Part I PRINCIPLES AND OBJECTIVES OF AMERICAN THE STATE OF THE UNION: Annual Message of the President (Eisenhower) to the Congress, Transmitted January 12, 19611 1. THE FEDERAL BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 1962: Message From the President (Eisenhower) to the Congress, Transmitted January 16, 1961-Selected Tables 2 1H. Doc. 1, 87th Cong.; Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960-61, pp. 913-930; the Department of State Bulletin, Jan. 30, 1961, pp. 139–143 (excerpts). Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960-61, pp. 947, 948, 963, and 964. The complete text of the budget message (H. Doc. 15, 87th Cong.) appears ibid., pp. 934-1028. 3 Compares with new obligational authority of $44,761 million enacted for 1960 and $45,912 million (including $289 million in anticipated supplemental appropriations) estimated for 1961. [Footnote in source text.] Compares with new obligational authority of $2,672 million enacted for 1960 and $3,207 million (including $666 million of anticipated supplemental appropriations) estimated for 1961. [Footnote in source text.] 2. "THIS EVENING I COME TO YOU WITH A MESSAGE OF LEAVETAKING AND FAREWELL": Address by the President (Eisenhower) to the Nation, January 17, 1961 ° MY FELLOW AMERICANS: Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor. This evening I come to you with a message of leavetaking and farewell and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. Like every other citizen, I wish the new President and all who will labor with him Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all. Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation. My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis, when long ago a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate postwar period and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past 8 years. In this final relationship the Congress and the administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling on my part of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together. › Compares with new obligational authority of $3,226 million enacted for 1960 ($1,331 million military, $1,895 million economic and contingencies) and $3,931 million estimated for 1961 ($1,800 million military, $2,131 million economic and contingencies). [Footnote in source text.] "White House press release dated Jan. 17, 1961 (text as printed in the Department of State Bulletin, Feb. 6, 1961, pp. 179-182). The President's address was carried by the principal radio and television networks. II We now stand 10 years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts, America is today the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this preeminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches, and military strength but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment. III Throughout America's adventure in free government our basic purposes have been to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad. Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully there is called for not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment. Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense, development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture, a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel. But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped-for advantage, balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable, balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the Nation upon the individual, balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration. The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have |