[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[May 25, 1994]
[Pages 984-989]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the United States Naval Academy Commencement Ceremony in 
Annapolis, Maryland
May 25, 1994

    Thank you very much, Secretary Dalton, for those fine remarks. 
Admiral Lynch, thank you for your comments and your leadership here at 
the Academy. Admiral Owens, Admiral Boorda, General Mundy, proud parents 
and family members, faculty and staff of the Academy, brigade of the 
midshipmen: It's a great honor for me to join you at this moment of 
celebration. I'm delighted to be back here on the eve of the Academy's 
150th year.
    Since 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy has provided superb leadership 
for our Navy, for our Marine Corps, and for our entire Nation. And I 
cannot imagine a more valuable contribution.
    The last time I was here, I joined some of you for lunch at King 
Hall. And ever since then, whenever people have asked me what I liked 
best about my visit to the Naval Academy I try to think of elevated 
things to say, but part of my answer is always pan pizza and chicken 
tenders. [Laughter] In memory of that luxurious meal--[laughter]--I have 
today a small graduation present. In keeping with longstanding tradition 
I hereby grant amnesty to all midshipmen who received demerits for minor 
conduct offenses. [Laughter] See, today the interest group is in the 
stands, not on the field. [Laughter]
    Next week I will have the proud responsibility to represent our 
Nation in Europe in the ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of D-
Day, the invasion of Italy, and World War II. That war marked the 
turning point of our century when we joined with our allies to stem a 
dark tide of dictatorship, aggression, and terror and to start a flow of 
democracy and freedom that continues to sweep the world down to the 
present day.
    That war also marked an era of sacrifice almost unequaled in our 
entire history. Some 400,000 of our fellow countrymen and women lost 
their lives. Over half a million more were wounded. Today we have among 
us many who took part at Normandy and the other great battles of World 
War II, such as retired Commander Alfred McKowan, Academy class of 1942, 
who served aboard the U.S.S. Quincy off Utah Beach on D-Day. They're a 
great reminder of what our armed services have done for America. And I 
would ask all the veterans of that war to stand now so that the rest of 
us might honor them. [Applause]
    To the members of the class of 1994, my parents' generation and your 
grandparents' generation did not end their work with the liberation of 
Europe and victory in the Pacific. They came back to work wonders at 
home. They created the GI bill so that freedom's heroes could reenter 
civilian life and succeed and build strong families and strong 
communities. They built our Interstate Highway System. They turned our 
economy into a global wonder. They forged the tools of international 
security and trade that helped to rebuild our former allies and our 
former enemies so that we could ultimately win the cold war. It brought 
us decades of peace and prosperity.
    Today we have come to celebrate your graduation from this Academy 
and your commission as officers of the United States Navy and Marine 
Corps. As we do, the question which hangs over

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your head is the question of what your generation will accomplish, as 
the generation of World War II accomplished so much.
    Lately, there have been a number of books written, not about you, of 
course, but about your generation that says that so many people your age 
are afflicted with a sense of fatalism and cynicism, a sort of 
Generation X that believes America's greatest days are behind us and 
there are no great deeds left to be done. Well, this class, this very 
class is a rebuke to those cynics of any age.
    Look at the extraordinary effort you have made to become leaders in 
service to America: formation at dawn, classes at 8 a.m., rigorous 
mandatory PT, parading on Worden Field, summers spent aboard ship or 
down at Quantico. Most college students never go through anything like 
it. It's a routine that turns young men and women into officers and that 
has taken your basketball team to the NCAA Tournament.
    I deeply respect your decision to serve our Nation. Your service may 
take many forms in the years ahead: commanding ships in combat, training 
aviators for flight, running a business, perhaps one day even sitting in 
the Oval Office. Your career, regardless of its past, will require 
sacrifices, time away from loved ones, and potentially, service in the 
face of danger. But regardless of where your careers take you, you 
clearly understand the imperative of civic duty. There's no brighter 
badge of citizenship than the path you have chosen and the oath you are 
about to take.
    You just heard Secretary Dalton speak of President Kennedy's 
wonderful speech here at the Naval Academy when he was here. I read that 
speech carefully before I came here. And among other things, President 
Kennedy said, along the lines that Secretary Dalton quoted, that if 
someone asked you what you did with your life, there's not a better 
answer than to say, ``I served as an officer in the United States 
Navy.''
    The challenge for your generation is to remember the deeds of those 
who have served before you and now to build on their work in a new and 
very different world. The world wars are over; the cold war has been 
won. Now it is our job to win the peace.
    For the first time in history, we have the chance to expand the 
reach of a democracy and economic progress across the whole of Europe 
and to the far reaches of the world. The first step on the mission is to 
keep our own Nation secure. And your very graduation today helps ensure 
that. Today the American people have 874 new leaders, 874 new plates of 
battle armor on our ship of state, 874 reasons to sleep better at night.
    The past 4 years have been a time of challenge and exertion for each 
of you, a time of challenge and exertion, too, for the U.S. Navy and for 
this Academy. The Navy has had to confront the difficulty of the 
Tailhook scandal. And this year the Academy had to confront improper 
conduct regarding an academic examination. These are troubling events, 
to be sure, because our military rests on honor and leadership. But 
ultimately, the test of leadership is not constant flawlessness. Rather 
it is marked by a commitment to continue always to strive for the 
highest standards, to learn honesty when one falls short, and to do the 
right thing when it happens.
    I came here today because I want America to know there remains no 
finer Navy in the world than the United States Navy and no finer 
training ground for naval leadership then the United States Naval 
Academy. You have my confidence. You have America's confidence.
    These are challenging times to be in the Navy because it's a new era 
in world affairs. When this class entered the Academy in June of 1990, 
think of this, Israel and the PLO were sworn enemies; South Africa lived 
under apartheid; Moscow, Kiev, and Riga all were still part of the 
Soviet Union; and the United States and the Soviet Union still pointed 
their nuclear weapons in massive numbers at each other. But now Nelson 
Mandela is the President of his nation. There is genuine progress toward 
peace in the Middle East between Israel and the PLO and the other 
parties. Where the Kremlin once imposed its will, a score of new free 
states now grapple with the burden of freedom. And the United States and 
Russia at least no longer aim their nuclear weapons at each other.
    These amazing transformations make our Nation more secure. They also 
enable us to devote more resources to the profound challenges we face 
here at home, from providing jobs for our people to advancing education 
and training for all of them, to making our streets safer, to ensuring 
health care for all of our citizens, and in the end building an economy 
that can compete and win well into the 21st century.

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    But the world's changes also can create uncertainty for those who 
have committed their careers to military service. Indeed, they create 
uncertainty for the United States. And in this time of uncertainty they 
tempt some to cut our defenses too far.
    At the end of the cold war it was right to reduce our defense 
spending. But let us not forget that this new era has many dangers. We 
have replaced a cold war threat of a world of nuclear gridlock with a 
new world threatened with instability, even abject chaos, rooted in the 
economic dislocations that are inherent in the change from communism to 
market economics, rooted in religious and ethnic battles long covered 
over by authoritarian regimes now gone, rooted in tribal slaughters, 
aggravated by environmental disasters, by abject hunger, by mass 
migration across tenuous national borders. And with three of the Soviet 
Union's successor states now becoming nonnuclear and the tension between 
the U.S. and Russia over nuclear matters declining, we still must not 
forget that the threat of weapons of mass destruction remain in the 
continuing disputes we have over North Korea and elsewhere with 
countries who seek either to develop or to sell or to buy such weapons. 
So we must, we must do better. For this generation to expand freedom's 
reach, we must always keep America out of danger's reach.
    Last year I ordered a sweeping review--we called it the bottom-up 
review--to ensure that in this new era we have a right-sized Navy, 
Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force for the post-cold-war era. That is 
especially important for our naval forces. For even with all the changes 
in the world, some basic facts endure: We are a maritime nation; over 60 
percent of our border is seacoast. Over 70 percent of the world is 
covered by water, and over 90 percent of the human race lives within our 
Navy's reach from the sea. Now, as long as these facts remain true, we 
need naval forces that can dominate the sea, project our power, and 
protect our interests.
    We've known that lesson for over 200 years now, since the time 
Admiral John Paul Jones proclaimed, ``Without a respectable Navy, alas, 
America.'' The right-size defense costs less but still costs quite a 
bit. That is why this year I have resisted attempts to impose further 
cuts on our defense budget.
    I want you to understand this clearly. It is important for your 
generation and your children to bring down this terrible debt we 
accumulated in recent years. And I have asked the Congress to eliminate 
outright over 100 programs, to cut over 200 others. We've presented a 
budget that cuts discretionary domestic spending for the first time 
since 1969. That will give us 3 years of deficit reduction in a row for 
the first time since Harry Truman was President of the United States 
right after World War II. But we should not cut defense further. And I 
thank the Congress this week for resisting the calls to do so. That 
enables us to answer John Paul Jones' cry.
    Today you can see the importance of our naval forces all around the 
world. Right now, at this very moment as you sit here, the U.S.S. 
Saratoga and her battle group are steaming in the Adriatic to help 
enforce the no-fly zone and to protect the safe havens in Bosnia. At 
this very moment, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson is in the Persian Gulf to help 
enforce sanctions on Iraq. Right now, the U.S.S. Independence is 
patrolling the waters of Northeast Asia to protect our allies and 
interests in Japan, Korea, and throughout the Asian-Pacific region.
    As we adjust our forces to a new era, our motto should still be: 
``Reduce where we should, but strengthen as we must.'' That's why we're 
investing in new weapons such as the next carrier, CVN-76; our new Sea 
Wolf attack submarine; new AEGIS ships, like the DDG-51; new air 
capabilities like F-18 upgrades and the Joint Advanced Strike 
Technology. It's why we're improving our weapons systems and making the 
technology that won Operation Desert Storm even better: Tomahawk 
missiles with increased accuracy and target area and better night-
fighting capabilities for our Harrier jump jets and other aircraft, so 
we can not only own the night today but dominate the night tomorrow.
    We have been able to afford a right-sized military at lower cost, 
but this year we must continue to fight any deeper cuts to defense. I 
want to emphasize how important it is that the House of Representatives 
and the Senate do that. I want to thank Congressman Gilchrest, who is 
here, and Congressman Machtley from Rhode Island, a graduate of the 
Naval Academy, also here, and their colleagues for their support for the 
C-17 vote and for their continuing support for an adequate military. 
This is a bipartisan issue; it knows no party. We have done all we 
should do, and we now must support an adequate defense.

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    We are working to safeguard the quality of the most important 
defense asset of all, you and the more than one million other men and 
women in uniform, who stand sentry over our security. Today our Armed 
Forces are clearly and without dispute the best trained, the best 
equipped, the best prepared, and the best motivated military on the face 
of the Earth. As long as I am President, that will continue to be the 
truth.
    The question of our security in this era still ultimately depends 
upon our decisions about where to bring our military power to bear. That 
is what makes it possible for our enormous economic strength to assert 
itself at home and around the world. And there is no decision any 
President takes more seriously than the decision to send Americans into 
harm's way.
    History teaches us that there is no magic formula, nor should a 
President ever try to draw the line so carefully that we would 
completely rule out the use of our military in circumstances where it 
might later become important. After all, the mere possibility of 
American force is itself a potent weapon all around the world. But this 
is clear: We must be willing to fight to defend our land and our people, 
first and foremost. That's why we responded forcefully when we 
discovered an Iraqi plot to assassinate former President Bush. And the 
Tomahawks we fired that day were fired by the Navy.
    We must be willing to fight to protect our vital interests. And 
that's why we've adopted a defense strategy for winning any two major 
regional conflicts nearly simultaneously. We must be willing to fight to 
protect our allies. That's why we deployed Patriot missiles to South 
Korea, and working with others--working with others--we must be willing 
to use force when other American interests are threatened. And that's 
why we sought a stronger role for NATO in Bosnia.
    The hardest cases involve the many ethnic and religious conflicts 
that have erupted in our era. The end of the superpower standoff lifted 
the lid from a cauldron of long-simmering hatreds. Now the entire global 
terrain is bloody with such conflicts, from Rwanda to Georgia. We cannot 
solve every such outburst of civil strife or militant nationalism simply 
by sending in our forces. We cannot turn away from them, but our 
interests are not sufficiently at stake in so many of them to justify a 
commitment of our folks. Nonetheless, as the world's greatest power, we 
have an obligation to lead and, at times when our interests and our 
values are sufficiently at stake, to act.
    Look at the example of the former Yugoslavia. For centuries, that 
land marked a tense and often violent fault line between empires and 
religions. The end of the cold war and the dissolution of that country 
into so many new republics surfaced all those ancient tensions again, 
triggering Serb aggression, ethnic cleansing, and the most brutal 
European conflict since the Second World War.
    Whether we get involved in any of the world's ethnic conflicts in 
the end must depend on the cumulative weight of the American interests 
at stake. Now, in Bosnia, we clearly have an interest in preventing the 
spread of the fighting into a broader European war, in providing that 
NATO can still be a credible force for peace in the post-cold-war era in 
this first-ever involvement of NATO outside a NATO country, in stemming 
the incredibly destabilizing flow of refugees from the conflict and in 
helping to stop the slaughter of innocents.
    These interests do not warrant our unilateral involvement, but they 
do demand that we help to lead a way to a workable peace agreement if 
one can be achieved, and that if one can be achieved, we help to enforce 
it. Our administration is committed to help achieve such a resolution, 
working with others such as NATO, the United Nations, and Russia.
    Those efforts have not been easy or smooth, but we have produced 
results. By securing NATO enforcement of the no-fly zone over Bosnia, we 
kept the war from escalating into the air. We initiated humanitarian air 
drops and have now participated in the longest humanitarian airlift in 
history. We secured NATO enforcement of the exclusion zones around 
Sarajevo and Gorazde, and as a result, the people of Sarajevo have 
experienced over 3 months of relative calm, and Gorazde is no longer 
being shelled. And by stepping up diplomatic engagement, we have worked 
with others to foster a breakthrough agreement between the Croats and 
the Bosnians, signed here in Washington, which I believe eventually will 
lead to a broader settlement.
    One of the dreams of World War II was that after the war, through 
the United Nations and in other ways, the United States might be able to 
cooperate with others to help resolve the most difficult problems of our 
age, not al-


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ways to have its own way, not always to be able to prescribe every move, 
but in order to help resolve the problems of the world without having to 
commit the lives of our own soldiers where they should not be committed 
and still being able to play a positive role. That is what we are 
attempting to work out in Bosnia. And if it can be done--if it can be 
done--we'll be on the way to managing some of this incredible chaos that 
has threatened to engulf the world in which you will raise your 
children.
    Today I want to acknowledge the outstanding contributions of Admiral 
Mike Boorda which were made to our efforts in Bosnia. His stunning 
leadership there, his clarity of thought, and resolve of purpose is one 
of the key reasons I named him to be our new Chief of Naval Operations. 
Thank you, Admiral Boorda.
    At every turn, we have worked to move the parties there toward a 
workable political solution. This is one of those conflicts that can 
only end at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. They can 
fight for another 100 years and not resolve it there. At every turn we 
have rejected the easy-out of simplistic ideas that sound good on bumper 
stickers but that would have tragic consequences. The newest of these is 
that we should simply unilaterally break the United Nations arms embargo 
on Bosnia and the other former Yugoslav states.
    I do not support that arms embargo, and I never have. We worked with 
our allies and tried to persuade all of them that we should end it. Now 
some say we should simply violate the embargo on our own because it was 
a bad idea to impose it in the first place. Well, if we did that, it 
would kill the peace process; it would sour our relationships with our 
European allies in NATO and in the U.N.; it would undermine the 
partnership we are trying to build with Russia across a whole broad 
range of areas; it would undermine our efforts to enforce U.N. embargoes 
that we like, such as those against Sadaam Hussein, Colonel Qadhafi, and 
General Cedras in Haiti.
    We simply must not opt for options and action that sound simple and 
painless and good but which will not work in this era of interdependence 
where it is important that we leverage American influence and leadership 
by proving that we can work with others, especially when others have 
greater and more immediate stakes and are willing to put their soldiers 
in harm's way.
    Our administration will not walk away from this Bosnian conflict. 
But we will not embrace solutions that are wrong. We plan to continue 
the course we have chosen, raising the price on those who pursue 
aggression, helping to provide relief to the suffering, and working with 
our partners in Europe to move the parties to a workable agreement. It 
is not quick. It is not neat. It is not comfortable. But I am convinced 
in a world of interdependence, where we must lead by working with 
others, it is the right path. It is the one that preserves our 
leadership, preserves our treasure, and commits our forces in the proper 
way.
    The world's most tearing conflicts in Bosnia and elsewhere are not 
made in a day. And one of the most frustrating things that you may have 
to live with throughout your life is that many of these conflicts will 
rarely submit to instant solutions. But remember this, it took years 
after D-Day to not only end the war but to build a lasting peace. It 
took decades of patience and strength and resolve to prevail in the cold 
war.
    And as with generations going before, we must often be willing to 
pay the price of time, sometimes the most painful price of all. There is 
no better source of the courage and constancy of our Nation that we will 
lead in this era than this Academy and our Armed Forces. This Academy 
has prepared you to lead those Armed Forces. As you take your place in 
the Navy and the Marine Corps, always bear in mind the heroism, the 
sacrifice, the leadership of those who have served before you.
    I think, in particular, of one of the stories that comes out of D-
Day, June 6th, 1944. On that gray dawn, as U.S. Rangers approached 
Pointe du Hoc, they were raked by German fire from the cliff above. One 
landing craft was sunk; others were endangered. But then, an American 
destroyer, the U.S.S. Satterlee, along with a British destroyer, came to 
the rescue. They came in perilously close to the shore, and opened fire 
with all their guns at the Germans who were raining fire down on the 
Rangers. By its actions, the Satterlee saved American lives and enabled 
the Rangers to carry out their now-famous mission. Forty-eight years 
later, a Ranger Platoon leader said, ``Someday I'd love to meet up with 
somebody from Satterlee so I can shake his hand and thank him.''
    The valor of those who proceeded you is the stuff of inspiration. A 
great country must always remember the sacrifices of those who went be-


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fore and made our freedom possible. But even greater accomplishments lie 
ahead if you can make them happen. For remember this: When our memories 
exceed our dreams, we have begun to grow old. It is the destiny of 
America to remain forever young.
    As the guardians of your generation's freedom and our future, may 
you never know directly whose lives you have saved--you may not--whose 
future you have improved. You may never hear their thanks or get to 
shake their hands. But they'll be out there. We'll all be out there, 
aware of your courage, impressed by your dedication, grateful for your 
service to God and country. You can keep America forever young.
    Good luck, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:28 a.m. at the Navy/Marine Corps 
Memorial Stadium. In his remarks, he referred to Rear Adm. Thomas C. 
Lynch, USN, Superintendent, U.S. Naval Academy; Adm. William A. Owens, 
USN, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Carl E. Mundy, Jr., 
Commandant of the Marine Corps.