[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[December 9, 1995]
[Pages 1868-1870]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1868]]


Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Senator David Pryor in Little Rock, 
Arkansas
December 9, 1995

    Thank you very much, Jimmie Lou. I will treasure this always. I wish 
you could have gotten me a ballot of a precinct that I carried. 
[Laughter] You know, I ran in Sebastian County a zillion times, and I 
started in 1974. It took me until 1990, where I finally carried it. 
[Laughter] But thanks to some of you in this room, it finally happened. 
I thank you very much. I thank you, Jimmie Lou Fisher, for being my dear 
friend and for introducing me in October of 1991 on the steps of the Old 
State Capitol. You seem to bring good luck to me and to everyone else 
whom you touch.
    I thank Maurice Mitchell and Skip Rutherford and everyone else who 
had anything to do with this dinner tonight. Chairman Gibson; my dear 
friend Mack McLarty, who came out with me tonight and who has done a 
wonderful job on all of our behalfs in Washington. I'm so grateful to 
him for being there with me these last 3 years. To Congresswoman Blanche 
Lambert Lincoln; if there is a living soul in this country who can 
change a deer season, it's her. [Laughter] I've gotten to where when she 
starts coming at me, I just say yes before she ever says anything. It 
saves a lot of time and a lot of energy, always the same result. 
[Laughter]
    Senator Bumpers, you do not have to get off the back door tomorrow. 
[Laughter] But however, after a few of those jokes tonight, I hope you 
won't mind if I ask you to board by the back door. [Laughter]
    I want to say that I am profoundly grateful to Dale Bumpers for what 
he's done for our State and what he's done for our Nation and for the 
kind of voice that he's been in the United States Senate for all of 
these 18 years or 22 years or however long he's been there--since--it 
seemed like before I could vote--[laughter]--but never more than the 
last 2 years when he has found that soaring eloquence in the service of 
views that seemed to be fading from fashion until the last few months. 
And it's because people like Dale Bumpers speak up in the lean times as 
well as the good ones that this country stays on the path to progress 
and keeps its common sense about it, and I'm very grateful to him, and 
all of you should be as well.
    So, Governor Tucker, let me say I hope you pass your bond issue, and 
I hope you pass a constitution. He was too gracious to say it, but when 
he was reeling off all of the names of the Governors that tried to get a 
new constitution, he could have said, had he been less gracious, that we 
all failed. [Laughter] But that doesn't mean we don't need one. And I am 
especially grateful to you for taking on a lot of tough issues that are 
often thankless because you know that 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, if 
we do these things, people will look back and say, ``Thank you very 
much. It might not have been popular at the time and it certainly wasn't 
easy at the time, but it was the right thing to do.'' And that's the 
kind of Governor you've been, and I am very grateful to you for it.
    To Senator Pryor and Barbara and all of the Pryor family, let me say 
I am very honored to be here tonight. Hillary wishes she could be here. 
She called David; they had a long conversation this morning. Neither one 
of them would tell me everything they discussed. But she loves you very 
much, as you know, and wishes that she could be here with you. But our 
daughter is engaged in an activity tonight that required her presence in 
Washington, and I know you understand that. But she and I feel a special 
debt to you and a special bond.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I've got to be honest with you: I'm kind of 
like Dale. This is a night I hoped would never come. I'm glad you showed 
up, and I thank you for your devotion to the Democratic Party and to 
Dale Bumpers and to Jim Guy Tucker and to our Congressman and our 
Congresswoman and especially to Senator Pryor. But I hoped that this 
night would never come.
    You know how there are just things in life you assume would go on 
forever? I just assumed David Pryor's career in the Senate would go on 
forever. I thought long after I retired from the White House I would be 
back here with you, you know, wearing his buttons and having his bumper 
sticker on my car. [Laughter] I fig-


[[Page 1869]]

ured I would be writing him someday, asking him to help me with my 
Social Security check. I just thought it would go on forever. [Laughter]
    So today my whole life has been parading before me. I flew into 
Fayetteville and went to the ballgame, and then I came down here, and I 
got to see the Ozarks, and I got to see the river valley that I love so 
well, and I got to relive my whole life with David Pryor. The first time 
I ever met David Pryor, I remember it just like it was yesterday, he was 
walking down the street in some small town in south Arkansas, asking 
people to vote for him for Congress. And I was not quite 20 years old. 
And I thought he was really something. It turned out I was right; he was 
really something.
    I remember once when I was a senior in college, and he and Barbara 
were standing outside a restaurant in Washington, DC, one night, and I 
was just walking down the street and I ran into them. And he was a 
Congressman, and I was a college student. They invited me in to sit down 
and have a bite with them and just talk. And I couldn't believe it. 
There was nothing in it for them, and it was a night they could be alone 
and away from politics and away from the pressures of the job. It 
probably didn't mean much to him, but I've never forgotten it after all 
of these years.
    I remember when he suffered the only defeat he ever endured in 1972, 
the incredible dignity and grace and generosity with which he bore it. 
It was a lesson that I had occasion to apply later on--[laughter]--more 
than once, I might add, but one I never forgot.
    I remember when he ran for Governor in 1974, as Jimmie Lou said when 
I ran for Congress, what a tough time it was, how hard it was to keep 
people focused on the fundamental goodness of our way of doing public 
business and the need to keep pushing forward because we had such a 
terrible recession. I remember sitting in the back of the Governor's 
limousine in 1978, when I was attorney general and he was Governor, and 
he told me he was going to run for Senator, and he suggested I might run 
for Governor.
    And he said--I never will forget this--he said, ``You know, as young 
as you are, you might even make a career of it. You might survive 10 or 
12 years.'' [Laughter] Well, I wanted to be Governor, but I thought he 
had a screw loose. It turned out he was right about that. That race in 
1978 gave him a chance to be a Senator, gave Jim Guy Tucker a chance to 
be a Governor and, I might add, a great Governor. It gave Ray Thornton a 
chance to be the president of both of our great, big universities and go 
on to--come back to Congress and help us all stand against the floodtide 
up there. It was an interesting year.
    One of my great joys all during the decade of the 1980's was going 
to these events that David and Dale and I used to go to and tell all of 
our bad jokes over and over again, to see whether we could still get a 
laugh, knowing all of the time that we were able to do something here, 
to keep a certain spirit, a certain sense of togetherness, a certain 
sense of being willing to make a future that a lot of our fellow 
Americans were having a hard time holding on to--thanks in no small 
measure to David Pryor.
    But the thing I remember most vividly tonight was in the cold, cold 
winter of 1991 and 1992 in New Hampshire, when our passion for a new 
future ran into the politics of personal destruction, and everybody said 
our campaign was over. David Pryor and Barbara Pryor were there day-in 
and day-out, walking in the snow, knocking on the doors, talking to 
people about what this country could be and what it ought to be and what 
kind of direction we ought to have in Washington. And as long as I live, 
I will never forget. They did not have to be there, but they were, and 
it made all the difference.
    You know, our whole country's existence has basically had three 
great strands: our love of liberty, our belief in progress, and our 
struggle to find common ground amid all of our differences. I can think 
of no public official in my lifetime I have ever met from any place who 
better embodied all three of those things and who always knew that 
unless we could find common ground through decency and standing up for 
the values that made this country great, it would in the end not be 
possible to preserve progress or even liberty.
    In Washington today we are having the debate of the century about 
what kind of people we are and what kind of future we're going to have, 
what our obligations to each other are, and whether we really believe in 
opportunity for all and responsibility from all, whether we really 
believe we have an obligation to help families stay together and to take 
care of our parents when they're sick and our children when they're 
growing up, whether we really believe that we are, as our motto says, 
from many one.

[[Page 1870]]

    David Pryor is the embodiment of what I want our country to keep at 
and to become and to do. Senator Bumpers quoted de Tocqueville. He said 
a long time ago that this is a great country. ``America is great,'' he 
said, ``because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, 
she will no longer be great.'' David Pryor has been a great public 
servant because he is fundamentally good.
    William Wordsworth said the last best hope of a good man's life are 
the little, unremembered acts of kindness and love. David Pryor, over 
more than 30 years, every person in this room and every person in our 
State has been embraced by your kindness and love, and we thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:25 p.m. in Governor's Hall II at the 
Statehouse Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Jimmie Lou 
Fisher, Arkansas State treasurer; Maurice Mitchell, attorney in Little 
Rock; Skip Rutherford, former State Democratic chair; and Bynum Gibson, 
State Democratic chair.