[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

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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

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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.