“We stand ready tonight, as we have always stood in our history, to test our system against any other on the field of thought and belief and the work of peace, for on that field, freedom will never lose. We have always welcomed dissent. We have never muzzled disagreement. Pick up any afternoon paper and you will see proof of that, for the truth of this Republic’s durability tells us that men worth of the Presidency must be measured by the highest rules of responsibility.
The Presidency of this Nation is no place for a timid soul or a torpid spirit. It is the one place where a petty temper and a narrow view can never reside, for the Presidency is both a legacy from the past and a profusion of hope for the future…The basic freedoms – the world that Franklin Roosevelt envisioned and that John Kennedy worked and died for – have taken on new meaning in our time. They were not fully realized in Roosevelt’s generation, nor will we fully reach them in ours. But they are a part of our heritage.
And from that heritage Americans must draw the goals and the guidance that are best suited to their own time. We are determined to preserve in the future what we have received from the past. But we are also aware that only by accepting the arduous, uncertain, and most of the time very lonely duty of interpreting and pursuing democracy according to our convictions of today – only then can we hope that our posterity will say to us: ‘They, too, guarded and handed on the Great Experiment’.”
-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, Miami Beach, Florida, February 27, 1964
