[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
[February 11, 1998]
[Pages 211-212]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 211]]


Remarks at the First Millennium Evening at the White House
February 11, 1998

    The President. Thank you very much, Professor Bailyn, for that wonderful, wonderful lecture. I thank the 
First Lady and Ellen Lovell for conceiving this entire Millennium series. The 
others will have a hard act to follow.
    I can't think of a better way to inaugurate this series of lectures 
than with one on the founding of our Republic, also the first White 
House cyberspace lecture. We are truly imagining--honoring the past, not 
by imagining the future but through the prism of the future.
    I thank Bernard Bailyn for what he said 
and the way he said it and for a lifetime of work. We received the 
distilled wisdom tonight of more than four decades of hard thinking and 
work about what it means to be an American and what America means to 
Americans and to the rest of the world.
    I was rather amused--he said, ``You know, when we started, we had 
all these people who came from a lot of different places; they moved 
around a lot; they disagreed a lot; they were disdainful of 
Government''--I thought, what's new? [Laughter] But they were also, as 
Professor Bailyn said at the end of his remarks, at their best moments 
profoundly idealistic and always, always appropriately suspicious of 
untrammeled power in the hands of anyone in the Government.
    They were very wise about human nature, our Founders. They 
understood that there was light and dark in human nature. They 
understood that we are all imperfect, but society is, nonetheless, 
improvable. And in some ways, I think their most important charge to us 
was to always be about the business of forming a more perfect Union. As 
I said in my State of the Union Address, they understood it would never 
be perfect but that we always had to try to make it more perfect. And 
that is what they always tried to do, and when they left the scene, they 
instructed us to follow suit. And we've been at it ever since.
    We have a lot of questions that we have to face about the new 
millennium: We're more diverse than ever before; can we really be one 
America? How do we have a Government that is flexible enough and strong 
enough to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own 
lives and still avoid the abuses that the Founders understood would 
always be there when people were too driven by power, instead of the 
larger purposes of America? How can we widen the circle of opportunity 
to include everyone in a market system that seems inherently exclusive 
in some ways?
    There are lots of other challenges facing us, but I think our 
ability to meet the challenges of the 21st century rest in no small 
measure on our understanding of the constant values and insights with 
which we began. By honoring the past, we know there were forebears there 
who were always imagining the future. By imagining the future, we must 
do so with the hope that all of our successes will honor our past, for 
it is there, in the depth of our values and the genius of our system, 
that we began the long journey that has brought us to this day and that 
I am convinced will take us to better days ahead.
    Thank you again, Professor Bailyn. And 
now I'd like to turn the discussion over to the Director of the White 
House Millennium Council, Ellen Lovell, and we 
will begin with the questions.

[At this point, the question-and-answer portion of the program 
proceeded.]

    The President. I'll just give you a couple of examples. I agree with 
you on this. I do think that we're very patriotic if patriotism means 
loving country and caring about its future more than you care about your 
immediate self-interest. I think we're still capable of that. And I 
could give you two or three examples.
    I think the enormous response we've had to the idea that we have to 
save the Social Security system for the 21st century before we go around 
spending this first surplus we've had in 30 years on tax cuts or 
spending programs is an example of patriotism. I think the enormous 
reservoir of interest we've had in this whole issue of climate change 
and how we can preserve the environment for 21st century America is an 
example of patriotism, because selfishness is just going ahead and 
gobbling up whatever was here before us. I think all these young people 
all over America that are responding to the call to serve in their 
communities is an example of patriotism.

[[Page 212]]

     So I think--why I am so glad you're here--I think that it's not 
because we're not patriotic, but I think a lot of the basic patriotic 
elements of America--that is, the things that make us go--we do tend to 
take for granted, which is why I think it's so important that we take 
the occasion of entering a new millennium and a new century to think 
about the basic things again, so we'll be more sensitive to them. Why do 
we have a Bill of Rights? Why do we have a Government with certain 
powers to unify us as well as certain limits so that it can't abuse us? 
What does all this mean?
    I think that we've been around so long now, and Americans get up 
every day just expecting the country to work, and so we tend to take for 
granted what's really best about our country. And I think that can be 
bad. But I do think that the country is fully capable of patriotic 
action, if patriotism means sacrificing today for something greater 
tomorrow.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. I was just going to say, following up on that, I 
think you can look at basically all the big turning points of American 
history, all of them, and say that we survived and sort of went on to a 
higher level of achievement because two things happened: one, we 
reaffirmed the Union in new circumstances instead of letting it become 
weaker and divided, obviously, in the Civil War; and secondly, we 
expanded the meaning of liberty in a new and different time but in a 
logical way.
    And I think if you go back throughout the entire history of the 
country and you look at every major turning point in history, it was a 
triumph for the idea of union and for the idea of liberty. And I hope 
that that will always be the case. But I believe that to be true.
    I also--we had a cyberspace question here about, should we learn 
anything from 1900? It may just be pure accident, but it's interesting 
that in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson was elected, when the century 
changed, we were essentially--we began the movement from being 
essentially a colonial society to a continental one. In 1900, when 
William McKinley was reelected and Theodore Roosevelt soon thereafter 
became President when Mr. McKinley was killed, we began to come to terms 
fully with the implications of the industrial revolution on our society. 
And in 2000, we will be still about the business of fully coming to 
terms for the implication of the technology and information revolution 
in our society.
    So I think there--you might be able to go back and see how people 
were dealing with it, what principles were there, whether they are 
relevant to today, and it might also be interesting to see what some of 
the predictions were in 1900 that turned out right and what turned out 
wrong, as a way of adding a grain of salt to whatever all the rest of us 
are going to be saying in 3 years. [Laughter]

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. First of all, let me say to all of those who have 
followed us in other sites, thank you for joining us. Technology really 
has turned out to be a wonderful thing. We had 4,000 hits on our website 
after the State of the Union. So Americans really are tuning in in 
positive ways on the Internet.
    Professor Bailyn, thank you for reminding 
us of the things that are profoundly, essentially American about our 
Nation, about our past, and, therefore, critical to our future.
    I want to thank Hillary again and 
Ellen Lovell for conceiving of this idea and 
executing it. I want to welcome you all to leave Abigail Adams' washroom 
here--[laughter]--and go down to the State Dining Room where we'll all 
be able to visit for a few moments now, and ask everyone to tune in when 
in about 3 weeks we have the next one of these.
    Thank you very much, and good evening.

Note: The President spoke at 7:45 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Bernard Bailyn, professor emeritus 
of Harvard University, who gave the first lecture in the Millennium 
series, entitled ``The Living Past--Commitments for the Future.'' This 
lecture was the first Internet cybercast originating from the White 
House.