Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Mr. Secretary Celebrezze and other Government officials, ladies and gentlemen:

Mr. Secretary, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to meet with this distinguished and constructive group who have lent their talents to helping us contribute a solution to bring happiness and improvement in health and comfort to some of the finest citizens of our land.

I am somewhat envious of the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, really for two reasons. I never quite understand it but he has as his responsibility one of the most satisfying assignments that any man in the world today could have, and that is the improvement of mind and body and the leadership for programs that cover a wide variety of age groups, but which mean much to the happiness of most of the individuals in this country.

He has successfully presented to the Congress the boldest education program that any committee in the Congress has ever given serious consideration to. He has presented it with confidence and with judgment and with competence to the point where it is concluding its hearings already in the first month in both the House and the Senate.

He and some of his rather outstanding associates, Miss Winston, Mr. Cohen, and others, have presented to the Congress a medical care program the like of which our country has never seen before. He and some of his associates have presented a new improvement in our health research and our health facilities that will completely revolutionize our living. And he has done all this in his own quiet and unassuming effective way with a bunch of little feists barking at his heels but never with a moment of irritation -- and with rather substantial results.

So I would like to have your job because you must go home satisfied at night that you have done a lot for humanity that day. I'd like to have your record of being able to work with the Congress as you have. Now I realize there are some tough days ahead and I don't want your hat to get too big for you because we have our problems in all the committees.

But I think it is phenomenal that during the month of January you should have made the advances on medical care, on education, on health facilities, on improvement of your personnel as you have done and I am glad to recognize it here this morning. I want to congratulate the members of this Council on Aging and I want to commend them on the high caliber of this fine report.

I have observed that it is organized and presented in such a way that I would hope that most Americans would have a chance to view it. I think our Government has done much in recent years to meet the problems of the aged.

When I came to Washington we were doing nothing. Social security was not even talked about. Old age assistance was not prevalent and it took the combined efforts of President Roosevelt and Huey Long, and a good many others to dramatize the situation where we could really have the Government do anything for the aged. Up to that time most of our elections had been run on the basis whether you were wet or dry, prohibitionist or anti-prohibitionist, clan or anti-clan, or whether you were for the local bridge or against the local bridge. I went through all those as a boy. I never heard of social security until I was 21 years old. All I heard was whether you were wet or dry, whether for the courthouse group or against them.

I am glad that we have reached a point now where we can discuss issues and discuss problems and try to not only discuss them but do something about them.

We have before the Congress some 17 messages and we are going to have some more and they will represent the best thinking in this Government and we hope they will command the best action in the other branch.

We must not assume that we have arrived at a resting point. Medical science and our rising health standards, as we all know, have greatly lengthened the span of life that we'll all live. And now our big assignment is to improve the quality of that life while we do live.

We have a great deal to learn and we have a great deal more to do. There are three items on our agenda this morning.

First, I am directing the Council on Aging to continue its study of the implications of aging for our Nation's economic and social policy. Specifically we want to know more about retraining and developing new skills for older workers. We want to know more about providing retirement income through private and public pension programs. We want to know more about the cost of living in comfort and dignity during old age. We want to know more about the use of leisure time before and after retirement. We want to know more about the role of education in later years. It is not just confined to those under 21.

I hope this council of constructive leaders will continue to spend some of their time studying and researching and thinking about these problems.

Second, I want to call on all Americans to get behind and help us and support prompt enactment of a comprehensive program of hospital care for the aged through social security. We are in the sight of the promised land. We just have two more big mountains to go over. I hope we don't get hung up on them like Bill Douglas did out in New Mexico.