 Thank you, Bert and Felicia. I want to extend my heartiest welcome to everyone watching the 99th annual Tournament of Roses Parade. Looking back on 1987, Americans can feel a great deal of pride about a year filled with the promise of peace and freedom for our nation. We celebrated the bicentennial of our Constitution, and in doing so, renewed the national values and way of life it symbolizes. Here at home, as employment continued to rise, growth and opportunity increased and our national prosperity remained a strong force for good in the world. Internationally, we saw dramatic new steps for peace at the Washington Summit and all around the world, a march toward democratic government and personal freedom continued. And now, if you will, this President would like to introduce another, Harriman L. Crunk, who is President of the Tournament of Roses Parade. To everyone watching, Nancy and I wish you the happiest of years in 1988, and hope you'll join us in whispering a prayer of thanksgiving for the blessings of the past year. Good evening. This is Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. I'm speaking to you, the peoples of the Soviet Union, on the occasion of the new year. I know that in the Soviet Union, as it is all around the world, this is a season of hope and expectation, a time for family to gather, a time for prayer, a time to think about peace. That's true in America, too. At this time of year, Americans traveled across the country in their cars, by train or by airplane, to be together with their families. Many Americans, of course, came to the United States from other countries. And at this time of year, they look forward to hosting friends and family from their homelands. Most of us celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, and as part of those celebrations, we go to church or synagogue, then gather around the family dinner table. After giving thanks for our blessings, we share a traditional holiday meal of goose, turkey or roast beef and exchange gifts. On New Year's Eve, we gather again, and like you, we raise our glasses in a toast to the year to come, to our hopes for ourselves, for our families, and yes, for our nation and the world. This year, the future of the nation and the world is particularly on our minds. We are thinking of our nation because in the year ahead, we Americans will choose our next president. Every adult citizen has a role to play in the making of this decision. We will listen to what the candidates say, we will debate their views and our own, and in November, we will vote. I'll still be president next January, but soon after that, the man or woman leading our country will be the one the American people picked this coming November. As I said, we Americans will also be thinking about the future of the world this year, for the same reasons that you will be thinking of it too. In a few months, General Secretary Gorbachev and I hope to meet once again, this time in Moscow. Last month in Washington, we signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in which we agreed to eliminate an entire class of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons. It was a history making step toward reducing the nuclear arms of both sides, but it was just a beginning. Now in Geneva, Soviet and American representatives are discussing a 50% reduction in strategic nuclear weapons. Perhaps we can have a treaty ready to sign by our meeting in spring. The world prays that we will. We on the American side are determined to try. You see, we have a vision of a world safe from the threat of nuclear war and indeed all war. Such a world would have far fewer missiles and other weapons. Today, both America and the Soviet Union have an opportunity to develop a defensive shield against ballistic missiles, a defensive shield that will threaten no one, for the sake of a safer peace, I am committed to pursuing the possibility that technology offers. The General Secretary and I also anticipate continuing our talks about other issues of deep concern to our peoples. For example, the expansion of contact between our peoples and more information flowing across our borders. Expanding contacts and information will require decisions about life at home that will have an impact on relations abroad. This is also true in the area of human rights. As you know, we Americans are concerned about human rights, including freedoms of speech, press, worship and travel. We will never forget that a wise man has said that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone. It is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Silence is a form of falsehood. We will always speak out on behalf of human dignity. We Americans are also concerned, as I know you are, about senseless conflicts in a number of regions. In some instances, regimes backed by foreign military power are oppressing their own peoples, giving rise to popular resistance and the spread of fighting beyond their borders. Too many mothers, including Soviet mothers, have wept over the graves of their fallen sons. True peace means not only preventing a big war, but ending smaller ones as well. This is why we support efforts to find just negotiated solutions acceptable to the peoples who are suffering in regional wars. There is no such thing as inevitability in history. We can choose to make the world safer and freer if we have courage. But then courage is something neither of our peoples have ever lacked. We have been allies in a terrible war, a war in which the Soviet peoples gave the ages an enduring testament to courage. Let us consecrate this year to showing not courage for war, but courage for peace. We owe this to mankind. We owe it to our children and their children and generations to come. Happy New Year. Thank you and God bless you. Take that, Mr. Gorbachev.