[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
[September 21, 1994]
[Pages 1586-1589]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
September 21, 1994

    Thank you very much, the First Lady and my old friend John Brademas, 
and to all of you who have agreed to serve and your friends and 
supporters who are here. I thank you for coming.
    Before I make the remarks that I want to make to you, I believe, in 
view of the events of the last few days and particularly the events of 
the last 24 hours, I should make a short statement about the situation 
in Haiti.
    The deployment of our forces there is now going quite well. As a 
result of the agreement we have reached last weekend, we now have 8,500 
United States troops who have entered Haiti peacefully without any 
resistance. The multinational force, which was enhanced today by the 
decision of Australia to join, will soon be in a position to carry out 
its overriding mission, to ensure the transfer of power from the de 
facto military leaders to the democratically elected government of Haiti 
by October 15th.
    I must also tell you how strongly we condemned yesterday's police 
violence there. Such conduct cannot and will not be tolerated. General 
Shelton, our commander on the ground, has met with the Haitian military 
and police officials today and made clear our policy to them.
    During this transition period, the Haitian military will carry out 
basic police functions. Our Armed Forces cannot and will not become 
Haiti's police force. But we can work to see that

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the Haitian military and police operate in a responsible and 
professional manner. Today we are deploying on schedule 1,000 United 
States military police who will monitor the Haitian police and by their 
own presence help to deter violence. In the days ahead we will 
reintroduce into Haiti human rights monitors who were expelled several 
weeks ago and bring in police monitors as part of the multinational 
force.
    Today is only the second day of this mission. The situation in Haiti 
will not change immediately. But today is better than yesterday, and 
yesterday was better than the day before. We will keep going. We will 
make steady progress. We will restore democracy.
    As we move toward the 15th of October, we will also work to moderate 
the conduct of Haitian security forces without assuming the 
responsibilities. Then after the democratic government returns to power, 
the coalition will help it to devise a long-term plan of police and 
military reform, including retraining people so that they can perform to 
their fullest capabilities in an appropriate manner for a democratic 
society.
    We went into Haiti to help stop the senseless, tragic terror that 
has plagued the nation since the democratically elected government was 
forced from power. The habits of violence will not be shed overnight. 
But during the coming weeks, we will work to help stop the violence and 
to begin the process of reconciliation.
    I thank the American people for their understanding and increasing 
support for this endeavor. And again, let me say my special word of 
appreciation to our troops there and to their families and all those who 
have supported them. [Applause] Thank you.
    Now let me thank you all again, all of you who've agreed to serve on 
the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, to underscore the 
vital partnership that must exist between your Government and the 
private citizens who do the work of the arts and humanities in our 
Nation. I want to thank the First Lady for agreeing to be the Honorary 
Chair, although this is a job she wanted, unlike some of those I've 
asked her to take on. [Laughter] You couldn't have a much more 
appreciative or informed friend.
    I am also very, very pleased that John Brademas has agreed to serve 
as the Chairman. I have known him for many years since his distinguished 
career in the United States Congress and through his brilliant 
presidency of New York University. I think he is one of our Nation's 
most outstanding citizens and will certainly be one of the most eloquent 
advocates imaginable for the cause you are here to further. He also 
happens to have been an original cosponsor of the bill that created the 
National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and he wrote the bill 
that established the Institute of Museum Services. He also promised to 
give me free congressional lobbying advice on the side in return for 
this appointment. [Laughter]
    I have charged the President's Committee with advancing public 
understanding of the arts and humanities, which is so important to our 
democracy, and to establish new partnerships between the Federal 
agencies and the private sector. As a sign of our commitment to the arts 
and humanities today, we have here with us members of the Cabinet and 
the administration, including Secretary Riley, Sheldon Hackney, Jane 
Alexander, Joe Duffy, and a number of other Government officials.
    I appointed, as all of you can see, an extraordinary group of 
Americans to this Committee--artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, 
leaders in the corporate world and the philanthropic community, 
committed citizens, activists recognized in their communities--people 
who represent outstanding achievement and a commitment to the cultural 
life of our Nation, a commitment to keep it alive and to make it more 
accessible.
    By this time next year, I want you to deliver to me a report on the 
progress we're making in furthering America's cultural life. For 200 
years the arts and humanities have helped to bridge American 
differences, learned to appreciate differences--they helped Americans to 
learn to appreciate differences, one from another, and to build strong 
and vibrant institutions across our country. You must help us explore 
ways to do this better.
    The most disturbing thing to me about American life today is not the 
problems we have, although we have problems aplenty; it is the lack of 
unity among Americans and the lack of optimism we feel in dealing with 
those problems.
    Just a couple of weeks ago, a distinguished international panel of 
economists said that the United States was the most productive country 
in the world. They said that for the first time in almost a decade 
because of the remarkable resurgence of our economy, because of the 
number of jobs we're creating, because we ac-


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counted for almost all the job growth and three-quarters of the economic 
growth in the seven great industrial nations of the world in the last 
year and a half, and because we are taking on a lot of our biggest 
challenges--bringing our Government deficit down 3 years in a row for 
the first time since Mr. Truman was President, the only country of all 
the advanced economies to do that. And yet, so many Americans still feel 
that we're kind of adrift and falling apart from one another.
    Maybe even more important as you look toward the 21st century, isn't 
it interesting that in the last year and a half the South Africans 
wanted us to spend $35 million and send our best people to South Africa 
to work on making that election a success? The Irish and the English 
have been fighting for eight centuries now; they wanted the United 
States to be involved in the process of reconciliation that is now 
taking hold in Northern Ireland. After decades of brutal struggle, the 
Israelis and the Arabs working together to make peace in the Middle East 
want the Americans to be centrally involved. Even in the moment of our 
greatest tension a few days ago in Haiti, one of the military leaders 
said, ``Well, if the President is determined to do this and the world 
community is absolutely determined to go ahead, we want the Americans 
here.''
    Why is that? We have Haitian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Arab-
Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans. You think of it: This 
diversity we have which cuts across racial and religious and 
philosophical and regional and income lines, it is the source of our 
great strength today in a world that is ever more interdependent.
    And people look at us and say, ``You know, with all their problems--
yes, their crime rate's too high; and yes, they're too violent; yes, too 
many of their kids drop out of school; and yes, there's too much income 
inequality, especially for working people. But you know, they pretty 
well get along. And people from all different kinds of backgrounds wind 
up pursuing their chosen path in life and living up to their God-given 
potential. And they're adaptable; they work their way through the 
changes that time and circumstance are imposing on them.'' That's what 
others think about us.
    We somehow have to begin to think that about ourselves again. And I 
cannot help but believe that the arts and humanities must play a central 
role in that task. How we imagine our own lives and our own future and 
how we imagine ourselves as a country will have as big an impact on what 
it is we ultimately become as anything in the world.
    I said the other day, I will just say again, a lot of you have been 
involved in various enterprises, great business enterprises, great art 
enterprises, great entertainment enterprises. Just imagine how you would 
function if every day in all the important years of your life you showed 
up for work and two-thirds of the people you were working with thought 
that your outfit was going in the wrong direction and nothing good could 
happen. [Laughter] Imagine what would happen if the National Gallery of 
Art were given the most priceless collection of Impressionist paintings 
uncovered after having been thought destroyed for 50 years, and two-
thirds of the people said, ``I don't believe they're Impressionist 
paintings. I know Monet; he was a friend of mine. That's not him. Don't 
bother me with the facts.'' [Laughter] You're laughing because you know 
that it's true, don't you? There is a grain of truth in this.
    Somehow we have to not sweep our problems under the rug and not 
sweep our differences under the rug, for that is also what makes America 
great. But we only find energy for dealing with our problems and the 
heart and the hearing to deal with our differences when at least we have 
a realistic appreciation of where we are, what we're doing, and where 
we're going. And I feel so good about the work we've done to move 
America forward in the last 20 months, but we'd all have to admit we've 
still got a lot of work to do in bringing America together, in giving 
our people a realistic feeling about where we are in the world and where 
we're going. You can do that. You can make a huge difference. The arts 
and humanities have always helped to do that work.
    So I urge you to continue in this work. I urge you to make your 
progress report to me. I urge you to remember what we are trying to do 
in our schools in helping to improve our children's education with the 
arts and humanities. I urge you to work to expand private philanthropy. 
We all know that the Government in this country provides a crucial 
measure but only a tiny measure of the support that the arts and 
humanities need.
    I urge you to promote international cultural exchange and 
understanding, not only because

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we need desperately to know more about others throughout the world but 
because I believe that we'll learn a lot more about ourselves if we just 
come in contact with people from other walks of life and other paths of 
the world.
    Thanks to phones, faxes, Internet, E-mail, CNN, we can see the power 
of our cultural traditions as they are exported around the world. And 
sometimes they come back to us. We're the first White House to 
communicate with huge numbers of people from all over by E-mail. And I'm 
trying to do a sociological analysis now of whether there's a difference 
between the E-mail communication and the mail communication--or the 
female communication. [Laughter]
    I am very hopeful that you will make a remarkable contribution to 
this country. I went over this list of people with great care. I tried 
to get a very different group of people. I tried to imagine all the 
different things that I hope that this Committee could deal with and all 
the different challenges I hope you could assume. If I haven't done a 
good job, it's not your fault. It's mine in picking you, but I think 
you're pretty special.
    Let me say in closing that I hope that in addition to the schools, 
you can think about how we can increase access to the arts and 
humanities all across America to people who might otherwise be isolated 
from them, people who are homebound, people who live in very isolated 
areas, people who now don't even know how to speak the language that 
would be necessary to ask for something that might change their lives 
forever. I ask you also to think of that.
    We've faced a lot of challenges as a country, but I'm actually 
pretty optimistic about it, based on the objective evidence. What 
remains is whether we can develop a vision that will sustain us as a 
people as we move through a period of change, without a known big enemy, 
into an uncertain future. It requires courage, but courage comes from 
having something inside that you can connect with what you see outside.
    You can help us as we work our way through this in this remarkable 
time in our country's history. I hope you enjoy it. I thank you for 
serving. And I thank you for being here today.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 5 p.m. in the East Room at 
the White House.