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

I call upon the members of this Council to meet as often as necessary, to recommend whatever actions need to be taken, and to carry out whatever tasks must be done to wage this war effectively.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I just do not agree.

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.

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

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

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

We are going to not just establish a Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke to recommend steps to reduce the incidence of these diseases; we are going to reduce them.

Unless we can do better, two-thirds of all Americans now living will suffer or will die from cancer, from heart disease, or stroke.

In coming to Washington, as you are now, you are tracing steps I myself once walked-as a 27-year-old new Member of the House.

Heart disease, cancer, and stroke can be conquered--not in a millennium, not in a century, but in the next few onrushing decades.

We must begin to think about the future--about the year 2000--about the foundations we must put in place for a larger, more complex, more challenging America for our children and our children's children.