[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
[October 9, 1993]
[Pages 1722-1728]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at Yale University in
New Haven, Connecticut
October 9, 1993

    Thank you very, very much. To my good friends Guido and Anne 
Calabresi, President and Mrs. Levin, to Mr. Mandel, and to all the 
people at the head table. Let me say a special word of thanks to the 
artist who did that wonderful portrait, unduly flattering, also a gifted 
flack. You see, he's got me holding Stephen Carter's book ``The Culture 
of Disbelief.'' We now know he took no money from Yale because Carter 
took care of him. [Laughter] Actually I'm deeply honored to be holding 
that book. I read it. I loved it. And the dean said that a person ought 
to be painted with a book he's read, since no one is very often.
    I thank Mr. Laderman for that wonderful fanfare for Hillary and for 
me. I enjoyed it very much. As far as I know, it's the first piece of 
music ever written for someone who is a mediocre musician but loves 
music greatly. I want to say, too, to all of my former professors, to my 
classmates, and to my friends here, I thank each and every one of you 
for the contributions you made to my life and to Hillary's and for the 
work you did to make it possible for me to be here today. I thank you, 
Dean, for mentioning our friend Neal Steinman, who doubled the IQ of 
every room he ever walked into. And I thank all my classmates who are 
here who contributed to the last campaign in so many and wonderful ways.
    I also want to say a special word of thanks to the people who taught 
me in class and to the people I just knew in the halls who were on the 
faculty in Yale Law School. It was a rich experience for me that I still 
remember very vividly. I was especially glad to see my fellow southerner 
Professor Myres McDougal out there. I'm delighted to see you here, sir. 
Thank you for coming today.
    My wife did a magnificent job today, as she always does. This is our 
20th reunion, and Monday will be our 18th anniversary. It's been a 
humbling experience, you know. I mean, she was so great talking about 
health care on tele-


[[Page 1723]]

vision the week before last and having the country follow an issue that 
we have cared about for so long. And shortly after that, the U.S. News 
or somebody--USA Today--had the poor grace to commission a poll in which 
40 percent of the American people opined, in an opinion agreed with by 
100 percent of our classmates and faculty members here, that she was 
smarter than I am--[laughter]--just when I was beginning to feel at home 
in the job.
    Then as if to add insult to injury, I went to California and did a 
town meeting on television and went down to L.A. And I was very excited; 
they put me at the Beverly Hilton. And I knew Merv Griffin owned it, and 
I thought, well, maybe he'll come out and say hi, and I'll begin to 
really feel like a President again. And sure enough, he did. He came out 
and said hello, and there he was. And he said, ``I put you on the floor 
where I thought you belonged. And you have a very nice suite. But there 
is one permanent resident of the floor, and he'll be there to greet you 
when you get there.'' So my imagination was running wild. I got up to 
the floor where the suite was, and guess who the permanent resident is? 
Rodney Dangerfield. As God is my witness, he met me there, gave me a 
dozen roses with a card that said, ``A little respect. Rodney.'' 
[Laughter]
    You know, I was thinking just sitting here about the incredible 
events that our country has seen unfold in the last 3\1/2\ weeks at home 
and abroad: the developments in the Middle East and in Russia; the 
efforts we are making here to deal with health care; and the signing of 
the national service bill, which was one of the things that drove me 
into the campaign for President; the efforts we're making to pass the 
trade agreement with Mexico and Canada; the continuing troubles of 
Somalia. And I was thinking about what it was like 20 years ago when we 
were here, a time of student demonstrations when we were about to get 
out of Vietnam and about to get up to our ears in Watergate, when the 
culture of heavy rock music and drugs began to blur the sensibilities of 
a lot of Americans. And I noticed last night when I was reading a book 
on that time to Hillary that while we were at law school, the gifted 
singer Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose, sort of symbolic of the 
tragedy that was those years.
    It was also a time of great hope, as Hillary pointed out, a time of 
advances in civil rights, a time where the environmental movement really 
got going in our country, a time that the real strength of the women's 
movement began to be felt. It was a time, too, when we assumed that if 
we could just fix whatever it was we thought was wrong, that everything 
else would be okay.
    I remember at the end of my tenure here the Yale workers were on 
strike. And the head of the local AFL-CIO, Vinnie Sirabella, who just 
passed away recently, was a great friend of mine. And we were all 
thinking of ways we could support him and still go to class.
    The idea then was that if we could divide the pie a little more 
fairly, everything would be wonderful. Connecticut for the last several 
years has been obsessed with a deeper question, which is how to get the 
pie to grow again and whether there will be enough for people.
    Today as you look at where we are after 20 years, virtually all of 
us in our class have done pretty well through a combination of ability 
and hard work and, even though we may hate to admit it, blind luck. We 
have done pretty well. And we live in a world without many of the 
burdens that we grew up with. The most important one is that the threat 
of nuclear annihilation is receding, that the end of the cold war gave 
birth to new movements for democracy, for freedom, for market economics, 
not just in Russia where it has recently been reaffirmed but also in 
Latin America and in many new nations in Africa, all across the world.
    There was someone holding a sign when I drove in here through East 
Haven and New Haven that said ``Rabin and Arafat, Mandela and de Klerk, 
Clinton and Yeltsin: It's a lot to feel good about.'' And there is, to 
be sure. But it's also true that there are a lot of troubles in the 
world today causing the deaths of many people. Some of them we know a 
lot about; others we don't see very often on television, the problems of 
the Sudan or Angola. We now see more of what is going on in Georgia and 
not so much about Armenia and Azerbaijan.
    We know, too, that the world hasn't quite figured out, in this post-
cold-war world, how we're going to deal with a lot of these problems and 
whether we can actually, those of us who live in stable societies, reach 
into others and shape a different and more human course. And so we argue 
about what our responsibilities are and what is possible in Bosnia, in 
Somalia, in Haiti. And we do the best we can in a time of change, 
without some quick, easy theory like

[[Page 1724]]

containment which helped us in the cold war.
    Here at home, there's an awful lot of good, too. The movements 
toward opportunity for people from diverse backgrounds have continued 
and reached an enormous degree of success for those who can access them. 
We saw it when Colin Powell retired and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ascended to 
the Supreme Court, when there are now five African-Americans in the 
Cabinet of the President of the United States, when over 20 percent of 
our Presidential appointments are people of Hispanic or African-American 
origin. We are moving in the right direction in opening up opportunities 
in this country to all people. When we were here, there were only five 
women on the Federal bench. Now there are 91, and there are about to be 
a whole lot more.
    And this is an exciting time where technology is changing the nature 
of work and leisure and shortening the time of decision and bringing 
people closer together all across the globe. It is also a time when 
education still largely bears its own rewards, and those who get a good 
education can do pretty well in this old world. It's also well to 
remember that with all of our problems, most people in this country get 
up every day, go to work, obey the law, love their families, love their 
country desperately, and do what is right. I saw a big slice of that 
coming in from the airport as there were hundreds and hundreds of people 
in East Haven and New Haven waving their American flags. A postman 
stopped and put his hand over his heart because the President of the 
United States went by. I still marvel every day when I travel at how 
much people love this Nation.
    And what I want to say to you today is that the same is true even in 
the most distressed areas, in south central Los Angeles or the south 
Bronx. Most people who live there work for a living, pay their taxes, 
care desperately about their children, want the best for the future, and 
obey the law. But we also have to face the fact that we have a whole new 
and different set of challenges at home, some of which we could have 
imagined in 1973, others of which have grown all out of control.
    In 1973 we now know that real average hourly wages for our working 
people peaked. Median family income today is only $1,000 higher than it 
was 20 years ago, $1,000 higher. The growth in income inequality between 
those who are educated and those who are not has escalated dramatically, 
so that even though there are 50 percent more people in the work force 
of minority origin with 4 years of college education or more, the 
aggregate racial gaps in income are deeper because the education gap has 
grown so great and because of the escalating inequality of income in the 
last several years.
    We know that our country needs to invest more in creating a new 
world, but we're so riddled with debt it's hard to do it. And we know 
that like other wealthy countries--and maybe they're the company that 
misery loves--almost no rich country, including the United States, 
understands how to create more jobs at a rapid rate.
    We also know that there are a lot of changes we have to make. Many 
of you have written about them, talked about them. A lot of you are 
living them. And we see the reluctance, the aversion to change in the 
United States at a time when we are being caught up in all the realities 
of the global economy. I believe that one of the reasons we haven't been 
able to come to grips with these great challenges is that too many of us 
are too personally insecure in our own lives, our family lives, our work 
lives, our community lives, to have the courage and self-confidence it 
takes to take a different course. You can see it when people are worried 
about losing their jobs, or they know they're working harder for less. 
The average working family is spending much more time on the job now 
than they were when we were here in law school.
    I see and listen to the opposition to the North American Free Trade 
Agreement, something which I believe will make better the problems of 
the eighties that most people grieve about and clearly open a whole new 
world of opportunity to us with democracies in Latin America who care 
about us. And as I listen closely, I find that the overwhelming majority 
of opposition really reflects the insecurity of the people in 
opposition, based on the experience of the last 12 to 15 years. It has 
in short become the symbol, the receptacle, for the accumulated 
resentments of people who feel that they have worked hard and done their 
best and they are still losing ground. So that here is a case, which at 
least from my point of view, it is self-evident that we should take a 
course that will benefit the very people who are fighting against it. 
Why? Because of the insecurity people feel.
    People feel rampant insecurity on our streets.

[[Page 1725]]

The leading cause of violence among teenage boys today is death from 
gunshot wounds. I learned yesterday at a trauma center in New Jersey 
that a person who is shot is now 3 times more likely to die from the 
shot than 15 years ago, because they're likely to have more bullets in 
them with the growth of automatic and semiautomatic weapons and the 
spread on the street.
    We see crisis in America's families. Do you know, at the end of the 
World War II there was no difference in divorce rates and out-of-wedlock 
birth rates among the poor and the nonpoor in America, absolutely none. 
We were literally a pro-family society in a traditional way. Today there 
is a breathtaking difference in the rates of out-of-wedlock birth among 
the poor and the nonpoor. And that is only one symbol of the pressures 
on the American family today and the fact that we are creating, 
especially among younger people in poor distressed areas, mostly males 
but a lot of females, not just an underclass but an outer class, people 
for whom the future has no claim.
    If you look across this vast sea of people today, if you look at the 
Democrats and the Republicans, the liberals and the conservatives, the 
people who identify with the whole range of speakers who have been here 
today, you will see that we at least all pretty much have one thing 
common: The future had a claim on all of us. We dreamed of what life 
might be. We imagined what we might become. We gave up things we would 
otherwise have wished to do at various stages along our lives, first for 
ourselves and our own future, and later for our children because we 
wanted them to have a future, which required us to do or not do certain 
things in the moment.
    And now we live in a country with millions of people for whom the 
future is what happens in 10 or 20 minutes or maybe tomorrow, people who 
are often better armed than the local police, who act on impulse and 
take other people's lives, not so much because they are intrinsically 
bad but because they are totally unrooted and out of control, not bound 
in by the things that guided our behavior.
    And I say to you today, my friends, without regard to your age or 
your politics, we've all done pretty well. We were really fortunate to 
be able to come here; I don't care how smart we were or how hard we 
worked. There are young geniuses in cities today whose lives are being 
destroyed by what they are doing or not doing. And our job in this last 
decade of this century is to try to give people, without regard to their 
station in this country, the same chance we had to live up to the 
fullest of their God-given capacities and in the process to revitalize 
the American dream in our time.
    This is a challenging time. It is an interesting time. Nation states 
are in some ways less control over their own affairs than ever before. 
They have to cooperate with others to get things done in a global 
economy. And yet the forces of the global economy are taking away their 
autonomy at home. But we in America, if we are going to do our job by 
our people, we have got to face our problems here and get our collective 
acts together. And all of us, each in our way, have a responsibility for 
that.
    I would argue that there are at least three things on which we 
should be able to agree. Number one, we have to have a change in the way 
we approach our economy. It means different economic policies, different 
education policies. It means reaching out to the world, not turning away 
from the world. We are now only 20 percent of the world's GDP, where we 
used to be 40 percent at the end of the Second World War. No rich 
country creates jobs except through expanding its relationships with 
others.
    We also have to face the fact that a lot of our institutions are 
just plain old out of date. There are Members of Congress here; I 
appreciate their presence. They're going to have to go back next week 
and try to figure out how to expand or extend the unemployment benefits 
because so many of our Americans have been unemployed for so long. But 
really what they're doing--and they should do it, and I'm going to help 
them--but what we're doing is trying to put a Band-Aid on a seriously 
inadequate system because the unemployment system, just for example, was 
created for a time when people lost their jobs in a down economy; the 
economy got better; they got their jobs back. So you gave them a check 
in between because it wasn't their fault.
    Today, more and more people never get their old jobs back. The 
average person changes work eight times in a lifetime. We don't need an 
unemployment system. What we need is what my classmate and our Labor 
Secretary, Bob Reich, calls a reemployment system. And as long as we 
keep extending unemployment benefits alone instead of turning the whole 
thing upside-down and aggressively starting training programs

[[Page 1726]]

and job education programs in the beginning of the unemployment period, 
we're going to have a lot of very frustrated, angry Americans who 
desperately want to do right and who are losing their confidence and 
their courage to change.
    The second thing we have to do is to frankly face the fact that this 
Nation has spoken one way and acted another when we have to organize 
ourselves in a different way to become more secure. And we're either 
going to have to make up our minds to frankly acknowledge that, or we're 
going to have to bring our actions and our organization as a society 
into line with our rhetoric. And I just would like to mention three 
examples.
    First, family: There are now well over half the women who are 
mothers in this country are in the work force. We have got to make up 
our mind that as long as the economy mandates this--and the economic 
pressures of the time do--we have to find ways for people to be 
successful workers and successful parents. And that means we have to 
organize ourselves differently with regard to child care, family leave, 
and the incomes of people who have children and who work but they still 
don't make enough money to support them.
    Perhaps the most important thing we did in the economic program 
which passed the Congress, in addition to bringing the deficit down and 
keeping interest rates at a historic low, was to provide an increase in 
tax refunds and benefits to lower income working people so there would 
never be an excuse to be on welfare just to support your children. And 
so, you can say, ``You can work and still be a good parent and take care 
of your family.''
    That's why I felt so strongly about the family leave law. I'll just 
tell you one story, so you don't think it is just about programs. I went 
for my morning jog a couple of Sundays ago, and when I came in there was 
a family taking a tour of the White House, a rare occasion on Sunday 
morning. There was a father, a mother, and three children. The middle 
child was in a wheelchair. And my staff member said, ``Mr. President, 
this is one of those Make-A-Wish families. That little girl has cancer 
and is probably not going to make it, and she wanted to come to the 
White House, take a tour, and see the President.'' So I went over and 
talked to the family and had a nice visit. They were fine people, 
dealing with their grief and their problem with great dignity. And then 
I went upstairs and got cleaned up and came down and took a picture with 
them after I had my Presidential uniform on. And I bid them goodbye. But 
as I was walking away, the father grabbed me by the arm, and I turned 
around, and he said, ``Mr. President,'' he said, ``I want to tell you 
something. My little girl's having a tough time, and she may not make 
it. And these times I've spent with her are the most important times of 
my life. If it had not been for the family leave law, I would have had 
to choose between working at my job and supporting my family or giving 
up my job and my support for my family to spend this critical, precious 
time with my daughter. Don't ever believe it doesn't matter what 
decisions are made in this town.'' I say that not to be self-serving, 
but to remind you that there are real, practical consequences in the 
lives of families in this time in public policy.
    The second thing I want to mention is violence. This is the only 
country in the world where police have to go to work every day on 
streets with teenagers better armed than they are. This is the only 
country in the world that would be fiddling around after all these 
years. How many years has it been since Jim Brady got shot in the 
attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan? And we still haven't passed the 
Brady bill, because people are fiddling around the edges of it making 
parliamentary arguments because they're trying to find some way to 
please the people who don't like it. It's unconscionable.
    I'm telling you, when I was in California earlier this week, I 
talked by television on this interconnected town hall meeting to a young 
African-American teenager. He and his brother left the school they were 
in because it was too violent. He said, ``I don't want to be in a gang. 
I don't want to own a gun. I want to study. I want to do well. So does 
my brother. We went to a safer school.'' And the day they showed up at 
the safer school, they're standing in line to register for class, and 
his brother was shot down in front of him, just happened to be in the 
way of one of these arbitrary shootings. This is crazy, folks.
    How can I preach to people about NAFTA, education, think of the 
future, and you've got to worry about whether your kid's going to get 
shot going to school? We can do something about it. And it is time to 
close the massive yawning gap between our rhetoric and the way

[[Page 1727]]

we are organized in this society.
    And finally with regard to security, I see this health care issue as 
a defining moral challenge for our people. Not in the details--maybe 
Hillary and I don't have it all right; I'm open to that--but in the 
essence. How can we justify--here we are, we talk about America and the 
American dream and what a great country this is. And it's all true. But 
we have 37.4 million people, according to last week's study, who don't 
have any health insurance. We have 2 million people a month who lose 
their health insurance; 100,000 of them lose it permanently. We have a 
system in hemorrhage. We find it necessary to spend 14.5 percent of our 
income for a health care system when Canada spends 9 percent and more 
appropriately Japan and Germany, which have a lot of medical research, 
spend less than 9 percent.
    And some of it we want to spend more on, medical research and 
technology. Some of it we have to spend more on right now because we 
have more poor people, more people with AIDS, more teen births, more 
low-birthweight births, and a lot more violence, and that's all true. 
But we also have hospitals spending 25 percent of their money on 
paperwork. We also spend a dime on the dollar more on paperwork than any 
country in the world for health care. And we can't figure out how to 
have primary and preventive health care and give everybody health 
insurance. We want people to have the courage to change. We say, ``Well, 
we'll give you a good training program; you may have to change jobs 
eight times in a lifetime; you'll go from a big company to a little 
company to a medium-sized company.'' And we're saying to every American, 
``You could lose your health insurance tomorrow.'' And it is not right. 
How can you expect people to have the courage to change if they don't 
know whether in the change they will be able to take care of their 
children's most basic needs?
    The time has come for us to join the ranks of the civilized world 
and provide health security and comprehensive decent benefits to all of 
our people. We have got to do it. It is a huge problem in trying to 
guarantee labor mobility, high productivity in the small business 
workplace, and the ability of small business people to continue to 
function. I met a small business person this week with 12 employees 
whose premiums went up 40 percent this year, even though they did not 
have one single claim except for normal checkups. We have to do it. This 
is a security issue. And if you want Americans to change--just about 
everybody in this room never gives a thought to your health care, but 
I'm telling you tens of millions of people do. And we have got to do 
better. We have got to quit saying this is too complicated or there's 
this or that or the other problem, and so maybe it'll go away. It is a 
security issue closely tied to whether we will change.
    So there's an economic change argument. There's a security argument. 
The third thing I want to say to you is that we somehow have to recover, 
each in our own way, a sense of personal stake in the American 
community. We have to ask ourselves if we really believe we don't have a 
person to waste, if we really think everybody's important, if we really 
think people who follow our laws, no matter how different they are from 
us, should have a place at the American table, and if we really think 
that we all have a responsibility to do something about it.
    That's why I wanted this national service program to pass so badly, 
because there are now millions of young people who are tired of the 
``me, too,'' ``let me have it first; forget about everybody else'' ethic 
that dominated too much of the 1980's. And they want to give something 
back. They need a way to do it.
    But I picked up the paper today, and some of these kids I'm going to 
see when I leave here, school kids, were saying, ``We want the President 
to know that we have a good school,'' and ``We want the President to 
know that we're trying to be good kids,'' and ``We're going to tell the 
President that we hope somebody will show up and paint the walls in our 
schools.'' Well, somebody who lives here ought to show up and paint the 
walls in their school. That ought to be done.
    And I tell you, the reason that I have done my best to promote 
Professor Carter's book ``The Culture of Disbelief '' is that I believe 
a critical element of our reestablishing a sense of community in America 
is trying to unite the inner values that drive so many Americans with 
the outer compulsion we have to have to work together. The problem that 
I have with so much of the religious right today is not that they may 
differ with me about what is or is not morally right. That has always 
been a part of America. The problem I have is that so many of them seem 
to believe that their number one obligation

[[Page 1728]]

is to make whatever they think is wrong illegal, and then not worry 
about what kind of affirmative duties we have to one another.
    But I think there ought to be ways we can talk. Let me just give you 
one example. I gave a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the campaign. And 
the folks that disagreed with me on the abortion issue were 
demonstrating, as they did during the campaign. And that's their 
American right, and welcome to it. And on the front row at this speech 
in the parking lot of the Quaker Oats Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was 
a woman who had a pro-choice button on. But she was also holding a child 
of another race who had AIDS, that she adopted from another State, after 
she had been abandoned by her husband and was raising two kids in an 
apartment house. And she still adopted a child of another race, from 
another State, dying of AIDS, because she said it was her moral 
responsibility to affirm that child's life.
    Now, which group was more pro-life? We have a friend who is pro-
choice but adopted an Asian baby with no arms. There is a Member of 
Congress who has adopted six children, who is pro-life--pro-choice, I 
mean. The point I make here is not an attack on the pro-life. The point 
I make is, surely we have something to say to each other about this. 
Surely we do. If you look at the work of the Catholic Church and the 
Pentecostal Church, to mention two, in promoting adoptions--I say to 
you, surely there is a way we can breach these great divides and talk 
together about how our actions ought to affirm what we can agree on. 
That is the point I want to make.
    Surely there is a way we can acknowledge, too, that no matter how 
important we Democrats think programs are, a lot of the changes we need 
in this country have to come from the inside out and require some 
personal contact with people who can give context and structure and 
order as well as love to a whole generation of Americans we are in 
danger of losing. There is a lot we have to talk about in this American 
community.
    And I did not come here to attack any group today motivated by their 
own version of what they think God wants them to do but simply to say I 
think God wants us to sit down and talk to one another and see what 
values we share and see how we can put them inside the millions and 
millions of Americans who are living in chaos. I believe we could do 
better if we talked to one another more and shouted at one another less. 
And I hope that together we can make that decision.
    Let me just say this, most everybody my age who came to Yale Law 
School could have gone someplace else to law school. And most of us came 
here at least in part because we believed that Yale would not only teach 
us to be good lawyers in the technical sense, not only to understand 
individual rights and individual contractual obligations and how 
particular areas of law work so that we could be successful as 
practitioners, but also how it all fit into the larger society. A huge 
percentage of our crowd came here because we thought Yale would teach us 
how to succeed as professional lawyers and how to be good citizens as 
well.
    And as we look toward the 21st century with the need for America to 
change, with the desperate need for us to reestablish the security that 
most of us took for granted when we were children, with the need to 
rebuild the American community, I say to you, my fellow classmates, we 
have much to do. Yale gave us the tools to do it with. We owe it to the 
rest of the country because of our success to share what we know and 
what we can give to the future so that we can enter the next century 
with the American dream alive and the American family strong.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 3:05 p.m. in The Commons. In his remarks, 
he referred to Guido Calabresi, dean, Yale Law School, and his wife, 
Anne; Richard C. Levin, president of the university, and his wife, Jane; 
Joseph D. Mandel, president, Yale Law School Association; Ezra Laderman, 
dean, Yale School of Music; Neal Steinman, Yale Law School class of 1971 
alumnus, who died in January; and Myres S. McDougal, Sterling professor 
emeritus of law.