    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [March 28, 1995]
    [Pages 404-406]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games in Atlanta,
    Georgia
    March 28, 1995

        The President. Thank you. This is a pretty lively crowd. Mayor
    Campbell, thank you for welcoming me back to Atlanta. I'm glad to be
    back. I'm glad to be here with Billy Payne and Andrew Fleming and all
    the leaders of the Olympics, LeRoy Walker and others.
        You know, I was listening to Billy Payne talk, and I was thinking it
    really would have been a shame if the world had been deprived of all
    that energy and the Olympics had gone someplace else. My granddaddy used
    to say that people like Billy Payne are the kind of folks who sell
    hospitalization to shut-ins. [Laughter] I believe he could talk an owl
    out of a tree. The more you think about that the funnier it will get.
    [Laughter]
        I'm glad to see my good friend Andrew Young here. He was a great
    ambassador for you, recently, when he spoke at the annual President's
    prayer breakfast, the congressional prayer breakfast in Washington, DC.
    And I thank him for all he has done over the years, especially on the
    Olympics.
        This is a great endeavor. I can't imagine that Herbert Hoover
    refused to open the Olympics. That's probably why he was a one-termer.
    All this time we've been reading in our history books it was because of
    the Depression; turned out it was the Olympics. [Laughter]
        I don't think--Herbert Hoover didn't like athletics very much
    because he was the first President who got a lower salary than a
    baseball player. [Laughter] Now the lowest paid baseball players make
    five times what the President makes, but back then the priorities were
    different. Babe Ruth was the first baseball player who ever made more
    than the President. And they asked him--they said, ``It's the middle of
    the Depression. You're making more than the President of the United
    States. What do you have to say about that?'' He said, ``I ought to be.
    I'm having a better year.'' [Laughter]
        You know, a lot of things happen here in Atlanta. I saw the other
    night on television Michael Jordan had his first buzzer-beater since
    coming back, you know, in Atlanta. You didn't like that, but it was nice
    for the rest of us. [Laughter] Georgia is going to the Final Four of the
    Women's NCAA. Playing Tennessee. [Laughter] We have a ticket here--don't
    you think one of us ought to be for Georgia? [Laughter]
        I am delighted to be here. I came here mostly to say a simple thank-
    you to all of you. You have no idea, I think, what you are doing for the
    United States. This is a great endeavor, and it is an endeavor that is
    just as much about cooperation as it is about competition. It's about
    cooperation because of the teamwork required to put this endeavor
    together. It's about cooperation because a lot of these sports are team
    sports. It's about cooperation because the competition, even in the
    individual sports, requires a rigorous adherence to certain ethical
    rules of conduct which make the competition honorable and honored when
    over. That is true for the Olympics, it is true for the Paralympics, and

    [[Page 405]]

    therefore, in what you are doing, you are upholding the very best in
    this country.
        The facilities are great. The technology is great. Don't you like
    hearing the Vice President talk about technology? You know, I thought I
    was a policy wonk until I had Al Gore as Vice President and Newt
    Gingrich as Speaker. It's amazing. [Laughter] Now I feel like the
    linesman at the tennis match. I just--out, in, let. [Laughter]
        I told them the other day--you know, we're up there, fighting about
    the School Lunch Program and the food stamp program, and I found a
    technological fix for them. We should scrap the School Lunch Program and
    substitute E-mail stamps that would give you virtual food that everybody
    could download on the Internet. They're going to explain to me next week
    why that won't work, when I get back. [Laughter]
        I want to say, too, that I appreciate the Olympic force. You're
    going to have 50,000 volunteers working on this, and then you're going
    to have--you've got 770,000 people in this Olympic force working in
    community service projects. That's an amazing thing. Nothing like that
    has ever been done, take my word for it, around anything like this
    before. And it probably would only happen in the United States. But
    again, it reinforces the fact that if you have enough spirit and enough
    vision and you're willing to cooperate, you can get just about anything
    done you want to do.
        And if you ask me what I hope would come out of this, it would be
    that. This is a remarkable endeavor. There will be some winners and some
    losers. There will be some things that don't go right. There will be
    occasional accidents. As the Vice President said, we offer our deepest
    condolences to the family and friends of Jack Falls, who was killed in
    the accident, working on the Olympic stadium, and to those who were
    injured, David Oakes and Bruce Griffin. But we know that in the course
    of human endeavor, if people work together and they try to bring out the
    best in each other and they play by rules that are honorable and clear
    and widely respected, that there is nearly nothing that cannot be done.
        I'll bet you anything when all this is said and done, people look
    back and they celebrate the Olympics, and then they'll celebrate the
    incredible physical facilities you'll leave behind, which will be used
    by generations of people after most of us are even gone here. But one of
    the most enduring legacies will be the idea that over three-quarters of
    a million people actually got together to try to use the Olympics as a
    way of organizing around how to lift people up who live here. This
    spirit of partnership is, frankly, one of the reasons that our
    administration awarded one of only six highly coveted empowerment zones
    to the City of Atlanta, because of what you represented here.
        I remember when I was a kid, I really admired Jesse Owens, and I
    watched those old films of Jesse Owens running in Berlin after Hitler
    promulgated all of his theories of racial superiority. And at the time,
    there was some question about whether Jesse Owens would be able to go
    and run; the Nazis were going crazy in Germany. And Jesse Owens ran his
    way into the hearts of the world and the history books of the Olympics
    and the United States.
        He said something that has stayed with me. He said, ``A lifetime of
    training for just 10 seconds.'' But the truth is that it's not that. You
    may feel that. You may feel like you're spending three lifetimes in the
    next 479 days just for 17 days. [Laughter] But it isn't that. It will
    endure.
        This is an interesting time for the United States, and it could not
    be a better time in our history for us to have the Olympics. And I'll
    tell you why. Our economic system has produced, and just in the last 2
    years, over 6 million new jobs. Other countries all around the world are
    asking us to come and help them set up the mechanisms of a market
    economy in former Communist countries: How do you regulate the banks;
    how do you set up a stock market; how do you get things so that they
    will work honestly and fairly and well, and free people can earn their
    way? We find people all over the world asking us to send the FBI in to
    help them deal with the problems of crime once they stop being
    dictatorships and they open up freedom, because we know that freedom can
    always be abused--always asking for America to do that. And when I go to
    these meetings, they say, ``Well, gosh, you guys seem to be doing well.
    You've got your economy going and your deficit's down and things seem to
    be headed in the right direction.'' And yet, here at home, because
    there's so many changes going on, a lot of Americans still don't feel
    secure about their future.
        In a global economy, the things that lift a lot of people in Atlanta
    up--make for the record

    [[Page 406]]

    number of new business starts we had in 1993 and the record number of
    people, hardworking Americans, becoming very wealthy--those same forces
    scare other people, with companies being downsized and all these changes
    happening.
        And we need the Olympics in the United States--not just in Atlanta,
    not just in Georgia, not just in the New South that you are leading into
    the future--the United States needs the Olympics to remind us that every
    time we work together, we keep our eye on the future, we have a set of
    honorable rules by which we play, and we try to lift each other up, we
    do quite well. You will stun the world by your performance here. You
    will do that.
        In doing that, and in working with all the people who are going to
    be doing all these volunteer projects, you have the capacity to remind
    America that just because the future is uncertain and rapidly changing,
    we do not need to be insecure. All we need to do is to do what we have
    always done when the chips were down and the stakes were high.
        We are doing, as a country, better than virtually any other place in
    dealing with the challenges of the modern world, but we are not immune
    to those challenges, those problems, those anxieties. Now we're either
    going to hunker down or take a deep breath, throw our shoulders back,
    and walk right through them into the future. That is what you must do
    here. And when you do it, I'll make you a prediction: It will have an
    enormous positive impact on what Americans all over this country, from
    Alaska to southern Florida, from Maine to southern California, will
    believe we can do. And goodness knows we need it. And we're all going to
    do our best to make the most of it.
        So thank you. Good luck, and Godspeed.

    [At this point, an ACOG representative and Mayor Bill Campbell of
    Atlanta presented commemorative bricks to the President and the Vice
    President.]

        The President. You have no idea how much this means to us--
    [laughter]--especially the way they were presented. We spend most of our
    time in Washington dodging these. [Laughter]
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at approximately 5:40 p.m. in the Inforum
    Building. In his remarks, he referred to William Porter (Billy) Payne,
    chief executive officer, and Andrew Young, cochair, Atlanta Committee
    for the Olympic Games; G. Andrew Fleming, chief executive officer,
    Atlanta Paralympic Organizing Committee; and LeRoy T. Walker, president,
    U.S. Olympic Committee.