US Presidency
1961

Their strength in the struggle for freedom depends on the strength of their economic and their social progress. We would be badly mistaken to consider their problems in military terms alone. For no amount of arms and armies can help stabilize those governments which are unable or unwilling to achieve social and economic reform and development. Military pacts can not help nations whose social injustice and economic chaos invite insurgency and penetration and subversion. The most skillful twelvemonth efforts can not succeed where the local population is too caught up in its own misery to be concerned about the advance of communism. But for those who share this view, we stand ready now, as we have in the past, to provide generously of our skills, and our capital, and our food to assist the peoples of the less developed nations to reach their goals in freedom, to help them before they are engulfed in crisis. This is also our great opportunity in 1961.