, and we call on all who have the means to join us
in this work in the world.
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.
For tonight, as so many nights before, young Americans struggle and young
Americans die in a distant land.
Tonight, as so many nights before, the American Nation is asked to
sacrifice the blood of its children and the fruits of its labor for the
love of its freedom.
How many times--in my lifetime and in yours--have the American people
gathered, as they do now, to hear their President tell them of conflict and
tell them of danger?
Each time they have answered. They have answered with all the effort that
the security and the freedom of this Nation required.
And they do again tonight in Vietnam. Not too many years ago Vietnam was a
peaceful, if troubled, land. In the North was an independent Communist
government. In the South a people struggled to build a nation, with the
friendly help of the United States.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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