    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [March 2, 1998]
    [Pages 314-316]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation Dinner
    March 2, 1998

        Thank you very much, Senator,
    Vicki, Caroline and Ed, other members
    of the Kennedy family, Paul Kirk. And I
    say a special word of thanks to all of you who have made this evening
    possible. I thank Senator Jeffords and
    Senator Thurmond and Senator Hatch for being here tonight to restrain the partisan
    impulses that might otherwise overtake Senator Kennedy and me.
    [Laughter] I thank Yo Yo Ma and Jill and all the other musicians who have come here. Mr.
    Secretary General, thank you for the wonderful
    job you do here at the OAS.
        I think I should begin by saying that for me this is not an
    obligation, it is an honor, not only because like every other member of
    my generation I was inspired by President Kennedy but because Hillary
    and Chelsea and I have been profoundly moved by the uncommon kindnesses
    of this family to ours.
        In 1991 I had an event in New York when no one in New York knew my
    name, and I looked up and John Kennedy
    was there. I think it would be fair to say that his name recognition was
    5 times higher than mine among all in attendance. [Laughter] Early in
    1992 Mrs. Kennedy came to an event for me and later went out of her way
    to be helpful and kind to Hillary and to Chelsea in ways that are
    difficult to relate but impossible to overestimate.
        The other day we were spending a weekend in Camp David, and I went
    out with a couple of Members of Congress, cavorting around in the lousy
    weather. Hillary stayed home with her friends and watched Jackie
    Kennedy's White House special, marveling again about the incredible work
    that was done to preserve America's house by Mrs. Kennedy.
        And I do believe that, no matter who writes the history books, when
    people look back on this century, they will say that Edward
    Kennedy was one of the ablest and most
    productive, most compassionate, and most effective men who served in the
    United States Senate in the entire history of the country.
        The JFK Library and its museum are national treasures, but I would
    like to talk about three things that are to some extent both more
    intangible and more tangible in the legacy of President Kennedy that
    will be enshrined forever if all of us do our job and keep this great
    enterprise going.
        First, the spirit of citizen service, most clearly embodied in the
    Peace Corps. President Kennedy said that he wanted to speak to those
    peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break
    the bonds of mass misery. We pledged to them our best efforts to help
    them help themselves. Five weeks later, 37 years ago yesterday, the
    Peace Corps was born. In 3 weeks, when I travel to Africa, my first stop
    will be Ghana, the first place President Kennedy's Peace Corps
    volunteers went to serve. Now they have gone, over the years, to 132
    nations.
        Tomorrow America will celebrate these accomplishments during the
    first ever Peace Corps Day, when thousands of former Peace Corps
    volunteers, including Secretary Shalala,
    who was

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    a volunteer in Iran, and I might add has volunteered to go back if it
    will help our new efforts. [Laughter] Thousands of Peace Corps
    volunteers have agreed to talk with students around our country about
    their life-changing experiences.
        The JFK Library also has a Library Corps, perhaps not as well known
    as the building itself, started by this foundation, which is inspiring
    young people in Roxbury, Dorchester, South Boston to work after school
    on community service projects.
        Inspired by President Kennedy's example, I have done what I could to
    advance the cause of citizen service. I just asked for the largest
    funding increase for the Peace Corps in history, in the hope that we can
    put 10,000 volunteers overseas by the turn of the century.
        Our national service project, AmeriCorps, has already given 100,000
    young people a chance to earn some money for college while they serve in
    their communities. One of my happiest days as President was when we
    walked up the South Lawn of the White House with all the first group of
    young people, and I met Senator Kennedy,
    and we signed the bill.
        Soon, tens of thousands of those young people will be working with
    elementary school students, to teach them to read, and middle school
    students, promising to stay with them throughout their careers to make
    sure they get a chance to go to college, too.
        So we thank President Kennedy and all of you for the spirit of
    citizen service.
        The second thing that I would like to say in appreciation to the
    legacy of President Kennedy is that he did a lot to remind us all that
    we owe it to ourselves, to our children, and to our future to cherish
    and proliferate exposure to the arts. The First Lady and I have tried to
    do that in our celebration of the millennium. We have been having these
    Millennium Evenings. We had the great Harvard historian Bernard
    Bailyn the other night, and this Friday night
    we will have the brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking. A week from tonight we will also highlight four vernacular
    dances that have entered our unique dance: tap, Lindy-hopping, jazz,
    and--so help me, I didn't organize this--Irish step dancing. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Yo Yo Ma for the work that he
    has done to try to bring the arts, and music in particular, to so many
    Americans who might otherwise have never had a firsthand experience with
    what can lead us all to a higher level of understanding and enjoyment of
    life.
        Finally, and most personally, I am here because President Kennedy,
    Robert Kennedy, their generation, made me admire and believe in public
    service and made me understand that it could be fun but that it also
    carried with it certain responsibilities. They made me believe that it
    was not a bad thing but a noble thing to want to exercise power but only
    if it were exercised for some larger purpose. There are many people in
    this room tonight who could be standing here making exactly the same
    statement.
        Just before I came over here, I finished a magnificent new biography
    of Theodore Roosevelt by H.W. Brands called
    ``The Last Romantic.'' It's a terrific book, and it's only 820 pages
    long. [Laughter] But I was thinking--because President Roosevelt died
    right after the close of the First World War, I was thinking about the
    whole sweep of the century that President Kennedy's life marked and that
    his service marked in such a profound way.
        This century we are about to leave was dominated by the consequences
    of the industrial revolution, the growth of very big organizations--
    economic organizations, governmental organizations--and the attendant
    wealth and power and possibility and threat that revolution spawned. So
    that for most of this century, Americans in positions of responsibility
    and ordinary American citizens have both had an incredible opportunity
    to find wealth and personal fulfillment and greater expression of
    freedom because of the organized development of this time. But they have
    also had an enormous responsibility to stand up against the new horrors
    that vast organized power presented to them, whether in greed or bigotry
    or outright totalitarian oppression.
        John Kennedy made us believe that in public service you could fight
    for the things that ought to be fought for; you could fight against the
    things that ought to be fought against; and that the sole purpose of
    power, fleeting though it is, was to be applied to the best of your God-
    given ability to those worthy goals.
        Now, we're about to enter a new century with problems and
    opportunities unparalleled in history, speeding along at a pace and with
    a complexity that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
    There is a lot of good in the fact that the knowledge of the world is
    now doubling--sheer facts are doubling every

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    5 years. We see in the human genome project miraculous health
    discoveries being made almost weekly now.
        But we also know that in this new world, where the Internet is
    exploding and 65,000 new sites are being added every hour of every day,
    that there will be new ways that people who are organized for the abuse
    of their power will present new threats, perhaps terrorists or organized
    criminals or narcotraffickers, perhaps in the forms of chemical or
    biological or small-scale nuclear weapons, perhaps unwise leaders being
    too greedy in the short run, forcing poor people off their land into the
    teeming cities of poor countries, devastating the environment, leading
    to the spread of disease.
        So we will now live in a new area where humankind will have all
    kinds of new possibilities for good and all manner of new things that
    need to be fought against. I hope that the children of this age will
    find a way to believe in America the way President Kennedy helped me to
    believe in America and to believe that the political process leaves the
    ultimate power in the people and gives its elected Representatives a
    precious chance just to bring out the good and stand against the bad. It
    is the eternal human obligation. He made it seem fun and noble and good.
    The least we can do is to keep the torch burning.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:10 p.m. in the Hall of the Americas at
    the Organization of American States. In his remarks, he referred to
    Victoria Kennedy, wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy; Caroline Kennedy
    Schlossberg and her husband, Edward; John F. Kennedy, Jr.; Paul G. Kirk,
    Jr., chair, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation Dinner; Jill
    Horner, wife of cellist Yo Yo Ma; and Secretary General Cesar Gaviria of
    the Organization of American States.