| Dec. 30th, 2006 @ 11:19 am (no subject) |
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“Even during the darkest hours of my administration, I always knew that I could draw on the strength, support, and love of my family and friends.” ~Lyndon Baines Johnson
“I’ve just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you’re going to help him with anything you can....If he hadn’t gone to Harvard, that’s the kind of uninhibited young pro he’d like to be-that in the next generation the balance of power would shift south and west, and this boy could well be the first Southern President.” ~President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Lyndon B. Johnson the Congressman
“When John F. Kennedy first offered me the Vice Presidential nomination, I asked him to be candid with me. If it was only a courteous gesture, I said, I wanted him to say so. He replied that he needed me to run with him if the ticket was going to be successful. I served John Kennedy for three years-as a candidate and as his Vice President. I served him loyally, as I would have wanted my Vice President to serve me. We did not always see things in the same light. I did not always agree with everything that happened in his administration. But when I did disagree with the President, I did so in private, and man to man.” ~Lyndon Baines Johnson
“There was only one full bullet that was found. That was on the stretcher that the President was on. It apparently had fallen out when they massaged his heart, and we have that one.... But the important thing is that this gun was bought in Chicago on money order. Cost twenty-one dollars, and it seems almost impossible to think that for twenty-one dollars you could kill the President of the united States.” ~J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
“A nation stunned, shaken to its very heart, had to be reassured that the government was not in a state of paralysis. I had to convince everyone everywhere that the country would go forward....Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous....The times cried out for leadership.” Lyndon Johnson on the death of President John Kennedy
“No memorial or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the book of law.” President Lyndon Baines Johnson
“I was driving from California to Florida in that summer of ‘64, just after the Civil Rights Act had been passed. Then, for the first time in my life, I was able to contemplate stopping at any restaurant or motel I cam across.” ~William B. Allen
“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a right.” ~President Lyndon Johnson
“This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America....Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” President Lyndon Johnson
“In the midst of rapidly developing technological advances, the adults among newcomers have little education and limited vocational skills. The children, retarded in academic achievement and lacking in motivation for school, require specialized programs of education if they are to overcome their limited backgrounds. Programs to meet the needs of disadvantaged children have been successfully demonstrated in each of the great cities but these cannot be extended to serve all the children in need because of lack of financial services. Local support of education comes largely from taxes on property; 12 cities pay well over 60 percent of the cost of operating their schools from local taxes. By 1965 enrollments in the schools of the great cities will have increased 48.6 percent over 1950, and these enrollments include large numbers of pupils requiring costly specialized programs.” ~Dr. Benjamin Willis, superintendent of the Chicago schools
“Experts tell us that most of a child’s full potential is achieved before he reaches school age. Half his eventual capacity has been established by the age of four. By the time he is six, two-thirds of his adult intelligence has been formed. How do such findings square with the notion that the ‘education’ of a child does not begin until he is six? The Head Start program we inaugurated led the way in the application of these discoveries to the classroom. Focused on culturally deprived children, Head Start was responsible for calling attention to several incredible facts. Almost half the children we reached with this program the first year came from homes that had no toys, books, magazines, crayons, paints, or even paper. Some of those children, particularly those from cit slums, could not recognize pictures of animals from the zoo. The only animal they all knew immediately was a rat. One little black girl literally did not know what the word ‘beautiful’ meant and she was overjoyed to discover its meaning as she watched herself in a mirror, trying on her teacher’s hat. The progress of these children under our Head Start program astounded and gratified us all. I urged that Head Start and its companion programs be made available to all 8 million poverty-level youngsters in this country below the age of ten, and not just to the million who currently are benefiting. This investment in human life would pay us the highest interest rate of any investment we could make. I want to see the Head Start lesson applied to all children. There are 12 million three-to-five-year-olds in the United States. Only 30 per cent of them are in school. We know this is a tragic waste of human resources, resources our country will sorely need before the turn of the century, when this generation of preschoolers will be leading the nation.” President Lyndon Johnson
“The morning after Dr. King’s death I sent letters to both Speaker McCormack and Minority Leader Ford, stressing that ‘the time for action has come.’... We worked on it the entire weekend, night ad day. This time our efforts paid off. The Rules Committee voted to keep the Senate bill intact and to send it to the House floor. Within twenty-four hours the full House gave its approval to the omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1968. I signed the bill on April 11, 1968, in the presence of many of the Negro leaders with whom I had met the week before. They all helped produce this victory.” ~President Lyndon Johnson
“Our country is not officially divided on race. [Legal] racial discrimination is virtually nonexistent. Poverty is the challenge that Martin Luther King’s ‘dream’ leaves for us. Poverty is the moral equivalent of slavery and we can end it in the 21st century-in our lifetimes-like we end slavery in the 19th century.” ~Andrew Young, former mayor of Atlanta
“I want the world to know that when the Untied States speaks it does so through the voice of a Negro.” ~President Lyndon Johnson on his appointment of Thurgood Marshall
“I had the same sentiments about Medicare, whose overriding importance, to me, was that it foreshadowed a revolutionary change in our thinking about health care. We had begun, at long last, to recognize that good medical care is a right, not just a privilege. During my administration, forty national health measures were presented to Congress-more than the preceding 175 years of the Republic’s history....This is not just a tribute to my administration’s concern for the people’s health but a tribute to the people themselves-a salute to what they demand of their government and to the system that makes it possible to meet the demand.” ~President Lyndon Johnson
“The act established the blueprint for the construction of 26 million homes by 1078, providing a complex network of fiscal tools to accomplish the job-including direct subsidies, loan guarantees, and below-market interest rates. Thousands of people stood I the courtyard of the new headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development when I signed that housing bill into law that August day of 1968.” ~President Lyndon Johnson
“Altogether, we passed sixty education bills. All of them contributed to advances across the whole spectrum of society. When I left office, millions of young boys and girls were receiving better grade school educations than they once could have acquired. A million and a half students were in college who otherwise could not have afforded it. Thousands of adult men an women were enrolled in classes of their choice, available to them for the first time.” ~President Lyndon Johnson “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible wall which imprison men because they are different from other men....[The Voting Rights Act of 1965] is one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.” ~ President Lyndon Johnson |
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