It is good to come out here and talk about the Peace Corps.
I think I know why President Johnson likes to get back here, why he looks like a new man every time he has been here. It is not just that he has been home. It is that he has been to Texas. And Texas is not just a place of great open spaces or new industry and opportunity. It is a state of mind.
Someone has said that there is at least one thing wrong with the mind of Texas. You have a limited vocabulary. There is one word missing. You do not know the word, “impossible” That is the spirit we need in the Peace Corps and in the war against poverty. That is the essential spirit of America.
I am told that a Texan with an inferiority complex is one who thinks he is only as good as anyone else. That is like Mark Twain’s creed. “I think I have no color prejudices nor creed prejudices, “Mark Twain wrote “Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough. for me; he can’t be any worse.”
You had a terrible tragedy take place in this State. But it could have happened anywhere. What you must also remember is how happy President Kennedy was to come here, how happy he and Mrs. Kennedy looked in those last hours, as they waved to the crowds of friendly people, as they responded to the warmth and friendliness deep in the hearts of Texans. There is nothing wrong with the heart of Texas.
I said I am glad to be here talking about the Peace Corps. Since your invitation to me, I have been given this other assignment, of organizing the war against poverty. Willi Unsoeld, our Peace Corps Representative in Nepal, was asked what it felt like climbing Mount Everest. “Like a vacation from the Peace Corps,” he said. The war against poverty is on vacation from the Peace Corps. But coming here to talk is a kind of vacation. For the nature of both assignments is to turn a lot of talk into work. Or, as President Kennedy put it in his Inaugural Address, “to convert our good words into good deeds.”
Let me use Willi Unsoeld as my text today. What he has said about his climb of Mount Everest can be said of our struggle for peace and against poverty.
Of that climb, which cost him nine toes (he now has the slogan, “Have Toe, Will Travel”), of the freezing night at 29,000 feet, he says: It was not so much a contest with nature or a competition with other men—it was primarily a struggle with ourselves—a struggle within each man.
And that is the heart of the problem of peace and poverty: Can we, the richest and most powerful people on earth, can we who have been so blessed, bring out the best within us to do what we know we ought to do? We have the means to end poverty at home, to establish, opportunity for all, to join hands and help those in the world seeking to develop their opportunities for a decent life.
You know we have the means, especially you who are studying our modern science and technology, you who know the modern miracles that can be performed. You know that the historian, Arnold Toynbee, is correct when he says that the great fact of world life is that for the first time it is possible for the benefits of science and technology to be made available for all men.
You know this, and the world knows it. The question is whether we act with all of our power and all of our skill and all of our will. Having the means to end poverty and to create the conditions of peace in the world, it follows, as day follows night, that we have the duty to do it.
Peace and the ending of poverty are the political Mount Everests challenging us. Will we have the vision and the courage and the endurance to take them on?
If we fail to do enough, if it is the old story of too little too late, then our whole civilization may go down Toynbee says that, all 20 previous civilized nations have collapsed because they failed to solve the twin problems of War and Poverty.
The news is out now and people everywhere are coming to believe that they no longer need be poor forever. Government and civilizations that fail to act to provide opportunity for all, fall. Most of the revolutions of our time rise out of such failures. The result of inaction is chaos or Communism, and War.
Your student body president asked me to talk about the relationship of the Peace Corps and its philosophy to American foreign polity. I am trying to go a step further and shows how the Peace Corps and the war against poverty are linked together, and how they both fit into the world picture—how they fit into America’s world policy and purpose.
The philosophy of the Peace Corps is action. It is an example of learning by doing. We knew that the developing nations needed our help, needed our skilled manpower, needed our teachers and builders, our mechanics and engineers, our nurses and doctors. We knew that they needed more than our advisors. For years, they had top-flight advice from our Point Four experts or from the United Nations. But there remained a gap between the plans laid at the top and their execution in the field. It was a manpower gap. They needed “doers” as well as “advisors.” They needed Americans who would work with them, who would live with them, who would teach in their schools, in their hospitals, in their villages, who would teach while on the job. They needed young college graduates, able to teach English or math, science or industrial arts, or older Americans young in spirit.
When President Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps, the skeptics said it was impossible. American youth would not respond as volunteers and, if they did, they would not be responsible when sent overseas. Fortunately, “impossible” was not in the President’s vocabulary either.
John Kennedy knew, as he said in his Inaugural Address, “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.” He knew that this new generation was ready to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship.” He knew that you would respond and be responsible.
You have proved him right. Today, some 7,000 Volunteers are serving in 46 countries.
From Texas Tech there are 14 Volunteers now serving. They are: Suellen Bass, Bolivia; Elizabeth Becker, Philippines; Jennie Bishop, Colombia; Robert Brick, Ceylon; Larry Caskey, India; James Donahue, Chile; James Hooper, Bolivia; Colleen Gillmouthe, Sabah Sarawak; Esther Marks, Pakistan; Sammie McComb, Peru; Leonard Sauter, Niger; Rodger Scott, Dominican Republic; and Russell Studebaker, El Salvador.
What if I reported to you— what if our newspapers were reporting that a Soviet or a Chinese Peace Corps, soon to be 10,000 strong had been welcomed “into—asked into—46 countries, that 10,000 dedicated young Communists were working in the schools, hospitals, and villages of Asia, Africa, and Latin America at the invitation of host governments? What if the next generation of many countries was being taught by friendly, hard-working, simple-living members of a Soviet Peace Corps? You can imagine what a Congressional investigation we would have then!
We do not need to worry, because this is the one thing Mr. Khrushchev doesn’t dare to do: let his young men and women go and see and live in and learn about the world beyond the wall.
They can be permitted short propaganda missions or to live in Embassy compounds. But he does not trust them to work and serve by themselves, on their own, in the schools and in the homes of proud and independent peoples. Maybe it would be good for all of us if Soviet youth could get a chance to see the outside world on a large scale. The ideas they would take home, the questions they would ask might bring about or speed up a peaceful change within Soviet society. But dictators in authoritarian countries have never been interested in freedom or change within their own lands.
America was able to launch the Peace Corps—to trust it young people—to let you loose in the world to work, to question, to teach, aid to learn—because freedom is our first principle, because individual initiative is our secret weapon.
President Kennedy once said that politics is like football. If you see daylight, go through the hole.
That is what happened in the case of the Peace Corps. Late at night, at the University of Michigan, John Kennedy asked a large, waiting group of students if they were ready to work overseas, on modest terms, living with the people they worked among, if they were ready to give two years of their lives to such work in the developing nations. The students’ response was so strong that Senator Kennedy decided to propose the idea to the nation in a major speech in San Francisco. And the response grew. After the election, we received more letters asking to join the Peace Corps, which was then not an agency at all, just an idea, than we received asking for jobs for all other agencies in the Government put together.
The President and Congress saw the daylight, and went through the hole. They decided to try, and it worked.
Now, President Johnson is determined to make a breakthrough in the struggle against poverty. We are going to find the daylight on this age-old problem. If Congress accepts our proposals for a Job Corps, for a corps of Volunteers for America, for community action programs, for a frontal attack on poverty, bringing together all the present efforts for a concerted drive, we will go through the hole.
With the Peace Corps, we have shown how Americans, young in spirit, can get to work to turn an idea into action, a dream into reality. We can do the same in the war against poverty.
President Johnson declared this a war against poverty in order to mobilize the full will of America. In war, we give everything we have. For peace in the world and full opportunity at home, we need to give more of ourselves, as we would in war.
A Peace Corps Volunteer who died in an air accident in Colombia, David Crozier, expressed this in a letter to his parents. “Should it come to it,” he wrote, “I had rather give my life trying to help someone than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them.”
The final test of the Peace Corps and the war against poverty will not be in statistics, not in numbers of countries served abroad or numbers of jobs found at home, not in the numbers of teachers provided or boots built or slums destroyed or workers trained. Rather, it will be Willi Unsoeld’s test on Mount Everest. This is the test within us: Have we done our best, have we given all we can?
We cannot do everything. But we can do something.
We do not yet know all that needs to be known about the job ahead. We do not yet know how to go to the moon yet either, but we are going to get there. Fifty years ago, we did not know how to eliminate typhoid fever, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, or paralytic polio. But we found out. Twenty-five years ago we didn’t know how to split the atom, but we found out. We may not yet know exactly how to go about ending poverty and abolishing war, but we are going to find out.
The captain who waits until his ship is completely ready never leaves port. In the Peace Corps abroad and the war against poverty at home, we will make mistakes. But when we see daylight, we will try for the hole, and we will get through.
In John Kennedy’s words, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor-in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our Lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
