Documents / Official release
This Gerald R. Ford Library folder of Ford Congressional Papers holds material from Ford's broadcasts in 1965 and 1966. It contains correspondence with WJR station manager James H. Quello and drafts of Ford's June 1965 "Your Government" radio report on congressional imbalance, Vietnam and Cuba, along with budget remarks. It also includes Ford's March 25, 1966 on-air statement calling for a congressional investigation of UFO sightings near Ann Arbor, Michigan, a Great Society documentary script and a Meet the Press transcript with Indira Gandhi.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
WETA-TV DOCUMENTARY ON GREAT SOCIETY, CREATIVE FEDERALISM, AND APPALACHIA BY HOUSE MINORITY LEADER GERALD R. FORD, R-MICHIGAN. The American people are a great people. They have built a mighty nation from humble beginnings. From the earliest days of this republic, our people have yearned toward greatness and have displayed the pride and spirit necessary to achieve it. We have been building a great society on the North American continent ever since the early settlers came to these majestic shores and began carving out a new life for themselves in the wilderness. President Johnson has seized upon a phrase--the Great Society--and has given it propaganda value. He tried it out in a University of Michigan commencement address before he quite knew what he was going to do with it. It caught on, and he has been capitalizing on it politically since then. Let's take a good look at the Great Society catch-phrase. What does it really mean? Briefly stated, it is the old New Deal updated. It is the New Deal warmed over and fluffed up into a giant omelet of Big-Daddy Government that is overflowing the sides of the pan and threatening to put out the fire. By "the fire " I mean the pride and spirit of industry and incentive which have generated the greatness we see everywhere about us in this rich and beautiful land of ours. There is nothing really new in Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" program-- nothing that does not flow out of the "New Deal" or out of the Kennedy Administration's attempts to build a mighty political machine in every city in the nation.
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.