This year I speak after 1 year as President of the United States.

Many of you in this Chamber are among my oldest friends.  We have shared many happy moments and many hours of work, and we have watched many Presidents together.  Yet, only in the White House can you finally know the full weight of this Office.

The greatest burden is not running the huge operations of government—­or meeting daily troubles, large and small—­or even working with the Congress.

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

Yet the Presidency brings no special gift of prophecy or foresight.  You take an oath, you step into an office, and you must then help guide a great democracy.

The answer was waiting for me in the land where I was born.

It was once barren land.  The angular hills were covered with scrub cedar and a few large live oaks.  Little would grow in that harsh caliche soil of my country.  And each spring the Pedernales River would flood our valley.

But men came and they worked and they endured and they built.

And tonight that country is abundant; abundant with fruit and cattle and goats and sheep, and there are pleasant homes and lakes and the floods are gone.

Why did men come to that once forbidding land?

Well, they were restless, of course, and they had to be moving on.  But there was more than that.  There was a dream—­a dream of a place where a free man could build for himself, and raise his children to a better life—­a dream of a continent to be conquered, a world to be won, a nation to be made.

Remembering this, I knew the answer.

A President does not shape a new and personal vision of America.

He collects it from the scattered hopes of the American past.

It existed when the first settlers saw the coast of a new world, and when the first pioneers moved westward.

It has guided us every step of the way.

It sustains every President.  But it is also your inheritance and it belongs equally to all the people that we all serve.

It must be interpreted anew by each generation for its own needs; as I have tried, in part, to do tonight.

It shall lead us as we enter the third century of the search for a more perfect union?

This, then, is the state of the Union:  Free and restless, growing and full of hope.

So it was in the beginning.

So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.

***

State of the Union Address
Lyndon B. Johnson
January 12, 1966

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the House and the Senate, my fellow
Americans: 

I come before you tonight to report on the State of the Union for the third time.

I come here to thank you and to add my tribute, once more, to the Nation’s gratitude for this, the 89th Congress.  This Congress has already reserved for itself an honored chapter in the history of America.