On other goods the bill will permit a gradual reduction of duties up to 50 percent—­permitting bargaining by major categories—­and provide for appropriate and tested forms of assistance to firms and employees adjusting to import competition.  We are not neglecting the safeguards provided by peril points, an escape clause, or the National Security Amendment.  Nor are we abandoning our non-European friends or our traditional “most-favored nation” principle.  On the contrary, the bill will provide new encouragement for their sale of tropical agricultural products, so important to our friends in Latin America, who have long depended upon the European market, who now find themselves faced with new challenges which we must join with them in overcoming.

Concessions, in this bargaining, must of course be reciprocal, not unilateral.  The Common Market will not fulfill its own high promise unless its outside tariff walls are low.  The dangers of restriction or timidity in our own policy have counterparts for our friends in Europe.  For together we face a common challenge:  to enlarge the prosperity of free men everywhere—­to build in partnership a new trading community in which all free nations may gain from the productive energy of free competitive effort.

These various elements in our foreign policy lead, as I have said, to a single goal—­the goal of a peaceful world of free and independent states.  This is our guide for the present and our vision for the future—­a free community of nations, independent but interdependent, uniting north and south, east and west, in one great family of man, outgrowing and transcending the hates and fears that rend our age.

We will not reach that goal today, or tomorrow.  We may not reach it in our own lifetime.  But the quest is the greatest adventure of our century.  We sometimes chafe at the burden of our obligations, the complexity of our decisions, the agony of our choices.  But there is no comfort or security for us in evasion, no solution in abdication, no relief in irresponsibility.

A year ago, in assuming the tasks of the Presidency, I said that few generations, in all history, had been granted the role of being the great defender of freedom in its hour of maximum danger.  This is our good fortune; and I welcome it now as I did a year ago.  For it is the fate of this generation—­of you in the Congress and of me as President—­to live with a struggle we did not start, in a world we did not make.  But the pressures of life are not always distributed by choice.  And while no nation has ever faced such a challenge, no nation has ever been so ready to seize the burden and the glory of freedom.

And in this high endeavor, may God watch over the United States of America.

***

State of the Union Address
John F. Kennedy
January 14, 1963

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the 88th Congress: 

I congratulate you all—­not merely on your electoral victory but on your selected role in history.  For you and I are privileged to serve the great Republic in what could be the most decisive decade in its long history.  The choices we make, for good or ill, may well shape the state of the Union for generations yet to come.