May 20, 1962 - President Kennedy took the case for medical care for the aged under Social Security directly to the people today. He told them their support was “essential if this or any other piece of progressive legislation is going to be passed.” The President spoke to a crowd of 17,500 inside Madison Square Garden and 2,500 outside — most of them elderly persons. His image and words, carried nationally by all three major television networks, went to 32 other rallies and into millions of homes from coast to coast. Mr. Kennedy and other speakers addressing the enthusiastic Garden rally likened the campaign to the drive waged in the mid-1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to get the original Social Security Act passed. “All the great revolutionary movements of the Roosevelt Administration in the ‘30s,” the President said, “we now take for granted. But I refuse to see us live on the accomplishments of another generation. I refuse to see this country and all of us shrink from these struggles which are our responsibility in our times.”
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