How many men who listen to me tonight have served their Nation in other wars?  How very many are not here to listen?

The war in Vietnam is not like these other wars.  Yet, finally, war is always the same.  It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise.  It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate.

Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world.

Many of you share the burden of this knowledge tonight with me.  But there is a difference.  For finally I must be the one to order our guns to fire, against all the most inward pulls of my desire.  For we have children to teach, and we have sick to be cured, and we have men to be freed.  There are poor to be lifted up, and there are cities to be built, and there is a world to be helped.

Yet we do what we must.

I am hopeful, and I will try as best I can, with everything I have got, to end this battle and to return our sons to their desires.

Yet as long as others will challenge America’s security and test the clearness of our beliefs with fire and steel, then we must stand or see the promise of two centuries tremble.  I believe tonight that you do not want me to try that risk.  And from that belief your President summons his strength for the trials that lie ahead in the days to come.

The work must be our work now.  Scarred by the weaknesses of man, with whatever guidance God may offer us, we must nevertheless and alone with our mortality, strive to ennoble the life of man on earth.

Thank you, and goodnight.

***

State of the Union Address
Lyndon B. Johnson
January 10, 1967

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, distinguished Members of the Congress: 

I share with all of you the grief that you feel at the death today of one of the most beloved, respected, and effective Members of this body, the distinguished Representative from Rhode Island, Mr. Fogarty.

I have come here tonight to report to you that this is a time of testing for our Nation.

At home, the question is whether we will continue working for better opportunities for all Americans, when most Americans are already living better than any people in history.

Abroad, the question is whether we have the staying power to fight a very costly war, when the objective is limited and the danger to us is seemingly remote.

So our test is not whether we shrink from our country’s cause when the dangers to us are obvious and dose at hand, but, rather, whether we carry on when they seem obscure and distant—­and some think that it is safe to lay down our burdens.

I have come tonight to ask this Congress and this Nation to resolve that issue:  to meet our commitments at home and abroad—­to continue to build a better America—­and to reaffirm this Nation’s allegiance to freedom.

As President Abraham Lincoln said, “We must ask where we are, and whither we are tending.”  I.