IN RECENT YEARS our Presidents - in a happy reversion to the historical consciousness of the early Republic - have acknowledged a responsibility not only to make history but to record it. In 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt began the systematic publication, year by year, of his Public Papers and Addresses. The Roosevelt volumes were issued under private auspices; but in 1957 the National Historical Publications Commission made the wise recommendation that the documentary publication of presidential papers become a public obligation.

The General Services Administration has now published the papers and addresses of President Eisenhower. Within a few years it will complete the documentary record of the Truman years. We shall then have a comprehensive record of the Presidency for more than thirty years. This, I trust, will be continuously enlarged by the contribution of future Presidents, as well as by the comprehensive collection and publication of the papers of past Presidents. I am especially pleased that during this Administration the volumes will appear as soon as possible after the end of each calendar year.

     These pages contain the full and exact texts of my speeches, messages, press conferences and statements of the year 1961. (For the presidential campaign of 1960 the student is referred to the valuable volumes compiled by the Committee on Commerce of the United States Senate and published in 1961.) This volume makes no pretense at revealing new information, or at providing new interpretations, or at setting forth a complete historical panorama. But it will, I hope, convey the enormous range of problems which confronted the American government and people in the first year of the seventh decade of the 20th century - the eighteenth of our national existence under the Constitution. And I believe that it will suggest the manner in which our people in this year began to come to a new and sober realization of our common perils and opportunities.

     A review of these months discloses, in my judgment, fresh beginnings and new momentum. The nation has commenced the work of laying the foundations for forward movement at home and in the world. We shall only be able to discover in later volumes how well the undertakings and prospects outlined in this book have been fulfilled. This volume, therefore, belongs most properly to the men and women whose hard work, generous counsel and patriotic service gave the year 1961 its significance and hope.