Your job is to help me in making policy and program decisions in waging this war.

Our objective is total victory--and we are going to attain it.

I hope the Vice President-elect will assume a role similar to the one I filled as Chairman of the Peace Corps National Advisory Council.

I am also asking Vice President-elect Humphrey to take a leading role in the war on poverty.

I LOOK to this body as a domestic national security council for the war on poverty.

I want to thank each and every one of you who has spent an hour or a dollar with the Urban League, because it is through efforts that you have made and others like you that the shackles of bondage have been removed from your fellow man.

It shall be my purpose and it is my duty to make it a fact.

Well, I am here to say to you tonight that I do not agree.

Our first objective will always be to assure nondiscriminatory operation rather than to put an end to programs which are vital to the welfare of all Americans.

For, as the problem of civil rights has grown in urgency, it has also grown in complexity.

One of the Presidents that I admire most signed the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years ago.

I want the Government of all of the people to speak with a single voice on this single question.

I just do not agree.

Will Rogers once made a very wise observation. He said: 'We are a funny people. We elect our Presidents, be they Republican or Democrat, and then go home and start daring 'era to make good.'

I welcome this opportunity to work with you in this historic period.

This is no small challenge. Small men with small horizons could never be adequate to that challenge.

Today our system, our society--and our Government, of which you are soon to be part--stand as the most successful in the history of man.

We shall need to be--as Americans have always been--prudent and practical in what we undertake.