Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)

[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[October 6, 1995]
[Pages 1544-1551]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

Remarks at a Freedom House Breakfast
October 6, 1995

Thank you very much. I'm honored to be introduced by someone who
writes so powerfully about the past and is working so effectively to
shape the future. The Secretary of State and I have tried to encourage
both those activities by keeping Win Lord busy at the State Department.
I'm honored to be here with all of you and to be here at Freedom
House. For more than 50 years, Freedom House has been a voice for
tolerance for human dignity. People all over the world are better off
because of your work. And I'm very grateful that Freedom House has
rallied this diverse and dynamic group. It's not every day that the
Carnegie Endowment, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, and the American Foreign Policy Council share the same
masthead. I feel that I should try out a whole list of issues and try to
get check-off here--[laughter]--before the meeting goes any further.
It does prove that there is a strong, dynamic center in our country
that supports America's continued leadership in the world. We have all
worked for that. And I want to publicly thank the Secretary of State and
Tony Lake, the others in our foreign policy team, my Counselor, Mr.
McLarty, up here who's been especially active on our behalf in Latin
America. And I want to thank all of you who have supported that
continued endeavor.
You know, in 1991 I sought the Presidency because I believed it was
essential to restore the American dream for all Americans and to
reassert America's leadership in the post-cold-war world. As we move
from the industrial to the information age, from the cold war world to
the global village, we have an extraordinary opportunity to advance our
values at home and around the world. But we face some stiff challenges
in doing so as well.
We know that at home we have the responsibility to create
opportunity for all of our citi-

[[Page 1545]]

zens to make the most of their own lives, to strengthen their families
and their communities. We know that abroad we have the responsibility to
advance freedom and democracy, to advance prosperity and the
preservation of our planet. We know that the forces of integration and
economic progress also contain the seeds of disruption and of greater
inequality. We know that families, communities, and nations are
vulnerable to the organized forces of disintegration and the winner-
take-all mentality in politics and economics. We know all this, and
therefore, we have an even heavier responsibility to advance our values
and our interests.
Freedom House, in my view, deserves extraordinary praise for your
sense of timing of this meeting. I wonder if Adrian Karatnycky and his
colleagues knew that in the days prior to this discussion the United
States would have the opportunity to demonstrate so vividly once again
the proposition this conference seeks to advance, that American
leadership and bipartisan support for that leadership is absolutely
essential as a source of our strength at home and our success abroad. We
must stand for democracy and freedom. We must stand for opportunity and
responsibility in a world where the dividing line between domestic and
foreign policy is increasingly blurred.
Our personal, family, and national security is affected by our
policy on terrorism at home and abroad. Our personal, family, and
national prosperity is affected by our policy on market economics at
home and abroad. Our personal, family, and national future is affected
by our policies on the environment at home and abroad. The common good
at home is simply not separate from our efforts to advance the common
good around the world. They must be one and the same if we are to be
truly secure in the world of the 21st century.
We see the benefits of American leadership in the progress now being
made in Bosnia. In recent weeks, our military muscle through NATO, our
determined diplomacy throughout the region, have brought the parties
closer to a settlement than at any time since this terrible war began 4
years ago. Yesterday, we helped to produce an agreement on a Bosnia-wide
cease-fire. Now, the parties will come to the United States to pursue
their peace talks mediated by our negotiating team and our European and
Russian counterparts.
We have a long way to go, and there's no guarantee of success. But
we will use every ounce of our influence to help the parties make a
peace that preserves Bosnia as a single democratic state and protects
the rights of all citizens, regardless of their ethnic group.
If and when peace comes, the international community's
responsibility will not end. After all the bloodshed, the hatred, the
loss of the last years, peace will surely be fragile. The international
community must help to secure it. The only organization that can meet
that responsibility strongly and effectively is NATO. And as NATO's
leader, the United States must do its part and send in troops to join
those of our allies under NATO command with clear rules of engagement.
If we fail, the consequences for Bosnia and for the future of NATO would
be severe. We must not fail.
The United States will not be sending our forces into combat in
Bosnia. We will not send them into a peace that cannot be maintained,
but we must use our power to secure that peace. I have pledged to
consult with Congress before authorizing our participation in such an
action. These consultations have already begun.
I believe Congress understands the importance of this moment and of
American leadership. I'm glad to see Chairman Livingston here at the
head table today. As I have said consistently for 2 years, we want and
welcome congressional support. But in Bosnia as elsewhere, if the United
States does not lead, the job will not be done.
We also saw the benefits of America's leadership last week at the
White House where leaders from all over the Middle East gathered to
support the agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. For
nearly a half-century now, Democratic and Republican administrations
have worked to facilitate the cause of peace in the Middle East. The
credit here belongs to the peacemakers. But we should all be proud that
at critical moments along the way, our efforts helped to make the
difference between failure and success.
It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States led the
international effort to remove Haiti's military regime and give the
people of Haiti a real chance at democracy. We've succeeded because
we've backed diplomacy with sanctions and ultimately with force. We've
succeeded because we understood that standing up

[[Page 1546]]

for democracy in our own hemisphere was right for the Haitian people and
right for America.
American efforts in Bosnia, the Middle East, and Haiti and elsewhere
have required investments of time and energy and resources. They've
required persistent diplomacy and the measured use of the world's
strongest military. They have required both determination and
flexibility in our efforts to work as leaders and to work with other
nations. And sometimes they've called on us to make decisions that were,
of necessity, unpopular in the short run, knowing that the payoff would
not come in days or weeks but in months or years. Sometimes they have
been difficult for many Americans to understand because they have to be
made, as many decisions did right after World War II, without the
benefit of some overarching framework, the kind of framework the bipolar
cold war world provided for so many years.
To use the popular analogy of the present day, there seems to be no
mainframe explanation for the PC world in which we're living. We have to
drop the abstractions and dogma and pursue, based on trial and error and
persistent experimentation, a policy that advances our values of freedom
and democracy, peace, and security.
We must continue to bear the responsibility of the world's
leadership. That is what you came here to do, and that's what I want to
discuss today. It is more than a happy coincidence that the birth of
bipartisan support for America's leadership in the world coincides with
the founding of this organization by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell
Willkie in 1941 when for the first time Americans, both Democrats and
Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates, understood our
special obligation to lead in the world.
The results of that responsible leadership were truly stunning:
victory in the war and the construction of a post-cold-war world. Not
with abstract dogma but again, over a 5-year period, basing experience
on new realities, through trial and error with a relentless pursuit of
our own values, we created NATO, the Marshall plan, Bretton Woods, the
institutions that kept the peace in Europe, avoided nuclear conflict,
helped to spread democracy, brought us unparalleled prosperity, and
ultimately ensured the triumph of freedom in the cold war.
In that struggle, Freedom House and organizations like it reminded
Americans that our leadership is essential and that to advance our
interests, that leadership must remain rooted in our values, must
continue to advance democracy and freedom to promote peace and security,
to enhance prosperity and preserve our planet.
When it comes to the pursuit of these goals, it is important that we
never forget that our values and our interests are one in the same.
Promoting democracies that participate in this new global marketplace is
the right thing to do. For all their imperfections, they advance what
all people want and often fight and die for: human dignity, security,
and prosperity. We know these democracies are less likely to go to war,
less likely to traffic in terrorism, more likely to stand against the
forces of hatred and intolerance and organized destruction.
Throughout what we now call the American century, Republicans and
Democrats disagreed on specific policies, often heatedly from time to
time, but we have always agreed on the need for American leadership in
the cause of democracy, freedom, security, and prosperity. Now that
consensus is truly in danger, and interestingly enough, it is in danger
in both parties. Voices from the left and the right are calling on us to
step back from, instead of stepping up to, the challenges of the present
day. They threaten to reverse the bipartisan support for our leadership
that has been essential to our strength for 50 years. Some really
believe that after the cold war the United States can play a secondary
role in the world, just as some thought we could after World War II, and
some made sure we did after World War I.
But if you look at the results from Bosnia to Haiti, from the Middle
East to Northern Ireland, it proves once again that American leadership
is indispensable and that without it our values, our interests, and
peace itself would be at risk.
It has now become a truism to blame the current isolationism on the
end of the cold war because there is no longer a mainframe threat in
this PC world. But when I took office, I made it clear that we had a lot
of work to do to get our own house in order.
I agree that America has challenges at home that have to be
addressed. We have to revive our economy and create opportunity for all
of our citizens. We have to put responsibility back into our social
programs and strengthen our families and our communities. We have to
reform our own Government to make it leaner

[[Page 1547]]

and more effective. But we cannot do any of these things in isolation
from the world which we have done so much to make and which we must
continue to lead.
Look at what is going on. Many of the new democracies in this world,
they're working so hard. I see their leaders all the time. They believe
in the cause of freedom, and they are laboring out there in these
countries against almost unbelievable obstacles. But their progress is
fragile. And we must never forget that. We have to see them as growing,
growing things that have to be nurtured in a process that could still be
reversed.
And we also have to recognize that we confront a host of threats
that have assumed new and quite dangerous dimensions, the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction. In the technology age, that can mean
simply breaking open a vial of sarin gas in a Tokyo subway. It can mean
hooking into the Internet and learning how to build a bomb that will
blow up a Federal building in the heart of America. These forces, just
as surely as fascism and communism, would spread darkness over light,
disintegration over integration, chaos over community. And these forces
still demand the leadership of the United States.
Let me say again, the once bright line between domestic and foreign
policy is blurring. If I could do anything to change the speech patterns
of those of us in public life, I would almost like to stop hearing
people talk about foreign policy and domestic policy and instead start
discussing economic policy, security policy, environmental policy, you
name it.
When you think about the world and the way that you live in it, you
readily see that the foreign-domestic distinction begins to evaporate in
so many profound ways. And if we could learn to speak differently about
it, the very act of speaking and thinking in the way we live, I believe,
would make isolationism seem absolutely impossible as an alternative to
public policy.
When the President of Mexico comes here in a few days and we talk
about drug problems, are we talking about domestic problems or foreign
problems? If we talk about immigration, are we discussing a domestic
issue or a foreign issue? If we talk about NAFTA and trade, is it their
foreign politics or our domestic economics? We have to understand this
in a totally different way. And we must learn to speak about it in
different ways.
The isolationists are simply wrong. The environment we face may be
new and different, but to meet it with the challenges and opportunities
it presents and to advance our enduring values, we have to be more
engaged in the world, not less engaged in the world. That's why we have
done everything we could in our administration to lead the fight to
reduce the nuclear threat, to spread democracy in human rights, to
support peace, to open markets, to enlarge and defend the community of
nations around the world, to share our aspirations and our values, not
in abstract but in ways that are quite practical and immediately of
benefit to the American people.
Consider just a few examples. Every American today is safer because
we're stepping back from the nuclear precipice. Russian missiles are no
longer pointed at our citizens, and there are no longer American
missiles pointed at their citizens. Thanks to agreements reached by
President Reagan, President Bush, and our administration, both our
countries are cutting back their nuclear arsenal.
Over the past 3 years, we've been able to persuade Ukraine,
Kazakhstan, and Belarus to give up nuclear weapons left on their land
when the Soviet Union collapsed. We've convinced North Korea to freeze
its nuclear program. We've secured the indefinite extension of the
Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. We're working hard to make sure
nuclear materials don't wind up in the hands of terrorists or
international criminals. And I hope and pray that next year we'll
succeed in getting a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.
Americans are safer because of the tough counterterrorism campaign
we have been waging, including closer cooperation with foreign
governments, sanctions against states that sponsor terrorism, and
increasing the funding, the manpower, the training for our own law
enforcement. These have helped us to get results, big, visible results,
like the conviction just this week of those who conspired to wage a
campaign of terror in New York, and things that aren't so visible but
are very important, the planned terrorist attacks that have been
thwarted in the United States and on American citizens, the arrests that
have been secured in other countries through our cooperation.

[[Page 1548]]

We have an obligation to work more and more and more on this. And if
there is any area in the world where there is no difference between
domestic and foreign policy, surely it is in our common obligation to
work together to combat terrorism.
That is why, even before Oklahoma City, I had sent legislation to
the Hill asking for additional resources and help to deal with the
threat of terrorism. And after Oklahoma City, I modified and
strengthened that legislation. The Senate passed the bill quickly, but I
am very disappointed that the bill is now stalled in the House. We need
this legislation.
I believe Federal law enforcement authorities must be held
accountable. I believe we must be open about whatever has happened in
the past. But that has nothing to do with our obligation to make sure
that the American people have the tools that they need to combat the
threat of terrorism. So, once again, I say I hope the antiterrorism
legislation will pass. We need it. The threat is growing, not receding.
When we gave democracy another chance in Haiti, a lot of people said
this has nothing to do with the United States. Well, it did. It did. It
mattered that, when somebody came to our country and gave their word
that they would leave and bring back democracy, that we enforce that
commitment. And in a more immediate sense, in the month before our
intervention, 16,000 Haitians fled tyranny for sanctuary in Florida and
elsewhere in our region, but 3 months after the intervention, the
refugee flow was practically zero.
When Mexico ran into a cash flow crisis, we put together an
emergency support package to help put our neighbor back on the course of
stability and economic progress. And to their credit, the Republican
leaders of the Congress supported that effort. But it was impossible to
pass a bill through the Congress endorsing it because of all the surveys
which showed that the American people were opposed to the Mexican
bailout by about 80-15, as I remember the poll on the day that I took
executive action to do it. This is another case, however, when what may
be unpopular in the short run is plainly in the interest of the United
States in the long run.
When your neighbors are in trouble and they're trying to do the
right thing, you normally try to help them, because it's good for the
neighborhood. Look what's happened since the United States stepped in to
try to be a good neighbor to Mexico. Economic growth has returned, even
though in a fragile state, more quickly than it was anticipated; exports
have returned to levels that exceed what they were pre-NAFTA; and just
yesterday, President Zedillo called me to say that Mexico will repay
$700 million of its debt to the United States well ahead of schedule.
Consider what would have happened if we would have taken the
isolationist position. What would have happened to their economy? What
would have happened to the international financial market's reaction to
that in Argentina, in Brazil, throughout Latin America and other
fragile, emerging democracies? What would have happened to our
relationships and our cooperation on a host of issues between us? It was
the right thing to do. Was it a domestic issue or a foreign issue? You
tell me. All I know is we have a better neighborly relationship and the
future is brighter for the American people and for the people of Mexico
because we are pursuing a strategy of engagement, not isolation.
You can see that in what's happening in Europe, where we're trying
to bring the nations of Europe closer together, working for democracy
and economic reform in the Soviet Union and Central Europe and
modernizing NATO, strengthening the Partnership For Peace. And again I
will say, these things also further our interests.
I was told just last week that by all the trade initiatives which
have been taken, from NAFTA and GATT to over 80 separate individual
trade agreements that Ambassador Kantor has conducted, 15 of them with
Japan alone, the expanded volume of exports for the United States has
created more than 2 million jobs in the last 2\1/2\ years, paying well
above the national average. With the Summit of the Americas, with the
APEC process that we have agreed on, there are more to come.
The Commerce Department and the State Department have worked
together more and have worked harder than ever before to try to help
Americans take advantage of these new opportunities. They are a part and
parcel of our foreign policy and our domestic policy.
And let me say one other thing. We have tried to make it a constant
refrain that while we seek to engage all countries on terms of goodwill,
we must continue to stand up for the values that we believe make life
worth living.

[[Page 1549]]

We must continue to stand up for the proposition that all people,
without regard to their nationality, their race, their ethnic group,
their religion, or their gender, should have a chance to make the most
of their own lives, to taste both freedom and opportunity.
The most powerful statement of that by anyone in our administration
recently was a statement made by the First Lady at the women's
conference in Beijing, where she condemned abuses of women and their
little children, and especially their little girl children, throughout
the world, not sparing the problems of domestic violence and street
crime here in the United States.
These are the kinds of things that America must continue to do. From
Belfast to Jerusalem, American leadership has helped Catholics and
Protestants, Jews and Arabs to walk the streets of their cities with
less fear of bombs and violence. From Prague to Port-au-Prince, we're
working to consolidate the benefits of democracy and market economics.
From Kuwait to Sarajevo, the brave men and women of our Armed Forces are
working to stand down aggression and stand up for freedom.
In our own hemisphere, only one country, Cuba, continues to resist
the trend toward democracy. Today we are announcing new steps to
encourage its peaceful transition to a free and open society. We will
tighten the enforcement of our embargo to keep the pressure for reform
on, but we will promote democracy and the free flow of ideas more
actively. I have authorized our news media to open bureaus in Cuba. We
will allow more people to travel to and from Cuba for educational,
religious, and human rights purposes. We will now permit American
nongovernmental organizations to engage in a fuller range of activities
in Cuba. And today, it gives me great pleasure to announce that our
first grant to fund NGO work in Cuba will be awarded to Freedom House to
promote peaceful change and protect human rights.
Just mentioning this range of activities and the possibilities for
positive American leadership demonstrates once again how vital it is to
our security and to our prosperity, demonstrates once again that
advancing our values and promoting our self-interests are one in the
same.
I suppose, given the purpose of this conference and the unique
sponsorship of it, that everybody here shares that belief and that, in a
way, I'm just preaching to the choir. But this isolationist backlash,
which is present in both parties, is very real. And if you look at it
from the point of view of people who feel threatened by the changes in
the world, it is even completely understandable. So it is important that
we not simply condemn it. It is even more important that we explain the
way the world is working. And as the world works its way through this
period of transition toward a new order of things in which we can garner
all of the benefits of change and technology and opportunity and still
reinforce the importance of giving everybody a chance, giving all
families the chances to be strong, solidifying communities, as we work
our way through this period, it is more and more important that we not
simply condemn the isolationists but that we seek to explain how the
world works and why we must be engaged and lead.
Condemnation is not enough. Characterization is not enough. We must
work through these issues. The American people are good people. They
have common sense. They care when people are being murdered around the
world. They understand that a war somewhere else could one day involve
our sons and daughters. They know that we cannot simply pretend that the
rest of the world is not there. But many of them have their own
difficulties. We must work and work and work on the basic values and
interests and arguments until we beat back the forces of isolation, with
both intense passion and reason.
You can do that. That is what you must help us to do. Every one of
you, each in your own way, with your own centers of influence, you can
do that, with assertion and with argument.
Let me just give you one specific example: I am determined to do
everything I can to preserve our international affairs budget. It
represents, after all, less than 2 percent of our overall budget.
Foreign aid is unpopular in the abstract because Americans believe we
spend a lot more of their money on foreign aid than we do. But when you
ask the American people how much we should spend, they will tell you 3
percent, 4 percent, 5 percent, more than we in fact spend.
No agency in this era when we're trying to balance the budget can be
exempt from conscious cost-cutting. Vice President Gore and I have
worked very hard to give the American people the smallest Government, in
terms of Federal employees, we've had since President

[[Page 1550]]

Kennedy was in office, to eliminate hundreds of programs. But we must
have the tools of diplomacy.
American leadership is more than words and the military budget.
Although the military budget is important, we must have a diplomacy
budget. Some in Congress literally want to gut foreign assistance, to
hack the State Department's budget, to slash the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency, the USIA, AID. They would shirk our responsibilities
to the United Nations. I want to go give this speech to the United
Nations. Wouldn't you like it if I did? Wouldn't you like it if I did?
[Applause] I appreciate the applause, but you tell me what I'm supposed
to say. I will go give this speech, and they will say, ``Thank you very
much, Mr. President, where's your $1 billion?'' [Laughter] Why is the
United States the biggest piker in the U.N.?
Now, let me say, does the United Nations need to be reformed? Has a
lot of our money and everybody else's money been wasted? Does there need
to be greater oversight? Of course there does. Is that an argument for
taking a dive on the United Nations? No.
We need your support for this. We must do this. It is the right
thing to do. It is the responsible thing to do. Those who really would
have us walk away from the U.N., not to mention the international
financial institutions, they would really threaten our ability to lead.
As you know, in instances from Bosnia to Haiti, working out how we
can lead and still maintain our alliances and cooperate through the
United Nations and through NATO is sometimes frustrating and almost
always difficult. But it is very important. We don't want to run off
into the future all by ourselves, and that means we have to work
responsibly through these international organizations and we have to pay
our fair share. Every dollar we spend on foreign assistance comes back
to us many times over.
By reducing the threat of nuclear war in the Newly Independent
States, we've been able to cut our own spending on strategic weapons. By
supporting democratic reforms and the transition to free markets in the
Soviet Union and in Central Europe, we promote stability and prosperity
in an area that will in the future become a vast market for the United
States. By assisting developing nations who are fighting against
overpopulation, AIDS, drug smuggling, environmental degradation, the
whole range of problems they face, we're making sure the problems they
face today don't become our problems tomorrow. The money we devote to
development or peacekeeping or disaster relief, it helps to avert future
crises whose cost will be far greater. And it is the right thing to do.
It is the right thing to do.
I am very worried that all these budgets are at risk--some of them
in an almost deliberate attempt to cut the United States off from
partnership. I'll just give you one other example so I can go home and
tell the Vice President I did it. [Laughter]
We have a little bit of money devoted to a comprehensive, worldwide
effort to deal with the threat of global warming. It is simply a matter
of science and evidence. Just in the last several days, there have been
a whole new rush of scientific evidence that 1995 is the warmest year on
our entire planet in 20,000 years, that the hole in the ozone layer is
bigger than we had imagined it to be, and that global warming is a real
threat. We spend a pittance on it. That is one of the items targeted for
elimination. This is not budget-cutting; this is ideology. This is
another example of what the teenagers say about ``denial'' being more
than a river in Egypt. [Laughter] This is wrong. It is not necessary to
balance the budget, and it is necessary to reverse it to stand up for
America's values and America's interests.
Let me just cite one more example. Radio Free Europe and Radio
Liberty were key weapons in the war of ideas waged against communism.
Many of you stood up for it and fought for them. To meet the challenges
of the new era, they have been dramatically downsized and moved from
Munich to Prague. But some want to squeeze their already vastly reduced
budget on the eve of major Russian elections, at the very time the
Russian reformers most need objective information and the free exchange
of ideas. They would do the same for the Voice of America, which serves
on the frontlines of democracy all around the world from Burma to the
Balkans.
Reckless budget cutters would shut down our Embassies first and
consider the consequences later. Last year alone, our Embassies
responded to nearly 2 million requests for assistance from Americans
overseas. They helped American companies win billions of dollars in
contracts. And every international business leader will tell you that
the State Department and its Embassies are working harder to advance our
economic

[[Page 1551]]

interests than at any time in the history of the global economy.
If we didn't have diplomats in Asia and Latin America to help stem
the flow of drugs to our shores, imagine how much harder that task would
be. In Northern Ireland and the Middle East, if we didn't have people
representing us, it would be a lot harder to move the peace process
forward. In Burundi or Rwanda, if we didn't have brave people there,
like Ambassador Bob Krueger, it would be even harder to avoid human
tragedy. We don't need half-strength and part-time diplomacy in a world
of fast-moving opportunities and 24-hour-a-day crises.
The last point I want to make is this. There are people who say,
``Oh, Mr. President, I am for a strong America. I just don't understand
why you fool with the U.N. What we need is for America to stand up
alone. We'll decide what the right thing to do is and do it. Let the
rest of the world like it or lump it. That's what it means to be the
world's only superpower.'' That also is a disguised form of
isolationism.
Unilateralism in the world that we live in is not a viable option.
When our vital interests are at stake, of course, we might have to act
alone. But we need the wisdom to work with the United Nations and to pay
our bills. We need the flexibility to build coalitions that spread the
risk and responsibility and the cost of leadership, as President Bush
did in Desert Storm and we did in Haiti.
If the past 50 years have taught us anything, it is that the United
States has a unique responsibility and a unique ability to be a force
for peace and progress around the world, while building coalitions of
people that can work together in genuine partnership.
But we can only succeed if we continue to lead. Our purpose has to
be the same in this new era as it has ever been. Whatever our political
persuasions, I believe we all share the same goals. I think we want a
future where people all over the world know the benefits of democracy;
in which our own people can live their lives free from fear; in which
our sons and daughters won't be called to fight in wars that could have
been prevented; in which people no longer flee tyranny in their own
countries to come to our shores; in which markets are open to our
products and services, where they give our own people good, high-wage
jobs; a country in which we know an unparalleled amount of peace and
prosperity because we have fulfilled a traditional American mandate of
the 20th century well into the 21st, because we, we, have led the world
toward democracy and freedom, toward peace and prosperity.
If we want the kind of future I described, we have to assume the
burden of leadership. There is simply not another alternative. So I ask
you, bring your passion to this task, bring your argument to this task,
and bring the sense of urgency that has animated this country in its
times of greatest challenge for the last 50 years to this task.
The future, I believe, will be even brighter for the American people
than the last 50 years if, if, we can preserve our leadership in pursuit
of our values.
Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:37 a.m. at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. In
his remarks, he referred to Adrian Karatnycky, president, Freedom House,
and Representative Robert Livingston.