    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [May 31, 1995]
    [Pages 773-774]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community at Peterson Air Force Base in
    Colorado Springs
    May 31, 1995

        Thank you very much. It's wonderful to see all of you, all of the
    service personnel, all of your families, all the kids who are here. I
    thank you for coming. And I just want you to know I kept the rain away.
    They thanked me at the Air Force Academy, and I said, ``You know, when
    you're President, you get blamed for so many things you didn't do; it's
    okay to take credit for a thing or two you didn't do, either.''
    [Laughter] But I'm very, very glad to be here, glad to see all of you. I
    want to thank Chief Master Sergeant Sue Turner for her introduction. If
    she were running for office, she'd get a lot of votes just on being
    brief, I think. [Laughter] And I thank her for what she said. I'm glad
    to be here with your Governor, Roy Romer, General Ashy, and others.
        Earlier this month--I want to say something serious, if I might, for
    a moment--our Nation lost six patriotic reservists of the 302d Airlift
    Wing based here at Peterson. Today, I, as their President, just want to
    remember them with my respects, my gratitude, my thanks. And I'd like to
    ask if we could all just have a brief moment of silence in their memory,
    please.

    [At this point, a moment of silence was observed.]

        Thank you very much.
        Like the Rockies, the men and women here of Peterson stand tall and
    strong and proud. You're always ready. You are the sentinels of our air
    sovereignty. You're the home base for our Space Command and for NORAD.
    You are our eyes in space.
        I did a couple of interviews yesterday with some Colorado
    newspapers, and one of them asked me if we still needed eyes in space
    since the cold war was over. And I said, the last time I checked we had
    more stuff up in space every day; I thought we needed more eyes, not
    fewer. I thank you for what you're doing.
        You have made America safer. You have made the world safer. And as
    we face the new challenges of the 21st century, you know as well as I do
    that the American military will continue to play a vital role, not only
    in the defense of our freedom and our security but also in advancing the
    cause of democracy and freedom throughout the world.
        We have seen painfully in the United States in the last several
    months, first at the World Trade Center and then at the awful incident
    at Oklahoma City, that our security can be threatened in a global
    economy with open borders and lots of personal freedom here at home as
    well as beyond our borders. We had those two terrorist incidents: One of
    them occurred from people I believe were deeply disturbed and way off
    track within our country; another occurred because this is a free
    country and people can come and go here, and people who bore us ill will
    and wanted to destroy a symbol of American democracy came into this
    country and set that bomb at the World Trade Center.
        I'm also happy to tell you that other sentinels of freedom working
    to thwart terrorism stopped two terrible incidents that were planned,
    one to blow up another bomb in New York and another that was designed to
    take some aircraft out of the air, flying out of the West Coast going
    over the Pacific.
        But we now know that the security threats we'll face in the future,
    rooted in terrorism and organized crime and drug trafficking, are
    closely tied to things the military has had to work on

    [[Page 774]]

    for years, trying to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass
    destruction, stand up to rogue states, and protect our security
    interests around the world. We're going to have to fight on all these
    fronts, and you're going to have to continue to be the best trained,
    best equipped, best motivated, most flexible military in the world for
    us to succeed.
        I am committed to making sure that you always are that and to doing
    whatever we have to do to improve the quality of life and the conditions
    of living, so that the best people in America want to be in the military
    and want to stay in the military.
        Since I have been President, I have twice had to go back to Congress
    to ask for large appropriations totaling over $35 billion to help to
    maintain our training, our readiness, and our quality of life. And this
    year I asked the Congress for a supplemental appropriation to cover
    contingencies in the Defense Department so we could fund a pay increase
    at the maximum legal level allowable and continue to make improvements
    in readiness and the quality of life. We are going to continue to do
    that. If you're committed to serving America, the people who make the
    decisions about investments in your future should be committed to making
    sure that you can serve and succeed, that you can have good families and
    a good life in the United States military. And we are very grateful to
    you for that.
        Let me say, what I most wanted to do was to have a chance to say
    thank you personally and to go down the row and shake hands with the
    children. And while I am very good at stopping the rain, I am not good
    at keeping it away forever. So I'm going to terminate my remarks with a
    heartfelt thank-you to all of you for your service to the United States.
        God bless you all, and thank you. Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:50 p.m. on the flight line. In his
    remarks, he referred to Gen. Joseph W. Ashy, commander in chief, North
    American Aerospace Defense Command, commander in chief, U.S. Space
    Command, and commander, Air Force Space Command.