National Affairs: KENNEDY'S LIBERAL PROMISES

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While the headlines were crowded with the religious issue, Presidential Candidate Jack Kennedy was busy nailing down some issues of perhaps more importance to his political future. In his first full week of campaigning, he revealed himself as the farthest-out liberal Democrat around. In a sweeping section of his Labor Day speech in Detroit, for example, he embraced civil rights, collective bargaining, increased minimum wages, a lifting of immigration restrictions, more pay for teachers, and more aid for the aged, farmers and small businessmen. Excerpts from Kennedy's week of speeches:

Economic Growth. "Last year, the United States had the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world. With an average rate of growth in this country, every workingman in the last eight years would have received $7,000 more than he has received." With a "really healthy rate of growth," the U.S. can have full employment, "pay for all the defenses this Administration says we can't afford," build the best schools and hire "the best-paid and best-trained teachers. If we're going to grow the way we should grow, we must adopt fiscal policies that will stimulate growth and not discourage it."

Credit Restrictions. "Every American who financed a home, who bought a refrigerator, who bought an automobile, bought a television set, has suffered from this high-interest-rate policy. Those of you who bought a home for $10,000 with a 30-year mortgage are going to pay out $3,300 more for that house than you would have paid in the Truman Administration." The promise: to lower "artificially high interest rates."

Labor. "The goals of the labor movement are the goals for all Americans, and their enemies are the enemies of progress."

Automation. "Unless we begin to attack it, not as a problem in one plant or in one company, but as a national problem which demands our attention, then by 1970 the blight of West Virginia could spread across this country. We must make it plain that the installation of new machinery is a proper subject for collective bargaining. The Government must offer technical assistance to those companies which want to bring in new machinery but want to do it without undue hard ship to the workers."

Education. "It is time for emergency federal action to halt the decline in American education." Needed:

U.S. help for school construction and for teachers' salaries.

Natural Resources. "We are going to reverse the policy of no new starts. So vast, so complex and so essential are our natural resources that they cannot be parceled out piecemeal. I think it would be most useful to estab lish for the office of the President himself a council of resource and conservation advisers to survey the whole scope of our natural resources so that we can, as a country, not merely as a basin, develop the resources for 1970 and 1980." When the U.S. builds "a great dam, I don't think the people should pay for irrigation and have the power distributed by a private company." Also promised: a "maximum effort to get fresh water from salt water."