    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [September 9, 1997]
    [Pages 1136-1143]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1136]]

    Remarks at American University
    September 9, 1997

        Thank you very much. First, thank all of you for that wonderful
    welcome. I told President Ladner that after you gave me such a buoyant
    welcome, I really didn't want to speak. I thought I should quit while I
    was ahead. [Laughter]
        I appreciate the president's welcome and his profound words. I thank
    Neal Sharma for his introduction and for his leadership here among the
    students. To Chairman Jacobs and Professor Mintz, Secretary and Mrs.
    Dalton, City Councilman Thomas; to all the trustees and alumni and
    faculty and staff and students who are here, and the friends of American
    University who are here.
        There are many people in our administration who graduated from AU or
    who otherwise have affiliation with it, including your former president
    Joe Duffey. And one of the most important is here with me today, former
    professor Judy Winston, who is the Executive Director of my race
    initiative, about which I want to talk a little. But I'd like for Judy
    to stand, wherever she is. She's here somewhere. Thank you, Judy. There
    she is.
        At the start of a new school year, this is a time when students are
    going back to work and when those of us here in Washington are going
    back to work after the August recess of Congress. It is a time of
    genuine hope and earned optimism for America, and I can hear it in your
    spirited voices here today. I think it's a good time for me to talk to
    you and to our country about what we have to do in the remaining months
    of this year to make the most of this moment in preparing our country
    for the 21st century.
        It is now--hard for me to believe--almost 6 years since I first
    announced my candidacy for President. Then, in late 1991, America seemed
    to be moving toward the new century with uncertain steps. Dramatic
    changes in the way we live and work and relate to each other and the
    rest of the world threatened the values by which we live our lives. We
    were in danger of becoming a more divided nation at the very moment when
    we needed to be moving forward resolutely together.
        On the day I declared my candidacy, I said that our mission as a
    people must be to keep the American dream alive for all who would work
    for it; to keep America the world's strongest force for peace and
    freedom and prosperity; and to bring our own people together, across all
    the lines that divide us, into one America. America's oldest and most
    enduring values--opportunity for all, responsibility from all, a
    community of all--these things had to remain strong and vibrant in a new
    and different time, which required a new course of action.
        Our Nation has remained young and strong now for over 220 years by
    always meeting new challenges in ways that renew our oldest values. That
    is the wellspring of our greatness. Our Nation was not founded on
    religion or race or geography but on a set of incandescent ideals, which
    have been reiterated and reaffirmed and reembraced at every critical
    moment in our history: Lincoln at Gettysburg; the Progressives forging a
    new freedom for an industrial age; Franklin Roosevelt rescuing America
    from the abyss in the name of our oldest ideals; Dr. King challenging
    America to live out the true meaning of our creed. At every single
    moment of challenge and change, we Americans have found a way to keep
    these old ideals, not musty words scratched on parchment but instead
    living guideposts for a new era.
        For 4\1/2\ years now, Americans have worked to make this a time of
    change for our generation. We set a bold new economic course, reducing
    the deficit by over 80 percent even before the recent balanced budget
    agreement, expanding exports through over 200 trade agreements, and
    investing in our people and their future. We set about establishing
    America's credibility in the post-cold-war world, forging new alliances
    and standing up for our values from Bosnia to Haiti. And we addressed a
    generation's accumulation of profound social problems, bringing work and
    responsibility and community action to bear on the challenges of crime
    and welfare and poverty. And we began to build a new Government, not
    intent on doing everything but not content to do nothing; instead, a
    progressive Government committed to giving people the tools they need to
    make the most of their own lives.

    [[Page 1137]]

        Today we see the results: Unemployment remains below 5 percent;
    nearly 13 million new jobs since 1993; inflation remaining low and
    stable; investment growth and consumer confidence at their highest
    levels in a generation; after decades when they remained flat, finally
    family incomes beginning to rise again; violent crime has dropped
    dramatically for years now; we have seen the largest drop in welfare
    rolls in history; and many of our poorest urban and rural communities
    are in a springtime of renewal.
        In late July, America reached a new milestone when I signed into law
    the first balanced budget in a generation. This was about more than
    numbers on a ledger. It embodies the single largest increase in aid to
    education since 1965. It includes the biggest increase in aid to help
    people go on to college and to community colleges and to graduate
    schools, the biggest increase since the GI bill was passed 50 years ago,
    and it will literally open the doors to college education to every
    person who is willing to work for it. It includes the largest single
    investment in health care since the passage of Medicaid in 1965, largely
    designed to insure up to 5 million children who don't have health
    insurance today. It restores just benefits for legal immigrants, and
    billions of dollars are provided to help move people even more from
    welfare to work.
        Now, after years in which the deficit dominated our politics and
    dampened our economy, America finally has lifted that burden from the
    next generation. After years in which the two parties seemed often as
    tired and trapped as punchdrunk fighters in a ring getting smaller and
    smaller, finally we found a way for Democrats and Republicans to work
    together for the national interest. And in so doing, we've proved to
    ourselves that America can still work.
        We are steering the vast changes underway today in technology,
    trade, and our social makeup--the very changes that once produced so
    much doubt and unease--in ways that will ensure that they will become
    powerful forces for good. In all this I want to emphasize that we are
    not merely riding the crest of the latest rise in the economic cycle.
    Our economic plan with the balanced budget at its center is the platform
    on which we are building America's future. Americans of this generation
    are forging and leading an entirely new economy. A larger proportion of
    Americans work in the computer industry today than worked in the auto
    industry at the height of the 1950's. And in the cutting edge industries
    of the future--computers, biotech, aerospace--America leads the world.
    But America also leads the world again, for the first time since the
    1970's, in automobile production and sales.
        In this new economy there'll still be ups and downs. There'll be
    recessions and crises. They'll demand action. But the economy has
    fundamentally changed. Once, the wealth of people came mainly from the
    gold in the ground or the abundance of our farmland or the power of our
    factories. Now, you know as well as anyone it will come from the skills
    of our people and the power of our imagination.
        The news is good today. And in the face of good news, the easiest
    thing to do is to rest, to take a vacation, to believe our work is done,
    and to be satisfied that our challenges are met. But complacency is not
    an option and vacations have to remain short in a time still full of
    challenge and change. There is, in fact, a lot more to do to renew our
    values, to strengthen our Nation, to deal with problems still
    unresolved, if we are really going to give you the 21st century you
    deserve. Now we have to take the steps that are clearly before us. And
    the time to start is now, this fall, with a series of concrete actions
    we can take to cap a year of real progress for America.
        First and foremost, we must press on to make opportunity available
    for all of our people. Equal opportunity is our central value, but the
    very meaning of that has fundamentally changed. For example, in the 19th
    century, opportunity meant access to a land grant. In the 21st century,
    it will mean access to a Pell grant, to a community college, to a trade
    school, to a university. And more education is important. We have made
    enormous progress. As I said, this budget contains the biggest increase
    in funds to help give people access to higher education in 50 years: not
    only the largest Pell grant in our history but in the last two budgets,
    300,000 more work-study positions, new opportunities for savings in
    IRA's for college education, and tax credits which will literally make
    it possible for everybody in the country who doesn't have any access to
    college to get 2 years of college, and will help people to pay for 4
    years and for graduate school. Nothing like this has ever been done
    before, and it will revolutionize opportunity when it comes to getting a
    college education.

    [[Page 1138]]

        But I want to explain something that's very important about why
    we're focusing on the next 3 months. The balanced budget agreement
    contains a 5-year plan for balancing the budget and contains the tax
    cuts. It has a spending plan in it. But the spending plan still has to
    be implemented every single year. And that is what Congress will do in
    the next 3 months in passing appropriations. So they have to authorize
    the money for the Pell grants. They must authorize the money for the
    work-study slots. They must authorize a doubling of funds for computers
    in every classroom so that we can meet our goal of hooking every
    classroom and library up to the Internet by the year 2000. It must
    authorize the America Reads initiative, which will help us to mobilize
    some of those community service folks you were talking about, work-study
    students all across the country, thousands of AmeriCorps students going
    into our schools, working with teachers and parents to make sure every
    single third grader in this country can read independently. We have to
    do that.
        We also must get through the appropriations process with our
    commitment to national education standards intact. We know, for example,
    that America has the finest system of higher education in the world, and
    people come from all over the world to be a part of it. And I'm very
    proud of that. We also know, however, that we do not do as well as we
    should in our K through 12 education for all of our children. Of course,
    it's harder in America than a lot of other places; we have more
    diversity. We have more racial diversity; we have more linguistic
    diversity; we have more cultural diversity; we have more income
    diversity than we would like--the other diversity is all to the good, I
    think.
        But we are making progress. For the first time this year on the
    international math and science scores, our Nation ranked well above the
    national average in math and science scores--well above the world
    average in math and science scores for fourth graders. But we still
    ranked below the world average in scores for eighth graders, as our
    children meet adolescence and all the difficulties that many of them
    face come to bear. We have to do better.
        We are the only major nation in the world that does not have high,
    clear, uniform academic standards of excellence in basic courses in
    public education. We don't have them. It is a legacy of our State
    constitutional responsibility for education, K through 12, and local
    control of the schools. But uniform standards--mathematics are the same
    in Maine and Montana, and children have to learn to read whether they
    live in Washington or the southern tip of Florida.
        We are now on the brink of being able to have a nonpartisan board
    set up by Congress for this purpose, to approve the development of
    examinations of fourth graders in reading and eighth graders in math.
    There are some who don't think we should do it. They say it's a Federal
    power grab. It isn't. The tests are voluntary. No State, no school
    district has to participate. The Government is not developing the tests.
    We're simply paying for it.
        But I hope that all of you who got here to this university will look
    at all--there are 52.2 million children enrolled in kindergarten through
    12th grade in America now, the biggest number of children ever, from the
    most diverse backgrounds ever. We are robbing them of the future you are
    here to claim if we let them get out of school without the basic skills
    they need to succeed in the university. And I hope you will support our
    efforts at national standards.
        Now, your student body president made a wry remark about Social
    Security--[laughter]--and I know a lot of you don't think it's going to
    be there, but it is. It is going to be there. Clearly, one of our most
    serious responsibilities is to make sure that Social Security and
    Medicare are there for the next generation of Americans. It is wrong to
    let people pay into the fund for a benefit they will never receive. That
    is wrong.
        We will begin in the next 3 months to build on this budget agreement
    in dealing with Medicare. This budget agreement extends the life of the
    Medicare Trust Fund by a decade. In fact, the structural changes that we
    have built in may even save enough money to carry it far beyond that.
    But we will also appoint, the leaders of Congress and I, members of a
    bipartisan commission to study Medicare and make recommendations for how
    it can be preserved for the next generation of Americans well into the
    21st century.
        We have shown that we can put our fiscal house in order while
    improving services for our elderly. Now we have to secure the future of
    this program. And then, we'll be beyond that to deal with Social
    Security as well. We can do this. If we can balance the budget, we can

    [[Page 1139]]

    plainly do this. These are problems that revolve around demographic
    changes in our society, and we owe it to you not to have to face this
    burden. I am confident that we will fulfill our responsibilities.
        The next thing we have to do is to continue our efforts to expand
    trade to the rest of the world. The United States is now the world's
    number one exporter again. But we must continue to do this. We must
    continue to do it not only because it is right for us, because it is
    right for the world. Let me just give you a couple of interesting
    statistics. We have less than 5 percent of the world's people in this
    country; we have about 20 percent of the world's wealth. We cannot
    maintain our wealth unless we sell what we have to the other 95 percent
    of the people in the rest of the world.
        Second, the growing economies of the emerging countries, principally
    in Asia and Latin America but also increasingly in Africa, are going to
    grow much more rapidly in the next 10 years than the advanced economies
    of America, Canada, and Europe. If we participate in that growth, we can
    move huge numbers of countries now classified as poor nations into the
    ranks of middle-income nations, where millions of children will have a
    more decent, more humane, more supportable future, where democracy will
    thrive, where we will have good partners not only in economic
    relationships but also in solving the other problems of the world when
    you have to take responsibility for them.
        The United States has a clear, clear obligation to continue to
    expand the frontiers of trade. And tomorrow in the East Room at the
    White House, I will launch a campaign to persuade the Congress to renew
    the traditional authority Presidents have had for over 20 years now to
    break down foreign barriers to America's goods and services. This is
    very important to you and your future.
        We do not need to be afraid to trade with the rest of the world. We
    are the most productive economy in the world. There will always be
    changes in this economy. There will always be new jobs being created and
    some going away. But on balance, we have benefited for 60 years by
    leading the way to integrate the world's economies. And that will
    promote peace. It will promote freedom. It will promote stability. It
    will raise the level of living standards in other parts of the world
    even as it maintains America as the world's most prosperous nation. And
    I hope you will support that as well.
        As we expand opportunity, we must also continue to demand
    responsibility from our citizens. Among other things, we have a common
    responsibility to do all we can to strengthen our families for the 21st
    century. This new economy puts extraordinary pressures on parents,
    demanding more time away from their children, imposing new demands for
    affordable child care, bombarding children themselves with commercial
    images that make it harder than ever for them to be raised according to
    our most basic values.
        We are working to pass a juvenile justice bill to help keep our
    children out of gangs, off of drugs, and away from guns. We will host
    the first ever White House Conference on Child Care, to explore ways all
    sections of society, including our Government, can better address
    perhaps the greatest problem facing working parents today. And we must
    make this historic opportunity real in our efforts to protect our
    children from the dangers of tobacco by passing sweeping legislation
    that focuses first and foremost on reducing smoking among young people.
    More people die from that than any other problem in our society today.
        Next, we must meet a very large environmental challenge in the next
    3 months. We will work toward a worldwide climate change treaty this
    December in Kyoto that protects the environment even as it promotes
    global growth by committing the nations that sign on to it to specific,
    clear guidelines in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions into the
    atmosphere. We know--[applause]--you can clap for that--that's all
    right.
        Now, there are students here from all over the world, students from
    all over the country. Many of you have witnessed and your families have
    witnessed, in your own homes, significant changes in climatic patterns
    in the last decade and more extreme climatic developments. It is
    becoming a part of the common parlance of America, all over the country,
    to talk about the 500-year flood we had along the Mississippi River. One
    Member of Congress, who happened to be a member of the other party, said
    to me the other day--he said, ``Mr. President, we've had three 100-year
    floods in the last 5 years in my home State.'' He said, ``Does that mean
    I get to wait 500 years before we have another bad flood?''

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        Many of you who are studying this issue know that a panel of over
    2,500 scientists has concluded that the climate of the Earth is
    significantly warming in ways that will have not entirely predictable
    but almost certainly destructive consequences unless we do something
    about it.
        This is something that will affect people of all incomes, of all
    backgrounds, from all parts of our country and, indeed, the whole world.
    We need the young people of America, particularly the university
    students who are in a position to study this issue, to make this a
    gripping national issue. And we also need people who have the confidence
    in our ability to break new technological and scientific barriers to
    stand up and say, ``You cannot make me believe that we can't reduce
    greenhouse gas emissions substantially and still grow the American
    economy.'' We could reduce them 20 percent tomorrow, with technology
    that is already available, at no cost, if we just change the way we do
    things.
        Now, this will be a very controversial debate. And there will be
    people who say, ``President Clinton has spent 5 years killing himself to
    revitalize the American economy, and now he's going to take it down
    overnight by committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in America.''
    That is not true. But if you let the sea level rise and we flood the
    southern coast of Florida and we flood the southern coast of Louisiana
    and we otherwise disrupt what life in the United States is like over the
    next 50 years, then your children will pay the price for our neglect. We
    can grow this economy and do right by the environment. I think you
    believe that, and I need you to help me convince the American people
    that it can be done.
        Finally, let me say we have a responsibility to improve the way our
    political system works. The amount of money raised by both parties is
    more than doubling now every 4 years. The primary driving thing is the
    cost of access to you, the voters. That is what is driving this, the
    cost of access through television time, through radio time, through
    mail, through printed materials. One of the things we have to do is to
    guarantee free or reduced air time for candidates for offices so that
    they won't need so much more money. And we are seeking that now.
        But there is also a very important piece of legislation sponsored by
    Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold
    which will come to the floor of the Senate later this month. Every year
    I have been President I have supported a good campaign finance reform
    bill. And every year I have seen the bills blocked by a filibuster in
    the United States Senate--every single year. Now, the people who don't
    want it this year say they're going to do it all over again. They may do
    it, but if they do it this year, we intend to see that it happens in the
    full glare of public light. I ask for your support for campaign finance
    reform this year.
        The third thing we have to do is to do a lot of work in the next 3
    months to advance our interests and our leadership around the world. We
    live in a world very different from the cold-war world, and we still
    have to do a lot to shape it. We have an opportunity to lock in the
    gains of democracy and stability and free markets and lay the
    foundations for the century in which you will live most of your lives.
        So far this year, we have ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention,
    so our soldiers and citizens will be safer from the threat of poison
    gas. We have worked hard to build an undivided, democratic, and peaceful
    Europe for the first time in history, inviting Poland, Hungary, and the
    Czech Republic to join NATO. I look forward to working with the Senate
    to ratify this historic step next year, and I'm pleased today that a
    group of America's leading citizens endorsed it. We're forging new
    partnerships with Russia, with Ukraine, with Europe's other new
    democracies, working with all of our friends in Europe to give the
    people of Bosnia a chance to share in Europe's democratic future. First,
    we stopped the war and turned killing fields into playing fields again
    and bomb shelters into schools. Now we have to redouble our efforts to
    build a lasting peace.
        In the months to come, we will continue to pursue peace in the
    Middle East, in Northern Ireland, continue to fight rogue states and
    terrorists, continue to make sure our military and diplomacy are the
    strongest in the world. But above all, in the remaining months of this
    year, we are going to reach out to our hemisphere and to Asia.
        Over the last decade in the Americas, coups, conflicts, and command
    economies have given way to democracies and free markets. Next month I'm
    going to Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina to work to expand trade, to
    fight drugs, to protect the environment, and to strengthen

    [[Page 1141]]

    our partnerships. The Americas can become a stronghold for our own peace
    and security.
        By the way, 70 percent of our increased trade in the last year has
    come from the Americas, from our own neighbors in our hemisphere, and we
    should stick with them.
        Because I want this effort to be truly bipartisan, I reached my hand
    across the aisle to choose an Ambassador to one of our most important
    allies and neighbors, Mexico, when I asked the Republican Governor of
    Massachusetts, Bill Weld, if he would serve. I believe, still, that he
    is the best person to be Ambassador to Mexico. And I believe--and I
    would believe this if there were a President of another party with a
    nominee with whom I did not agree--I believe when a President nominates
    someone for a job, that person is entitled to a hearing before the
    Foreign Relations Committee, and I think he ought to get it.
        This fall, the President of China will come to Washington. China is
    home to a quarter of the world's people. In less than two decades, its
    economy may be the largest on Earth. America has a profound interest in
    seeing that China is stable, open, at peace with its neighbors. We want
    it to embrace political pluralism and the international rules of
    civilized conduct. We want a China that works with us to build a secure
    and prosperous future. China will choose its own destiny, but if we
    engage China instead of isolating ourselves from her, we can help to
    influence the path it takes.
        President Jiang's visit is an important opportunity, not so much for
    grand statements and dramatic gestures as for constructive work on
    common challenges like the one we face on the Korean Peninsula, or
    protecting the environment, or stopping the spread of nuclear weapons,
    and for expanding the frontiers of free trade between us. It's also a
    chance for us to address, candidly and face to face, our differences on
    issues like human rights and religious freedom.
        Sitting down together across the table is far more likely to produce
    progress than pointing fingers across the Pacific. So when President
    Jiang comes here, I hope the American people will welcome him and will
    say, ``Yes, we have things that we disagree with you about, but you
    represent a quarter of the world's people, a large measure of the
    world's future, and your people and our people will be better off if we
    find a way to forge that future together.''
        Finally, in the next 3 months, we will be working for new ways to
    preserve perhaps the most fragile value of all, the bonds of community
    that bind us together as Americans. In this century, we have absorbed
    wave after wave of immigrants, drawn here by our abundance and our
    ideals. This century has seen unparalleled racial progress as African-
    Americans and other minorities join the American mainstream. Still, the
    very forces of progress that are propelling us forward could also pull
    us apart, threatening to isolate us, each with our own webpage but
    linked by few human bonds of community.
        The age-old dilemma of racial inequality, racial prejudice, or just
    plain old fear and mistrust of people who are different from us is
    compounded by the new task of absorbing new immigrant groups into what
    is already the world's most diverse democracy. Within a decade, our
    largest State, California, will have no majority race. Within just a few
    decades, this entire country will have no majority race. We can study
    the demographic patterns and know what America will look like in the
    21st century, but we have to look inside to imagine what America will be
    like in the 21st century. That answer is up to all of us.
        I have asked the Nation to join me in a great national conversation
    about race, an effort to redress imbalance, to root out hatred and
    prejudice, to deal with real underlying problems that may have nothing
    to do with race but that manifest themselves in racial inequality and
    tensions, and above all, to bring Americans of different backgrounds
    together to face one another honestly across the lines that divide us.
        Your president noted that you have people from 140 different racial
    and ethnic groups here on this university campus. Good for you. You can
    be America's laboratory. You figure it out and let us know.
        This diversity of ours is a godsend. It is a huge gift in a global
    economy and a global society. If we can find a way not only to respect
    our differences but to actually celebrate them and still say what binds
    us together is even more important, we will have solved the conundrum
    that is paralyzing Bosnia, that is still leading to people blowing
    themselves up to kill innocent children in the Middle East, that has my
    people in Ireland still arguing over what happened 600 years ago, that
    has led to vicious tribal warfare in Africa, leaving hundreds of

    [[Page 1142]]

    thousands of people hatcheted to death. And yet, look around this room.
        This is a question of imagination, of vision, of heart. And it is
    also very important to be hard-headed about it. Until everybody has
    economic opportunity that is real and educational opportunity that is
    real and streets that are safe, there will be racial disparities in
    America which will manifest themselves in things that look like racial
    discrimination whether they are or not. We have to deal with the
    underlying real causes here as well.
        But don't kid yourself--fear of people who are different is an
    underlying real cause. How did people get to be Serbs or Croats or
    Muslims in Bosnia? How did they belong to the Orthodox Church, the
    Catholic Church, or the Muslim faith in Bosnia? It's an accident of
    history, of geopolitics going back hundreds and hundreds of years. The
    people are biologically indistinguishable. But they were more than happy
    to abandon decades of peace and begin within weeks to murder each other
    with abandon and shoot each other's children not very long ago.
        There is something in us all that in our most defensive periods
    makes us want to find somebody else we can look down on--I mean, no
    matter how bad it is for me, at least I'm not her or him. Isn't there?
    And every one of us at some point in our life has been guilty of that in
    some way or another.
        You come here in this magnificent university environment. You cheer
    with your great enthusiasm and hope for the future. You look at each
    other, and you're different, and you like it. That's the way we've got
    to make daily life in America. People have to get up in the morning and
    feel good about this country with all of its diversity, because we have
    to know what's good about the differences between us and celebrate them,
    and we must know, too, what it is that binds us together. What are the
    requirements of membership in the American community? What do you have
    to believe in and be willing to live by and be willing to stand up for
    in order to be an American? That is what we are going to do. We have to
    visualize our future as a truly multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious
    democracy that still runs in a straight line from here all the way back
    to George Washington. I'm convinced we can do it, but I'm convinced that
    all of you have to lead the way.
        Now, let me say that a lot of this work has to be done with
    Congress. And I'm very pleased by the relationship that we had working
    on the balanced budget. I'll work with them to do everything we can to
    implement the budget, to confirm the judges and the others who await
    action. We are in unchartered territory, to some extent, but we know the
    times demand action of us, and I am sure the American people, without
    regard to their party, want us to work together in the public interest.
        For all of you who are students here, consider this: It is now 844
    days to the year 2000, to a new century and a new millennium and a new
    era of human endeavor. Will it bring new progress, new prosperity, and
    new greatness for America? It is basically up to us.
        Thirty-four years ago, here at American University, President
    Kennedy delivered what many people believe was his greatest speech. It
    was an era bristling with superpower tension, but President Kennedy
    looked forward and saw a day when the cold war was a thing of the past.
    Because of decades of work to uphold our values by Americans of both
    parties, we are now living in the world John Kennedy imagined 34 years
    ago at American University.
        So I leave you with this thought: It all depends on your
    imagination. It all depends on your imagination. Think how many
    children's lives we could save in all these trouble spots of the world
    if all the people with power and the people that support them just
    imagined their future in a different way, just took their heart and
    their head together and came up with a different picture than the one
    they see before them every morning when they get up. It is the most
    important force in the world.
        President Kennedy imagined the world we are living in today, 34
    years ago in the speech here at American University. Now it is up to you
    and to me and to our fellow Americans to imagine what the 21st century
    will be, and then to do what is necessary to make that vision a reality
    for all our people. That is what I came here to ask for your help in
    doing--for your help and for that of every other American. You've got a
    lot riding on it, and I'm betting that we're going to get there.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:30 p.m. at Bender Arena. In his remarks,
    he referred to Benjamin Ladner, president, Neal Sharma, student
    confederation president, William Jacobs, board of trustees chairman, and
    Mary Mintz, university senate

    [[Page 1143]]

    president, American University; Secretary of the Navy John H. Dalton and
    his wife, Margaret; Harry L. Thomas, Sr., District of Columbia City
    Council member, Ward 5; and President Jiang Zemin of China. The
    President also referred to the ``Commencement Address at American
    University in Washington. June 10, 1963,'' Public Papers of the
    Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing
    Office, 1964), p. 459.