[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[July 29, 1994]
[Pages 1335-1338]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the American Legion Boys Nation
July 29, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Welcome to the 
White House. I want to say a special word of welcome to your president, 
Thomas Whitehead, and your vice president, Robert Mattivi, and to Jack 
Mercier, George Blume, and Ron Engel. And to all of you, welcome and 
congratulations.
    I have a special treat for you today. This has been a remarkable 
week for America, a great week for you to be here. We had the signing of 
the agreement between the King of Jordan and the Prime Minister of 
Israel ending the state of war between them, the announcement that 
Russia would withdraw all of its troops from Central and Eastern Europe, 
for the first time since the end of World War II, by the end of August. 
We had the announcement today that our economy grew 3.7 percent in the 
last quarter, that jobless claims are down, that the robust growth is 
continuing. It's produced now 3.8 million new jobs in the last year and 
a half.
    And yesterday we had the historic agreement by the Senate and the 
House on what will be the toughest and smartest crime bill in the 
history of the country, that will put 100,000 more police officers on 
the street, ban assault weapons, provide a ``three strikes and you're 
out'' law, and provide billions of dollars to young people for 
activities to give our kids something to say yes to as well as to punish 
people who do the wrong thing.
    And then today we had an historic event just about an hour ago, 
where a new Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer, 
was confirmed. And I thought it would be a nice thing if Mr. Justice 
Breyer, accompanied by Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch, would come 
here and make his first public appearance to you. So I'd like to ask 
Justice Breyer and Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch--[applause].
    I wanted to say just a word about this, and then I'd like to ask 
Justice Breyer to come up here and speak to you for a moment or two, and 
then they'll all have to go back to work.
    Let me thank Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch and Chairman Biden 
and the other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who recommended 
Judge Breyer by a unanimous vote to the Senate as a whole.
    This gentleman has set a standard of excellence and fidelity to the 
law and the Constitution of which every American can be proud. When he 
came before the Senate, there was a very broad spectrum of praise for 
his appointment among Democrats and Republicans alike, among people who 
consider themselves liberals and people who consider themselves 
conservatives.
    I have now had the honor to appoint two people to the United States 
Supreme Court. Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer have now shown that 
we can have excellence on the Supreme Court that unites the American 
people, rather than divides them.
    Let me say that--we were joking a little out here--the Founding 
Fathers in their wisdom said that there had to be somebody hanging 
around to resolve these fundamental constitutional disputes, and so they 
created the Supreme Court. And they didn't want the Supreme Court to be 
subject to undue pressure, so they gave the Justices of the Supreme 
Court a lifetime term, so they could say no to everybody, including the 
President. And we were laughing on the way out that Senator Kennedy and 
Senator Hatch are running for reelection, and of course, the President 
gets a 4-year term. Now Justice Breyer has a lifetime term. You are 
looking at the only man in America that you've met lately with total job 
security. [Laughter]
    There is a reason for it. Someone needs to be free to decide what 
the Constitution requires

[[Page 1336]]

of the rest of us without the pressures of day-to-day politics. But that 
imposes on the President and on the United States Senate a very heavy 
responsibility to pick someone with the character and wisdom to use that 
awesome power and that lifetime guarantee in the interests of our 
Constitution, our values, and all the American people, without regard to 
their race, their income, and their background. I believe Justice Breyer 
will be that kind of person, and it's an honor for me to introduce him 
to you at this time.

[At this point, Justice Stephen Breyer made brief remarks.]

    The President. Well, I am glad we were able to do that, and I hope 
you enjoyed it.
    As all of you know, we share a common bond. I sat where you are 31 
years ago, and Senator Kennedy's brother was here as President. 
Ironically, Senator Kennedy pulled out the record of what President 
Kennedy said to us when I was here where you are, and on that day he 
happened to be meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So he brought 
them out to meet the Boys Nation delegates. And so you'll now always be 
able to remember this, and I think as Justice Breyer goes on to a long 
and distinguished career on the Supreme Court, when you read about him 
or you hear some decision that he's written, I hope you will always 
remember this day with pride and with some amount of joy.
    I was thinking a little today about how different the world is now 
from what it was like 31 years ago when I was here. We were in the 
middle of the cold war; Russia was still the Soviet Union; our troops 
faced each other, divided, in Berlin. We still had huge amounts of legal 
segregation in large parts of the United States. There were all kinds of 
problems. But at the same time, we had enormous faith in the capacity of 
our economy and our people to solve those problems.
    Now the cold war is over. We had all those good events I told you 
about this week. We have been working very, very hard to try to deal 
with the horrible tragedy in Rwanda. And again, I have been so impressed 
with and grateful for our military in their capacity to move quickly 
over there to take a terrible situation--we have delivered 20 million 
packets of oral rehydration therapy to try to help the people with 
cholera. We've gone from zero to 100,000 gallons of water a day to serve 
the people there almost overnight.
    We have all these things going on. And yet we know that there's 
still a sense of foreboding, of worry in our country because we do have 
a lot of problems. There's still a lot of people that want jobs that 
don't have them. There are people who have jobs who are insecure in 
those jobs. We have people who are growing up in mean streets and tough 
neighborhoods where there's too much crime and violence. There was a 
study last week which showed young people between the ages of 12 and 17 
are 5 times more likely than people younger than or older than them to 
be victims of violent crime, that even in cities where the crime rate is 
going down, often it's going up among young people.
    So there is a disturbing as well as a hopeful atmosphere in the 
country. The thing I always love about Boys Nation is that I can look 
out and be guaranteed I'll see 96 optimists. And that's a very important 
thing for our country because a great deal of how we live and whether we 
go forward depends upon our willingness to view the future with 
possibility and hope. And a big part of the battle I fight around here 
as President every day is to try to keep people's spirits up and their 
eyes on the future and thinking about big things, not little things, and 
believing that we can make a difference. And I believe that.
    I ran for President because I was very concerned about the direction 
of the country. We had the economy going down and the deficit going up, 
middle class people being burdened more, while we weren't investing 
enough in our young people, in our future. The country was coming apart 
when I thought we ought to be coming together. And my simple mission is 
to make sure that the American dream is there for you in the 21st 
century and to do it by restoring the economy, rebuilding our sense of 
community, empowering individuals to take responsibility for themselves 
and to do it by putting the power of Government on the side of ordinary 
Americans.
    The first thing I tried to do was to get our economic house in 
order. We had quadrupled the debt of the United States in 12 years. You 
were facing a prospect, by the time you were my age, we'd be spending a 
third or more of all your tax money just paying off our deficit.
    Now, we've had the biggest deficit reduction program in history. We 
have reduced the size

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of the Federal Government dramatically. By the end of this decade, your 
National Government will be under 2 million people in size for the first 
time since I came here when President Kennedy was President--smallest 
Federal Government in 30 years. We will have 3 years of deficit 
reduction in a row for the first time since Harry Truman was President 
of the United States. And it's produced 3.8 million jobs and a 1\1/2\ 
percent drop in the unemployment rate. Last year, we had the largest 
number of new businesses started in the United States since the end of 
World War II, in any year. So we're moving the economy in the right 
direction.
    What else do we have to do? We've got to make sure young people are 
ready to compete in it. We need a system of lifetime learning in which a 
young person, who will change jobs on average seven or eight times in a 
lifetime, will know that he or she can always, always get the training, 
the skills, the knowledge that you need if you have to make a change.
    You know, when you make changes in life, they can either be very 
frightening or very exciting. And usually, changes are a little bit of 
both, aren't they? Usually changes are a little bit of both. And what 
keeps our country going is knowing that changes always have more hope 
than fear in them, that there's more excitement than there is 
reservation. And every time in our country we come to the end of one era 
and start another, there's almost a mental war that goes on inside the 
American people: Are we going to be scared, or are we going to be 
hopeful? Because we've always had problems, and we're always going to 
have problems. The Scripture says we'll have problems until the end of 
the Earth. It's part of our human nature, right?
    So when we come to the end of one era and we start another, the 
issue is, will our dominant feeling be fear or hope? In the 20th 
century, when World War I was over, the American people said, we do not 
have any more energy for the problems of the world. We withdrew from the 
world. We elected a President who said he would take us back to 
normalcy, whatever that meant, and give everybody a good lettin' alone. 
And there was this huge uprising of the Ku Klux Klan right after World 
War I and a huge uprising of a Red scare--you know, there was a 
Communist under every bush.
    At the end of World War II, the same thing happened, but we had a 
President named Harry Truman who said, ``We're not going to walk away 
from our problems at home; we're not going to walk away from our 
obligations abroad.'' He passed the GI bill to give the soldiers coming 
home housing and education and a way to support their families. He put 
in motion the system that allowed us to stop communism and win the cold 
war. He passed the Marshall plan to restore Europe and Japan after World 
War II so that even our former enemies could become our allies and our 
trading partners. Today, America has a very close relationship with both 
Germany and Japan, our bitter enemies in World War II, fighting for 
democracy, fighting for economic growth.
    But all the time, there were people who said, ``Oh, I'm more scared 
than full of hope.'' There were people who said Harry Truman was 
radical, incompetent, unfit to be President, too liberal--accused him of 
being soft on communism. At that time--some of you will read about this 
when you go to college--not long after that, Senator Joseph McCarthy 
from Wisconsin started saying every third person he met was a Communist. 
It's interesting, because Wisconsin has historically been one of the 
most progressive States in America. But what it shows you is, at the end 
of one time and the beginning of another, when people are used to 
looking at the world through this set of glasses and then they haven't 
put on another set of glasses yet, anybody can be confused.
    And that's what we're seeing today. We've come to the end of the 
cold war, and I can no longer be President and just tell you that we'll 
view everything in terms of our competition with the Russians, because 
it's not true anymore. We're cooperating with the Russians. I just was 
elated the week before last when the United States Congress passed by 
overwhelming majorities our continuation in the international space 
station project which now is not an American project to put a space 
station in the sky, it's an American, a European, a Japanese, a 
Canadian, and now a Russian project. We're going into the future 
together. And that's good.
    But what it means is, when you're trying to get people to build the 
future and when there's not an obvious enemy and when you have a lot of 
responsibilities, there's a big question out there in the country. Are 
we going to be dominated by our hopes or our fears? Are we going to be 
builders or dividers? When we look at

[[Page 1338]]

America's problems and promise, is the glass half empty, or is the glass 
half full? You wouldn't be here if you didn't think the glass was half 
full, if you didn't believe in yourselves, your communities, and the 
future of your country.
    What I want to say to you goes way beyond any kind of partisan 
politics or issue. It is that this country has now been around for a 
very long time, 218 years since the Declaration of Independence, 11 
years less than that since the Constitution. We have been around for a 
very long time. And the way we have survived is by believing in the 
future and by coming together, not being driven apart. And we've had to 
redefine over and over and over again what coming together means. 
Upstairs in the next floor up here, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the 
Emancipation Proclamation, in this house, liberating the slaves. Before 
that, coming together meant what all the white folks decided to do. He 
redefined that forever. It took us another 100 years and more to figure 
out how to live together. We haven't quite got it all worked out yet, 
but we've made a lot of progress.
    Now what we have to do is to figure out, how are we going to restore 
our economy? How are we going to make it work for all Americans? How is 
all this racial and other diversity we have in our country going to make 
us stronger and more united? How do we stand up for what we believe in 
our religion and our politics and still respect people who are totally 
different from what we are? How can we live together? Los Angeles County 
alone has 150 different racial and ethnic groups, one county. Can we be 
an American family?
    I can tell you this. If we figure it out, nobody can stop this 
country because in a world where the global economy gets smaller and 
smaller and smaller, having somebody in your country who's an American 
first but who understands every other culture in the world is a huge 
plus. It is a big deal we should be happy about.
    So, can we be a community again? How can we rescue all these kids 
that are in trouble? How can we drive the crime rate down and the 
graduation rate up? How can we empower people so that they don't think 
the Government's doing something for them but the Government is doing 
something with them to give them the skills to take responsibility for 
their own lives? These are the great questions. How can we live in a 
world where we promote peace and prosperity by taking care of the 
remaining nuclear threats, stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass 
destruction, promoting democracy, and at least trying to limit chaos and 
human suffering as we are doing in Rwanda?
    And it is clear, as we move toward the next century, to me, that a 
major, a major, major, major factor in what it looks like, whether the 
American dream is alive for you and your children, is whether we believe 
we can do these things.
    And so, that's what I want to leave you with. Whatever your 
politics, whatever your philosophy, whatever your party, do not 
participate in this movement that happens at the end of every great era 
to be cynical, to be negative, to be divisive, to look down on your 
friends and neighbors, to see the glass as half empty, not half full. 
This is America. The glass is half full, and you can fill it up the rest 
of the way if you are determined to do it.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 4:08 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Jack Mercier, director of 
activities, and Dr. George Blume, legislative program director, Boys 
Nation; and Ronald A. Engel, deputy director for Americanism, American 
Legion.