 prevail upon President Johnson to say a word or two. Students and Senator, I'm sure I speak for all this group, although that is a presumption. In saying, it would feel in your depth or the time you give us, the wisdom that's flowed from your great experience. I think the outstanding feature about this man that's spoken this morning is this, his total unselfishness and his dedication to his fellow man. I think the greatest handicap that any public servant can have is to thank themself. And a great many of us have had to do that in public service to survive. Bill Benton did it. He told it as it was. He didn't survive long as a senator. But his contribution will live after all of us have gone. We, the great president of the Republic of Texas, once said that education is a guardian genius of our democracy. It's the only dictator that free man will ever recognize. And he's the only ruler that free man will ever desire. That was Lamar. And now, first week after I came into the very high office, I was at dinner with the prime minister of Canada and many distinguished cabinet officers and leaders of the world. And I was the last speaker, and I had to observe in my opening statement that I sat at the table with four graduates from Oxford, three from Harvard, two from Princeton, two from Yale, and one from the St. Marker's Teaching College. And I guess that if you look over the many weaknesses that prevailed during my administration, the greatest single handicap the president had was the insufficiency of talented, competent, dedicated people to carry out his policies and be loyal to them. My creed was very simple, and I thought if you could educate the people and all the people. And every boy and girl born in this country, there's a basic right, just like to valorize, was entitled to all the education that he or she could take or wouldn't take, that would preserve this democracy. I thought that good health to them was essential to a good education. I thought that their environment was a very important asset. I thought an absolutely rigid requisite was equal justice to all of them. And then there were many other things like consumers' problems, space, defense, our relations with other nations. But those are the things were relatively simple creed that I tried to promulgate in the form of statutes, laws of the land. Could you believe that it was more than 100 years ago when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and it's still just a proclamation, it's not a fact? And I wonder if we're in an era to it being a fact today, and we were 10 years ago, I think so. And I wonder why and how that came about. Well, it might have made you, but I think a black boy who only finished elementary school, that was in the capital parlance known as a porter, who drove my car back and forth from Texas after each session of Congress had more to do with bringing about a semblance of equal justice in this country than any president from Lincoln to Johnson. I recounted my book, but it might be interesting for you to know that we had to come back to Texas every year after Congressional session ended. And as plain schedules got better, why, Ms. Johnson and I would fly back to Texas with the children. And it would be up to the black man that worked for us to drive our car and bring the cook and all the kitchen utensils, the baby's necessary furnaces, et cetera. And one day he came in one evening after I finished the heckic session in the Senate and said, Senator, I was leaving in the morning about daylight, said, you got any other thing you want to tell me? And I said, anything else you want to say? And I said, well, are you going to take Beagle, the dog? And he said, yes, yes, do I have to take Beagle? And I said, well, of course, Beagle's a member of the family. We can't leave him here all summer when we're in Texas. Why, don't you want to take Beagle with you? He said, yes sir, I guess dejectedly he went back to the kitchen where he's been washing dishes. And I said, Jean, come tell me why you don't want to take Beagle. He said, well, I said, and these are his words. But Negro has enough trouble getting through the South without a damn dog. And that for the first time really aroused in my consciousness the terrible injustice that we whites had perpetrated this in a nation where men are supposed to be created equal. For almost two centuries. He went to elaborated some. He said, we drive all day, but when we want to go to the bathroom, just like y'all do, we have to go out of side road and our women have to get behind the tree because we can't go in a filling station like you do. We get hungry and we got to eat just like you do. But we have to go across the tracks to grocery store and get some cheese and crackers because we can't go in the cafe. Or if some hamburger stand, we take the chance on being insulted, try to get by and we have to go around to the pack, wait till everybody else is served something to eat. So we drive hard all day long, comes 10, 11 o'clock and Helen and I want to go to sleep. We said, we can't go in a motel or a hotel. We have to drive across the track and find some Bowdoin house way down there where they take us in for the night because we're not allowed in hotels or motels in the country. I said, you're not allowed in any place almost even across the tracks, you got a damn dog you got to take with you. Well, I was chagranted my insensitivity to my fellow man and out of that conversation when I got to be president, I urged in my first statement that we start on a course of equal justice for a fellow man, a fellow man. And the first course essential to providing that justice was the simple right to permit him to vote, permit everybody to vote in this country. Could you believe that for more than a century the color of your skin determined your right to participate in democracy? Not your right to fight wars, not your right to carry the burden of others, but your right to make a decision affecting yourself and your country. That was determined by the color of your skin. Could you believe that the color of your skin could determine where you went to a bathroom, or where you ate, or where you slept, or where you had a home, where the house you lived in. I guess every female born the first thing that they want after they reach maturity, soon find their responsibilities a roof over their own head. But they could never do this because if they owned one at all, it was in what they called the nigger part of town. No pay streets, no inside money, no running water. I walked from the Driscoll Hotel on Christmas Day in 38. Within three blocks of Driscoll Hotel, I found 115 people using one privy. 115 human beings drinking out of one water hydrant where they'd go with their 10 buckets and get it. One room containing nine human beings with a grandfather dying with tuberculosis and the baby just born in the same room with him on a pallet. And that's resulted in the first public housing back to this nation, President Rosary. Now, on December 10th and 11th, we're going to meet here with the leaders who are responsible for bringing about to a changed atmosphere in this country about who can vote and about who can eat and where and who can sleep and how and who can live in a home and so forth. Those are simple laws. Then they got the civil rights program of the 60s. There are a million papers that went into those bills. A million memos, a million conversations. There's something totally added up to a million. A million pleas with the president personally and by the gardener also. And we're going to open all those private memos. We're going to see what I said to Adam Clayton Bowell and what he said to me. And what I said to Martin Luther King and what he said to me and what I said to the Congress. And I never was suspected of being very dramatic or colorful, charismatic individual. But when I looked the Congress in the eye and said, we shall overcome. It was very significant to me that some of my dearest friends with whom I had associated through the years who thought I was just another crooked confederate. And the roof set on their hands and wouldn't applaud. But I'm very proud to say it was a matter of weeks until I signed the civil rights bill under Abraham Lincoln Statue and returned to the capital of the United States. That's a great event for you if you're interested in not just in yourself but in justice for your fellow man. If you're interested in making this a better and more perfect union. If you're interested in doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, that's going to be an exciting meeting. We're going to have all the black leaders of that time come here and participate. We're going to have the man responsible for the Brown Decision 1954, the then Chief Justice Supreme Court grand old man, American Democrat Republican. Earl Warren was out who's heard of the brain and after gifted political talents, we probably wouldn't have had any of these statues. He will keynote these. Ralph Ellison, the noted black writer, Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP. Thurgood Marshall, the first black man they ever serve on the Supreme Court. Man who started out, I met him right here at the University of Texas because they wouldn't let Herman Sweatt, a black boy, come to school. His people paid taxes always and they worked hard and went to church on Sunday. And they participated in the burdens of government just as the whites did but Herman Sweatt couldn't come in this great university. Thurgood Marshall came in and started a lawsuit, went to the Supreme Court, permitted blacks in this country to go to state sports school. All of that talent's going to be here. I would hope that it's a requisite, the highest priority that each of you come here and they increase your ability to meet the future that you face by letting a little of this rub off on you and maybe a little of you rub off on it. My father used to have an old saying out in the hills. He said, you've got to brush yourself up against the grindstone of life and it'll give you a polish that you can't get from Harvard or Yale. And if you come here and brush up against the grindstone of what's going to happen those two days, you may get a polish that these PhDs can't give you. On the Equal Housing Act, I remember sitting in a room with Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young and all the group and they demanded the president issue a proclamation that said you could build a house any place you wanted to, black, white, brown. If you wanted to go out in the north of West Hills, build a home next to the mayor and you had the money to do it, you could do it and the president would issue that by proclamation. And I said, no, I won't do that. And 34 of the 35 black leaders insisted that I issue that proclamation. I said, no, I'm not a Hitler. I don't ever intend to be one. I am a product of the Congress, 12 years in the house, 12 years in the Senate, minority leader, majority leader, vice president. And we don't do things by decrees in this country. We've got to do them by the consent of the government. People themselves and their representatives and the Congress. Now I will urge the Congress to pass an equal housing law, but I will not decree one with the stroke of the pen. Great disappointment to 34 of the 35 men in the room. And I said, I know it'll take a decade, perhaps two decades. I passed the first civil right bill in 85 years in 1957, I guess it was. I had to go around the clock all night long for many, many nights to break a Southern filibuster to pass the first civil rights. Senator Russell used to come to me about one or two o'clock in the morning and said, don't you think it's time we go to bed? And I'd say, are you going home? Said yes, I think I'll call it day. I said, all right, I think I'll call it one too. I would go to my office and he'd go down to his little office and he'd immediately call back and say, have a quorum call. And that meant I had to, as majority leader, deliver 51 men in 10 minutes. If I didn't, we didn't have a quorum and it would break the meeting up. But I delivered them all through the midnight hours, two, three, four o'clock until we passed that bill after many days and nights. So I believe that you've got to do things within the bounds of the Constitution, within the laws of the land and most particularly in the spirit of the democratic way of life that we have. And I don't think one man ought to make the laws for the land by stroke of the pen. But out of that group, one man spoke up, Clarence Mitchell, it's a revered name in our household. He's a lobbyist, a lobbyist of the NAACP for 40 years. Said many abusive things about me. Good many of them justify it. But he said the president's right. The country will hardly take a law to that effect and they'll never take proclamation. And what good's a piece of paper if you can't get resolved? And this man believes that he's a can do man and he believes in getting results. Now I never get it in his presidency, but we get it and when we get it, it'll be here to stay. So he's supportive. A few days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the next morning I called the leadership down and the next week we passed Equal Housing in the United States. It's the law of the land, it's not proclamation, it's got the signatures of the majority of the house and the majority of the Senate. And despite all the things you've heard and all the changes that are taking place and I'm one who encourages change and believes in it and don't think changes, I don't believe changes our enemy, I think status quo is. But notwithstanding that, they haven't repealed a single one of those laws. Franklin Roosevelt put 120 major basic piece of legislation on the statute books and his four terms are expressed. But during this changing period of the 60s in five years, we put more than 400. I've just listed five or six in the civil rights field. There's 60 education measures, there are 40 health measures that dozens of environment measures and consumer measures, et cetera, I won't go into. Now, all during that period, the one thing that I felt I felt inadequate in many fields. No man can occupy that majestic post of leadership in this country without to being humble and without feeling inadequate. But the greatest inadequacy I felt was my ability to do what, to know what was right. I just didn't have the intelligence or the staff to make judgments that I was always posh, they would result in the right. A president's greatest job is not wanting to do what's right. I believe every man holds that job, wants to do what's right. He's reached the ultimate. After all, why does he want to leave to his children, his grandchildren, the heritage that he was a bum and he did what was wrong? He wants to know, wants to do what's right if he can only know what's right. But the things that come to him are balanced just about like that. And you put them on scales and it's pretty difficult to detect which one goes up and down. And if they're not questions like that, they shouldn't come to it. Usually they're settled by minor people down the line, the bureaucracy. So his big job is not doing what's right, but knowing what's right. And this frightening age in which we live is pretty difficult to know what's right. And if you're going to make a decent approach to it, you've got to have the most competent technicians around you. And I never knew of an institution and I was associated with education, a good part of my life. I was with NYA for three wonderful years of my life. I spoke at a job court opening where I had a camp in Camp Arias in Marcus and the mayor presided and the congressman spoke and the governor followed through and the church judge spoke and sergeant driver of Yale who graduated from Yale head of poverty spoke job school program. And I spoke and I didn't have a speech. And while they were talking, I was thinking about what I was going to say and I just got up and said this, what a wonderful program the NYA was because the mayor was one of the first men on the NYA job when I was director. And the congressman, congressman Pickle was an NYA student. And John Conley, I gave him a $12 a month NYA job at the University of Texas. He was governor of the state and home of Thornberry's on the circuit court and he had $14 a month working in the sheriff's office. Sergeant Sriver went through Yale as a poor boy before he met to... Before he was married on an NYA scholarship and the president of the United States came out of that program. And what more lasting testament could be given to the results of a youth, of faith in youth that men like Harry Hopkins and Franklin Roosevelt had. So, when I came home I thought that the greatest contribution we could make to preserving freedom in our land, a society that would give us the fruits of life as we should have them, would be to prepare and equip people to serve their fellow man. And that's what public affairs is and that's what it means. And my mother told me as a little boy, I want you to be a preacher, or a teacher, or a public servant. Many, many times I wondered when I was in a Mexican school room down on the border teaching poor Mexican children who couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak Spanish, why my mother wanted me to be a teacher. And when I went to, I was corralled into some of the brush arbor revivals, I wondered why she wanted me to be a preacher. But when I came home on that last night from Washington on January the 2069, I never had any doubt about why she wanted me to be a public servant. Because the greatest known satisfaction to human beings is that that comes from knowing and if you are the only one that knows it, it's there and that's what's important, that you've made life more just and more equal. And more opportunity for your fellow man. And that's what this school is all about. Thank you very much. I don't speak often, I never speak long and I'm doing it against orders now. But I won't tell you a little story, it's a little off cover. I won't appeal to all of you to come to this conference. You have to cut your classes, participate in it, be a part of it. Having said to be able to sit in three decades from now, I was there, we have to overcome December the 10th and 11th. I want you to be my consultant. That's one thing I want to ask of you. I've put a lot of interest to, a lot you don't know about. I got a blood-scattered all over the state capitol. I got a blood-scattered all over the state capitol. I got a blood-scattered all over the state capitol. Someone brought a big black bulldog into the neighborhood. And pretty soon the whole neighborhood was flourishing with a little black dogs. And very much to the distress of the mothers, the ladies of the neighborhood just had dogs on every porch. And they decided to do something about it and they consulted one of the red Americans, took the dog down, had him operated on. And there was a relative calm in the community for a period of two or three years. And then pretty soon the dog started flowering again. Hope his were seen waterling down the sidewalk. And the ladies' AIDS Society met and they were discussing it. And one senior maternalistic old lady said, well, I'll tell you what's happened. It's that damn black bulldog. That's what's causing it all. And the other lady observed, well, I thought we had him operated on. Said, I know it, but he's acting as a consultant. I want all of you to act as my consultant. I want to get all the little folks that we can to fill that auditorium when they come here. And fill it, fill it with curiosity and with interest and with dedication. And this is a new place. So go out and get your boyfriend or your girlfriend your banker and bring them in.