1962 State of the Union Address
speech by US president John F. Kennedy
The 1962 State of the Union Address was given by John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, on Thursday, January 11, 1962, to the 87th United States Congress in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives. It was Kennedy's second State of the Union Address. Presiding over this joint session was newly elected House speaker John W. McCormack, accompanied by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his capacity as the president of the Senate.
Kennedy began his speech with a tribute to former House Speaker Sam Rayburn who had recently died in office:
This week we begin anew our joint and separate efforts to build the American future. But, sadly, we build without a man who linked a long past with the present and looked strongly to the future. "Mister Sam" Rayburn is gone. Neither this House nor the Nation is the same without him.
In this speech, Kennedy discussed his plans for the economy in response to the recent recession and threat of inflation. He also addressed the need for Congress to respond to certain domestic issues including pollution, education, mass transit, urban housing, civil rights, public health, and welfare assistance programs. On the side of foreign affairs, Kennedy spoke about the spread of communism through Asia and Latin America, his plan for Cold War diplomacy, and the importance of organizations such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in managing international affairs.
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This entry incorporates text from “1962 State of the Union Address” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.