LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — President John F. Kennedy stopped in Las Vegas and gave a speech at the Las Vegas Convention Center as part of a five-day tour promoting conserving natural resources in the U.S on Sept. 28, 1963.
He was joined by then-Governor Grant Sawyer, Senator Howard Cannon, and Senator Alan Bible.
According to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Kennedy gave a 17-minute speech and told the Las Vegas crowd it was good to be on the road.
"I can assure you that from my experience of the last days, however useful it may be to sit at a desk in Washington and read statistics about increasing population and about the need for water, there is no better education for a President, a Senator, a Congressman or a citizen than to fly over the West and see where it is green where water has done its work and see where it is arid, where there is no water, and then you come to understand the truth," Kennedy said. "Water is the key of growth and its wise use essential to the development of the Western United States."
"I read in this morning's paper that our population today is 190 million. At the time of Franklin Roosevelt, it was 130 million. By the year 2000, it will be 350 million people living where 130 million people lived," Kennedy predicted. "This is a tremendous increase in the population of the United States."
Kennedy praised Nevada for working to "unlock nature to provide us with greater wealth."
"This state is the fastest growing state because it symbolizes the old and new in the best way possible," Kennedy said. "You pioneers are going to be followed by others. Everybody seems to move from East to West, for some mysterious reason, but they do come out here and many more are going to follow you and we want to be able to provide for them."
Kennedy said some of the key things moving forward for Nevada, at the time, would be giving Lake Mead National Park status, which it did become the first national recreation area in 1964, including supplementary water from Lake Mead in the Interior Department's Pacific Southwest Water Plan, preserving the shoreline of Lake Tahoe and Great Basin National Park, and restored damaged Range Lands.
"There isn't very much that you can do today that will materially alter your life in the next three or four years, in the field of conservation but you can build for the future," Kennedy said. "Out task, the task of propelling a third wave of conservation in the United States following that of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt is to make science the servant of conservation and to devise new progress of land stewardship that will enable us to preserve this green environment, which means so much to all of us."
