Press copy, Address at the Inaugural Anniversary Dinner, 20 January 1962

IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 20, 1962 Office of the White House Press Secretary THE WHITE HOUSE ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT AT THE INAUGURAL ANNIVERSARY DINNER NATIONAL GUARD ARMORY WASHINGTON, D. C. THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Rosenbloom and Mrs. Freeman, Mr. Bailey and Mr. McCloskey Mr. Speaker: I first of all want to express, I know, on behalf of all of us, our great appreciation to Miss Clooney, Miss Remick and Danny Thomas for coming from a far distance to help us tonight. I wish we could all just applaud them. I want to also express my appreciation to President Truman. I must say it is nice to have a former President who speaks well of you, and we are glad to have him here tonight. His only request has been, since I have been President, to get his piano up from the cellar, and we have done that -- and we are going to run on it. And I also want to express my appreciation, and the appreciation of s all, to the Vice President for his tribute to Speaker Rayburn. I must say that the merger of Boston and Austin, as he said today, was really the last merger that the Attorney General has allowed, but it has been one of the most successful. And as a loyal and faithful friend, I think we have worked together better than any President and Vice Presidential team in history, at least since Roosevelt and Truman. I spoke a year ago today, to take the Inaugural, and I would like to paraphrase a couple of statements I made that day by saying that we observe tonight not a celebration of freedom but a victory of Party, for we have sworn to pay off the same party debt our forebears ran up nearly a year and three months ago. Our deficit will not be paid off in the next hundred days, nor will it be paid off in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Admin- istration. Nor, perhaps even in our lifetime on this planet, but let us begin remembering that generosity is not a sign of weakness and that Ambassadors are always subject to Senate confirmation, for if the Democratic Party cannot be helped by the many who are poor, it cannot be saved by the few who are rich. So let us begin. I want to express our thanks to all of you for helping. What we are attempting to do tonight is to lay the groundwork for the Congressional campaigns of 1962, and we realize, I think, all the Members of the House and Senate, that history is not with us, that in this century only in 1934, during the periods of the great pre-eminence of the Democratic Party did the Party in power ever win seats, let alone hold its own. But we believe in 1962 that the Democratic Party, both at home and abroad, is best fitted to lead this country and therefore we start tonight on the campaigns of 1962. This is though we like to think of ourselves as a young country -- this is the oldest Republic in the world. When the United States was founded there was a King in France, and a Czar in Russia, and an Emperor in Peking. They have all been wiped away, but the United States has still survived. We are also members of the oldest political party on earth, more