| Senator Dirksen, Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. Vice President,
President Johnson, Vice President Humphrey, my fellow Americans—and my fellow
citizens of the world community: I ask you
to share with me today the majesty of this moment. In the orderly transfer of power, we
celebrate the unity that keeps us free. |
| Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious
and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that
shape decades or centuries. |
| This can be such a moment. |
| Forces now are converging that make possible, for the
first time, the hope that many of man's deepest aspirations can at last be realized. The
spiraling pace of change allows us to contemplate, within our own lifetime, advances that
once would have taken centuries. |
| In throwing wide the horizons of space, we have
discovered new horizons on earth. |
| For the first time, because the people of the world
want peace, and the leaders of the world are afraid of war, the times are on the side of
peace. |
| Eight years from now America will celebrate its 200th
anniversary as a nation. Within the lifetime of most people now living, mankind will
celebrate that great new year which comes only once in a thousand years—the beginning
of the third millennium. |
| What kind of nation we will be, what kind of world we
will live in, whether we shape the future in the image of our hopes, is ours to determine
by our actions and our choices. |
| The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of
peacemaker. This honor now beckons America—the chance to help lead the world at last
out of the valley of turmoil, and onto that high ground of peace that man has dreamed of
since the dawn of civilization. |
| If we succeed, generations to come will say of us now
living that we mastered our moment, that we helped make the world safe for mankind. |
| This is our summons to greatness. |
| I believe the American people are ready to answer
this call. |
| The second third of this century has been a time of
proud achievement. We have made enormous strides in science and industry and agriculture.
We have shared our wealth more broadly than ever. We have learned at last to manage a
modern economy to assure its continued growth. |
| We have given freedom new reach, and we have begun to
make its promise real for black as well as for white. |
| We see the hope of tomorrow in the youth of today. I
know America's youth. I believe in them. We can be proud that they are better educated,
more committed, more passionately driven by conscience than any generation in our history. |
| No people has ever been so close to the achievement
of a just and abundant society, or so possessed of the will to achieve it. Because our
strengths are so great, we can afford to appraise our weaknesses with candor and to
approach them with hope. |
| Standing in this same place a third of a century ago,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a Nation ravaged by depression and gripped in fear. He
could say in surveying the Nation's troubles: "They concern, thank God, only material
things." |
| Our crisis today is the reverse. |
| We have found ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in
spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord
on earth. |
| We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by
division, wanting unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment. We see tasks
that need doing, waiting for hands to do them. |
| To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the
spirit. |
| To find that answer, we need only look within
ourselves. |
| When we listen to "the better angels of our
nature," we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basic things—such as
goodness, decency, love, kindness. |
| Greatness comes in simple trappings. |
| The simple things are the ones most needed today if
we are to surmount what divides us, and cement what unites us. |
| To lower our voices would be a simple thing. |
| In these difficult years, America has suffered from a
fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry
rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead
of persuading. |
| We cannot learn from one another until we stop
shouting at one another—until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard
as well as our voices. |
| For its part, government will listen. We will strive
to listen in new ways—to the voices of quiet anguish, the voices that speak without
words, the voices of the heart—to the injured voices, the anxious voices, the voices
that have despaired of being heard. |
| Those who have been left out, we will try to bring
in. |
| Those left behind, we will help to catch up. |
| For all of our people, we will set as our goal the
decent order that makes progress possible and our lives secure. |
| As we reach toward our hopes, our task is to build on
what has gone before—not turning away from the old, but turning toward the new. |
| In this past third of a century, government has
passed more laws, spent more money, initiated more programs, than in all our previous
history. |
| In pursuing our goals of full employment, better
housing, excellence in education; in rebuilding our cities and improving our rural areas;
in protecting our environment and enhancing the quality of life—in all these and
more, we will and must press urgently forward. |
| We shall plan now for the day when our wealth can be
transferred from the destruction of war abroad to the urgent needs of our people at home. |
| The American dream does not come to those who fall
asleep. |
| But we are approaching the limits of what government
alone can do. |
| Our greatest need now is to reach beyond government,
and to enlist the legions of the concerned and the committed. |
| What has to be done, has to be done by government and
people together or it will not be done at all. The lesson of past agony is that without
the people we can do nothing; with the people we can do everything. |
| To match the magnitude of our tasks, we need the
energies of our people—enlisted not only in grand enterprises, but more importantly
in those small, splendid efforts that make headlines in the neighborhood newspaper instead
of the national journal. |
| With these, we can build a great cathedral of the
spirit—each of us raising it one stone at a time, as he reaches out to his neighbor,
helping, caring, doing. |
| I do not offer a life of uninspiring ease. I do not
call for a life of grim sacrifice. I ask you to join in a high adventure—one as rich
as humanity itself, and as exciting as the times we live in. |
| The essence of freedom is that each of us shares in
the shaping of his own destiny. |
| Until he has been part of a cause larger than
himself, no man is truly whole. |
| The way to fulfillment is in the use of our talents;
we achieve nobility in the spirit that inspires that use. |
| As we measure what can be done, we shall promise only
what we know we can produce, but as we chart our goals we shall be lifted by our dreams. |
| No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not.
To go forward at all is to go forward together. |
| This means black and white together, as one nation,
not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what
is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are
born equal in dignity before man. |
| As we learn to go forward together at home, let us
also seek to go forward together with all mankind. |
| Let us take as our goal: where peace is unknown, make
it welcome; where peace is fragile, make it strong; where peace is temporary, make it
permanent. |
| After a period of confrontation, we are entering an
era of negotiation. |
| Let all nations know that during this administration
our lines of communication will be open. |
| We seek an open world—open to ideas, open to the
exchange of goods and people—a world in which no people, great or small, will live in
angry isolation. |
| We cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but we
can try to make no one our enemy. |
| Those who would be our adversaries, we invite to a
peaceful competition—not in conquering territory or extending dominion, but in
enriching the life of man. |
| As we explore the reaches of space, let us go to the
new worlds together—not as new worlds to be conquered, but as a new adventure to be
shared. |
| With those who are willing to join, let us cooperate
to reduce the burden of arms, to strengthen the structure of peace, to lift up the poor
and the hungry. |
| But to all those who would be tempted by weakness,
let us leave no doubt that we will be as strong as we need to be for as long as we need to
be. |
| Over the past twenty years, since I first came to
this Capital as a freshman Congressman, I have visited most of the nations of the world. |
| I have come to know the leaders of the world, and the
great forces, the hatreds, the fears that divide the world. |
| I know that peace does not come through wishing for
it—that there is no substitute for days and even years of patient and prolonged
diplomacy. |
| I also know the people of the world. |
| I have seen the hunger of a homeless child, the pain
of a man wounded in battle, the grief of a mother who has lost her son. I know these have
no ideology, no race. |
| I know America. I know the heart of America is good. |
| I speak from my own heart, and the heart of my
country, the deep concern we have for those who suffer, and those who sorrow. |
| I have taken an oath today in the presence of God and
my countrymen to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. To that oath I
now add this sacred commitment: I shall consecrate my office, my energies, and all the
wisdom I can summon, to the cause of peace among nations. |
| Let this message be heard by strong and weak alike: |
| The peace we seek to win is not victory over any
other people, but the peace that comes "with healing in its wings"; with
compassion for those who have suffered; with understanding for those who have opposed us;
with the opportunity for all the peoples of this earth to choose their own destiny. |
| Only a few short weeks ago, we shared the glory of
man's first sight of the world as God sees it, as a single sphere reflecting light in the
darkness. |
| As the Apollo astronauts flew over the moon's gray
surface on Christmas Eve, they spoke to us of the beauty of earth—and in that voice
so clear across the lunar distance, we heard them invoke God's blessing on its goodness. |
| In that moment, their view from the moon moved poet
Archibald MacLeish to write: |
| "To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue
and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on
the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers
who know now they are truly brothers." |
| In that moment of surpassing technological triumph,
men turned their thoughts toward home and humanity—seeing in that far perspective
that man's destiny on earth is not divisible; telling us that however far we reach into
the cosmos, our destiny lies not in the stars but on Earth itself, in our own hands, in
our own hearts. |
| We have endured a long night of the American spirit.
But as our eyes catch the dimness of the first rays of dawn, let us not curse the
remaining dark. Let us gather the light. |
| Our destiny offers, not the cup of despair, but the
chalice of opportunity. So let us seize it, not in fear, but in gladness—and,
"riders on the earth together," let us go forward, firm in our faith, steadfast
in our purpose, cautious of the dangers; but sustained by our confidence in the will of
God and the promise of man. Back to Richard Nixon |
