In the words of a great President, whose birthday we honor today, closing his final State of the Union Message sixteen years ago, “We pray that we may be worthy of the unlimited opportunities that God has given us.”
[State of the Union Address]
John F. Kennedy
January 11, 1962
Mr. Vice President, my old colleague from Massachusetts and your new Speaker, John McCormack, Members of the 87th Congress, ladies and gentlemen:
This week we begin anew our joint and separate efforts to build the American future. But, sadly, we build without a man who linked a long past with the present and looked strongly to the future. “Mister Sam” Rayburn is gone. Neither this House nor the Nation is the same without him.
Members of the Congress, the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress. We are all trustees for the American people, custodians of the American heritage. It is my task to report the State of the Union—to improve it is the task of us all.
In the past year, I have traveled not only across our own land but to other lands—to the North and the South, and across the seas. And I have found—as I am sure you have, in your travels—that people everywhere, in spite of occasional disappointments, look to us—not to our wealth or power, but to the splendor of our ideals. For our Nation is commissioned by history to be either an observer of freedom’s failure or the cause of its success. Our overriding obligation in the months ahead is to fulfill the world’s hopes by fulfilling our own faith.
I. STRENGTHENING THE ECONOMY
That task must begin at home. For if we cannot fulfill our own ideals here, we cannot expect others to accept them. And when the youngest child alive today has grown to the cares of manhood, our position in the world will be determined first of all by what provisions we make today—for his education, his health, and his opportunities for a good home and a good job and a good life.
At home, we began the year in the valley of recession—we completed it on the high road of recovery and growth. With the help of new Congressionally approved or Administratively increased stimulants to our economy, the number of major surplus labor areas has declined from 101 to 60; non-agricultural employment has increased by more than a million jobs; and the average factory work-week has risen to well over 40 hours. At year’s end the economy which Mr. Khrushchev once called a “stumbling horse” was racing to new records in consumer spending, labor income, and industrial production.